NOT LONG AFTER SHELBY ARRIVED IN PARIS, MARIE-CLAIRE, MY beloved wife, decided we should have some kind of place of our own in the capital. If I was going to spend time there with Shelby, she said with what I took to be humor, she would need to be on hand to keep an eye on me, post bail, call the medics, and so forth. Maybe I should have pressed her more closely about her reasons, but I trusted her. Perhaps more accurately, I wanted to trust her, even though I worried that she might be preparing an escape route from what we had built together, what she had built for us. Don’t worry, she said. It’s bricks and mortar, an investment, a pied-à-terre for us both to use as we wished—a retreat from the farm now that it no longer required the constant tending it had seemed to demand under my exclusive stewardship.
She had a point. The stud farm was doing well. She had brought in professionals to maximize profit, and local muscle to cope with the straw-baling and mucking-out I had once done myself. My old Ferguson tractor from the 1950s had been pensioned off, replaced with several much larger and newer models. (I insisted that it be reconditioned and parked near the stud entrance in its original sparkling red livery, its yellow wheels as bright and unsullied as my heart told me I still was.)
The goats I had kept as a sideline had been sent away, she said with all apparent sincerity, to one of those farms where children get to feed or be bitten by truculent critters. My old ledger books had given way to encrypted accounting systems on her computer. Accountants kept us honest. Managers managed. With a lurch in my guts, I realized she had created wealth. Big time. A hideaway in Paris was no great stretch.
I tried not to dwell on what she had said when we first met—that the country life was the life for her and she never wanted to return to the big city. I was reminded of the old vaudeville song: How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? I was not too enthused, either, about her choice of neighborhood. Personally, I might have gone for the old favorites around the Rue du Bac in the chichi Seventh or even the Latin Quarter in the Fifth around Saint-Michel, within reach of the Île de la Cité and the bouquinistes along the Seine. But, maybe in a nod to her father’s ambitions for her, she chose the Sixteenth, the old haut-bourgeois neighborhood beloved of foreign envoys and missions, where, on some streets, you would never find a cup of coffee or a croissant with the early-morning street sweepers, or a place to buy milk at midnight among the sober-fronted apartments staring silently into the blind, curlicued facades across the street, like mirrors.
The Sixteenth was a place for discretion, anonymity, far from the sidewalk theater that most visitors associate with the capital.
But in a way, it was thanks to our location in the Sixteenth that I began to understand what I came to call Shelby’s Great Disappearances.
Not that he ever missed his shift, or went AWOL when he should have been batting out his ledes and new tops or calling stringers in Kandahar or Dire Dawa to inquire about obscure and bloody events on their turf.
Professionally, he was impeccable.
But somehow it seemed there were ever fewer of those afternoons when we would head out after closing down our computers (Shelby had a new one by this time, his previous machine having succumbed—mysteriously, the techies thought—to legions of assailants: trojans and viruses and spybot invaders) and locking our offices.
Our aperitifs in Saint-Germain dwindled, and there were ever-fewer occasions when he prevailed upon me to stay over and destroy a few brain cells at Le Dôme or La Coupole.
At first I thought it all had to do with Gloria Beeching. Duffie had moved her onto permanent night shifts as a punishment for the abandon he believed she must have displayed to earn her roses. In fact, though, I had my doubts about whether Gloria had been as wayward a lady with Shelby as Duffie imagined. Perhaps there had been some fumbled quest for mutual gratification, perhaps not. But whatever this newsroom peccadillo entailed, it was not a grand amour. There really had been just one of those in Shelby’s life, and his vanishing acts only began after he buried her.
Marie-Claire and I had decided to celebrate the new apartment down from the Étoile off the Avenue d’Iéna by spending a weekend together. There was something illicit about the idea, like borrowing a friend’s apartment, where you did not know quite which way to turn the faucets, or where to switch on the hot water supply, or how to find a way to the bathroom at night without stumbling into a Louis XV sofa.
After a sometimes uproarious evening with friends—movies at Odéon followed by dinner around the corner at l’Alycastre—we repaired to our new love nest.
Marie-Claire disappeared into the bathroom, telling me to fix myself a nightcap and put some music on the sound system. I concurred on both fronts, pouring a scotch and sliding a CD of Dire Straits into the wall-mounted Bang and Olufsen sound system she’d had installed. When she reemerged, she had shed her party clothes down to a sheer, silky slip that hugged her curves. She was dancing in a way that made me think back to my first sighting of her. She writhed and shimmied and pushed me back into a newly acquired armchair, still in its plastic wrap, sashaying back and forth, her eyes closed. Then she moved closer, spreading her legs to sit athwart me and take my drink from my hand and begin unfastening my shirt. Our lovemaking had been regular and—I thought—exciting out at the farm, but some other factor seemed to have gotten tangled up with it at this apartment in this most sober arrondissement.
