Naked Angels

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‘I don’t live here now,’ Nico said, ‘I just come here when I need to.’

Evangeline shrugged. ‘It would still be nicer clean,’ she told him. ‘You never know, after all.’

‘You never know what?’

‘You just never know, that’s all. You might get rats or something. Somebody might break in and see all the mess. I don’t know.’

Nico shook his head, tapping his finger against his forehead. ‘You know you are a little crazy, don’t you?’ he laughed. He didn’t look comfortable, not even in his own home. He picked up a handful of mail from the mat and began sifting through it quickly.

‘There’s a room locked,’ Evangeline said.

‘I know. That’s where we’re working.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes, today.’

He made coffee, which drove Evangeline mad with impatience.

‘We just had coffee!’

‘I know, but I always drink coffee when I work. It’s kind of a rule. Black, too. You’d better get used to that yourself.’ They drank black coffee that made her shudder. She washed up and dried before he could pour a second cup.

There was another unlocking ritual and then she was inside her father’s workroom. It was small, no bigger than a bathroom, and dark, because the windows had been boarded over.

‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘Why are you whispering?’

Because it was like being in church, she thought: weird, silent. Darkness made your voice sound funny, so it was better to whisper. Nico clicked a switch and a bare red bulb bathed the room in an eerie light.

‘You OK?’ Nico asked. He didn’t know if she was scared of the dark. ‘Uh-huh.’ He heard her swallow.

There were tables and a sink and some washing lines overhead with metal pegs hanging from them. Evangeline held her hand to her face to see what it looked like in the red light. Nico tossed something into the air a couple of times and then threw it at her. She caught it, which was good. It was a film.

‘They’re the shots from last night,’ he said. ‘We’re going to print them up. This is my darkroom, Evangeline. This is where I work.’

She rolled the film around in her fingers. ‘You work in the clubs,’ she said.

‘No,’ Nico told her. ‘I take shots in the clubs. This is where I work. This is where the magic is done. Did you take a look at the people I photograph? Eh?’

Evangeline nodded.

‘Pretty? Yes or no? No. Right. You know that they’re ugly. I know that they’re ugly. But what do you think they know about it, eh? Well I’ll tell you. They think they look great. They think they look so good it’s a wonder the mirror doesn’t pay them to look into it.

‘What they see when they look into the mirror is not what you and I see, Evangeline. They see Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida; what we see when we look at them is a baboon’s arse, if you’ll pardon my French. Now, they pay me to take their photo. What do you think they want to see when they get those shots back? Curtis and Lollo? Or a monkey’s arse?’

Evangeline laughed.

‘Right,’ Nico said, ‘so therefore the magic. Anyone can take a photograph, Evangeline. It’s making that photograph look good that counts.’ He bent his head closer towards hers, ‘The old lady wanted to teach you how to paint pictures, Evangeline. She wanted you to be like her son and your mother. Well, you’re not, so don’t bust your whole life trying. Maybe you have talent, maybe you don’t. You’re not happy with paint and paint isn’t happy with you, that much is obvious.

‘But there’s more than one way to create pictures, Evangeline. You see an image and you record it for others to see. Then you dress it up a little, make it look better than it already is. That is true of great artists, but it is also true of great photographers.

‘Photographers and artists see exactly what we all see, Evangeline, but it’s how they translate those pictures that makes them good – understand? Right, let’s see what we can do with a group of baboons’ arses, shall we?’

She had never heard her father say so much before and she would never hear him speak so eloquently again.

She watched enthralled as he took the lid off one of three large tanks and stuck a thermometer into the liquid inside.

‘Twenty degrees.’ He spoke to himself but she knew he was teaching her, too. He leant across and switched the light out and the room became the darkest darkness she had ever sat in before. There were a couple of cracking noises as he took the film out of its canister and then he described how he was loading it onto a metal spool.

The spool went into the first tank and she heard a watery sound as he dunked it up and down. Then he put the lid back onto the tank and switched the dull red light back on again.

‘I have a timer, see? Like an alarm clock. It all has to be timed, like baking a loaf. Six minutes, maybe more – you get the feel of it after a while, but you still time it, right?’ The timer went off as he spoke and Evangeline nearly jumped out of her socks.

The light went off again.

‘Right. Now it goes into the wash. Now I drain it and then it goes into the fix – see?’ Evangeline nodded even though she could see nothing. ‘In the fix for two minutes,’ Nico continued, ‘then I take a look at it – you learn what to look for – then I wash the film for twenty minutes or so. A bit of wetting agent and then we can hang it out to dry.’

