SHELBY BREWED A STRONG BLACK LIQUID THAT TASTED OF CHARCOAL and burned Arabica. There were no trimmings such as croissants, milk, sugar. I cleared up the detritus of the Battle of the Avre, shaking the cold barbecue tray into the fabled stream, as if spreading crematory ash according to the final instructions of a departed angler.
The morning mist had burned off the river and sunlight gilded its surface. Across the way, sheep still munched, unperturbed. Normandy stirred.
As if part of a Viking burial rite, a languid current bore away the gray smear of cinders and fish bone surrounding the charred head of Shelby’s quarry with its querulous, gaping eye sockets. I savored an early cigarette, tobacco fumes rising around me—the smell of victory?
Dust to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
Upstream, the swans hovered on sentry duty, watching the despoilment of their domain with disapproval. I bared my teeth at them, and they ruffled their feathers back at me.
Round two to us, I figured, making it a points draw over all.
The plan was to stop by the railroad station in Dreux to pick up Elvire Récamier.
The police had, at least, released the body of Faria Duclos for burial. But I had seen nothing to indicate that they had closed the file on their investigation into her death.
As he drove, I thought I heard Shelby muttering disjointed phrases in French as if they were an incantation of some kind.
“Je suis le Ténébreux …” I translated the words as “I am the dark one” and figured he was referring to his mood after the combined assault on his equilibrium of swans, bats, and single malt. I caught the word “veuf”—it means “widower”—but I thought no more of it. Another clue missed, as it turned out.
We pulled up in the station forecourt underneath a sign that said “No Parking at Any Time.” Shelby ordered me to fold myself into the jump seats in the rear of the car so that Elvire could slide her svelte, starved frame into the front.
She was immaculately groomed, with fringed black hair that combined the looks of Man Ray’s models and Coco Chanel, draped in a black silk pantsuit over a red silk blouse, the whole outfit wrapped in a loose-fitting, belted overcoat of fine cashmere, also black. Her makeup was unambiguous: red lips, black arching eyebrows, eyelashes cemented by mascara into a shocked curl. She smoked old-fashioned unfiltered Gauloises, picking loose strands of tobacco from lips as bright as stoplights.
“Alors, Shelby. The old warhorse. Gone lame.”
“The animaux de la guerre all grow old, Elvire,” he shot back. “Même les chiennes—even the bitches.”
“You know, you always were a shit. I told Faria so, but she would not listen.”
“It’s so good to see you have not changed one single bit,” Shelby said, smiling toward her, leaning across the Jaguar’s high transmission tunnel to kiss her pale and proffered cheek. “La belle dame sans merci.”
They were still fighting old battles, as people do when they bid the last farewell to special friends, folding their hurts and unredeemable slights into the shroud. The sparring reminded me of the evening Elvire Récamier told me the story of Shelby’s wild motorcycle ride to the arms of another woman. Elvire had said that, in this opera, the lady had not yet sung, so I wondered whether she was rehearsing the first lines of her libretto. At first blush, it sounded like her arias would be more Wagner than Mozart or Puccini.
As we drove off, Elvire launched into a catalog of Duclos stories, each one designed to needle Shelby a little bit more than the last.
“So this one time, her boss from the picture agence in Paris arrived in Phnom Penh and started looking for Faria,” Récamier was saying. “And he went up to old Mr. Liu at the reception desk of the Royal and says, ‘Which room is Mlle Duclos staying in?’ And he replies, ‘124, 337, 428, 507.’”
She chortled but Shelby did not. I intercepted a look between them—she mischievous, he enraged. I had heard the story before, or variants of it, told about any number of women photographers and writers who had become the object of professional jealousy. I wondered how often derivatives of the same anecdote were recounted about those swashbuckling male reporters who, in the ethos of the times, actually felt obliged to share their favors—and their boudoirs—without restraint.
“And of course she was the first to discover the opium in Cambodia, and the naked swimming in the pool at Le Royal.”
“No reason men should have all the fun,” I said. “I mean, in this day and age. It would be sexist to think otherwise.”
“Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Clancy?” Shelby growled.
Shelby pulled over for gas and Elvire turned back to me, speaking in a stage whisper that could not have been much louder if it had been amplified by rock-concert sound systems.
“I remember once at the Commodore in Beirut, she came up to me and said, ‘If Shelby asks where I am, tell him I am in the camps with the Palestinians.’”