If I hadn’t been married to her, I’d have said she wanted a dirty fuck.
And if I had not been so preoccupied with eagerly following her instructions, I might have started wondering what I should make of this journey into the explicit.
By the time the morning came, I was bleary and hungry, drained and mystified. And that was when, hastily dressed, pungent and unshaven, I began the quest for croissants, combing the empty Sunday-morning streets of the Sixteenth.
The low-slung silver Jaguar was parked at an odd angle with its roof down on the Rue Auguste Vacquerie. Something about the way its tires scuffed the sidewalk and its rear wing protruded into the street suggested an uncharacteristic negligence. The coachwork that had been so pristine when the car rolled down the ramps outside the offices of the Star now bore the scars of urban warfare—paint scratches, minor dings that sullied the perfect lines.
I glanced around surreptitiously, a caricature of a car thief, then checked the glove box: the Nerval volumes were in their place. Shelby could not be far away if he had left the car to guard, the Michelin Guide to his dark-starred soul.
I was about to close the glove compartment when I caught sight of a stapled sheaf of paperwork. Surreptitiously I fished it out. The letterhead proclaimed it to be from a company called Saad & Trad s.a.l., Corniche El Nahr, in Beirut. In the old days you’d have called it Christian East Beirut, but I wasn’t sure those labels were still observed as meticulously as they were when Shelby and Duclos haunted the Commodore but never told anyone where they were heading out.
Saad & Trad s.a.l., it seemed from the letterhead, was the place to go in the new, post-war Lebanon for Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Jaguars. The document seemed to be an innocuous enough bill of sale for a secondhand Jaguar XKR. Silver. Super-charged 400 bhp model. The price tag looked as if it might just have been in the range of some middle-aged guy splurging on his crisis. The buyer was identified as one Joseph Shelby. The previous owner was listed as the company itself, as if it had been a display model or a vehicle that had suddenly made its way into Lebanon with no previous documentation. There was no mention of a shooting gallery in the Bekaa Valley, or a warlord, or an Israeli drone. Was the document just a cover, a piece of paper to persuade customs officers in Lebanon and France to approve the shipment of a car? Or was it exactly what it seemed to be: evidence of a humdrum transaction at a car dealership, a midlife trade of dollars for delusion?
I replaced the document in the glove compartment with the Nerval, fitting it snugly alongside the leather helmet, which, I noticed, no longer contained the scribbled note I had folded into it as we returned from the funeral of Faria Duclos. Quite the Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, I turned my attention to working out where Shelby might be. I did not need to look further than a kind of origami depiction of a knight and a dragon in red metal, bolted to a sign indicating that here was the Church of St. George.
It did not look much like a church, though I confess that I have little expertise beyond the familiar images of thatch and steeple that I had observed at the Duclos funeral. After my literally bare-knuckled introduction to it as a kid, organized religion had not really been part of my adult life. It wasn’t only the corporal punishment meted out by the Brothers that put me off. I found it difficult to spend my days chronicling human cruelty, folly, and hatred for the pages of the Paris Star and then to accept, after hours, that it was all part of some grand divine plan directing the world’s havoc to the greater good of redemption. My skepticism only deepened with the wave of sexual abuse scandals that washed over the Vatican and all its subsidiaries soon after we set up Nonstop News–Paris Outpost. I channeled the avalanche of articles about priestly perversion onto the website with a mixture of rage and relief: rage at what these depraved custodians of young souls had been capable of and relief that they had not inflicted anything beyond overzealous beatings on me.
I also had a kind of fear of clerics, as if, once they spotted you hovering in the rear pews, they could somehow cast a spell over you and your cash flow, enslaving your soul and your bank account forever.
St. George’s Anglican Church was in a basement with stripped walls of reddish-brown brick, approached—counterintuitively, I thought as I entered—by steps leading downward, as if to the diabolical depths of eternal pain rather than to the celestial heights promised to those who truly believed and behaved without blemish. (I wondered if I could lay claim to that status after my night of magic, stretching the limits of blue movie inventiveness, albeit within the lawful embrace of holy matrimony.)
There were no windows. So how would anyone see the light?
