CAMERA

Copyright (c) 2019 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

CAMERA

By R. Peterson

It was the final day of our vacation and I was browsing the last ten acres of the world’s largest flea market in Quartzsite, Arizona when I spotted a rusty Flexaret twin-lens reflex camera loitering on a junk table, along with a garage door opener and a radar detector. I’d been a camera nut ever since fourth grade when I got my first non-mother kiss from Gloria Newberry inside her father’s basement darkroom. Gloria ran out on me about the same time the Kinks finished their first US tour … but my love of photography stayed.

“Don’t spend over twenty dollars,” Nancy warned me. I’d lost my job with a public relations firm and I intended to start looking for a job as soon as we returned. She followed a dancing Charles to a table that sold Amazon blow-guns made from plastic-pipe that shot real feathered darts.

Meopta, a Czechoslovaian  film company, started building Flexaret VI Automat cameras in 1947. This one was possibly much older perhaps an experimental model because the manufacturer’s plate read Flexaret 4.19. The sticker on the side was $5.

“Can you still buy film for this thing?” I asked the stoned looking senior citizen hiding behind the table with below-the-shoulder-hair half-covering a Grateful Dead t-shirt. His apple shaped old-lady, wife or girlfriend answered for him when she walked around the canvas curtain shading his booth stirring a glass pitcher of orange Cool Aide. “They stopped making 120 roll film last year, but most stores still have some … if you know where to look.”

The film winder was stuck on seven. I was pretty sure the camera had exposed film inside. An antique photograph properly developed could be worth a fortune if the film was undamaged. “How long has this thing been sitting in the sun?” I asked.

The hippy behind the table laughed. “About thirty minutes,” he said. “Craziest thing I ever seen.” He reached down with a bandaged hand and dropped a battered metal box on the table that looked chewed on by the Jaws of Life. “The camera was in this box when I found it in a cold storage unit in Chicago. I went to two burglars and a cop and nobody could pick the lock. I finally ended up having it cut open this morning by the guy selling metal saws two booths down … all for a damn German camera that may or may not bring me five bucks.”

“What makes you think the camera is German?” I asked.

The Hippy produced a hand lettered slip of yellowed paper from his shirt pocket. “I almost forgot. This was on top of the camera.”

Mein Liebling Eva mit all meiner Liebe - A  the note read.

“It’s been years since I took German as my foreign language in High School, the Hippy said, “but I think this camera was a gift!”

I put my hand on the torn metal of the heavily insulated box … it was over ninety degrees out but it felt cold.

I was turning the camera over with my hands and noticed a spot of flaky tarnish clinging to the bottom. I rubbed it away and then put on my reading glasses. I turned the camera sideways to catch the light. Engraved in the metal base was a name … Eva Braun.

 “I’ll take it.” I said.

-------2-------

Two days after we returned to New York City I took the camera, the box and the note to a friend of mine who specialized in antique photographs and rare documents. I was going uptown anyway scattering resumes. “Is this worth anything?” I asked my old friend Benjamin Goldstein.

“Eva Braun was Hitler’s mistress for more than fifteen years and his wife for less than a day,” he said. “If this is real, and not some hoax, it could be worth a fortune!”

“How can we tell if it’s real?”

“I can take the note to a handwriting expert and have it authenticated. Until then I’d advise you to not let the camera or the lock box out of your sight. The undeveloped film inside could be priceless!” He put the note into a plastic sleeve and promised to call as soon as he found out anything.

-------3-------

I’d home processed hundreds of rolls of film over the last forty years still I was extra- meticulous as I opened the camera in my darkroom. A professional should be doing this but at the moment I was strapped for cash. The undeveloped film felt brittle. I was careful to only touch it around the edges. Even with the glow of the red light bulb my fingers felt like they were covered with boxing gloves as I loaded the film onto a metal spool and placed it inside an aluminum canister. I added a developing solution to transform the film into a negative and after agitating the solution for the required time added a fixer to stop the process.

