LONG BEFORE HE JOINED THE GRAPHIC, SHELBY SUBSISTED ON freelance assignments and stand-in shifts on the news wires for Amalgamated and United out of Saigon, one of those footloose kids who worked their passage to Indochina just to hear the sound of real gunfire and befriend the grunts—Homer Bigart style—as they patrolled the paddy fields far from home. When the Khmer Rouge and the Viet Cong triumphed, he had been among the valiant few who clung on to the last, watching the tanks (“T for Tommy, A for Apple …”) break through the palace gates as the choppers plucked America’s finest from the rooftops.
Then, like many of them, he moved on to the Middle East and Africa, relishing, craving the call from Paris or New York that would propel him on his travels. How do you feel about Sarajevo, the top editor would say, and the old hands would pretend to be blasé—another day, another story. But in the young hearts beating beneath the scarred carapace of a thousand bylines, they were the spry dogs they had always been, unleashed once more to hunt down their newsy prey, freed from mundane restraints of behavior or cost, sanctified by the magic litany of boarding passes, check-ins, passport control, security, and, in the old days, the first-class or business lounge (now considered an affront to the gods of financial rectitude but, then, common enough).
No matter how often the order came—and sometimes when it did not—the urge took them to be on the road without paying, to go to war on someone else’s ticket. Risking your life was price tag enough without the tedium of receipts and accountancy. They sniffed the wind for tales to tell and scoops to break in Ouagadougou or Babylon, Lamu or Leningrad (as it was in those days of difficult visas and KGB hoodlums). Flying out, Shelby used to say when he waxed his most lyrical, you shed the shackles of need and duty that hemmed in most of the human race; you floated free on a wave of adrenaline and credit card platinum.
And anyone who denied it, he liked to say, just had not been there.
He boasted that he was the last of his kind to have sent dispatches by carrier pigeon—a title he was likely to retain as long as a newer generation of foreign correspondents relied on satellite phones to call in from the more outlandish places. He was happy to be spoken of as old-school: outlandish, hard-charging, but never knowingly wrong; never bearing false testimony from the arenas of humanity’s depravity.
I am, he liked to say, the shitholes man. I go to places the others won’t.
He put it about that his father had met his mother in the First Class cabin of a Pan Am red-eye from L.A. to Sydney, Australia, in the early days of intercontinental flights. But there was a persistent rumor—too good to dismiss out of hand—that Shelby was the unacknowledged, undocumented product of a brief liaison between a French starlet called Jenny Colon and Don Shelby, the legendary reporter who ran the Paris slot at the old and now defunct Interpress wire service in the late 1940s. Shelby the Elder was still talked about in reverential tones by a certain generation of reporters—those who managed to keep one foot out of the grave. In the annals of his rise and fall, reference was always made to the trilby hat punctured by two neat bullet holes that he inherited (some said stole) from his mentor, Clay Brewster, having done the same with Brewster’s wife. But the subject of Joe Shelby’s provenance was taboo, even among those, like me, who had spent long hours with him in the confessional booths of bars across the city.
He spoke with a hybrid accent, American at its heart but suffused with affectations of English, pepperings of “old boy” and “dear fellow” and, like Gatsby, “old sport.”
His legends went before him and lingered long after: the time the Saigon bureau chief gave him $4,000 to finance a ten-day swing through Southeast Asia and he spent it all in twenty-four hours without ever leaving the city; the time a companion discovered him in flagrante delicto in Zimbabwe and he drove a friend’s Aston Martin across a lawn and into another friend’s front parlor to provide an alibi whose logic he could not later recall.
When I first heard he was taking the NND job, I wondered whether they had chosen the right guy.
The web wanted news hot and fresh—the poetry would come later. The first break might even be clunky, shaped by the blacksmith’s hammer rather than the jeweler’s filigree.
But like all reporters—in their own eyes, at least—Shelby’s considered his compositional style no less literary than Tolstoy’s, his poetry no less lyrical than Byron’s, his words as fluid and evocative as those of any Nobel laureate. Touch his opening paragraphs—his ledes, in the idiom of his trade—and you defiled his soul. Even I—his most lenient, longest-suffering editor—did not escape the diamond glint of his narrowed eyes, the hardening of his voice to a menacing growl if I questioned the deployment of his periods and commas, verbs and adjectives, without circumspection and respect. The web, the digital era, the constant tinkering and updating of “content”—all this was anathema to him.
