THE CAB FROM SAINT-GERMAIN SKIRTED THE CLOGGED TRAFFIC CIRCLE outside the Wepler seafood place where, when he was not composing his magisterial tributes to abundant sexuality, Henry Miller liked to consort with the hookers who took refuge there from the cold. (His favorite, so the story went, sported a wooden leg).
The neon glare of the world’s red-light districts always spreads a miasma of seediness, destroying the last vestige of pretense that the business at hand is anything other than the crude trade in momentary gratification. London’s Soho or New York’s Eighth Avenue, the Patpong Road in Bangkok, the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, or the De Wallen of Amsterdam—wherever vendors erect their beacons to the lewd commerce that undermines human claims to a higher form of being, they do so in neon: Sex Shop, Peep Show, Girls, Girls, Girls. Or Boys, Boys, Boys. Or Both, Both, Both.
The driver turned south, navigating a grid of streets to reach a narrow canyon of Haussmannian apartment houses staring into one another’s tall windows. Most of them had huge, ceremonial carriage gates—memories of an earlier, grander era—with smaller pedestrian entries set into them, controlled by codes punched into a keypad. As I paid off the cab, I noticed the small door open at the address I had been given for Faria Duclos, located between two streetlamps but not fully illuminated by either. There was something vaguely familiar about the person slipping out, some memory that stirred like an indistinct sound you can’t identify. Then I was pocketing my change and la fiche from the cab fare. (I had asked for a receipt more out of habit than need: no one redeemed my expenses anymore.) The mystery man did not look back.
I fumbled for the piece of paper Elvire Récamier had provided with the coordinates, punched in the requisite four digits, and heard the faint, satisfying click signifying that access had been electronically approved.
The apartment was on the seventh floor, so I figured it would be one of those long, thin places right under the zinc roof, created from the mansards that had once offered rooms to the maids of the rich folks living down below. I squeezed into an elevator the size of a small closet and noticed that, to judge from the available buttons, it went only as far as the sixth. Why make it easy for Monsieur to pay clandestine visits to Mademoiselle? Why give the maids their own easy access when the space taken up by a lift shaft would make an extra room for one more of them? So much for the “égalité” part of the national motto. (I had never been too sure about the “liberté” and “fraternité” bits either in these post-revolutionary days.) The elevator took a long time to wheeze and creak to the apex of its allotted course, as if it were sending a warning on ahead. It delivered me into darkness. I groped for a light switch.
A narrow spiral staircase ran up from the landing on the sixth floor. As I set foot on its metal rungs, I wondered how someone stymied by physical disability would cope. There was no way an invalid in advanced stages of decline would make it alone: somebody must be looking out for her. Above me, I heard, or sensed, an indistinct waft of music. The air carried a familiar trace of marijuana.
The entrance to the apartment was unmarked—no name, no number—and in the absence of a bell push, I knocked vigorously. The music—early Dylan, maybe?—faded away and I heard a faint whirring noise that grew louder.
No footsteps, though. I remember thinking, Why are they are no footsteps? Then I felt foolish for asking myself the question.
Even as she opened the door and peered up at me, she was looking beyond me for someone else who was not there. I hoped that would distract her from my shock at seeing her, but whatever her physical appearance, she still had her wits about her.
“Clancy,” she murmured huskily, as if her vocal chords could not stretch to much more than a whisper. It sounded like “Clonsee.”
“Tu es tout seul,” she said. “Moi aussi.”
She was in one of those electric-powered wheelchairs operated by controls on the arms, like the handsets that children use to manipulate radio-steered boats or cars or airplanes. Her legs, always stilt-skinny, fell from her waist like twin strands of dark dried rope. Her signature tight, black jeans hung as loosely as shredded rigging on a ghost ship. She was wearing a black T-shirt and an old leather jacket in the same color—one of those Dada Cuir trophies of the Shelby days. Hanging around her neck, outside her T-shirt, a mangled piece of lead hung from a worn leather thong. The bullet. Shelby’s Vietnam bullet. Even indoors, she wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, tilted to hide a side of her face.
I wondered if she had dressed like that because she expected him to knock at the door instead of me, in his own matching outfit, like they were headed to some macabre costume party, transporting them both back across time to the days when they ruled the world and each other.
