He made twelve exposures, but he wasn’t satisfied. Framing the image to make its perspective identical to that in Packard’s photograph wasn’t going to produce a brilliant photograph, he realized. The result would merely be a visual trick. He had to build on what Packard had done, to find a metaphor equivalent to the bird of prey hovering over Falcon Lair.
“Mitch?”
Coltrane rubbed the back of his neck.
“Mitch?”
“Huh?” He turned toward Jennifer.
“You haven’t moved in the last ten minutes. Are you all right?”
“Just thinking.”
“You’ve got only forty-five minutes of light,” Jennifer said.
“Forty-five?” Startled, Coltrane checked his watch. He had lost more time then he realized.
Yet again, he poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera. Earlier, when he and Jennifer had driven toward the estate, Coltrane had wondered, not seriously, if Packard had been playing a practical joke on him by suggesting this project. Now that idea struck him as being very serious. With one foot in the grave, had Packard been determined to show Coltrane – typical of all would-be Packards – that Coltrane didn’t have a hope of competing with him? Was this project the old man’s way of proving one last time how superior he was?
“Mitch?”
Coltrane noticed slight movement on the focusing screen. He heard a far-off echoing whump-whump-whump and peered up from the camera to search the sky, seeing that the movement was a distant whirling speck: a helicopter. He inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative and grabbed the shutter release. “Come on,” he whispered tensely. He held his breath as the chopper’s glinting blades crossed the horizon.
“Now.” He squeezed the shutter release.
The camera clicked.
He breathed out. Packard’s bird of prey had symbolized Valentino’s bad ending and the impending invasion of the land. Now a helicopter and all it symbolized about the mechanization of the twentieth century had taken the falcon’s place.
“If that picture turns out the way I hope…” Coltrane watched the helicopter recede into the distance. “That was a one-time only chance. Even if another helicopter flies past, the odds are it’ll never be in the same spot as Packard’s falcon.”
Jennifer studied the sky. “You’re losing the light faster than we expected.”
“There might be enough for a couple more.”
A soft voice asked, “Do you suppose…”
Puzzled, Coltrane looked at Diane.
“When you’re finished taking pictures of the house…” Diane hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Could you take one of me?”
“Of course. It would be my pleasure.”
“You’re sure I’m not imposing?”
“Not at all. You made us feel welcome. I’d enjoy repaying the favor. If you turn this way… yes… with the sunset on your face…” Coltrane smiled. “It’ll be lovely.”
6
“SHE’S DYING,” Coltrane said, driving from the mansion.
“Something’s definitely wrong,” Jennifer said.
In his rearview mirror, Coltrane saw Diane standing in her driveway, her arms crossed on her oversized sweater, forlornly watching them head back toward Benedict Canyon Drive. Then he rounded a corner, and she disappeared.
“Studying her through the camera made it even more obvious,” Coltrane said. “The hollows around her eyes. I don’t think she has any hair under that kerchief. I think she’s bald from chemotherapy. I think getting married on Saturday is her attempt to grab at life.”
Jennifer didn’t say anything for a moment. “Yes. To grab at life.”
It was after dark, around six, when they pulled into the garage beneath Coltrane’s town house in Westwood. Jennifer’s BMW was at the curb.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked.
“What I’d really like to do is go into the darkroom and develop these negatives.”
The photographs of Falcon Lair turned out to be excellent. Most were a close match to the angle Packard had used, but close wouldn’t do it. For the exercise to work, the match had to be perfect. The one with the helicopter in place of the falcon did the trick. All Coltrane had to do was crop it a little and print a slight enlargement of the cropped area so that Falcon Lair was precisely the same size in both photos. Eerily, the helicopter was almost exactly where the falcon had been. By modifying the development period, Coltrane was able to get the same crisp black-and-white definition that Packard had. When he glanced from Packard’s photo to his own, he had the odd sensation that he was looking at time-lapse photography, that both pictures had been taken by the same person, who had made himself wait motionless in one spot for two-thirds of a century. Staring at that relic from the past, he couldn’t help recalling that after Valentino’s death, Buster Keaton had moved into the area and put up an Italian villa. John Gilbert had built a Mediterranean palace. Other movie stars – their names no longer familiar – had built their own mansions. All lost and gone. Only Falcon Lair remained. And would remain as long as Packard’s photo and his own survived.
“It’s a keeper.” Jennifer put an arm around him.
But the photograph of Falcon Lair wasn’t the treasure of the day. That honor went to the image of Diane.
He had done it in color. The glow of sunset chased the wanness from Diane’s cheeks. Her face was raised yearningly, her recessed eyes sad, her gaunt features determined, her frail shoulders braced as she smiled wistfully toward the sunset of her life.
“That I want my name on,” Coltrane said. “Her bravery’s an inspiration.”
“Packard would have been pleased to take that picture,” Jennifer said.
While they worked in the darkroom, they heard the phone ring on three different occasions. Each time, it stopped after four rings, the limit Coltrane had set for the answering machine to engage. “It’s probably more reporters wanting an interview about those war-atrocity photos. I hope my fifteen minutes of notoriety soon stop,” he said.
But after he finished making the prints and went to the living room to press the play button on his answering machine, he frowned when all he heard was mournful classical music.
Jennifer stopped next to him. “The same as on Saturday night?”
Coltrane nodded, troubled. “And this time, we know it wasn’t Packard.”
7
REPRESSING HIS MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE PHONE CALLS, Coltrane left his apartment the next morning shortly after seven. He brimmed with energy, never having been this enthusiastic about any project. First, a few blocks away, he stopped at a mailbox to drop in an envelope addressed to Diane. Along with three copies of her photograph, the package contained a copy of Packard’s Falcon Lair photograph and Coltrane’s parallel version of it. His note read, “Here are some mementos of our photographic adventure. Enjoy your honeymoon. I wish you every happiness.” He watched the lid close on the mailbox. To grab at life, he thought.
With that, he went to work.
There was a time, he knew, when pepper trees had grown on Hollywood Boulevard, when Beverly Hills had bridle paths, when streetcar tracks occupied the route that freeways now did, when Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood, Burbank, Tarzana, Encino, Van Nuys, and all the other communities in the San Fernando Valley (how Coltrane loved the litany of their names) were distinct villages separated by farmland. Each had a different architecture, English-style cottages in one contrasting with mission-style bungalows in another, Victorians in this area, colonials in that. The distinctness of each area was destroyed as the farmland shrank and the communities merged, although sometimes, driving from community to community, if Coltrane ignored where the borders met and concentrated only on the historical core of each area, he could still see the contrast between one community and another.