The film strips were hung onto the small washing line. ‘I hang them over the radiator here so that they dry more quickly – just enough time for another coffee and some cheesecake.’

‘Fruit,’ Evangeline said, ‘or you’ll get fat.’

‘Photographers don’t get fat, Evangeline,’ Nico said, ‘we’re lean, mean fighting machines. We eat what we will – it’s one of the rules of the job.’

After more black coffee Nico showed Evangeline how to work the enlarger. She hopped with impatience while he did a test strip and then finally he came up with a proper print on paper.

‘See this?’ he asked. She bent over the sheet, chewing her hair. She recognized the faces in front of her. It was a man from the night before and the woman in satin who had given her the paper umbrella from her drink. ‘Baboons’ arses,’ Nico said. They looked gormless and ugly. Nico held up a lady’s stocking. ‘This is where the magic begins,’ he continued. He stretched a piece of the stocking over the lens of the enlarger. ‘Or I could blow on the lens to mist it,’ he told Evangeline. This time the print came up softer and more film star-like. Nico held the shot up to the light. ‘I think she needs a smaller nose and less of a gap between the front teeth,’ he said. ‘He could do with a couple less chins.’

He took the print into the kitchen and sat down with a small box of pens and inks and razor blades. He worked quickly, bending so low his nose almost touched the paper, dabbing, dotting and gently scraping until the shot was finished.

‘There you go.’ He held the photograph up for Evangeline’s inspection. ‘Well?’ he asked.

He was right – it was magic. He had made the couple look like film stars. Evangeline was speechless.

‘You don’t like?’ Nico looked confused.

‘How did you do this?’ Evangeline asked. Nico’s expression relaxed into a smile.

‘You saw how I did it. I showed you.’

‘But this is special. This is perfect. You made things perfect, Nico.’

‘No, Evangeline, it’s just hard work. If you know what you’re doing it’s not difficult. And I’m not that good – there are many more tricks than I’ll ever bother to learn. Look.’ He pulled a book out from under a pile of photographic paper boxes. The book was a large one and full of photographs. Nico sat and drank coffee while Evangeline looked through it.

‘You like?’ he asked. The book was full of shots of old movie stars. Evangeline studied each one closely.

‘You think they’d look like that if you passed them in the street?’ Nico asked. He was smiling at her. He leant forward, pointing: ‘This photographer who did these shots, he was an artist, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘He took the photograph, yes, but then the true work was done. Retouch, retouch, retouch. The man was a genius. I see him sitting over his desk at night, a box of paints and a few blades, just as I have here, scraping, gently, bleaching, eliminating. He created these stars, Evangeline, he did it himself.’

Nico threw another book down in front of her. ‘Never believe what you see in pictures, Evangeline,’ he said. ‘They say the camera never lies, but that is one of the greatest lies of all time. Famous war photographs – look at them. How many do you think were staged, eh? You see a so-so shot and you turn it into something special with a little staging.

‘Do you think Dino Foretti wanted a business portrait of himself squatting in that old cane chair with the holes in it that he works from most days? No. That chair is the truth, but I sat him on a real leather chair, Evangeline, the sort with studs and everything. I draped some satin in the background – red, like presidents use. The result? Not Foretti as he is, but Foretti as he wants to be. Foretti the business tycoon. He was happy, he loved it. Trade in falsehoods, Evangeline, and you have a business. Try to sell the truth, and you end up bankrupt within the month.’

He pointed out one of the movie stars in the first book. ‘You like her nose?’ he asked. He leant forward and his voice dropped. ‘That lady has an invisible wire set up, which is stretched across the set before she is photographed. She leans her nose against the wire and suddenly it isn’t so long. Suddenly it turns up at the end, instead of down. Suddenly she looks like the movie queen she is supposed to be. Now that’s a class act, Evangeline, take my word for it.’

‘It’s great,’ Evangeline said.

‘Good,’ Nico sounded as though he approved. ‘Now, do you think you’re ready to have a go at printing the next batch?’

Evangeline swallowed. ‘Sure.’ She had never felt so unsure about anything in her life before, but she was prepared to drop down dead before she let her father know that.

For an impatient man, Nico was a surprisingly good teacher. He talked Evangeline through the process and he didn’t shout or swear when she made bad mistakes. By the end of the day they were both exhausted and Evangeline had a small print on the table in front of her that was all her own work. The picture was crooked and a little too dark and that made her mad with herself but Nico insisted it didn’t matter – it was the best trophy possible for all the effort she’d put in.

