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The Remington Hotel was Houston’s wealth and elegance at its best. It lay in a wooded setting just off San Felipe in Tenneco’s forty-three acre Post Oak Park adjacent to River Oaks and just across Loop 610 from the Galleria. New and relatively small, the Remington was built with great attention to detail and craftsmanship and was operated in the manner of the Grand Residence, with emphasis on intimacy of service and atmosphere. Its guest list was largely international and the creme de la creme of corporate world travelers.
They drove inside the gates of the walled driveway and passed under the lighted trees to the entrance, which seemed to emit a warm amber glow from within the travertine facade. They left the Vanden Plas with the valets and went inside to the Main Living Room, where Haydon knew Herrick would be waiting for them.
Herrick stood to meet them as they stepped down into the room. He was sitting in an alcove with a bay window at his back, the lights of the Galleria district sparkling behind him. He was dressed à quatre épingles, his British suit severely cut, almost Edwardian.
“Nina, you’re gorgeous,” he said, smiling richly and holding his hands out to her. He kissed her on both cheeks, offered her a seat beside him, and shook hands with Haydon, who took a chair opposite them, facing the night.
“Something to drink? Of course.”
They ordered from the dark coated waiter, who had kept his eye on them from the moment they appeared on the landing and who dis patched his attendants for the drinks.
“Aren’t the flowers here absolutely marvelous,” Herrick said, lighting a cigarette and settling back as he swept an arm around the room. “These profuse table displays here, in the foyers, the dining rooms. There’s a fortune in bloody flowers. I’ve read how much a month they spend on these lovelies. Thousands.”
Herrick was a stereotype: British foreign correspondent. His manners were Continental, his ideas worldly, if a little jaded. A lifelong bachelor with no regrets, he was satisfied with his past and eager to get on with the future. He was smiling at Nina now, enjoying her, whose presence he had always relished, with the open pleasure of a connoisseur who knows he’s looking at the very best of a kind.
“You’re looking well, Thomas,” Nina said in self-defense.
“My tailor’s a damn lush,” he said through his preoccupation. Nina smiled back. For the most part, she ignored his non sequiturs, having learned to pass over them as though they’d never been uttered. She had once said that since they made sense only in Herrick’s mind, that’s where she would leave them. Haydon managed to ferret out the connections about half the time. In this case, he knew that Herrick’s tailor, whom he had met on a trip to London, was an alcoholic and didn’t manage his money well. Herrick often commissioned clothes he really didn’t need, paying for them in advance in an unselfish act of noblesse oblige. As a result he had more clothes than he could reasonably expect to wear and, being easily bored with the ordinary, often ordered suits and shirts that were more highly stylized than most people were used to.
“So, how long has it been?” Herrick said, suddenly turning to Haydon. “Six, eight months?”
“Almost a year.”
“Good Lord! I’d not left Reuters, then?”
“No.”
“But you heard about it?” Haydon nodded.
“Of course you did.” Herrick brought his arms up and used the base of his palms to smooth the longish graying hair at his temples. “Well, I’d rather tired of it all, though I must admit I miss the esprit de corps and all that. But being on one’s own has its advantages. And the years with Reuters gave me wonderful contacts. I go to London every few months, travel some, but mostly I’m here now.”
“I’ve heard you’re doing well. I’ve seen you a couple of times in Newsweek, something in U.S. News and World Report, Paris-Match, Der Spiegel.”
Herrick grinned appreciatively. “You do your homework, don’t you, Stuart. Yes, I’ve been fortunate. Actually, for journalists like me things haven’t been this good since Vietnam. All sorts of little wars, plenty of dying and tragic stories, big countries and smaller ones plotting amongst themselves and blowing up one another’s people. No one ever learns anything. We are all of us troglodytes, and perversely enjoy reading about our continuing stupidities in newspapers and magazines.”
“I spoke to someone at your old base who gave me your telephone number. She said to ask you to call her. Nancy.”
“There you are! Advantages of contacts.”
Haydon had met Thomas Herrick nearly a dozen years before, when Herrick was covering the murder trial of a British RAF pilot who had been training at NASA and had become romantically involved with the wife of a NASA officer. When the affair soured, the RAF pilot convinced the woman to have one last meeting with him. They argued and he lost his temper and strangled her, then stuffed her body in the trunk of her car, which he abandoned on a secluded drive in Memorial Park. The pilot turned out to be the son of a Member of Parliament, adding a lot of spice to the ensuing trial.
At one end of the room a thin young man sat in a straight backed wooden chair and played subdued selections for baroque guitar against the backdrop of a massive, black-lacquered Chinese folding screen with narrative scenes and columns of characters in inlaid gold that glistened in the soft light. Most of the armchairs and sofas in the room were occupied now, and a low muttering of conversation mixed with the strains of music.
They had a second round of drinks, which they finished over stories of the past year and of mutual friends. Haydon signaled the waiter that they were leaving, and they continued to talk as they walked along the central hall done in beige and pastels through a series of arches with imposts and piers of bleached oak. Their footsteps echoed softly on the floors of pale Italian marble and periodically fell silent as they passed over dhurrie carpets recessed into the stone.