Maybe I was jaundiced, biased. We agreed on a lot of things, Shelby and I. And we agreed to differ on a whole lot more. But you never forgot the Great Divide. The Graphic placed its correspondents on pedestals, like minor gods. But editors like me had observed their entrances and exits a hundred times, watched their trajectories soar and fizzle. If they were the gods, we were the High Priests: we knew how frail those pedestals were, like the egos they supported, and we knew just how easily those mortal plinths could be sundered at the whim of higher divinities.
We had different takes, too, on the most basic of approaches to life’s challenges. Shelby and his ilk favored the doomed charge into the jaws of battle, the grand gesture, the devil-may-care, live-nowpay-later exuberance of the premodern foreign correspondent.
But over the years, I had learned that, most times, you could achieve more by waiting until the fog of war had cleared before you made your move, nailed your colors to whatever mast you chose—and then only if it was absolutely necessary.
Okay. I had my share of critics. Sometimes I got it wrong biding my time. But more often patience paid off.
If Shelby was a chronicler, I was an observer.
If Shelby played by the rules of history’s grandes batailles—the Charge of the Light Brigade, for instance—my game was chess. For me, the endgame was all.
Even as one of the dwindling few who had survived to count Shelby as a friend, I couldn’t altogether blame Duffie for his ambivalent attitude to the new arrival in his newsroom.
It was one thing to be buddies across a thousand miles of bad phone connections, or to carouse with him on a transit halt, knowing that, the next morning, the passport control officers at Charles de Gaulle would scrutinize his bleary visage and wish him well—and good riddance—on his way out of France on the Air Afrique flight to Chad or Cameroon or Senegal. But it was quite another to find yourself locked into the journalistic equivalent of a lifer’s shared cell.
When you met up with him, it was as if he was beckoning you to join him on the far side of some Alice in Wonderland portal that led to a world where everything changed gear, changed perspective; as if he was luring you to enter Narnia or Oz and not be too surprised about what you might encounter. You could almost feel yourself decoupling from your familiar coordinates, drifting free.
You could not know Shelby well without recalling W. B. Yeats and those lines about the center not holding. Or Shakespeare’s cries of havoc and slipped dogs.
So why now? Why me?
One minute his byline was attached to datelines in Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt. The next—hey presto!—he was ambling into the down-at-heel newsroom of the Star, conjured out of nowhere, one more mystery to be unraveled.
Shelby had not been forced to come to Paris. He could have chosen anyplace where the broadband networks and time zones allowed him to do the job.
But he had chosen Paris, my Paris. I started to understand how the French felt in 1940.
And there was another thing.
Only a few weeks before his arrival, I had heard rumors that Faria Duclos, the grand amour of Shelby’s life, had been taken to see medical specialists in Paris because of some unspecified malady. There was talk that Gibson Dullar, Shelby’s archrival—both professionally and personally—was finagling his way into a top job on the Graphic, eyeing promotion at Shelby’s expense. My source for all this was Elvire Récamier, war photographer extraordinaire, who never left the battlefront while there was still blood to be sniffed in the gutters, mayhem to feed her hunger for the Great Image to match those of Capa and Leroy and Demulder. She was petite, dark, skinny. A snapshot of her working undercover in Tehran showed her almond eyes, framed by a niqab, twinkling with impiety, exuding mischief.
“I will not run for these bast-a-a-a-rds,” she had famously remarked in Beirut when she came under a withering hail of fire that sent other photographers and reporters scampering for whatever cover they could find. She was as indestructible as she was inventive, as rigorous with her celluloid (and later digital) images as she was cavalier with the facts of her after-hours gossip. It was said she could not pass through airport security without the shrapnel lodged in her body triggering alarms.
I lapped up every word of her stories and measured my belief in them in the low percentiles. But I never ignored the possibility of a nuclear truth: What more could you ask of an inveterate theorist of conspiracies, an elfin aficionado of human foibles?
