Suddenly Wise appeared from somewhere, camera expanded for usage and cradled within the bend of his arm. Whether he had come out from inside the building just then, or had come up to them from somewhere out on the street, Marshall was not able to determine afterwards; he had not caught sight of him in time.
“I’d like to take a snapshot of you fellows,” he offered. “Shove in a little closer, so I can get you all in it together.”
The others, nothing loath and smiling fatuously as people usually do when an offer is made to photograph them (for they think this implies they are considered handsome), drew inward together shoulder to shoulder. One smoothed back his hair, one corrected the knot of his necktie, the third lifted one foot and surreptitiously dusted off his shoecap by stroking it up and down against the opposite leg of his trouser.
But Marshall, suddenly and belatedly, in that one instant, knew full-fledged suspicion and wariness of the camera. Of Wise’s motive in using it gratuitously like this. Where, until now, there had been none.
It’s me he wants. He wants to get my picture. Wants to get my face down on record. To send it off someplace, maybe, for purposes of comparison and identification.
“Come on, Marshall; you too,” said Wise, seeing that he made no move to sidle toward the others.
“I’m not in it,” he answered with sullen wariness, beginning to shift further over out of range.
“Sure you are. Why not?”
“Because I don’t like...” He changed his mind about saying that; it might lead their surmises too close to the truth. He amended it to, “Because I take a poor picture.”
“They’re no raving beauties,” Wise protested jovially. “Why should yours come out any worse than theirs?”
Marshall had moved now, deliberately, so far wide of the rest that Wise could no longer possibly have encompassed him with the same lens. But yet as he looked he noted that (possibly because it was he that Wise was addressing and turned to at the moment) it was he that the camera was sighted toward and not the rest of them any longer.
This only inflamed his conviction. It’s mine he wants! he told himself harassedly. Mine, and not theirs at all. Including them was just a blind. He’ll mark an X over me, or run a circle around me, if he does take the whole group, and then send it on to—
“Cut it out!” he cried out almost savagely, and threw up his forearm protectively before his face, to ward off any impending snapshot.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” somebody jeered.
What could he say then? “I’m not afraid. I just don’t happen to want my picture taken. I’m not in the mood right now, that’s all.”
“All right, let him alone, I’ll take the rest of you,” Wise said, crestfallen.
Marshall, safely out of range, watched closely. He received a distinct impression that no exposure had been made, that Wise’s thumb had not shunted the trigger at all, even though it had pretended to.
He turned, moved all around them in a wide circle, careful to pass behind Wise and camera, and started to go in the building entrance.
“Marshall,” Wise called to him unexpectedly.
He turned his head inadvertently, unable to control himself in time. Wise was holding the camera up, and in that instant took the snapshot.
“Thanks,” Wise said drily. “Got you that time.”
A laugh went up at Marshall’s expense. His first impulse was to stride back, wrest the camera away from Wise, and trample it. He checked himself. Too drastic, too self- incriminating. Then they would surely fathom that he had graver reasons than just an unsociable mood for not wanting his picture taken.
He started again to enter the building, but was thoroughly frightened now. At the elevator he turned and watched for Wise. Had the latter remained outside for any length of time — such as would have been required to step around to some nearby drugstore to leave the film for developing — he almost certainly would have gone outside again, followed him, and perhaps made some desperate, last-minute attempt to impede or thwart him. Though what form it could have taken, he had not the slightest idea. But Wise — and the others — came in at his heels, so he could feel sure the roll was still in the camera, if nothing else.
They all went up in the elevator together. Wise now tried to make amends (probably for the reason that obvious discomfiture was still to be read all over Marshall’s face). “I didn’t really take your picture just now, Marsh,” he said placatingly. “I was just kidding.”
He’s lying, Marshall told himself. He wants to throw me off guard. Showing that it’s even of more importance to him not to have me think he’s taken it (now that he has), until it has been processed and he can get a confirmation on the basis of it.
Wise replaced the camera on his desk where it had been all morning, and everyone went back to his work.
Marshall couldn’t keep his eyes off it. Under their concealing lids they surreptitiously went to it again and again. His undoing, his destruction, he told himself, was lurking at this very moment in that harmless-looking slablike oblong box, so near at hand.
He mustn’t carry that out of here with him this evening! He mustn’t be allowed to take it beyond my reach, while it’s got what it has in it! Once he does. I’m lost. But how? How?
Near three, Wise was suddenly called inside to Ponds’ private office for something. The camera stayed there where it was.
Marshall was on his feet even before the closing of the intervening door had been completed.
He unobstrusively caught up the camera en route, while passing by, and took it with him over to the sun-slopped window sill.
There, with his back screening what he was doing from the others in the room, he opened the lid, expanded the shutter, as if he were about to take a picture of the emptiness outside the open window.
He peered down into the little red-glassed indicator slit. The numeral 5 was standing there. Meaning either (he could not be sure) that Wise had so far taken four shots and moved the film onward into position for the fifth ahead of time, or already taken all five and left the film in its last position.
He put his thumb to the lever, pushed it down, held it there as for a time-exposure, letting the sun go boiling in through the open lens, blanching the exposed film to a useless milky white.
Then he went back, and did it to 4, and 3, and 2, and 1. Finally, lest he be taken unaware again and Wise make another attempt at snapping him without his knowledge, he brought the film all the way forward to 6 and exposed that too. That was all there were on any commercial film roll, he knew; six exposures.
Then he closed the camera once more, took it back to the desk, replaced it there.
Pandora’s box had been rendered harmless; it could be opened now and nothing would come out.
“He sure wanted that badly,” he smiled to himself with grim satisfaction. “But not half as badly as I didn’t want him to have it.”
13