AFTER THE ARGENTINE SOY VOTE RECOUNT—A SCOOP CONDEMNED to eternal exclusivity—Shelby and I resolved to hit the town. I called home to say I would be late, held up on business. But not really to my surprise, Marie-Claire registered some opposition to this bold act of boyish exclusivism and said that—au contraire—she would drive into town to join us and we would meet in Saint-Germain.
“No. Seriously. It’s business. With Shelby. I wouldn’t want you to waste your time.”
“Where are you meeting?”
“Deux Magots.”
“Flore is better.”
And that was that.
She was far more tutored in the nuances of upscale Paris than I. But whatever the venue, I was not relishing the idea of introducing her to Joe Shelby.
For one thing, I had foolishly regaled Marie-Claire with a selection of the more colorful Shelby stories that sprang to mind when I learned he would be assigned to Paris. Of course, I had maintained a judicious silence about the most outrageous, three-or-four-in-abed anecdotes that seemed to swirl around Shelby like some lewd miasma, not necessarily related to fact. But I should have known that it was unwise to recount too many old hack tales without the risk of being perceived as a past, or potential, player in those chortling, late-night sagas of hotel rooms and rebel encampments. Every denial on my part would be taken perversely as a confirmation, no matter how hard I tried to distance myself from Shelby’s possibly fictional misdeeds.
It was not I who had dictated eight hundred words of copy from a Thai massage parlor without interrupting the business at hand; it was not I who had lost his shoes beside a hotel swimming pool in the Congo while distracted by submarine romance involving a Wagnerian Lufthansa stewardess. But had I told those Shelby stories to my stern and beloved bride, she would immediately have suspected my complicity and direct participation—guilt by projection.
Another reason for my less-than-enthusiastic anticipation of our apéritif à trois was that, in my experience, it was never wise to lionize a friend or colleague. Build up someone’s reputation as an adventurer, a lover, or, worst of all, a swordsman—to use that old, politically incorrect, and all-too-Freudian expression—and there was every chance that his renown and prowess would be taken as a challenge.
Either way, I had not been married to Marie-Claire for long enough to claim total familiarity with her likely responses to every situation. (She was not the kind of person who would ever permit such a boast about her, in any event.) Neither did I, at that point, sense that she saw the future in quite the same exclusive, Darby-and-Joan terms that I secretly yearned for. Even as I assented to her choice of venue, I was trying to recall exactly what I had told her about Shelby that I might regret.
In his long career, Shelby had moved from one grand establishment to another, entertaining with ambassadorial regularity and commitment, never omitting his closest friends from a long list of those to be invited to cocktails, catered dinners, and rambunctious barbeque parties in Bangkok or London or Johannesburg. Early on, he had converted a ramshackle ruin in New Delhi into a luxurious palace, with staff to tend to his every need and those of his guests. His tennis courts and pools, snuggled behind razor-wired walls in various third-world hellholes, enjoyed near-mythical status as social venues where the parties and the misbehavior never seemed to end.
But not once did he shirk coverage of the most unpleasant events. Not once, he liked to claim, had he missed a deadline—although it had sometimes been a close-run race against the clock and the attentions of the eager companions who shared his taste for war zones. Not once did he withdraw the pledge to his friends that his house was their house, a communal approach that they sometimes extended to his nearest and dearest: in his younger days, Shelby lived in constant suspension between loyalty and lust.
When he looked for his spiritual forebears, he scoured hack history and alighted on legends like Reynolds Packard of United, who had once dedicated a book to “my wife’s lovers—in friendship and appreciation.” Yet as I knew and Elvire Récamier knew, there was one constant in Shelby’s life, one love who really counted—and all the rest was window-dressing.
Thankfully, I had assured Marie-Claire of that.
Shelby belonged to a generation at the Graphic that had basked in glory at the height of print’s prosperity, lived in style, worked hard and spent hard.
He was, perhaps, the last of the “receipt lost” generation before the Auks of the Abacus took over his universe.