“And wasn’t she?”
“Of course not. She never liked to be tied down, pinned, like some beautiful butterfly in a collection.”
“But I thought she and Shelby were a big number.” She looked at me with scorn.
“Of course they were,” she said, “the biggest ever. He was the love of her life. But she had demons”—she pronounced it “demoons”—“and she believed that if she stopped running she would be boring and men would find her boring. But if she kept running, she would run away from the people who loved her the most. Catch-22.”
She shrugged.
“And you, Elvire?”
“That is for me to know—and nobody to find out,” she said. “I never kiss on television!”
“But she didn’t stick with him. After the other woman left.”
“She did not want to be Shelby’s nurse.”
“And in the end she needed nursing herself.”
“But not by Shelby.” Récamier rolled her big eyes that had absorbed so much but that betrayed nothing.
We drove on through the apple orchards of the Eure, across valleys latticed with chalk streams whose trout population was at least one less than the day before, through woodlands that would be either mysterious or menacing, depending on your mood. Shelby insisted that he knew the route to the Duclos ancestral home, where Faria was to be buried, but he took some wrong turn at a complex traffic circle and slowed the car to a halt on loose roadside gravel bordering a mowed wheat field to scan his Michelin map, curse, and throw the Jaguar into a tire-squealing one-eighty, ignoring an oncoming truck that blared its Klaxon and began to weave as the driver slammed on the air brakes.
Shelby pushed the car to maximum power, heading back the way we came, passing a rental car coming in the opposite direction laden with fellow mourners who, seeing Shelby’s Jaguar with its telltale Lebanese license plate, spun their modest Citroën into the path of the same truck and lit off after us.
The wrong turn would delay us beyond the official starting time of the service.
Our Keystone Kops chase made us ridiculous.
If Faria had been among us, Shelby said with a guffaw, she would be hooting with laughter: the old hands, veterans of the battlefields, navigators of the human condition, chroniclers of hidden wars, lost in the apple groves of Normandy, late for a funeral, but chasing one another, hell-for-leather, as if they still ran scared of rivals who might get there first, take the pictures before the bodies were removed, bribe the telex operator to block the lines, dismantle the public call boxes so no competitor could call in a story first or ever. How often had they done that, he wondered—laid false trails, slipped out of town at dawn, driven like the possessed to escape the hack pack in pursuit.
“She’d love it,” Shelby was chuckling.
“But she is not here. She cannot be here.” Elvire Récamier said without a hint of sadness or sentimentality. “And you did not even go visit her on her deathbed. But I tell you who did: Dullar came. Dullar always loved her. Way back when. Dullar came to see her in Paris when she was dying. And you did not.”
Now I realized who I had seen slipping away into the shadows as I approached the Duclos apartment, the man who brought roses but left no calling card.
“Dullar? Gibson Dullar?”
Shelby reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out his leather flier’s hat, ramming it on his head so that the flaps covered his ears.
The onward drive got a bit strained after that.
The village was as remote from Saigon or Beirut as you could imagine—“not just in distance but in the life of a woman laid to rest here the other day, the final halt on a journey from the breathless theaters of twentieth-century warfare to the bathos of death by accident,” as one of her overblown obituaries recorded.
We parked on a grass verge and scrambled up a narrow lane to the church, Shelby propelling himself with his stick as if he were some gigantic crane striving for vertical takeoff. Reaching the church, Shelby pulled off his leather cap and held it in both hands, like a schoolkid late for roll call. The service was already underway, conducted by a woman lay preacher in the absence of a priest to conduct a mass for this woman who believed only in what she saw through the range finder and recorded on celluloid and published in magazines. She had died broke, supported by fellow photographers who auctioned their work to finance her apartment and her medication and her day nurse from Vietnam and her night nurse from Sweden. Her colleagues had paid for the funeral, too, and they gathered now in a wooden-roofed village church whose gracious, curved beams gave it the air of an upturned Noah’s Ark, bearing souls in ones and twos back to the memories of the good times. Her coffin lay between the hard wooden benches that did for pews, draped in the kaffiyeh headdresses of the underdogs and terrorists and fighters who had scrambled for position in her world of smoke and flame and spilled blood.
As an outsider, contemplating the graying men clutching unfamiliar prayer sheets, I wondered how many of these hobbled warriors had paraded before her in hotel bars and combat zones, questing for her favors, and for some sign from her that they meant more than the fleeting fly-by-night couplings so common to their kind. I took up position in a shadowed corner at the rear of the church and watched.