The majordomo recognized Haydon when they came into the foyer outside the dining room and immediately led them through the formal area with its French chinoiserie murals to their table in the conservatory. They ordered dinner and, in Herrick’s honor, a special bottle of Chateau Laville-Haut-Brion.
When the waiters left, Herrick carefully moved aside the single blue iris that sat in the center of the table and leaned back comfortably in his white wicker armchair. He toyed with an unlit cigarette and looked at Haydon with a bemused smile.
“All right, Stuart, I can’t tolerate any more of this polite avoidance. What is it you think you can get from me?”
The waiter came with the white Bordeaux and uncorked it. Haydon thanked him and said he would pour, which he did, and then shoved the bottle back into the ice.
“I’m hoping you know someone I’m interested in,” he said, taking the first sip from his glass. “When you were with Reuters did you ever come across a man named Ricky Toy? He was a photographer: motion picture, not stills.”
“Yes, I did,” Herrick answered crisply, a little surprised. “He was a Chinese-American. From California, I believe. I worked with him quite a few times. I saw him get shot in the head.”
“He was killed?” Haydon was perplexed.
“No. It was a freak thing. I heard it, actually.” Herrick slapped a fist into an open hand. “Just like that. We were all horrified. It was a Twenty-fifth Infantry Division encampment near this little mountain village called Bouk, I believe it was. We’d been Huey’d in the day before, several of us from different news agencies. Really, I believe, the place was so secure that nothing was going to happen there and that’s why we were dropped in.
“In any case, late one afternoon we were looking down into this valley from behind one of those huge sandbag embankments, and this silly lieutenant was giving us some really boring information about how they’d pacified the area. Toy saw half a dozen peasants in those coolie hats winding down a trail toward the bottom of the valley. Always flamboyant, he quite suddenly hopped onto the embankment and began filming. We’d been warned, of course, of snipers. The lieutenant shouted a reprimand and then”—the fist in hand again—”smack Toy’s head snapped back, and he tumbled off the sandbags. Medics got all over him, and a chopper came in within minutes and took him away. We were lectured by the lieutenant, who was beside himself with rage. For the next twenty-four hours we solemnly spoke of Toy in the past tense. Then we received a radio message that he was going to be all right. Spent round hit him at a glance or something. He had a fractured skull.”
Herrick finally lit the cigarette. “Spent round. Sounded odd to me, which it was, I suppose. They said it was probably some primitive low caliber thing. I worked with him after that, too. It didn’t change him.”
“Didn’t change him?”
“Right. Toy had a reputation for recklessness. That made him unpopular with the backup men who were assigned him, his battery and cable assistants who had to drag all this hardware along behind him in order for his camera to function. On the other hand, it also made him popular with journalists, who always knew that if there was exciting footage to be found Toy would find it, and if you were working with him your story was more likely to get airtime because of it.”
“He was good at it then?” Haydon asked.
“The very best.”
Haydon thought a moment and then roughly outlined the case for Herrick and explained how Toy’s name had come to his attention. Just then their dinner arrived, and Haydon poured more wine.
It was a little while before Herrick said, “I can’t imagine, of course, what his connection might be, if any. I don’t really know what to tell you that would help. Naturally, because he was such an exhibitionist he was controversial. The younger men among us were likely to be awed by his sheer refusal to believe he could sustain injury while filming. That happened a lot with those cameramen. It seems they found it almost hypnotic to watch violence through that little viewfinder. Their concentration was absolute; they literally forgot themselves. They’d walk right into a firefight with that damn camera stuck to their faces filming this fascinating unfolding drama. It was a mesmerizing delusion; they thought they were invisible.” He laughed. “Of course, the poor fellows carrying the battery packs and cables didn’t have the talismanic protection of the viewfinder and were terrified out of their minds.”
“Was Toy wounded just that once?” Nina asked. “He had no other close calls?”
“Wounded just the once, yes, but there were endless close calls. Journalists would relate hair raising stories after coming in from the field with him. As the Vietnam thing wore on, Toy’s antics became absurd, actually. There were some journalists who wouldn’t go out with him. They had no desire to see the man blown to pieces. It was nerve racking to watch him work. We all wagered each time he went out that it would be his last. But we were always wrong. He never got it.”
Herrick bent to his Lamb Provençal. The conservatory tables with their tea rose cloths were watched carefully by the waiters in black and their white jacketed attendants, who moved silently and unobtrusively among the diners, serving in response to unobserved gestures and inaudible requests. Muted ceiling light fell in pools through potted Ficus trees, casting random traceries of shadows on the tables and the diners.
At the first liquid notes of the flute, Haydon looked through the beveled panes of the tall fan windows that separated the conservatory from the formal dining room. He saw the back of the girl, arms raised to one side of her head in the supple posture of a ballet dancer as she held the flute to her mouth. She bent her head slightly as if hearing the Handel for the first time, entranced. Her dress had an open back, and he saw the tiny dusky shadows that defined her shoulder blades. He wondered how old she was. Young. Certainly young enough to live another kind of life from his, a different tempo of different days and nights.