But then the Angel of Austerity arrived. No longer would relocation budgets be open-ended. No longer would financial comptrollers be hoodwinked by requests from reporters in Hong Kong for permission to transport “just my old junk”—only to find themselves paying the freight costs for huge wooden vessels built to ply the South China Sea. There was a loophole, however, and with his move to Paris, Shelby found it and quite literally drove through it in style.
The wrinkle lay in his discovery that, while the movement of household goods and furniture between assignments was subjected to ever-closer restrictions, “office equipment” was covered by a separate budget over which no one seemed to have claimed oversight. Soon after his arrival in Paris, thus, a truck arrived containing what the manifest indicated to be the appurtenances of some mythical bureau of far more opulent proportions than Shelby’s new accommodations at the Star.
Shelby boasted the kind of kit that Henry Morton Stanley or Evelyn Waugh’s Boot of the Beast might have chosen for an expedition to explore Abyssinia, or find the source of the Nile, or locate Dr. Livingstone himself.
On its own, the Zodiac fifteen-foot inflatable boat might not have drawn comment, neatly wrapped as its components were in heavy-duty blue plastic pouches, each the size of a large suitcase or a small portmanteau. But there was no mistaking the long shaft and scuffed propeller of the 50-horsepower Mercury outboard that came with it, or the boat hook, or the paddles of polished marine ply and the spare tanks for gasoline. (I wondered if, in some old, archived expense account, there was a claim to be reimbursed for “riverboat to reach pygmy warriors (receipt lost).”) Then there were the trophies: a twenty-pound tiger fish from Zimbabwe, mounted on varnished teak, as if turning to attack, locked forever in a snarl of razor-sharp teeth; the petrified jaws of a prowling shark caught off Mombasa when it swallowed a tuna on the end of Shelby’s deep-sea fishing line; the massive head of a Colorado black bear, shot by Shelby as he lay injured from a fall in a ravine high in the Rockies. There was much more, all piling up in a vacant storeroom once used for pens and notebooks before the newspaper stopped supplying them to reporters: a batch of antique cane angling poles in dented aluminum tubes; a Picasso ceramic, mounted and framed in glass; an antique Blickensderfer 7 typewriter; a supposedly decommissioned AK-47 assault rifle with a folding metal stock and a suspiciously live-looking clip of 7.62 mm (intermediate) ammunition (“office ornamentation,” Shelby called it); a long coffin-size box with no clear markings or purpose, listed on the manifest as “press clippings” but in fact containing a collection of silk carpets from Beirut and Baghdad and Tehran purchased cannily as a hedge against abrupt cash-flow restrictions; a large samovar in working order; a hookah that smelled suspiciously of illicit substances; several aluminum Halliburton suitcases festooned with baggage labels from the Nile Hilton in Cairo, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the Beirut Commodore, and Raffles in Singapore; a large Impressionist painting of water lilies at Giverny, retrieved from the ruins of a post-coup presidential mansion in Bangui, which Shelby always insisted was “just a cheap copy.”
Most people missed the unloading of the pièce de résistance, but I didn’t.
I happened to glance out my first-floor window to see how much more was left to be unloaded from the truck parked on the street below. The workers had rigged two long steel ramps to the rear of their vehicle and, with infinite caution, rolled out a long, low crate that seemed to have wheels. A shipper’s label on the side identified whatever was inside as “File Cabinets/Misc.”
The crate was big enough, I figured, to house enough file cabinets and miscellaneous items for an average-size law firm. But it remained a mystery why such contents would require wheels—particularly aluminum wheels with complex spokes and low-profile tires.
Once it was safely unloaded, the workers jimmied away the wooden walls of the crate to reveal its true contents, and the mystery was solved, only, perhaps, to be replaced by another puzzle: How on earth, in these days of draconian oversight by gimlet-eyed accountants, who could spot lunch-with-mistress disguised as lunch-with-source at a thousand paces, could Shelby have had the chutzpah to believe he could get away with this crude piece of legerdemain by some dubious shipping agency in some distant and equally dubious port?