Elvire Récamier’s speculative angst about the arrival of the old crew dovetailed with my own. You could sense galaxies shifting, tectonic plates groaning: too many coincidences, too many people moving simultaneously into the frame. A drama scripted in far-flung combat zones was teetering toward an oft-postponed finale on the cobbled avenues and teeming boulevards of Paris.
My Paris.
“What a pair, Gib Dullar and Joe Shelby,” she began as we sat together one spring evening, sipping drinks at a café near her loft in the Marais in what might have been the overture before the main show began.
“You know they were once the best of friends. Brothers. Oh, yes. You laugh, but it is true. They were both kids. They were both Romeos. They both liked the boom-boom in any way—on the battlefield, in the bedroom. They loved the fighting. They loved being first. And that was fine until they both loved the same woman.
“I will tell you a story.” She settled in for the narrative, rearranging her cigarettes and lighter and a dewy glass of Kir Royal, aligned with one side of a triangular yellow ashtray marked “Ricard” as if she was seeking some kind of geometric order to banish the loose ends that history always leaves as its inconvenient bequest. Or perhaps, I caught myself thinking, she was marshaling her recollections to ensure they matched previous accounts she might have offered to other people. As my mother used to say—and she should know, I’m afraid to say—liars need good memories.
“Way back. In the old days—in Vietnam, Cambodia—I met a young man called Gibson Dullar and I was a young woman myself and there was some fire between us, more than a spark I believed, until one day another young man called Joseph Shelby arrived on the scene with my friend Faria Duclos and I could see where the spark really belonged. Dullar burned for her. With his big eyes, he followed her like a puppy. Always wanting to wag his tail for her!”
I detected an edge of bitterness.
“Then I began to notice that my amour, Gibson, was not there so often anymore. He was not going to the same battles as I was. And when you saw his stories on the agences you saw they were from the same places as Faria’s images. So I figured I’d play a game. If Faria was not everywhere I was, then maybe Joe Shelby would be where I was. So I—what do you say?—tipped my hat to him. And you know—entre nous, Clancy—there were some moments, after some bataille, when it had been very dangerous, when you were just glad to be alive that maybe it might have gone somewhere in some hotel or at some OP. But Joe Shelby was not stupid. He figured out my game and Dullar’s. It was love—L majuscule, capital L.”
She sighed, placed her lighter below her cigarette pack as if drawing a line, took a sip of Kir Royal.
I waited. Traffic hooted. Police sirens blared. Waiters sneered. This was Paris, after all, though the slightly misty look in Elvire’s eyes suggested she was thousands of miles to the east, in the Mekong Delta or someplace, decades adrift.
“Bah,” she exclaimed with that peculiar plosive exhalation the French do so well, as if concluding an inner debate she had not shared with anybody. “So Joe Shelby made his plan. He asked around to find out where she was and where Dullar was. And presto! What does he discover? Well, bien sûr: treachery afoot. They were together at some military base in the boonies. You could imagine how it would be. After the patrols with the Marines, the bullets, the ambushes. Alone together with all their adrenaline pumping. Their hearts full, their bodies alive with the fire. Shelby knew there was not much time left to beat his rival to Faria’s door. So to speak. It was not easy to get to where she and Dullar were. It was late in the evening. There was a curfew. You could only get to the base on one road, and at night, it was Charlie’s road. That is what the Americans called the Viet Cong: Charlie. Charlie was everywhere. He had every ditch and turning covered. Every village. Every rice paddy. But as Shelby thought about Dullar and Duclos, together, beyond reach, he took a couple of pipes.”
“Pipes?”
“Opium, of course. Do not look so shocked. Anyhow, Shelby believed he had no time left. Somehow he knew that if he left the two of them alone, it would be le grand boom-boom and he would lose her. My plan was to make him angry at her so he would come to me. Instead it made him fall in love with her when he saw some other lion in the pride. In Afrique, they say ‘two bulls in the kraal.’ Two bulls in Faria’s kraal. So it was a mess. Joe came to me at the Caravelle and said goodbye. Adieu, he said. Not au revoir or anything like that. Adieu. Farewell. Curtain. You say ‘curtain’?”