She reversed the wheelchair jerkily along a corridor with uneven wood-tile floors, then spun around to enter a long, low loft with the kind of casement windows that moviemakers choose to frame the vistas of lovelorn poets in their garrets. From the seventh floor, looking south at the city, she had a great view—all the way to Saint-Sulpice on the left and to the Eiffel Tower on the right. The tower was sparkling, as it did every hour, to waste electricity and remind people what city they are in. Looking uphill to the north, I thought I could just see a single red spar from the Moulin Rouge.
The walls, even where they sloped inward under the eaves of the building, were filled with prints of her most famous photographs, all in black-and-white: the dead-eyed marine in Hue; the murdered white family in Zimbabwe, their bodies mimicking the broken dolls in the arms of the savaged children; the Palestinian man in Gaza cradling a dead infant; the Israeli soldier with prayer shawl and machine gun. There were moonscapes from Fallujah; improbable images of the broken jigsaws of quake zones in Pakistan and Haiti; the tilted, holed minarets of south Lebanon—the stage sets of the drama she sought out and passed on to a remote world, as if to shake its complacency. Most of her photographs had been taken at close quarters with a wide-angle lens, capturing in shocking intimacy a helpless victimhood that had gone far beyond self-regard or self-pity. Blank eyes gazed from Balkan prison camps, Afghan compounds, sandbagged revetments—an unremitting gallery of pain and loss. At a vernissage, they might have drawn comment for their uniform horror; as interior decoration, they made you shiver, as if all the depravity she had ever seen had come full circle, enfolding her.
“So. He did not come.” She was always one to get straight to the point. “I guess I cannot blame him.”
Below the brim of her hat, someone had drawn her long hair back and tied it in a loose bun. Once it had been a lustrous black. Now it was thin, shot with gray, defying any effort to disguise the advancing years. In her most vibrant days she had liked to wise-crack about how her slender frame made her “a smaller target for the bad guys.” Now she was downright gaunt, as if the flesh and musculature had retreated wholesale from her bones, leaving her skin to hang from them. A thin plastic pipe looped from an oxygen tank on the back of her wheelchair to feed her nostrils. Her lips were pale—gray lines drawn in papyrus. But the eyes held me, deep, black, glowing with light, as if to say, Look into me, into these eyes; this is me, not the body you see; in here is the real me, like so many years ago when we were young. I was reminded of a time I drove by a prison and, at one barred window out of a hundred, saw a single inmate staring out at a world that had locked him in and thrown away the key.
“Do not be shocked, Clancy. You get used to it.” She smiled, and I noticed that her teeth had been whitened, almost jaunty against the pallor.
“Faria,” I said.
“For God’s sake, Clancy. Control yourself,” she said in a mockstern whisper.
I wiped my eyes.
“You really know how to make a girl feel good.”
Faria Duclos had started her working career as a model, traveling from a small town in Normandy to Paris, where she hit the big time on the catwalks and magazine covers. But she had always been fascinated not so much by images of herself as by the cameras that made them. So she bought one: a Leica, long predating the digital era with its mechanical shutter and split image focusing. On a fashion shoot in Jordan, she had witnessed a street battle and photographed it from the level and the perspective of the combatants. The result earned her sales around the world. Her pictures were labeled exclusive. She left the catwalk for the battlefield. On a shelf in her apartment the old Leica—an M2—held pride of place in a glass display case. But if the work on her walls was designed as a retrospective, it also had the unmistakable feel of a valedictory, a farewell.
She nodded toward a dark, antique dresser where a bottle of Talisker—Shelby’s favorite—stood unopened. Next to it, a bouquet of expensive red roses was still wrapped in florists’ cellophane.
“Help yourself,” she said.
I did, tearing at the heavy lead foil to open the bottle and pouring a solid jolt of its peaty, smoky, fiery contents.
I took her bony hand and squeezed it. She tried to reciprocate the gesture, but her fingers barely moved, as if the brain had sent out a signal that was just too faint for what was left of the organism to hear. The backs of her hand were channeled into the skeletal ravines caused by muscle loss—“guttering,” neurologists like to call it, though not in front of patients who might think the term too cavalier. I guessed it had been a long time since she had been able to raise a Leica or press a shutter. Or walk through passport control in a strange country. Or talk her way through a roadblock. Or dodge bullets.
