MARIE-CLAIRE TURNED FROM JOE SHELBY AND GAVE ME A HUG.
“What chivalrous friends you have,” she said.
Shelby preened.
“Up to a point.”
She gave me an odd, surprised look and squeezed my hand.
“So, Joe,” she said, “welcome to Paris. What do you think of our capital city?”
“It’s all true,” Shelby said. “The light. The poets. The palaces. The elegance.” He paused almost imperceptibly to shift the stress onto what he was about to say. “The beautiful women.”
He narrowed his eyes slightly, and I found myself thinking, I don’t believe this. But, of course, I did. Marie-Claire was very beautiful, even in her most casual moments. Leaving the stud farm to meet us, she seemed to have spent no time at all changing clothes and she was still dressed in her horsey kit: beige riding breeches with high black boots polished to a deep luster, fawn cashmere sweater, Hermès silk scarf in muted countryside tones, a quilted green Barbour jacket tossed casually over her shoulders. When she shucked it off to drape it over one of those tiny wicker-backed bistro chairs, the sweater stretched across the outline of her breasts.
Indisputably, she matched Shelby’s description—and then some.
If she had been carrying her riding crop, half the male population cruising the boulevard would have lined up to be disciplined.
“Don’t be fooled,” she told Shelby. “Those beautiful women may look like kittens on the outside, but they are tigers inside.”
Shelby did a passable imitation of a feline growl, and she laughed. I did not.
“How was your day?” I said, taking her hand, turning it to show off the wedding band and chunky sparkler that had cost me a slice of my pension.
The waiter was hovering and she ordered a Perrier. Shelby renewed our rounds.
“So what brings you to Paris, Joe?” Marie-Claire went on. “I feel as if I know you already. My husband has been dining out on Joe Shelby stories for years.”
“Only the good ones, I hope.”
“Just the true ones, Joe,” I interjected.
“No, really. I mean it.” She was not to be distracted from her line of questioning. “People come to Paris for many reasons, most of them wrong. And when Paris lets them down, they are disappointed.”
“I hope I won’t be disappointed,” Shelby said.
“Joe has a lot of friends in Paris, don’t you, Joe? Lady friends, I mean.” It was meant as a low blow, but it broke the first rule: Never talk up your buddies in front of your spouse.
“Aha!” Marie-Claire said lightly, with a charming smile. “So it is romance. Toujours l’amour, n’est-ce pas, Edward?”
“Edward!” Shelby exclaimed. “I guess I had never figured there was an Edward in there. I always had you down as an Ed. Plain and simple. Mister Ed.”
Marie-Claire looked sharply between us.
“Well, I guess there are some lady friends. One at least. But I’m told she is in a wheelchair now and does not have too long to go. So I guess it’s not so much amour as adieu.”
She laid her hand on Shelby’s arm.
“But I am so sorry,” she said. “Edward had not told me.”
“Well, I don’t like to wear my heart on my sleeve.”
The only place you would wear your heart, if you had one, I found myself thinking, would be in your pants. Or in someone else’s.
Shelby had brought his Nerval with him and she tapped the cover of Les Chimères without opening it.
“Well, I guess we can do without le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie here,” she said, half schoolmarm, half joking. I guessed she was quoting directly from one of the poems.
“You know him? You’ve read Nerval! My God, fantastic!”
“Mr. Shelby, I am French. For me to have read Gérard de Nerval is about as unusual as an American reading Walt Whitman. So where were you before Paris?”
“Middle East. Africa. Asia. You name it, I guess. I never counted the datelines.”
He glanced at me and I glowered back with a look that said, Oh, yes, you did, you asshole. At least till the number of countries reached a hundred. Like your other conquests.
I just hoped we’d end the evening without the pigeon story.
“So where was home?” Marie-Claire asked.
“Home! Home for a day we used to say. Some hotel room, some bar. Someplace or another.”
Jesus!
“And where was most recent?”
“Beirut, Lebanon.”
“Of course, the license plate,” she said, gesturing toward the car she had come close to remodeling with the tow hitch of her SUV.
“You noticed, huh?”
“Well, it stands out a bit. The XKR is a pretty rare beast in these parts—you know the princes and the sheikhs go more for Ferraris and Rolls.”
I could not tell if that was supposed to be a bit of a put-down, but Shelby did not really notice it if it was.
“Like a fine pedigree stallion,” he said. “The XKR is a thoroughbred. Last in a line of development, every little glitch ironed out. Beautiful lines.” He paused again to smile at Marie-Claire. “Power under the hood.”
“So how did you get it here?” she asked with an innocence I knew to be feigned.
“The car? Right. Well, it’s an interesting story. A long story.”