The church itself was, I guess, no more than a couple of decades old, built at a time when people figured modern architecture would draw in the recruits to the heavenly divisions more efficiently than dusty beams and chilly benches. Above a slab-like altar, a boxy lighting device descending from the ceiling suggested a “beam me up, Scotty” pathway to heaven. In a corner, a choir intoned the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. “Have mercy on me,” they chanted, and I could not fault that particular request. I approached cautiously, checking my watch to work out whether Marie-Claire would have started wondering where I had gotten to. I could hardly say I had been at church with Shelby, as if that trumped the prospect of returning to her svelte body enfolded in rumpled sheets of the finest, if stained, cotton percale. Like a latter-day Quasimodo, I took up position behind a metal grille that allowed me to observe without being noticed and dragged before the congregation for all to witness the agnostic deformity of my spirit—or, worse still, forced into public confession.
It was that time in the service when the faithful form a line to go up to the altar and kneel before the cross to receive the body and the blood of Christ. Most were dressed in a way that would define the term “Sunday best”—stout women in stout shoes; men in fawn slacks, navy blue blazers, and knotted ties.
Not Shelby.
His faded blue jeans seemed to be hanging from his frame, and crumpled shirttails peeked out below an old sand-colored suede jacket. He mingled, nonetheless, with a blue-rinsed set you might not have suspected to be his first choice of fellow travelers on the highway to eternity. He shuffled forward and knelt, his hands outstretched to receive the holy wafer—the body of Christ—from a priest in heavy green robes. He took the chalice eagerly, and I thought there was a brief tussle over how deeply he might quaff from the blood. Shelby remained on his knees for slightly longer than anyone else, then rose and joined the line of congregants returning to their places, reaffirmed in their faith by their solemn encounter with the Almighty.
I left quickly and silently, but not before observing Shelby’s tired, craggy features fixed in a beatific expression, as if, with that evocation of the Last Supper, he had truly communed with a power that passed all understanding, illuminating the benighted recesses of his being.
“Goddamn Sixteenth,” I complained to Marie-Claire when I got back. “Can’t find a croissant or a pint of milk for love or money.”
I might have hoped for a reprise of the previous night, but she already had showered, dressed, done her makeup, brewed espresso, and changed the sheets.
“Time to go back to the farm, big boy,” she said. I thought there was a note of regret in her voice, and her mood seemed brittle. I put it down to fatigue after our exertions.
Shelby’s next mystery tour was rather more dramatic and not nearly so spiritual.
The call came on a Monday morning as I pulled out of the stud gates, past my shiny restored Ferguson.
The sky was lightening in the east, toward Paris, and white mist floated over the still dark paddocks and gallops like luminous chiffon or ectoplasm. The early staff was on duty, and before clambering into the car, I paused to sniff the familiar, ripe air and listen to the intimate snuffles, snorts, and whinnies of a horse farm. Stable lads carrying riding helmets nodded respectfully toward me (respectful, of course, because of my association with their boss, my wife) and headed for their tasks, armed with brushes and bridles, saddles and blankets for the early ride out atop their frisky charges.
As usual, at that hour, I had snuck from the conjugal bed to shower and dress on the lower floor. Marie-Claire slumbered on. Our weekend in the Sixteenth had rekindled the physical aspects of our relationship to such an extent that these early starts for the office had become an effort. I brewed coffee and poured a generous measure into a thermos flask for Marie-Claire whenever she rose. The flask reminded me of one Shelby’s stories and that, in turn, reminded me of our weekend in the Sixteenth and that, in turn, made me wonder who would notice if I goofed off and went back to bed, seeking to redeem the promise of the thermos.
But I resisted. My routines held the line: rise, shower, cuppa joe, drive. The car radio was tuned to a scratchy version of the BBC on AM, offering me my first infusion of news.
The day seemed quiet enough. The suicide bombers had not yet detonated their explosive vests, the F-16 pilots had not yet unleashed their missiles, the CIA drones had not yet splattered some mud hut in Waziristan, the politicians had not yet taken their bullhorns to bend the truth—at least not so far as was known to the armies of stringers and correspondents and editors who formed the chain that ended in those time-honored words “… and this news just in.”
Sometimes you had to ask yourself why news was always so noisy: bombs/blasts/explosions that ripped/tore/shattered mosques/ minibuses/markets. The crude language was a code for mayhem, its familiarity easing the pain of actually visualizing and confronting the participants’ true trauma—disconnected limbs, blood on baby shawls, blank eyes with the life snuffed out as quickly as you or I might flick a light switch; futures that should have been measured in decades destroyed in a high-decibel nanosecond.
It was no time to be thinking such things and I settled in for a quiet drive.
Then the call came. Unusually, my cell was switched on.