Then, as suddenly as he had done with Nina, he imagined it happening to the girl too. In the gilded light that suffused the room, the blood he envisioned emerging in a single trickle from the wispy hair at the back of the girl’s neck appeared black. Slowly it followed a serpentine path between her shallow shoulder blades to the small ridge of her spine and then continued in a glistening track until it disappeared into the downward curve of her dress at the base of her back. Unaware, she continued playing as another trickle oozed from her hairline, and then another, scoring black paths on her ivory skin as they plunged in quickening streams to join the first along her spine.
He felt Nina’s hand on his. He looked at her. She smiled awkwardly, sadly·. He looked at Herrick, who was holding his napkin midway between his mouth and the table. His eyes were fixed on Haydon.
“You all right, old boy?”
“Sorry, Thomas,” Haydon said self-consciously. There was no convincing way to get out of it. “You made a remark that reminded me of something. I guess I just took off with it. I’m sorry.”
Herrick quickly showed an ingenuous smile. “Sherlock’s preoccupations.” He tried to chuckle, but Haydon saw him cast a quick look at Nina. Haydon did not look at her.
Instead, he took the white Bordeaux from the bucket and poured more for each of them.
“Thomas,” he said after a moment. “Could you give me your personal feelings about Ricky Toy? How would you assess him?”
Herrick was more than willing to forget the awkward hiatus. He finished chewing the bite in his mouth and assumed a thoughtful ex pression.
“That’s not so easy to answer, really. I worked with him off and on over a period of five years or so. We all changed during those years, adjusted our world views to make sense of the times and to justify the ways of God. But Toy changed dramatically. We first met in 1965 in Saigon. Oddly, it was in Saigon exactly ten years later that I last saw him. At that Dantesque madness of Tan Son Nhut during the fall. At that time, however, I hadn’t actually worked with him in several years.”
Herrick put his hand on the stem of his wineglass and rotated it, watching the pale topaz liquid catch the light..
“I’d been there a year, in ‘sixty-five, and he’d just arrived. Terribly brash, gung-ho, ready to capture the best footage of the war. He didn’t like being the new boy and was eager to gain the experience that would make him an old hand. Experience was easy to find in those days. Toy made more sorties into the fire zones than any other cameraman during the next three years. And more of his footage got on the air, too, both in America and abroad, than any other cameraman.
“Of course his reputation became such that it preceded him wherever he went. It was a reputation of steel nerves, of getting footage that told the war ‘like it is.’ An anecdote:
“By 1969 Ricky had had two cablemen killed behind him and one seriously wounded. It got to the point that no one would work with him. A reprimand came down from the agency big boys that Toy was not to run extraordinary risks, et cetera, and that from this point on cablemen could use their discretion on a given assignment as to its inherent dangers. In other words, Toy could be only as adventurous as his cablemen saw fit. Toy was livid but not frustrated. He simply requested additional cables and lengthened his umbilical cord so that his cablemen could take cover while he exposed himself to as much fire as he bloody well wished.”
They finished the wine and declined dessert. Haydon ordered coffee and the two men lit cigarettes. Nina was enjoying listening to Herrick. He was a superb raconteur and knew it, and he talked as much to her as to Haydon. There was more than a little thespian in Herrick’s personality, and after-dinner talk was his métier.
“I don’t know when it was, precisely,” he continued, “but at some point around ‘seventy or ‘seventy-one, some of us recognized a gradual change in Toy’s footage. It was still good stuff. Marvelous action. Much of it remarkable. But there was also something else. And his fellow correspondents in the field weren’t the only ones to notice it. The networks began using less and less Toy footage.
“In every cameraman’s work there is footage that is considered too violent by the network chiefs to show over national television. There are thousands of yards of combat footage in the network vaults that were never used because the chiefs wouldn’t allow it. Too rough to see while having one’s roast beef dinner during the 6:00 news hour. Of course, toward the end of the war the networks began to fancy they’d some sort of moral scruples about the war and began allowing actual killings to be shown as a kind of ‘brutal truth’ journalism that made a statement, I suppose, of the war’s ‘immorality.’
“After a period of time, however, Toy’s footage was never used. It became too incredible. Not just some of his footage was violent: all of it was. And it became increasingly grisly and ghoulish. Some of it was unspeakable. The agency told him to rein in, produce some usable footage. He didn’t. The cablemen again refused to work with him, and eventually the agency brought him home and dismissed him.”
Herrick sugared his coffee and ate several butter mints from the small tray the waiter had placed on the table.
“End of Toy’s professional career as hotshot war photog,” Herrick said. He spread his hands and sighed.
“But I thought you said you saw him during the fall of Saigon,” Nina said.
“I did,” Herrick responded. “He’d been dismissed about eighteen months before that, but within a few months he’d returned with his own cablemen, operating independently. I can’t imagine what he did with that kind of footage. I don’t know who would have bought it. Not the kind he was getting.”
“Did you speak to him at that time?” Haydon asked.
“Good Lord, no. You know what it was like in those closing days. Sheer chaotic hell. Toy, of course, was filming it all. The licking flames, the lost and despairing souls. Everything.”
Haydon didn’t hear the flute. He looked across the gold light of the room, but the girl was gone.