From the crate emerged a pristine two-seater Jaguar XKR sports car in polished silver, packed in white Styrofoam chips for all the world as if it were a Christmas present delivered in a seasonal snowfall. I sprinted down to street level to admire its sleek lines.
Shelby supervised the unloading with a look on his craggy features that blended concern for the paint job and the fussiness of a mother hen tending her brood. Even before the chips had been cleared away, he had folded himself with surprising nimbleness into the pale leather of the driver’s seat and turned the key, listening rhapsodically to the sound of the four-liter, 400-horsepower V8 engine burbling into life.
Shelby’s most recent assignment before Paris had been in his beloved Lebanon, and I made a mental note to prize out of him at some stage the story of how he acquired a Jaguar sports car in a perennial war zone—and exported it in one piece.
“Well, hop aboard, Clancy, me bucko,” he said, blipping the throttle as I slid into the passenger seat.
If I had been more observant, I would have spent less time examining the gauges and gearshift and more time wondering why, even as we drove off, Shelby loaded the glove box with two scuffed leather volumes, both written by the French poet Gérard de Nerval, which I had seen many times on his desk.
One was the famed collection of sonnets called Les Chimères.
The other was Aurélia, the poet’s account of his descent into madness.
I was no great expert on nineteenth-century French poets, but I knew that Nerval had been a pretty confused sort of character. For a start, his name was not Nerval; it was Labrunie. So he had faked his own roots to disguise humdrum origins: in the post-revolutionary times France was going through, I guess he figured “de Nerval” had more of a doomed aristocratic ring to it. He spent plenty of time, on and off, under psychiatric care and plenty of time, too, in mourning for a mother who died far away while he was young. Not being a literary type, I couldn’t vouch for his poetry (my skills were limited to turning tortured stringer copy into legible news), but it seemed to me that Nerval, or Labrunie, was something of a fruitcake. In his late forties, midway through the nineteenth century, Nerval hanged himself. It was rumored that he used a silk ribbon that he believed had once been part of the Queen of Sheba’s waistband. They found his body hanging from the railings in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. Before his death, it was said, he had used that same ribbon as a leash to take his pet lobster for walks through the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens. Finally, the poet had found his place in the French national memory secured and sign posted by a slender marble column bearing his name across the way from Honoré de Balzac’s grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery over in the Twentieth—the same vast expanse of tombs and mausoleums that offered a final resting place to a more recent icon of despair, Jim Morrison.
“Watch out for the lobsters,” I called out above the rumble of the Jaguar’s engine.
“They’re on order,” he shouted back. “And the silk ribbon.”
With a minimal amount of fiddling, the roof folded itself back and we drove off, leaving a shower of white chips in our wake as the removals crew offered a round of spontaneous applause and huzzahs and effortlessly Gallic shrugs.
Now, after the soy vote fiasco, Shelby and I headed out once more in the convertible Jaguar, rippling along the cobbles of the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
“Follow the star,” he told me.
“Star?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘Follow the star.’”
“Star. L’Étoile.” Shelby waved expansively at the Arc de Triomphe with its star-burst of avenues leading off from the central runway-scale circle around it. The French call it L’Étoile, but I had the feeling that he had been thinking of some other stellar being.
“You wouldn’t always have done that.”
“Done what?”
“The soya bean rowback. Should have been a correction. Straight up. Honest. Goddamn it. Have you forgotten what the word “honest” means? H for Harry, O for Orange, N for Nuts …”
Shelby peered at me, narrowing his lizard eyes. We were on the Champs-Élysées now, dodging and weaving through the traffic, then cruising alongside the wide sidewalk with its cafés and movie houses and boutiques. The car—and its raffish, devil-may-care driver—drew significant looks from women across the generations. Most men tended to focus on the eighteen-inch alloy wheels and the torpedo phallus of the louvered hood.
“Rowback?” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
“An existential point.”