“Why not cut it short?” I heard myself saying.
“That’s your job, Edward,” he said very quickly and tartly. “You’re the editor. I just tell the stories. You do the cutting.”
“Now, boys,” Marie-Claire said in the tone she normally reserved for rambunctious stable lads.
“Okay, okay, out of line. Sorry. Ed, really. Il miglior fabbro, that’s Ed. The great craftsman. Eliot’s dedication to Ezra Pound in The Waste Land, 1923.”
“1922,” she corrected him. “But the epithet underestimates mon mari. So much more than a craftsman.”
Now it was my turn to preen.
“The car?” she reminded him.
“Right, right. The car. In the Bekaa Valley. Do you really want to hear this?”
He raised his glass, looked at it quizzically, and lowered it again.
“The Bekaa. Lebanon.”
He looked at us as if he was trying to remember who or where we were—or who he was.
“The car,” I said. “You were telling us how you got the Jag.”
“Of course. Funny old yarn. Long story short, for Ed’s sake. Well. It all came down to a shooting match.”
“Shooting match? My God. I thought you were a reporter, not a gunslinger,” Marie-Claire said.
“Both! You better believe it.” Shelby pointed a long and knuckly index finger at each of us, flicking his thumbs as if cocking the hammer on matched revolvers. One hand seemed to droop slightly, which kind of spoiled the Wyatt Earp impression. I put it down to whatever his illness was.
“Well. Like I said. Bekaa Valley. What do you expect? Gun central. You remember Bashir? Bashir Fares?”
The name was vaguely familiar from those half-told stories about warlords and spooks that were never quite confirmed enough to print. Shelby was in full flow.
“So Bashir came up to me in the restaurant near the old ruins at Anjar, where they serve the grilled trout, and he and his goons were practicing pistol-shooting with nine-mills aiming at a cigarette pinned upright on a chair back at twenty paces. Bashir was one tough hombre. Minister’s son. Top intelligence officer.”
Marie-Claire broke in. “He did a lot of the bad stuff at Hama—personally. Heroin. Car bombs. Remind me to tell you the full story sometime. If they ever got him to the Hague … but go on. Sorry for the interruption.”
Where did she know this stuff from?
“That’s the guy,” Shelby continued, looking at Marie-Claire with a new respect. “Bad hat. Known him for years. He always thought he was numero uno, and I guess I had had too much arrack to resist. ‘Wanna play?’ he said. ‘Hundred bucks a shot. Winner takes all.’ So I said, ‘Sure.’ Now I was with a bunch of guys—farewell party from Lebanon and they’d thrown me a lunch in the Bekaa. Some friends! Right on the Syrian border with Israeli drones cruising around overhead. And you remember old Dmitri, the famous snapper? Well, he took me to one side and said, ‘Whatever you do, Joe, don’t hit the cigarette.’ And I said, ‘Shit, Dmitri, I just put a hundred on the spot.’ And he said, ‘How much is your life worth?’”
The waiter refreshed our drinks and set down dainty little dishes of nuts and pretzels, and Shelby scrunched a mouthful before continuing. I had a feeling that strangers at adjacent tables had quieted their own conversations to listen in. He seemed to like the audience.
“Now you know how I am these days. Cane. Crip. Fucked. Pardon me, Marie-Claire. Delete expletives. Sorry. So I figured, What the hell? What is my life worth? Not a lot.”
Marie-Claire made to dispute the point, as Shelby evidently had scripted her to, but he silenced her with his wilting hand.
“No, no. Just facts. The quacks all say you can’t kick this thing. You’re only going to get worse. I mean, how much worse can it be? Anyhow. Back to the Bekaa. So I said, ‘Okay, Bashir, hand me the shooter.’ I guess I figured a hundred bucks would be cheaper than a trip to the old Swiss clinic.”
He broke off and laughed with a bitterness I took to be feigned. But it was the first time I had heard him acknowledge his illness, let alone permit a peek into the prognosis. I wondered if he and Faria Duclos shared the same ailment along with everything else they had in common.
“Well, it was looking like no contest. I was none too steady on the old pins what with the cane and a few glasses of arrack under my belt. And I could see Dmitri out of the corner of my eye doing that finger-across-the-throat thing they take pretty seriously out in the Bekaa. So Bashir whips out a platinum-plated nine-mill, barely draws a bead, and fires—pouf—and that’s one less Marlboro for the world’s nicotine police to worry about. ‘Still want to play,’ he says? ‘Sure,’ I said. And now this is the weird thing. I propped myself up with one hand on the cane and aimed with the other and I actually tried to miss. But when I pulled the trigger—bingo! I’m right on target. I’ve hit the freaking cigarette and Bashir is looking pretty pissed. And his goons are kind of sniggering that a stupid old crip with a stick is shooting evens with the boss. So we try again. Same thing happens except this time I was aiming at the goddamn smoke because I figured I’d miss it, but I hit it anyhow.”
