Chapter 5

“NO, I don’t think so,” answered Ivy to a question from Samuel Farakhan about the National Liberation Front at the dinner table on that evening of January 1, 1956. “No,” she repeated. “The FLN cannot win militarily. It’s not like Indochina. There’s no jungle. The fellagha can hold the mountains; they can wander at will through the Casbah of Algiers. But they cannot really hold the territory.”

“Fells? No, not over there. A bit too dangerous, even for me. There are too many irregulars who’ll slit your throat first and ask questions afterwards. And there are quite a few Frenchies who are no better. That said, I did meet some leaders in Morocco; and here too, people from the FLN’s French Federation. No percentage in it for photos, of course. But it can help get your ideas straight. If you want to take good photos, first get your ideas straight. I don’t think you can have good images and figure them out later. It works the other way round.”

“What about the MNA?” asked Farakhan. “Do they still have a chance?” (He was referring to the Algerian National Movement, led by Messali Hadj, which had been swamped by the activists of the CRUA—the Revolutionary Committee for Unity and Action—and then by the FLN.)

Ivy shrugged and pouted, her mouth full of roast lamb. Lajos had decided to make an English meal because Farakhan was English. They had started with tomato soup containing strips of bacon and accompanied by triangles of toast. This was followed by a leg of lamb with mint sauce—a condiment the French are wrong to consider repugnant.

Ivy, who seemed tired, but whom Farakhan was questioning because she had spent a month in Algeria after her trip to the Golden Triangle, swallowed her mouthful of meat and stated vaguely that the Messalists were finished, at least for now. Had they made concessions earlier to the MNA (then known as the MTLD, the Movement for the Victory of Democratic Freedoms), things might have been different. Now, wrongly perhaps, but probably rightly, the Algerians saw this organization as a moderate tendency, even a treacherous one.

Also mentioned were the armed Messalists of the maquis led by Bellounis, which the FLN guerillas were relentlessly and brutally driving northwards, and which was believed to be in closer and closer touch with agents of the French civilian or military secret services. There was even talk of the legislative elections. In short, dinner-table conversation. After the lamb came a choice of cheese: Cheshire, a green-veined cheddar in a terrine, also a Camembert (this was Normandy, after all). Lemon meringue tart topped things off. While Lajos, determinedly Anglophile, took tea throughout the meal, Ivy and Farakhan shared a magnum of blanc de noir champagne that the former flight lieutenant would get from an RM grower-producer in Bouzy. Ivy drank more than her half and, reckoning that champagne was not a dessert wine, went to get another vodka to drink with the tart. She appeared to have a high tolerance for an excessive consumption of wine and spirits. Still, she did seem really tired. Before dinner she had gone upstairs to freshen up and come back down wearing elegant black ankle-boots, a voluminous black woolen skirt and a wide-ribbed natural-wool sweater. During the meal she took the sweater off, revealing a beige silk blouse. She wore no jewelry.

“Would you like some target practice?” asked Farakhan when Lajos had cleared the table and could be heard washing the dishes in the nearby kitchen. “Or listen to a little music?”

“Target practice,” said Ivy, rising and stubbing out her Gitane in a Lalique ashtray.

At the shooting range in the basement she fired seven 9 mm shots with a Beretta 1934 at a target in the form of a man without legs. The noise was deafening, but Farakhan and the young woman wore protective earmuffs resembling large headphones. Ivy had also put her sweater back on before going down, knowing that in the normal way the basement was barely heated. As usual she aimed at her target’s belly and fired rapidly. Farakhan went to examine the grouping. She had placed five shots in the abdomen, one at the sternum, and one beneath a breast. He removed his noise-reducing muffs.

“You are tired,” he said, coming back to Ivy, who had taken the empty clip from the Beretta and returned the weapon to its place.

She made no reply. They went down the passageways of the basement and back upstairs and sat in the living room. Ivy poured herself a glass of the fifty-percent vodka.

“You drink a lot,” said Farakhan. “You smoke a lot,” he added as Ivy lit a Gitane. “Not to be a mother hen, but I feel you’re overdoing it.”

Farakhan reacted with the sort of mildly impatient glance that one reserves for outlandish claims. Ivy lowered her eyes, nursing her vodka. She had long black glistening lashes. She was pale save for rosy patches over her cheekbones. Her nails were well trimmed and unpolished. She looked up once more.

Lajos came in smiling, hesitant, afraid to disturb, but they protested and urged him to sit down, which he did.

It took her just a moment to run upstairs and come back down with two records from her bag: A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet, volumes 1 and 2, twelve-inch LPs from Blue Note, recorded at the nightclub on 52nd Street on February 21, 1954.

Lajos inspected the two discs delightedly, even uttering an exclamation in Hungarian, and looked up with a thrilled expression.

“Sam managed to get a letter through to me. He said that you play jazz piano and love bebop, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk. Do they listen to that in Hungary?”

“Voice of America,” Lajos explained. He looked back at the LPs. “I don’t know those guys, but I’m sure . . . I’m so touched that you thought of me.” He turned to Farakhan. “May we listen to them?”

