“Good morning,” Arnette said, coming into the main room from yet another doorway carrying a mug of coffee and a large packet which she took to the library table. The woman with the headset began clearing aside the ring binders. “Get some sleep?”
“Some,” Graver said, coming back to the table.
Arnette pulled the photographs out of the large envelope and slapped them on the table.
“The photographer stayed up late last night,” she said. “Let’s see if it was worth it.”
They both sat down and started turning through the photographs. There were forty-eight of them.
“The stippled effect on some of them is actually the spray coming from the fountain,” Arnette said, picking up a photographers loop and putting it on a photograph that was lying flat on the table. She put her eye right on the loop. “They must’ve been soaked by the time they finished talking.”
Graver went through the four dozen photographs rather quickly, setting aside the ones in which the unknown man did not appear. The ones in which he did appear Graver then examined again more closely using the loop. The photographer had done a good job of getting the unknown man’s face from several different angles as well as straight on. He appeared to be, as Arnette had said, in his late fifties. Shorter than Burtell, he was also heavier, though not obese. He was wearing a suit without a necktie, his shirt collar undone. His hair was thinning, but he kept it neatly parted and combed. Even though the photographs were in color, it was difficult to determine anything about his complexion or hair color because the lights of the fountain reflecting off the water and the beige granite gave an overall distorted cast to the photographs. He had a slightly bulbous nose and, in one photograph, a noticeable mole on the right side of his chin. He would have had trouble shaving around it.
Sometimes the man talked to Burtell while looking away, and the expression on his face did not change in any of the pictures. Once the photographer caught him looking back and up at the high curtain of water that almost surrounded them, and it was easy to see that his baldness was generalized over the top of his head.
“What do you think?” Arnette said after a while.
Graver shook his head. “Just a guy.”
“He’d disappear in a room with half a dozen people,” Arnette said. “He looks like a ‘government’ guy.”
“I can’t imagine that,” Graver said, still looking at the photographs.
Arnette didn’t say anything. She sipped her coffee, looked at a photograph.
“They didn’t see him arrive?” Graver looked at her.
“No. He just came across the grass and was there. Left the same way. In fact, we tried to catch him leaving, but we just flat missed it We would have had a better chance if we’d gotten out of the cars, but we decided against risking it.”
Graver looked at the man in the picture with a degree of frustration that he found difficult to hide. This was nothing. What could he do with it? Where did it get him? No matter how much he looked at this man’s face, it wasn’t going to tell him any more than he could apprehend in the first few minutes. It was like having a fingerprint before the existence of the national fingerprint index. There was nothing to compare it with. There was no national index of faces.
“There’s one thing,” Arnette said. “We think we see some countersurveillance there.”
Graver looked at her.
“Yeah, no kidding,” she said. She turned sideways and reached for the photographs Graver had set aside. She riffled through them, quickly arranging them in some specific order, and then held them up one by one so that she and Graver could look at them together. “The reason there are so many prints of the crowd is to check for this kind of thing.” She picked up a pencil from the table to use as a pointer. “These shots were taken while Dean was strolling around the sunken lawn area. He made one full circle, eating sunflower seeds.”
“Sunflower seeds?”
“Yep. See this couple here? They’re walking together as Dean arrives.”
At the mention of the word “couple,” Graver felt his face flush as he leaned closer in to the photograph, braeing himself against the recognition of the man and woman from La Facezia. He focused on the woman whose face lay under the tip of Arnette’s pencil. He stared at her. He did not recognize her. He focused on the man to her left. The face was not familiar.
“Dean starts walking along the grassy mall from the west end of the fountain,” Arnette continued. “They meet him at this moment, but they’re looking away at something. They pass by, Dean keeps going toward the north end of the lawn. The couple stops at the west side of the fountain to watch some kids throwing a Frisbee down on the sunken lawn. This gives them a view of the entire lawn area with Dean circling.”
Arnette’s pencil touched the faces on another photograph. Graver leaned in again, studying the man and woman from another angle. He simply does not recognize the faces. He is relieved, but puzzled. If he had been given the chance to bet that they would be the same couple from La Facezia, he would have done it.
“See, they’re standing there facing the Frisbee players, but the woman is actually looking away toward Dean,” Arnette went on. “Now she’s looking back along the west side of the lawn. Here she’s looking on the east side. Guy she’s with is looking toward the fountain now. Dean circles the north end. Couple splits up. She walks to the north end; he stays at the fountain, and they mill around, watching the place from both vantage points. Here, the woman pretends to be watching some kids down in the sunken lawn. Now, Dean comes along the east side of the lawn, and when he gets to the fountain the Unknown joins him, and they step up to the fountain. Man at the fountain hangs around inside with them. He looks at the water falling. He looks at the arches, probably through them at the grassy mall beyond. Woman joins him after having come up the east side.”
Arnette picked up several other photographs she had set aside. “Now, here, my photographer really goes close up.” She put the point of the pencil on the man’s left ear. “See this? I think this is an earpiece. There’s disagreement here about this, but I think that’s what it is. The couple stay a while in the spray of the fountain looking out through the arches, out to the sides. After a while they split up again and head to opposite sides of the grassy mall where they stay, just looking around as before, until Dean and the Unknown finish talking and split up.”
Arnette put down the last picture and the pencil, took a sip of coffee and looked at Graver.
“In these photographs the couple do not appear to speak to each other even once. They don’t lounge around on the grass, sit on the benches, go up to the waterfall, up close and look up and laugh about it-people always go up to the water and look up and laugh for some reason. The perspective gives you a weird feeling. But what’s most important is that they do not look at what’s in front of them. Ever. They’re always looking somewhere else.”
Graver was motionless, studying the pictures.
“We’re seeing this all the time, now,” she said, sitting back, cradling her coffee cup. “Everybody’s a spy. The dope traffickers, the computer chip bandits, the stolen car rings, you name it Business associates; business competitors. And middle-class America? Everybody’s bugging everybody. Everybody’s tapping into everybody else’s modem, and eavesdropping on their portable telephone conversations. It’s the technology. Radio Shack has turned America on to a new game… keeping up with the Bonds, the James Bonds.” She smiled. “When the stakes get past who’s cheating on whom, countersurveillance is a given. We automatically look for it.”