Double Image

Synopsis:

After a harrowing experience in Bosnia, war photographer Mitch Coltrane makes a vow. From now on, he will take only those pictures that celebrate life and document hope instead of despair. Then the horrors of his previous assignment return to threaten him, and Coltrane must seek refuge from the present in the past. Having uncovered an old, uncaptioned photograph of a hauntingly beautiful woman, Coltrane sets out to discover who the woman was, and why her photo was hidden in the vault of a world-famous art photographer. Soon he finds himself hopelessly obsessed with the woman in the photograph and slipping into a maze of deception and treachery. Surrounded by illusions of the past and present, Coltrane now must fight for his life in the world capital of make-believe: a decadent and deadly L.A....

The terms
shoot
and
take
are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term
make
define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events. Stieglitz told me, “When I make a photograph, I make love!”
— Ansel Adams

THE PIT SMELLED OF LOAM, mold, and urine. It was three feet wide, seven feet long, and three feet deep, the size of a shallow grave. Coltrane had been lying in it for thirty-six hours, a rubberized sheet under him, an earth-colored nylon sheet suspended over him, anchored by dead branches and further camouflaged by fallen pine needles. Two hundred yards below the wooded slope on which he was concealed, vehicles were arriving. Six big open-backed trucks jounced along a narrow road into a clearing in the deserted valley. With an echoing rumble, a bulldozer and a backhoe struggled to keep up. A few flakes of snow drifted to the frost-hardened ground as the convoy stopped next to a rectangular area, roughly fifty by a hundred feet, where the ground had been disturbed.

Having waited so long, Coltrane frowned toward the increasingly dark clouds drifting into the valley and prayed that the weather wouldn’t turn against him. He raised one of the four cameras arranged before him, focused its zoom lens, and started taking photographs. Men in tattered winter clothes, clutching automatic rifles, jumped from the trucks and scanned the slopes around them. Despite the care with which Coltrane had hidden himself, he tensed when they concentrated in his direction. Afraid he’d been spotted, he ducked his head and pressed himself harder against the floor of the pit. When the men changed their attention to another area of the valley, Coltrane let out his breath, taking more pictures. A bandy-legged, heavy-chested, beefy-faced man with dense dark hair and a thick mustache waved directions to the bulldozer and the backhoe.

Got you, you bastard. Coltrane pressed the shutter button, unable to get over his good fortune. Back in Tuzla, his contact on the UN inspection team had spread out a map and indicated a dozen areas that they intended to investigate. Of course, they wouldn’t get around to those areas until they finished with the dozen areas they were
already
investigating. The schedule depended on the weather, which was due to worsen now that November was almost half over. By the time the investigators reached all the suspected areas, the men they wanted to prosecute would have eliminated the evidence against them.

Coltrane had chosen the most isolated spot, his compass and terrain map preventing him from getting lost as he made his way, burdened by two knapsacks, across streams and ridges toward this slope. Concealed among bushes, waiting two hours, he had studied the rugged landscape for any sign that he had been noticed. Only after dark had he constructed his primitive shelter and crawled into it, exhausted, craving sleep but knowing that food had to come first, the cheese sandwiches and dry sausage he had brought along. But even before eating, there was one thing he knew he absolutely had to do: check his cameras.

Throughout the next day and night, Coltrane had remained in his cold hiding place, permitting himself movement only when he ate more sausage, drank from a straw inserted in his canteen, or turned onto his side, urinating into a plastic bottle. All the while, he had second-guessed himself, telling himself that he was wasting his time, that he had chosen the wrong location, or that nothing was going to happen in
any
location and he might as well hike out of here. The dingy bar where his fellow photojournalists hung out in Tuzla was beginning to seem more and more appealing. But he hated to surrender to impatience. Giving up wasn’t in his nature. And now he was overjoyed that he hadn’t. Not only was he getting prime photos of what the UN inspection team had suspected was happening at various sites but he was also documenting the participation of the man they most wanted to nail.

Dragan Ilkovic. A perfect name for a monster.

The son of a bitch leaned his rifle against the front of a truck and braced his hands on his powerful-looking hips, watching with satisfaction as the bulldozer went to work, plowing earth. The backhoe moved into position behind it. Heart pounding against the rubber sheet, Coltrane kept rapidly taking pictures, glad that he had brought four cameras, each with a different lens and film speed, some with black-and-white film, some with color, so that he wouldn’t have to waste time changing film.

Below him, a man with a rifle shouted, pointing fiercely at what the bulldozer had exposed. The beefy-faced man hurried over, yelling commands at the backhoe’s driver. For a frustrating moment, the commotion hid what agitated them, but the group quickly parted, some of them rushing to help unload a large piece of equipment from a truck, and Coltrane reacted with horror, the small image in his viewfinder intensified by the magnification of his zoom lens.

He was staring at corpses, a soul-searing countless jumble of them. The bodies had been thrown into the mass grave with such careless haste, so tangled among one another, that it was impossible to know which leg belonged to which torso, which arm to which shoulder to which neck to which skull. The confusion became more manifest as the weight of the bulldozer crushed spines and rib cages. Clothes had disintegrated, flesh had rotted, creating a common putrescent black mush from which gray bones protruded and lipless mouths gaped in silent, eternal anguish.

