I learned something firsthand too from that little escapade, something Frank had told me once: though it's fairly hard to kill the first time around, it is a lot easier the second.
As for Kim, the memory's still vivid, but in time, I know, it will fade.
I took so many shots of her over the weeks of our acquaintanceship, they all seem to run together now. At each stage I saw her the way I wanted to, and when we finally got to the end I saw her dead.
Every once in a while I look at my last picture of her-the one I took just after I shot her. I looked at it again last night. I must have studied it for at least an hour. Like every other picture I ever took of her, it tells me nothing about her, nothing at all. But it does tell me something about Geoffrey Barnett. It fixes the moment he knew he could be merciless.
Which, I've begun to think, is the case with almost every kind of photograph. A photograph, you see, may or may not tell you much about its subject. But if you look at it closely, and you were the photographer, it can tell you a great deal about yourself.