“Tell me, Faria.”
“There is not a lot to tell,” she said. “You must laugh in the face of danger.”
The expression was one Shelby used to mock a colleague who adopted that motto too frequently, usually from the safety of a bar. It took me a moment to realize that the grimace agitating her spectral features was supposed to reflect her old, wry merriment at the folly of her trade and its practitioners.
I leaned forward to catch her words. That was when I noticed the catheter bag catching her urine. She intercepted my glance and lowered her eyes. Look at me now, she seemed to be saying in this dialogue without words. Look at what has become of me.
“My night nurse will be here soon, and he will chase you away, so I will try to be quick. Quick. Ha! I do not do quick anymore.” She was offering her imitation of laughter again and I laughed with her, though I felt more like kneeling in homage. When she spoke of her prospects, she was so matter-of-fact that, at first, you did not realize she was talking about herself. I guess she had been so close to the end for so long that nothing really surprised her anymore.
“They say it will not be long. Maybe weeks. Days. Who knows? Shelby is in Paris?”
“He is here.”
“He is sick?”
“He walks with a cane.”
“It should be a crutch. He always had a crutch. Me, or Eva, or Elvire. I would like to see him.”
“I will tell him.”
“No. Do not tell him. He must come of his own free will. When he is ready.”
“But if …” My sentence tailed off.
While I spoke she had been wrestling with her unresponsive arms to produce the stub end of a reefer from the folds of her clothing.
“Cigarette me.” It was an old joke and I smiled.
I took the roach and placed it between her lips, where her own hands would not reach. I flicked my lighter and she took a shallow drag, then another and a third before she signaled to me to remove it.
“Medicinal,” she said. “But do not tell the médecin! You were saying, Ed Clancy. ‘But if’ what? If I die before he gets here? If I die without telling him I forgive him, that I would have taken him back anytime if he had only asked? That I would have nursed him if I were not broken? Is that what you wanted to ask me? Would that be true? Maybe he thinks I hate him. Maybe a little bit I do. Maybe he thinks I am sick because of him and the places we went. Maybe he is right. Funny that we both are fucked up.” In her Édith Piaf whisper it sounded like “ferked up.” She knew her accent gave her a free pass on English obscenities.
“Maybe it is possible to love and hate at once. Maybe, now, we will never, ever know. Maybe it was for me to look for him, and up to him to look for me. For him to know and me to find out. Or vice versa.”
She fell back against the worn padding of her wheelchair. Her speech had exhausted her.
“He will come. I will make him come.”
“He will come if he wants to,” she said. “Only then.”
“You might not recognize him.”
“Impossible.”
“He’s older …”
“We are all older, Clancy. Especially you.” Her laughter rustled again like a zephyr crossing dry leaves.
“But I know what he would say to you.”
“You always did think you knew too much about other people, Edward.” She pronounced my name the way Marie-Claire did. There was an accusatory tone to her voice, but then it softened. “Do not say anything Shelby would not.”
“I know what he would say.” I was beginning to sound defensive. “And I know what he would like to say and could not.”
“A riddle?”
“He thinks you do not want to see him.”
“But, Clancy, you know I do. And what would he say when he came to visit?”
“He would say …” I stopped to rephrase my words and took a deep breath as I prepared my little speech. “Look, you guys have your secrets. No question. And I know there’s something about all this that no one will tell me. But this is the thing, Faria. Whether Shelby said it or not, you would know from his eyes and his hand in yours that he still loves you more than anyone on the planet.”
She looked at me, and I thought she would weep. Like I was doing.
But instead, she smiled and said, “And how does he know that there is no one else who loves me just as much?”
I thought of the mystery man leaving the building. I thought of the roses next to Shelby’s unopened whiskey bottle.
“I guess that was the question you never answered for him,” I said.
“No, no. Clancy. Do not be cruel. Not now. Not to me, to this sick old woman I have become. This crone who dares not look in the mirror. I know what people say. They say when I went back on the road, after he started getting sick, it was because I could not love him in that condition. But the truth was, I wanted to set him free to decide for himself what he wanted to become of us.”