“Curtains.”
“Okay. Curtains. The grand geste. He had borrowed a big motorbike from another hack and he gave me an envelope to pay for it if he did not get back or anything happened to it. He called his friends in the American staff and asked them to radio ahead that he was coming. They told him he was crazy but he set off anyhow.”
She was smiling now, a big, happy, nostalgic smile as if Shelby’s act of folly had reaffirmed the essence of the human condition.
“Well, you can imagine. One crazy round-eye on a big Honda motorbike zooming between the rice paddies.”
She said “zoom” as if the word contained far more o’s than the usual English spelling. Her eyes were like dark, hypnotic pools and I found myself drawn to their vortex in a manner that might be considered unseemly for a married man. She ran the pink tip of her tongue around the scarlet bud of her lips, pursed to deliver the next chapter of this drama. Looking at her, I could see that Faria Duclos must have exerted an awesome magnetism to draw Shelby into the perils of Charlie’s night and away from the exotic enticements of Elvire Récamier.
“The VC had radios, too,” she continued, slightly breathlessly, “and every time he slowed down there was a new ambush, so he did not slow down anymore. Just zoomed”—zooooomed—“with his typewriter in a rucksack on his back. That is the story that went around, anyhow. Go figure. How many people stole that story and said it was them, with the tracer bullets red and green like fireflies, like comets in the night. Vroom, vroom! Imagine. The night. The mist on the paddy fields. The motor screaming. The bullets whistling.”
Elvire told a good yarn, and I had the feeling that I was not the first to be regaled with it. And maybe not the first to muse on its veracity. When the old-timers in our line got together to recall the efforts they exerted to excavate truth’s kernel from life’s obfuscation, you could be sure that no two versions of any recognizable event would coincide completely: everyone reached the front line first; everyone ducked the same bullets, smuggled themselves exclusively onto the same evidently elastic cargo plane to reach the same rebel bridgehead on some indistinct African river, interviewed the same reclusive dictator next to a cage full of prowling leopards.
I sipped at my double Jameson, allowing my mind to stray back to the youngblood Shelby had been when I first met him—all cock and rib, as they used to say. I knew from the stories he had filed from tight spots that he had gotten into many such locations, usually, later on, with Faria Duclos. (Unlike some—and I am thinking mainly of Gibson Dullar—he never lied about his datelines.) So Elvire Récamier’s account had a certain plausibility. I found myself conjuring an image of the young knight-errant bent over the chromed handlebars of his giant mechanical steed, twisting the throttle to squeeze every last drop of power out of the howling engine, locks flattened by the wind, slicing through a night filled with insects and bullets.
Elvire’s eyes had narrowed, and she fell briefly silent, transposed to the bitter night when a man risked all to spurn her for another.
“So, thank God, because he has called ahead, when he gets to the American base, the grunts at the gate behind their sandbags know that something crazy is going on but of course they are not going to open up to just anybody. It could be a bomber. A crazy. So Shelby slows right down and the Marines shine their light on him and see he is American and the VC see the lights and they see Shelby and they open fire and Shelby starts the motorbike again but a bullet hits the tire and it skids and slides and he falls off and gets up and runs toward the base with his rucksack and by now the Marines are shooting at Charlie and there is World War Three. So inside the base Faria Duclos is there with her camera doing low-light shots of Marines under fire and Gibson Dullar is there with his notebook, ducking down for cover. Someone’s bullets hit the motorbike again and its gasoline tank explodes so there is a big blaze—whoooomph—and all Faria can see through her range finder is this one running figure coming through the gates. A silhouette against the flames. And then, because the VC have given away their position, the Americans call in support from the air and there is napalm. Whoooosh! Do you like the smell of napalm, Ed?”
“I never smelled it.”
“But like in the movie, the smell of victory?”
She was teasing me, the way field types tease the home desk, the way they imply, if you weren’t there, you can’t know. (Though real warriors always say their trade is 90 percent crushing boredom, 10 percent terror.)
“So what happened then?” I injected a world-weariness into my voice as if listening to a child offering a particularly inventive tale of the dog eating the homework.