Shelby’s eyes locked on the shiny wooden coffin, garlanded with roses, as if trying to peer through its lid to something long past. I scanned the other mourners. All of them, maybe, wanted to turn back the pages. And as at most funerals, all of them wanted to behold the dead to reconfirm their status on this side of mortality’s divide and say, one more time, as they did when they trudged back from the fray, eyes glowing with relief and adrenaline, that they had made it, that they had survived when others did not.
There but for the grace of God …
Was that what they all thought as they filed past the coffin, laying a flower on it, clumsy with their unwonted, unfamiliar gestures of the cross, touching the burnished casket as if reaching out through time to reconjure a kiss, an embrace, a sudden glimpse into her hidden soul across tangled sheets and storm-tossed pillows?
I scanned the church and saw Ivar Bild. His blue eyes brimmed. I would have liked to ask him, So what did you tell the cops, Mr. Night Nurse? When he felt my eyes on him, he turned his head toward me, then looked sharply away.
Shelby was not listed among the eulogists, among those who would read a line of Palestinian poetry, a Buddhist incantation, a simple biography of a complex life, offering the editing and censorship, the gentle recasting of history that decorum dictates for the dead. But plenty of the mourners cast surreptitious, sidelong glances his way, trying to guess whether, finally in her death, he would acknowledge the loss he had experienced far earlier than her physical death when she had left him to his illness and returned to the war zones.
When his turn came to lay a rose and offer a prayer, he paused at the head of the casket, leaning on his walking pole, canted at a spindly angle. His stance reminded me of one of those heraldic images of the knight leaning on his sword over the body of the damsel that destiny has taken from him. Shelby scanned the mourners, looked down at the coffin again, then took a deep breath and began to speak, his gaze ranging over all of them. No one seemed to want to make eye contact.
“You all know me,” he began with a smile, sounding for all the world like Quint, the shark-hunting ship’s captain in Jaws. “And I know you. And we all knew her.”
He looked down at the casket again and fell silent.
You could tell in that pause—when men, alone or with their wives and partners beside them, peered up toward some indeterminate point of suddenly overwhelming interest in the rafters or looked down at their feet—that he had the audience in the palm of his hand.
No one knew what Shelby would say. Everyone feared what he might.
“We all loved her,” he said finally. “In our different ways. We loved her in the best ways we knew how, and she loved us according to her own way of loving. We loved her and now she has gone. Some of you helped her, the way she deserved to be helped. Some of us failed. I did. I failed and I should say so. She failed me, of course, but that was her way. And I never knew the full extent of it until today”—he cast a savage glance toward the heat-resistant shields of Récamier’s Christian Dior sunglasses—“but I could never act in vengeance toward Faria Duclos. How do you avenge pure love, transcending the ownership of the body, transcending earthly gestures?”
There was another long silence. Someone coughed. A cell phone began a chirrup and was smothered. Outside, a blackbird called out and a wood pigeon answered.
“Yes, we all loved her. I see you out there. Jean-Pierre, how’s Baghdad? Jonno, still chasing the Kurds? Hirsch flew in from Beirut, of course. Récamier. Well, Elvire. What can I say that you don’t already know? You are here and she is not. You dodged this particular bullet. She didn’t. She would have mourned you with as many tears if the situation was reversed. And me?”
His voice rose suddenly, and he spoke clearly to make every word audible and understandable to all the assembled gathering.
“Faria, my dear lost Faria Duclos, whom I neglected and betrayed and who was never what anyone expected. And who was capable of neglect and hurtfulness, too. I wish it was me in there and her out here, making you all want her again. But it’s not like that.”
He paused. You could hear a murmuring, a muttering of discontent among the congregants. His words were not going down well. I could not figure out whether it was embarrassment or annoyance. If Shelby was confronting his demons, this was not the place for it. Some things were best left unsaid, even among these truth-tellers, these chroniclers of other people’s woes who so jealously guarded their own. From a dark corner of the church, a man in a fancy leather jacket—I had not noticed him initially—slipped out of the building and I heard a car engine start up. There was a squeal of tires on tarmac—it sounded angry—and then the sound faded away.