‘You did well,’ Nico told her. He had been surprised to see her so driven and quietly worried by her perfectionism. She was only a kid. Perfection shouldn’t matter so much to a kid of her age. It was like the cleaning and the clearing up she was always at. It was as though she wanted everything right. He wished she enjoyed mess more, like most normal kids.

She didn’t look up, she just sat chewing her hair, but she was more pleased than she was showing.

‘Maybe you’d like to learn how to take shots, too.’ She could hear her father smiling at her and she thought she might burst with pride.

‘You deserve cheesecake now – proper cheesecake from an Italian deli, not the sugary crap that hotel serves up.’ Nico actually put a hand out and ruffled her hair, like she used to ruffle Patrick’s coat when he’d done something extra wonderful. Evangeline didn’t argue this time. Even cheesecake sounded good. When they’d finished eating he let her cut the end of a cigar for him. The other men in the deli laughed at that and she laughed along with them.

When Evangeline woke the next morning there was a large envelope propped on her bedside table, next to the hotel phone. She wiped her eyes and picked it up. Her name was written on the front in Nico’s handwriting. When she opened the envelope a photograph fell out and, when she turned the shot the right way up, she cried out loud as though someone had pinched her.

The shot was the one of Lincoln with the mouse ears, only much, much bigger and much, much fresher. Nico must have done it, he must have taken the shot from her bag and got all the creases out and then copied it just for her. She ran her finger down the baby’s nose and a tear landed bang on the back of her hand. Nico was right; photography was magic. Evangeline knew she was smitten.

13 (#ulink_576eba29-9f5c-5625-b1e4-3799e0c65c7b)

Budapest 1985

Mikhail stood in the middle of Kapisztran ter, beneath the statue of the monk the square had been named after, and studied the tourists. It was a few degrees below zero that morning but the weather was no longer such a problem. He had a new coat around his shoulders and three pairs of good socks on his feet. In exactly seventeen minutes, when the church clock chimed the half-hour, he would go into the coffee house in National Assembly Street and sit amongst the old women with their white hair and pearls and order a hot chocolate with whipped cream and a slice of sweet pancake with nuts on top.

An American couple walked up to the statue he was standing in front of and paused. Mikhail could spot the nationality from the clothes the tourists wore. Furs for the Italians, and always good quality shoes. Trousers for American women and the men always wore a hat. The British wore inappropriate shoes and carried umbrellas, even in summer. Mikhail waited until this couple were busy reading the inscription on the statue before crossing to speak to them.

‘Good morning,’ he said in English. So polite, so formal.

The couple smiled at him. ‘Hi there.’

Mikhail pointed at the statue. ‘John Capistranus,’ he said, ‘saint, Franciscan monk and fighter of the Turk.’

The couple’s smiles widened.

‘He led the armies into the battle of Belgrade. It was a great victory. American?’ he asked. The couple nodded. ‘Would you like a photograph of the two of you in front of the statue? Both together?’ he held his hand out for the expensive camera the American was carrying. The man went to hand it over but his wife dug him discreetly in the ribs. Keep your camera at your side, the guide book told them, Don’t let a thief run off with it. The man was in a quandary. He didn’t want to look as though he was accusing the young man of thieving …

‘I can use my own camera if you like,’ Mikhail said, smiling. ‘Give me your address and I can have the shot sent to your room by tonight. Cheap, too – not much money.’

The American smiled with relief. ‘OK,’ he said. They posed nervously for a shot, then paid a very large sum in cash. Mikhail chatted to them a little longer, then stood waving as they walked away. Claude’s camera had come in handy. Maybe one day he would even put a film in it and learn how to take some proper photographs.

Tincan was sitting on a bench a few feet away, his hair plastered flat with gel and an ill-fitting jacket around his beefy shoulders. Mikhail sauntered over and passed him the couple’s name and hotel address. ‘Room 171,’ he said. ‘They’re at the opera between seven and ten thirty tonight.’ Tincan would rob the room later and pay Mikhail a little from his takings. Life was almost sweet as long as you forgot the past and tried not to consider the future. As long as you ignored the ghosts, too. Andreas didn’t visit so often now and when he did it was only in dreams.

He looked at the camera. Sometimes he thought he could still smell Claude’s scent on the plastic. Tincan had suggested he sell it and buy a cheaper one. After all, what did it matter what type he used since it was all a scam anyway? But Mikhail had wanted to keep it. Not for sentimental purposes; his only thoughts of Claude were of anger and disgust. No, Mikhail still had plans to leave Hungary one day for somewhere better and he thought the camera might help to find him a job. He had told Tincan, but the boy had only laughed.