I held my breath as I removed the negatives from the spool. Even under the red light bulb I could tell something was wrong. The first three photos looked almost black there must have been a light leak in the camera. The next three looked double exposed. The remaining eighteen were mostly clear which meant the frames hadn’t been exposed to any light.

I attached the developed negative to a wire strung across one corner of my work area with a clothes pin and crimped another to the bottom of the strip so that it would dry straight. I reloaded the camera with fresh film. It was a habit I cultivated from my earliest days. A camera without film is an opportunity lost. The phone rang and I went upstairs to answer it.

Benny sounded ecstatic. “I’ve taken your document to two experts and both are more than 95% certain that the note was written by Adolph Hitler. One of them offered me a thousand dollars on the spot!”

“You told him no?”

“Of course I did. This isn’t just a note, it’s part of history. We’re talking five figures here and if the photos in the camera turn out to be something we could be talking millions!”

“We?” I couldn’t help but smile.

“You need an agent,” he said. “I’m not going to let you throw yourself to the wolves who prowl this town!”

I was smiling when I hung up the phone. I had a feeling Benny’s friendship was going to cost me but who knows … maybe we’d both end up rich!

-------4------

I was even more careful with the negatives as I loaded them into my enlarger and decided to make some photos. I chose eight by ten papers even though the resolution on these cameras was meant for five by five prints. I wanted to be able to study these pictures in detail.

It was just as I thought, all three of the useable negatives were double exposed. The first print showed two Scottish Terrier dogs apparently begging for food near a kitchen cabinet. In a ghostly overexposure, on the same frame, were the same two dogs lying in an outside garden with gunshot wounds to their heads. The second photograph was a cityscape of Berlin. I spent hours with a magnifying glass mapping out the location of known buildings and came to the conclusion that the photo had to be taken from the balcony of the Reich Chancellery. Overexposed on the same frame were the same nearby structures shattered and in ruin … broken brick, dust and rubble marking the locations of once elegant and historic buildings.

            The third photograph showed a mustached man wearing a woman’s housecoat leaning on the same balcony rails and seeming to stare toward a distant horizon as he smoked a cigarette. For more than an hour I wasn’t sure the man was Adolph Hitler. He looked much older and different when he wasn’t wearing a Nazi uniform. This frame was also double exposed and it was the double exposure that finally convinced me.

In a much closer exposure, Adolph Hitler lay slumped against the back of a small sofa. His eyes were open at the instant of death and he seemed to stare right at me. I was terrified. He looked furious and defiant. A woman’s drawn-up legs could be seen to the left of him. A smoking Walther Police Pistol was clutched in his right hand and blood dripped from a gaping hole in his right temple.

-------5-------

            I knocked the breath out of Benny when I called him on the phone and told him about the developed photographs. It was almost a half-minute before he responded and then he sounded like he’d drunk a glass filled with whistles. “Don’t do anything,” he begged. “Not until I get there!”

            “I assured him that I’d do nothing with the photos or the camera … until he arrived.

The strange photographs kept flashing over and over in my mind. Each photo showed a seeming ordinary scene overlapped by what looked like the moment of death for the subject. A city isn’t really supposed to die but Berlin sure did in the last days of April 1945.  I did some research and a dog handler was reputed to have shot Eva Braun Hitler’s two beloved dogs shortly after her and Adolph’s suicides. The strange thing was, I believed the photos I’d developed were taken by Eva Braun herself. No one else had complete access to Hitler’s personal life and his inner sanctum but her. But where did the double exposures come from? Who would be around to photograph the instant of death for the subjects?

            A cold chill ran down my spine as I stared at the camera sitting on my darkroom worktable. The Flexaret twin-lens reflex camera suddenly seemed like some kind of monster! “What the hell are you?” I gasped, “and why have you been locked away all these years?”

The doorbell rang. Nancy and Charlie had gone out to see a movie. I felt remorse. My wife had more time for our twelve year old son than I did.

I went upstairs to answer it …

TO BE CONTINUED …