He seemed quite outraged. Lajos did not insist, nor did Ivy. They sat down again and exchanged collusive and regretful glances. Samuel Farakhan had a calm dislike of jazz and movies. When he spoke of them he compared both to the cheap plastic items that fashion and mass production had thrust on the American public and that were beginning to invade Western Europe. Lajos’s taste for Coca-Cola, westerns and Charlie Parker grieved him, as did Ivy’s appetite for that same music and those same movies and for hard-boiled American fiction. Samuel Farakhan believed that the Americanization of the world was a descent into imbecility and barbarism scarcely less fearsome than the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms. He listened with a rather shocked astonishment as Lajos and Ivy talked animatedly, Ivy describing the two records she had given Lajos, naming influences on the pianist Horace Silver, recounting how asthma prevented the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson from traveling far from his New York doctor, so that he was unknown in Europe, and lastly calling the twenty-five-year-old trumpeter Clifford Brown a “genius” (at which Farakhan grimaced furiously).

It was January 1, 1956, a quarter past five or a little later, and Ivy could not have known that Clifford Brown would die in a car accident along with the pianist Richie Powell, brother of Bud, on the following June 26. “Brownie was driving too fast, it’s horrible,” Richie Powell’s widow would say later.*

At ten thirty Lajos withdrew discreetly and went upstairs. He took the disks with him, for he had a record player in his quarters, albeit of lesser quality than the hi-fi system in the living room on which Farakhan sometimes played classical or romantic music and even works of Schoenberg and his disciples. All the same, it is reasonable to assume that the main reason the sensitive Lajos departed was to leave Ivy and Farakhan to themselves.

“You are a little shit,” said Farakhan dispassionately. “You know perfectly well that I am not that sort of queer. I have attachments, yes.” He directed a savage smile at the young woman. “And you? How has your love life been this last year?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Three hundred and sixty-five days without getting laid once. I must have a screw loose. Guys bore me shitless. Girls too. I’m wasted. I’m not doing well, Sam. Not well at all.” Samuel Farakhan looked at her steadily, attentively; he seemed quite calm. She rose from her armchair, which was a copy of a Henry van de Velde. “I’ll have another vodka,” she said.

“I’ve been that way ever since last night. New Year’s Eve party at some duke’s suite at the Eden Roc. He loves stars. He is very fond of starlets too, the dirty old man. But he loves to have stars at his soirées, celebrities.” Ivy sat back down, placing her very full glass on the table. “Well, shit! The famous Ivory Pearl! The woman photographer who goes to stinking places where guys daren’t go. The female Robert Capa. I can’t take it, Sam. The reporting itself is not the most tiring. Though God knows how much I’ve chalked up since 1950! Indochina three times. Kenya in the middle of the Mau Mau revolt. Tibet. The Philippines. East Berlin in ’53—the uprising. What else?”

“Yes, but I mean for me! I’m losing it, I really am!” exclaimed Ivy. “But all that stuff is not the most tiring in the end. The most tiring is not being able to rest when I get home. I’m in demand, wanted, invited. Café society, as they say. When I’m off the job, I drink more champagne than water.”

“No,” he replied. “No, perhaps not. Perhaps you are not inconsistent. But you are tired, fed up. So?”

“Two years ago, it was okay. The time when I finally met Bob Capa.” She looked sharply at Farakhan. “No thanks to you!” she added. “But anyway, I met him. I’ve told you. That season in Paris, the bar at the Ritz, Capa and Hemingway. I know you don’t like Hemingway,” she sighed without animus. “And the stunt director Noël Howard with the great art director Alexandre Trauner. They were preparing a grand Hollywood monster, Land of the Pharaohs, eventually shot last year. Hollywood films you don’t like either. Why do I love you, you old poof?” Farakhan did not reply. “And what was I saying? Well, shit!” she exclaimed again. “I don’t know what I was saying, I’m so tired. Oh yes, that was it! I’m tired and I’m going to quit everything.” She stared at Farakhan. Large gray-blue circles were visible under his eyes. His face was pale. His dark eyes seemed enormous. His fair hair glistened. She went on: “All this year of 1956 I’m not going to do any reportage. I’m going to fuck off into a hole, pass the time in some out-of-the-way place where there are only trees and water and animals. I’ll take pictures of the trees and the animals. Well, shit, I’ve spent hours stalking Viet-minh to photograph, surely I can shoot beasts. It doesn’t sell, animal photography, but I have a little dough saved. And anyway I’m the famous Ivory Pearl. They’ll surely take photos from me. A few. Here is a lion or a capuchin monkey photographed by the famous Ivory Pearl who has withdrawn from the world like Greta Garbo.”

She smiled. Samuel Farakhan was looking at her in a strange way and sitting completely rigid on the couch, leaning forward with both hands clamped to his thighs. Suddenly he went over to the odd piece of furniture that served as a bar and poured himself a stiff measure of his whisky, which came from the Isle of Jura. He emptied the glass in one gulp.

“I forgot something,” said Farakhan, looking at the wall, where a drawing under glass by Koloman Moser was hanging. “I’ve forgotten to adjust something. The boiler.” He turned towards Ivy but did not appear to see her. “I’m going downstairs for a moment. Would you like to go up? It’s late. Or would you rather wait for me?”

After Ivy had said that of course she would stay where she was, Samuel Farakhan went down to the basement. With a key from his pocket he opened the cylinder lock of a gray reinforced-steel door. He entered a small windowless room. It held a metal filing cabinet, a metal desk, a metal and moleskin swivel chair, a telephone on the desk, and on the wall a work by Egon Schiele under glass in pencil, charcoal and gouache. Farakhan sat down at the desk, picked up the phone’s receiver and asked the operator for a Paris number with the prefix BALzac.

“Yes,” he told the recipient of his call, “I know it’s late. But it’s about Ivory Pearl and the Alba Black business.”

* Manchette is mistaken: in point of fact, Richie Powell’s wife Nancy was at the wheel and all three occupants perished when the car went off the road. —Trans.