During the war, this region in eastern Bosnia was supposed to have been a UN-controlled safe haven for Muslims. From hundreds of miles around, as many as fifteen thousand Muslims had hurried here, seeking protection. The target had been too tempting for the Serbs, who surrounded the area and bombarded it, forcing the UN troops to surrender. Surprisingly, the Serbs had let the Muslim children go. But they raped the women — to breed the Muslims out of existence by forcing Muslim women to bear Serbian children. And as for the men . . . Coltrane’s mouth filled with bile as he worked the cameras, taking more and more photographs of what remained after the Serbs had loaded the Muslim men into trucks and driven them to isolated valleys like this one, where they dug pits with bulldozers and backhoes, lined the Muslim men up on the edge of the pits, and shot them.

Some of the pits, like the one Coltrane photographed, held as many as four hundred corpses, he had been told. It took a lot of hate and determination to get the job done, but the Serbs had been up to the challenge. When they had finally shot the last Muslim in the back of the head, they had used the bulldozers to spread earth over the bodies, and that was that — problem solved, everything neat and tidy. Except, when the war ended and Bosnia had been carved into Serb, Croat, and Muslim regions, the UN had started talking about outrages against humanity. A war-crimes tribunal was convened in the Netherlands, and suddenly a lot of Serb commanders, like Dragan Ilkovic down there, had become wanted men. They had to be tidier.

The roar of a large machine attracted Coltrane’s notice toward the cumbersome piece of equipment that the men had unloaded from one of the trucks. It had a huge funnel on one side and a spout on the other. It resembled the device that city cleanup crews used to pulverize fallen tree limbs. In this case, the machine was a
rock
pulverizer that Dragan Ilkovic had brought from one of the many nearby mines. The backhoe was dropping bones into the funnel. The spout on the other side was spewing horrifying pebbles into the back of a truck. The pebbles would be eliminated in a shaft in one of the mines, Coltrane’s informant had suspected. The trouble was, no one could prove that this sanitizing was actually taking place.

Until now
, Coltrane thought with fury. Abruptly he noted how quickly the clouds were darkening and thickening. The few flakes of snow had become flurries. He had to work fast. He got a close-up of Dragan Ilkovic, switched to a wide-angle view, and felt his heart stop as the camouflage sheet suspended over him was torn away.

HANDS GRABBED HIS ARMS AND SHOULDERS. Guttural voices barked. Coltrane barely had time to snag the straps on his cameras before he was jerked from the pit. The hands spun him, bringing him face-to-face with two muscular men wearing outdoor clothes, their features flushed with anger. The repeated clicks of his cameras must have alerted them as they searched for intruders. Conversely, the clicks — amplified in the confinement of his narrow shelter — had prevented him from hearing their footsteps creep toward him.

“Okay, guys, calm down.” Coltrane had no hope that they understood him. But if his tone communicated his intent, the men had absolutely no interest in calming down. Instead, they shoved him backward.

Coltrane made a futile placating gesture. “Look, I was only camping. No hard feelings. Why don’t I grab my stuff and leave?”

The men unslung assault rifles from their shoulders.

Several times, in Nicaragua at the start of Coltrane’s career, later in Lebanon and Iran, armed men had confronted him about photographs he had taken. Their attention had always been on his cameras. But
these
men barely glanced at his cameras. As they raised their weapons, all they seemed to care about was his chest.

Jesus. Coltrane reacted without thinking. Pretending to stumble back, he twisted as if to try to regain his balance, and
kept
twisting, spinning to face his attackers again, swinging his heaviest camera by the end of its strap. The bulky zoom lens collided with the chin on the man to Coltrane’s right, bone crunching. With a groan, the man lurched to Coltrane’s left, jolted against the second man, and threw off his aim, the second man’s assault weapon blasting chunks from a tree.

Coltrane rushed the men as they toppled into the pit. Swinging the camera again, he cracked it across the second man’s forehead. Blood flying, the man collapsed.

Startled voices echoed from the valley. Coltrane jerked his gaze in that direction. The small figures below had heard the gunshots. They were glaring toward this slope, some of them pointing, others shouting. The heavy-chested man grabbed his rifle and scrambled toward the slope.

Coltrane raced toward the ridge top, entering the dense fir trees on the opposite side. Shadows enveloped him. His cameras banged against him. The one he had used as a weapon was smeared with blood. The lens had shattered. If only the camera isn’t cracked, he hoped. If only the film hasn’t been exposed to light. Despite the frenzy of his descent, he pressed the rewind button and heard a whir, relieved that the motor hadn’t been damaged. Immediately, he lost his balance, a mat of fir needles slipping out from under him. His back struck the ground so hard that his teeth snapped together. He fought to dig in his heels to prevent himself from sliding faster down the slope, but the needles kept giving way. He tumbled, walloped to a stop against a tree, and grimaced from a sharp pain on his right side, finding where the camera had rammed against him.