“I still say you wouldn’t have done it. Not in the print days. Jeez. Sometimes back then I thought you were a poet.”
“‘And all that is left in me is an obstinate writer of prose,’ as the man said.”
“Man? What man?”
“‘I composed my first poems out of the enthusiasm of youth.’” He turned to me with a lupine smile. “‘The second ones were written out of love,’” he said, lowering his voice to a tremulous basso profundo, pronouncing the word “lerv.” “‘The last ones,’” he went on, “‘out of despair.’ Unquote. Gérard de Nerval.”
He laughed uproariously. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Despite appearances to the contrary, despite the parties and the revels, Shelby had always taken his trade seriously. Even in the most taxing of circumstances—there was that rumored episode in a cage-dancing bar in Phuket, for instance—he had been able to establish communications with his editors to iron out blunders. Corrections, printed in that prissy style so familiar to newspaper readers (“An article in Monday’s edition referred erroneously to Ouagadougou as the capital of Upper Volta. The country is now called Burkina Faso.”) provoked in him days of shamed regret. Errors haunted him. A misspelled name that survived the shock waves of editing made him squirm.
Worse still was the double whammy when a correction contained an error that demanded its own correction, as if the fixes had begun to procreate like some virus. The more abstruse the mistake, the worse it seemed; the more persnickety to the casual observer, the more heinous the crime.
“Listen,” he said, “if readers figure we can’t spell their names properly, how the hell can we expect them to believe us when we unravel the mysteries of the cosmos?”
Verbatim, Shelby could recite corrections he harvested from his own newspaper and others with the zeal of a true collector.
An article on Friday about a National Aeronautics and Space Administration report on warmer temperatures in the past decade misidentified the agency that oversees the National Climatic Data Center, and a correction in this space on Wednesday reversed two words in that agency’s name in some editions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (not “Atmospheric and Oceanic”) has jurisdiction over the data center; NASA does not manage it.
—The New York Times
A reference to the Indian foreign minister misstated her gender.
—The New York Graphic
“This way be dragons,” Shelby would intone when he launched onto the theme of the Correction as Curse, a sin so venal that no amount of prayer and penance could expunge it. In religion, you could go to the priest, bend the knee, whisper your admissions of hanky-panky, misbehavior, slap, tickle, and tears.
“Forgive me, father …”
And, duly titillated, the cleric would apportion the appropriate dose of atonement. But not in print. Print fixed your error for all the world to snicker at. Forever. Religions might forgive, but in newspapers, sins were archived. The worst two words in Shelby’s professional vocabulary were “Correction appended.”
Carelessness was no excuse. Readers and editors would never, ever forgive the whambo-zambo blooper that might crop up in the heat of any reporter’s compositional passion.
An article describing Wayne Rooney’s soccer career described incorrectly a recent change of heart about playing for Manchester United. His new readiness to play for the team represents a 180-degree turn, not a 360-degree turn.
—The Paris Star
Ho, ho, ho—you could hear them chortling forever more.
Even the flimflam of travel articles was not safe from human carelessness and the mandatory abasement that came in its wake. Shelby’s catalog of truly humiliating climb-downs included one that he recited with mournful incredulity, as if it could—and would—happen to anyone guilty of even the most momentary lapse of concentration.
The cover article on June 19 about Places to Go misidentified the civil war that kept safari camps closed for a decade. The war was in Zimbabwe, not Zambia. The article also misstated the length of time of a train trip between Cape Town and Pretoria and misidentified the type of train used. The trip is by overnight sleeper train, not by a bullet train, and the trip usually takes 28 hours, not one hour. And the article referred incorrectly to the area of Africa in which a beach and an island are located. Diani beach and the island of Lamu are on the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Kenya, not the north which is the landlocked border with Ethiopia.
—The Paris Star
Facts, Shelby used to say in the old print days, are the warp and weft of our business. Get the facts right and the poetry would follow. “But never bend the verifiable facts,” he said. “And note please that I am referring exclusively to the verifiable truth.”