“So Faria is thinking: Merde, a pretty good image. A fighting retreat by a lonely soldier. The lost warrior returns. Napalm. Fire. Tracer bullets. Marines on rock and roll. The noise is terrible. Fifty-caliber machine guns. Mortars. Outgoing. Incoming. RPGs. Booom fucking booom! Later, Faria told me all this. She laughed. It was her favorite story to put me in my place. Because then she realizes it is not a soldier or someone. It is Joe Shelby!”
Elvire reached the crescendo with a gusto that defied all skepticism.
“So Joe comes through the gate and the battle dies down and the Marines call him many names for being so crazy. But no one was killed—on their side. And plenty of VC maybe got fried. And no one cared about the motorbike although it cost Shelby a thousand dollars, which was mega-bucks in those days. So there they all are, Shelby and Duclos and of course Dullar, all in that tent where Dullar figured he would be alone with Duclos and get over his leg. And Shelby takes the rucksack off his back and inside, wrapped in an airmail edition of the New York Graphic, is a single red rose he has brought from Saigon. His old party trick—the single red rose. And—this is the best part—when he looks at his typewriter, stuck in the middle of it is a bullet! A freaking bullet that would have cut his spine if it had not been stuck in the typewriter. So the pen is mightier than the sword after all! But of course, when Faria saw that, she knew her heart must be with the man who had driven through the killing fields with a rose in his rucksack and a bullet in his typewriter to save her from his rival. For many years she kept the bullet on a leather string around her neck. And Gibson Dullar has never, ever forgiven Joe Shelby. And I have never forgiven him for doing that for Faria Duclos and not for me! But you know the worst thing?”
“What was that?”
“The worst thing was that they moved Dullar into a different tent, away from the two lovebirds. And that night, Charlie attacked again and a tracer round set his tent on fire and he burned.”
“Burned?”
“On his arms. His chest. He needed skin grafts for months. And that really is what he never forgave Shelby for. Fire!”
“And now?”
She paused and looked out at the evening traffic clogging the Rue Réaumur, the trendy young kids with their laptop bags hurrying along the sidewalks. I wondered if an IBM ThinkPad would stop a bullet as efficiently as an Olivetti Lettera or a Hermes Baby.
“Well, maybe now is not so different,” she said.
“How so?”
“Shelby is coming to Paris. Duclos is coming back. Dullar is hovering.”
“Hardly bright young things, though, Elvire.”
“Well, neither are you,” she said sharply.
“You still love him! I’ll be damned.” I was not sure whether I meant Shelby or Dullar, or whether I was just out for a little devilry.
“Still? Love? You Anglo-Saxons are always so simplistic. Love! Trust! Apple pie and mother! You forget that love is pain. Froufrou is not free. When you hurt the ones who love you, when you spurn and neglect them, they want payback before they will love again, if they will ever love again. For you Americans, love just happens. Wham-bam. Thank you. Short story. End of story. Soap opera. For us French, it is the whole five acts—do you say the whole nine yards?—the drama of life, the grand amour. It is not over until the lady sings. And this lady has many songs left to sing. You better believe it, Ed Clancy. You will see. Shelby better believe. In my work I capture the decisive moment. I know how to wait patiently until it comes. And then I act. But my memory is long, longer than you think. Elvire Récamier does not forget the sins of the past.”
I figured it was the Kir Royal talking because the Elvire Récamier I had come to include in my collection of characters was a woman of deep, abiding, and ultimately benevolent passions, a warm heart in a tough-guy shell. But there was something else woven in there, a legacy of ’Nam—enduring love yearning for release from old hurts.
I made a mental note to squirrel away that kernel of emotional intelligence: the wise man knows when silence is the best counsel—another big difference between me and Shelby.
She placed a cigarette between her lips and did not move until I flicked my Zippo to light it.
After a long smoky pause, with gradually slowing inhalations and exhalations, she continued: “You know she is very ill. After everything, all the boom-boom, the pipes of opium and all the other stuff, her nerves are curtain. In a wheelchair. And Shelby is not so good either. So maybe this is Dullar’s last chance to do something. Who knows? One night in Paris …”
I completed the line for her: “… may be your last.”