“I am saying the things you are not supposed to say at funerals, aren’t I? I apologize. I don’t know how else to honor her except with the truth. My truth. My truth with her. She taught me a poem, you know, by someone called Gérard de Nerval. It’s called “El Desdichado” and I won’t bore you with all of it, but there’s a line that says this:
“‘Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé, / Rends-moi le Pausillipe et la mer d’Italie …’ Give me back the sea of Italy. Give me back the days of innocence, really, before desolation took hold. In the night of the tomb, when everything is dark, give me back the light.
“And then there’s a bit that says: ‘Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine …’ I guess you all know what I mean: My brow is still red from the kiss of the queen … red and bleeding.”
I thought of her brow, scarred and unhealing, and wondered if he would have used those words if he had seen it, too.
Shelby delved into the pocket of his worn and crumpled linen jacket and withdrew the copy of Aurélia he had showed me the night before. He turned to a different passage from the one he had shown me, as if he had cherry-picked the great poet for echoes of his own grief. He read first in French, then English for any of those present who did not quite get the message.
“She is lost,” I cried out to myself. “And why? … I understand. She has made a last effort to save me; I missed the supreme moment when pardon was still possible.
“The abyss has claimed its prey. She is lost to me and lost to us all.”
With extreme awkwardness, he knelt and rested his head on the gleaming coffin, supporting himself in what seemed to be prayer on its trestle. Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling and blinked furiously, but it was too late to hide the tears. He laid his beloved old edition of Aurélia among the roses laid on the casket lid.
Shelby drew himself upright and walked down the nave, holding his cane under his arm like a general’s baton to show he needed no aid or assistance, gesturing for me to follow him out of the church, as if I were some attendant, or maybe his consigliere. But I hung back to show I was neither of these things.
We clambered into the Jaguar—just the two of us. Elvire had arranged another ride back to the city, which came as something of a relief after the journey to the funeral. I ventured to tell Shelby he should not blame himself. Faria had suffered but among colleagues. She had known the stakes.
“Look, Clancy,” he said. “She went quick in the end. Some go slow. But we all go.”
He slapped his bad left leg with his good right hand.
“Do you think this will ever just go away? One day it’ll wing in, accelerate. The limp will get worse. The rest will go with it and I’ll be done for. Like her. Whambo-zambo.”
Even at her funeral, I thought, maybe uncharitably, his thoughts had gravitated back to their solipsistic default setting.
On the drive back to Paris, he smashed his hands against the wooden steering wheel so fiercely I thought it would splinter. Tears came and we did not speak.
But just before we reached the city, as he powered the Jaguar out of a tunnel and onto a curve of highway with a fine view of the Eiffel Tower, he seemed to pull himself together.
“Gibson Dullar,” he said. “Old Faria sure knew how to hurt a guy. Never by halves. She never did things by halves, I’ll say that for her.”
“Did she know you knew Dullar?”
“Did she know I knew him? I introduced them.”
We bowled over the Seine, crossing the Pont de Sèvres.
“There are so many things you can’t undo,” he was saying. “Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve, didn’t. Okay, so you can’t turn the clock back. But you can’t stop it ticking, either. And all you hear in it is everything you didn’t do. Every person you hurt, neglected, treated badly. All those people who lived their lives in a mess because of something you did or didn’t do. Parents. Lovers. Name it. All ticking away in there, somewhere, in the back of your mind, buried under your memories. Then it explodes. All your life you deny that you damaged people. And then one day, the shutters fall away and you see what you did and what you can’t undo. You wonder how you could have done the things you did: Was that really you? Did you really walk away from the people you left scarred? Did you really deny them and pretend they never existed? And when that light dawns, it’s too much to take, Clancy. Too much.”
“Look. There’s something I have to tell you,” I finally said when my patience with his monologue snapped. “I saw her.”
He stamped on the brake pedal and the car squealed to a halt.
“When? Where?”
“Before she died. In her apartment. I saw her. I saw the scar tissue. Something about a fire? What the fuck was that, Joe? What are you hiding? Or hiding from?”
“Get out,” he said. “You Judas, Clancy. You rat. You snake in the grass. You and Gibson Dullar. What a pair. Et tu, Brute! Get out.”
I was relieved he decided to eject me within sight of a Métro station. With the car stationary.
The twin exhausts rumbled to a howl as he drove off.
On the passenger seat, folded into his leather hat, I had left her scrawled epitaph: “I would rather be alone than hurt by the people around me.”