His digital debut seemed to contradict all his adages. Suddenly speed trumped accuracy; get the words up on the web and the facts would follow.
As a driver, if not skilled to Formula One standards, Shelby was certainly enthusiastic and fearless, maneuvering the powerful Jaguar with deft assurance and utter disregard for the buzzing hordes of small Citroëns and boxy Smart cars that hovered around him like swarms of summer insects. The V8 engine rumbled and howled, as if warming up for the Le Mans sport car race, circa 1980. The cream-colored leather upholstery smelled new and luxurious.
“Listen up, Clancy.” Shelby said, as if explaining an obvious point to a slow child. He could really be irritating. “It’s a question of being right at the time. It’s a question of how long is ‘now.’ In the paper days, ‘now’ lasted twenty-four hours, from one day’s paper to the next. You had to be right for twenty-four hours. And if you were right for twenty-four hours, chances were you could be right for a lot longer. Now it’s warp-time, nano-time. You are right—or wrong—in a space of time so brief it hardly exists before it moves on. Time is subdivided, chopped into the merest slivers. Chopped sliver—I like that. Time as chopped sliver. If you are ‘wrong’—he took his hands briefly off the custom wood-rimmed steering wheel to imitate quotation marks, a gesture I find irritating at the best of times and even more so heading into the Place de la Concorde at something over the legal speed-limit—“you are wrong so briefly that your error is diluted. Within seconds you are right. There is no time to confess because your sin is too brief to be noted. Your wrongness is preserved nowhere. There is no record of error, no evidence, no members of the jury except maybe in some geeky parallel universe. Wrongness is relative—Einstein.”
I thought of Marcel Duffie and imagined him prowling that parallel universe where the web was infinitely transparent with all its errors preserved in cyber-aspic for all time to be inspected and recalled to life as expediency dictated.
“Bull,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.
“Paper! Ink!” He embarked on a victory lap of the Place de la Concorde to expand on his theme. “They give our words weight, permanence. An organic life, maybe decaying, but decay that lasts decades, centuries. Look at this.”
With one hand, he waved the small leather volume of his beloved poet while, with the other, he piloted the Jaguar around the obelisk at the center of the Concorde, the squeal of the tires punctuating his words.
“When this was written and published, they had barely built the Arc de Triomphe. No one had even dreamed of the Eiffel Tower. And yet here’s the self-same text, worn only by human touch, legible, living, surviving in a way that its author has not, immortal. Imagine the eyes that have read it, the hearts that have soared, the tears that have poured onto its pages. All that history, all those people, their pain, their joy, all of it is here, now, in this single volume. Sure, cyberspace is infinite in time, eternal. But it is ephemeral, a whole universe in servers and computers, and whatever we do within that galaxy does not even constitute a planet, just an asteroid, a stray meteorite. Our words on the screen have the appearance of weight but no physical being. They exist and don’t exist simultaneously. As soon as we end our shift, the next bunch of hacks starts to dismantle everything we have done. In newspapers, our work lasted twenty-four hours. Then, as the Brits say, it wrapped the next day’s fish and chips. And those twenty-four hours fed our egos, made us think that what we did was the first draft of history. But you can’t wrap anything in the web. Across the pond, in their time zone, we are just the night shift, the moles who leave piles of stuff on the lawns to be cleaned up the next morning; the Draculas who suck the blood out of the news, then scurry back into our sarcophagi as daylight comes. We are nocturnal beasts, like hippos, who come out to feed in the dark hours when our bosses are sleeping and shit all over the riverbank. Then, come first light, we slide back under the surface, and all they hear from us is a distant bark of disgruntlement from across the waters.”
He offered the appropriate imitation of a hippopotamus as we anchored briefly at a traffic light on the Place de la Concorde, startling a passing cyclist who wobbled on her Vélib rental bike.
“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle,” Shelby said with flirtatious contrition.
“Je vous en prie,” she said, smiling forgiveness.