“What’s this got to do with the car, Joe? I thought you said you were cutting a long story short. Spare me the unexpurgated version.”
Marie-Claire laughed at my interruption. Shelby did not.
“Patience, Edward, patience,” he said. “Some stories just can’t be rushed. Isn’t that right, Marie-Claire? Some things are worth taking time over, right? Where was I? Okay. So Dmitri and the boys are getting a bit edgy and moving out toward Dmitri’s old Subaru, and Bashir is getting more and more pissed and he says, ‘You shoot pretty well for a hundred bucks. How about raising the stakes?’ ‘Like to what?’ I said. ‘How about your watch?’ he says.”
Shelby shot his cuff and brandished his scratched steel Rolex.
“I mean this watch. This watch that has been with me since Tehran in ’79. This watch keeps the bogeymen away. It’s my talisman. So I say, ‘Shit, Bashir. This watch means a lot to me. What will you shoot for?’ And he looks around and there parked outside the restaurant is a beautiful new XKR Jag. Silver. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Your watch. My car.’
“Now this has got a lot of attention and there’s a bit of a crowd. ‘Best of five,’ Bashir says. And I’m in way past the point where you can back out. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘best of five.’ I put my watch on the table. He tells one of his goons to put the Jag keys on the table. And we set up. Five smokes on two chairs. A chalk line to fire from. New ammo fresh out of the box to reload the nine-mills. ‘Penalty shootout,’ I said. He didn’t think that was very funny. And that’s not all. His goons are all getting a bit fidgety with their AKs, slipping the safeties on and off. So, round one—bang! Shit. Sorry, Marie-Claire. He misses. I hit. Round two: I miss. He hits. Evens. One each and three rounds to go. Round three, we both hit. Round four, the same. Then the final round. I go first. I notice Dmitri going ape. I can’t make it obvious to him that I’ve accepted I’m going to lose my watch and I’m trying to miss without letting it show. So I aim slightly off. But just as I go to pull the trigger, the goddamn Israeli drone overhead fires off a missile, my bad leg does something funny, the gun swings round, and—bang—I’ve hit the cigarette. Like in some kind of circus act.”
Shelby paused for effect, his eyes wide in mock amazement. He took a slug of his drink to spin out the story.
“So. There’s silence. Total silence. And then suddenly Bashir laughs and holsters the nine-mill. And the heavies laugh and lower their AKs. ‘Take the car,’ he says. ‘It’s no good on these roads anyhow.’ And he throws me the keys and I put my watch back on and his goons bring round a few Range Rovers and off they all go. ‘Take the car …’ It seemed crazy. And then I figured why: he reckoned the drone was looking for him in the Jag so the next guy to drive it was quite literally toast so he figured he had won either way. Wrong again, as it turned out.”
“Is any of this true, Shelby?” I asked.
“Every word,” he said. “Just like the Argentine soy vote.”
Marie-Claire was giving him a delighted, if somewhat sardonic, round of applause.
I knew she would leave early—she kept equestrian hours, rising in time to supervise the staff for the first misty dawn ride-out on the gallops—so I would need to head back to the office to retrieve my Jeep from the parking garage,
“It has been a pleasure to meet you, Joe. I think that, quite possibly, a lot of what Edward told me about you is probably true.”
“In other words, Joe, that you are just an old bullshitter.”
“Thank you, Ed,” Shelby said, but this time with a smile.
Marie-Claire rose from the table, and whatever physical challenges he might have said he faced, Shelby was on his feet to help her into her quilted Barbour coat, take her by the shoulders, and lean in for the double-cheek embrace that can mean as much or as little as you want.
“Don’t be too late,” my wife told me. She kissed me square on the lips. No ambiguity there.
She clambered into her SUV. I noticed that, as she nudged into the Boulevard Saint-Germain, she permitted the tow hitch to touch the prow of the XKR—not enough to scar, just enough to make a kind of contact. Shelby noticed it, too, and looked speculatively at the big, mud-spattered 4x4 as Marie-Claire pulled into the traffic with supreme indifference to anyone she might inconvenience.
“What a gal,” he said. “You old rogue, Clancy. You netted the best. And all she got was you—hook, line, and sinker.
“Mind you,” Shelby said. “I guess it’s not all upside. I mean, that’s a hell of an act to keep up with.”
Sometimes he showed glimmers of understanding. Even—heaven forbid—sensitivity.
But like Charlie in ’Nam, he had a good way of camouflaging it.