I refilled my whiskey—three fingers, no ice—in a big, chunky tumbler. She gestured to her stash and I rolled another joint for her, lighting it and letting her puff on it. When she tried to inhale too deeply, she coughed and her eyes watered.
“Quick, before the night nurse. One more toke,” she said.
The conversation drifted. I talked about Elvire and her stories from ’Nam, the desperate motorcycle ride, the bullet in the typewriter (she gestured to her makeshift necklace), the rose in the backpack, and Gibson Dullar hovering, back then. Way back.
“I do not remember Gibson Dullar being there,” she said, suddenly haughty and distant. For a second I thought her eyes flickered toward the unwrapped roses.
I heard the door open and close behind me.
A man who did not look like a night nurse entered the apartment. He had an honest, open face and curly blond hair. He wore an expensive tweed sport coat, a blue cotton shirt open at the neck, and freshly pressed Levi’s. He was much younger than Faria or I. His eyes matched his shirt and shone like a puppy’s when she looked at him.
“Ivar,” he said, holding out a hand to me in introduction.
“This is the famous Shelby?” he said, turning to Faria, slightly bemused, as if the image he had did not at all match the person he found rising from her side to greet him.
She did her laugh-wheeze whisper again. Dry as old leaves.
“Clancy. Shelby’s sidekick,” she said. The story of my life in three words.
“Ivar Bild,” he said. “From Sweden.”
“I would never have guessed.”
“Ivar is my agent in Scandinavia,” she said. The look between them told me he was—or had been, or wanted to be—much more than that.
I assumed it was he who had brushed back her hair, dressed her in her old combat clothes, prepared her public face, even as his own love consumed him. Maybe it was he, too, who rolled her joints, changed her oxygen bottles, switched the catheter bag and emptied its contents into the john. He struck me as being one of those men with older women who have the gift of seeing beyond age; who cherish the secret, bedside photograph we all keep hidden, like a portrait of Dorian Gray in reverse, preserving eternal youth. I wondered if he was the man I had seen leaving the apartment building when I arrived, but I figured not.
“The night nurse?” I said.
“The night nurse,” Ivar said with a comfortable smile.
“Time to go, Ed,” Faria said. Our conversation had tired her. Dark bags spread below her eyes.
I felt relieved to be leaving, to have done my duty, to have gleaned the message to take back to Shelby: Go see her, you do not have much time. Or, rather, she does not have much time.
Ivar led me back to the door after permitting me to kiss Faria on both cheeks. It was like brushing your lips over parchment.
“Remember what I said,” she whispered. “Do not tell Shelby I asked for him. He must come without prompting.”
Her head slipped forward, and her straw hat fell from her head so that you could see what it was supposed to hide: livid scar tissue across her right temple and into her scalp, pink as a vulture’s neck, the kind that comes after third-degree burns have destroyed too many layers of skin for recovery. I was too shocked to do anything but stare at her. More than any words, the panicked, desperate look in her eyes said: Do not tell him what you have seen; do not judge me like this.
As I reached the door, Ivar the Swede took my hand in a bone-crushing grip.
“She is looked after. Twenty-four hours a day. She is in no pain. And she will be in no pain when the moment comes. I will make sure of that.”
I wondered how.
“How long has she got?”
“Not long. Tell this to the heartless Joe Shelby. Tell him to come see her. He is all she is staying alive for.”
His eyes watered with the humiliation of a confession dictated by a terrible honesty.
“Does she forgive him?”
“She forgave him a long time ago. Did he tell you about the fire?”
“What fire?”
“The fire in Beirut. Ask him. Ask the great Joe Shelby.”
“You are a good man, Ivar,” I said.
“She is a good woman.”
He handed me a scrap of paper with a single sentence written on it.
“It was in a letter addressed to Shelby. The last thing she wrote while she could still hold a pen and move her fingers.”
The handwriting was spidery, labored. The words formed jagged parabolas, barely legible, like some kind of weird spiky graph.
“I would rather be alone than hurt by the people around me,” it said.
“Tell him,” Ivar Bild said. “Take the message—perhaps he will remember it. After all, he once said the same words to her.”