Age shall not weary them …
We drove on, crossing the Seine at the Assemblée Nationale, throwing an oblique left into the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where the rich folks lived. Shelby was heading toward the see-and-be-seen zone of Brasserie Lipp and Les Deux Magots. With these wheels, he would find effortless, illegal parking outside any number of fancy establishments.
“Now you listen to me, Shelby.” I think my tone surprised him. Like a lot of his kind, he had lived so long in a world free of restraint that he was not used to being talked back to. “What you have said is bullshit. And you know it. What we do now plays by the same rules we have always played by—the rules you have always played by, especially. You’ve risked your life—and other people’s—plenty of times to get at what you told your readers, your editors, was the truth. Let that slip now and the vultures will be circling, I promise. You won’t know it till it happens. Then all those little mistakes, those lapses you think disappear into cyberspace, those errors—they will turn around and bite you in the ass. It’ll be like you’ve stumbled into a tank of piranhas, and no one will throw you a lifeline.”
He had taken his hands for the steering wheel again to cover his ears and mutter something that sounded like “blah-di-blah-di-blah.”
“Your metaphors really suck,” he said.
“Listen,” I said. “You and I have one single stock in trade: We get it right. We break stories. We publish them.”
“That’s three,” he said.
“Three what?”
“Stocks in trade.”
“I’m serious, Shelby. Whether it’s one or three, the reality is the same. The only way we can defend ourselves against an early buyout is to keep on getting things right. To resist all the pressures. To tell them to cool it when they want us to post unconfirmed news.” I was tempted to tell him about the deadline Marcel Duffie had invented for us—a month, tops, before he initiated some doomsday scenario.
The mere mention of the word “buyout” made him shudder and switch lanes inadvertently in the mighty Jaguar, waving a vaguely lewd gesture in response to a chorus of blaring horns and protesting tires. I gripped the dash and plowed on.
“You just don’t seem to realize how many people would like to see you go down because you are who you are—and me with you. But I’m not ready for that. So don’t you fuck up. No more soy votes. No more recounts. Right?”
“Whimpo-whampo,” he said. “Jesus, Clancy. What happened to your sense of humor?”
As instructed by Marie-Claire, we took seats at Café de Flore, the rival to Les Deux Magots made famous by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Shelby insisted on positioning himself on the outside terrace where he could keep watch on his beloved wheels, although I knew that the Paris smart set favored the first-floor salon indoors to set itself apart from the hoi polloi who could not be expected to know any better.
Shelby ordered a scotch, and I took a glass of Sancerre, keen to pace myself—especially at these prices, far beyond the modest pocketbook of an editor at the Star. He gazed out at the Boulevard Saint-Germain with its humming traffic. The Jaguar had found a prized mooring alongside the sidewalk, and strollers turned their heads to see who might cavort on such exotic wheels.
“So, do you feel soiled, used?” he said, almost sneering. “Did you lose your cherry in the great Argentine soy vote scandal, Ed Clancy?”
“If you put it that way, no. If you mean, did I have more faith in the great Joe Shelby, then the answer is sure, I did.”
A mud-spattered SUV had drawn to a halt alongside the Jaguar, reversing, nimbly for its size, to squeeze into a gap between Shelby’s car and a late-model Porsche. The rear of the SUV was equipped with the kind of chunky tow hitch people use to pull trailers and horse boxes, and its solid, phallic curve was within centimeters of the Jaguar’s pristine paintwork when the pilot of the SUV brought it to a halt. The driver’s door swung open and a tall red-haired woman—the kind people always stop to look at—stepped down onto the sidewalk, tossing the keys to one of the many voituriers who had suddenly materialized to offer their assistance in parking the car. The woman strode toward us, smiling.
“Shelby, meet Marie-Claire Risen. Marie-Claire—Joe Shelby.”
I offered the introductions with a sinking heart.
“Enchanté,” Shelby said in surprisingly fluent French, raising my wife’s hand for one of those air kisses I thought had disappeared with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“How gallant,” she said.
Fuck you, Joe Shelby, I thought.