It was Shelby inquiring in his most exaggerated, anglicized accent—“old sport”—if I might vary my route to drop by a police precinct in the Eighth to stand bail or otherwise extricate him from incarceration so that he might start his shift on time.
“Bail?”
I was juggling the phone to switch it to hands-free as I rolled along the highway toward Paris. I figured at first it might be about the Duclos inquiry. There had been rumors that Ivar Bild, the night nurse, had returned to Sweden shortly after the funeral. There was some muttering among her surviving colleagues and friends that her death just seemed to come too quickly. She had died at home, in her top-floor apartment. There had been no suggestion that she had been hospitalized and there were plenty of questions about why an autopsy had been ordered—was there a suspicion here of euthanasia, aka murder? Were the investigators looking for toxins or evidence of an overdose? And, if they were, who was suspected of administering it? Faria Duclos had never struck me as a likely suicide but Ivar Bild had assured me she would feel no pain at the end. What on earth could that mean? Was Shelby somehow implicated? In the absence of news, I often suspected, my colleagues fell all too easily into the recycling of gossip and rumor, conspiracy, even. But the cops were saying nothing beyond the boilerplate: our inquiries are ongoing. So I kept the rumors about her death to myself.
Shelby’s case was rather less mysterious.
“Slight misunderstanding, nothing more,” he said over the phone. “Not sure, in fact, if it’s bail or they just want someone to ease me quietly off the premises.”
“What the … ?”
“Can’t talk right now. Only one call permitted and all that …”
I drove faster than usual. Shelby had given me an address off the Champs-Élysées—not too far, in fact, from the Church of Saint George and the love nest of Clancy, but in a different, almost-assnooty arrondissement. The fact that he was in detention—or somehow deprived of liberty—at least helped explain why I had been unable to reach him all weekend.
I had been trying intermittently to call Shelby ever since an informant at the Star passed on an item of news—not for repeating, mum’s the word, entre nous, hush-hush, deepest background, etc.—which I immediately planned to transmit to Shelby on much the same ground rules of confidentiality.
The story was this: a delegation from the top echelons of Big Brother Graphic in New York was planning to visit Little Sister Star in Paris.
There was a time when the arrival of the head office luminaries could be turned to advantage, when the pooh-bahs could be lured into situations of such embarrassment (usually involving a literal cocktail of booze and sex) that they would never again threaten to sack you without risking full disclosure of behavior that neither their wives nor their own uber-bosses would approve.
Shelby himself had told me of an occasion when he still worked on the wires and some high-up from the executive committee had rolled into town while he was covering an uprising in the Congo, then known as Zaire. In those days, Mobutu Sese Seko ran his enormous country from Kinshasa, with his juju motifs of a leopard-skin hat and a stick carved with representations of intertwined naked women. (No story from Kinshasa, in that era, was regarded as complete without reference to Mobutu’s full name—Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga—which translated variously in hack-speak, if not in any known language, as “the warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake” or, alternatively, “the cock who goes from hen to hen, showing no fatigue.”)
The senior wire service executive, technically Shelby’s superior by many rungs on the bureaucratic ladder, went by the name of Whitecroft, and he tracked down Shelby to his room at the Intercon to inquire with a nudge and a wink where he might locate what he called “Congolese music.”
“Try the radio,” Shelby said.
“No, no,” the executive said. “You don’t understand. Congolese music. Live music.”
Shelby understood exactly what the executive meant. “Congolese music” denoted merchandise of a type that Kinshasa specialized in, purveyed in the kind of place that throbbed darkly to the rhythms of West African boogie and the transmission of HIV. Elsewhere I had heard a story about American television executives mulling how to bill their head offices for such moments of abandon in the tropics and coming up with the term “Zulu translators.”
Congolese music. Zulu translators. Receipt lost!
“I took him down to the Jambo Jambo, which, I guess, meant ‘Hello Hello’ if you translated it direct from the Swahili,” Shelby began. “It meant a lot more than that to every lonely expat roaming the bushlands looking for solace. It was an awful spot. Sweaty. Steamy. Great music—I mean real music—but the most awful hookers, the kind who take out a glass eye, shake off a wig, and park a wooden leg on the bedpost before they get down to business. But Whitecroft had a weakness. A passion. Some guys do. An itch that needed scratching. Off we went to the Jambo Jambo, with him insisting all the time that he really only wanted to listen to what he called “the old boomlay-boom,” and so once I’d gotten him in there he’d be fine on his own. But I saw him exiting out back with a particularly lurid example of ‘Congolese music’ on his arm, and he saw me watching him. So he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew—et cetera, et cetera—and he could never put the squeeze on me again. Friend for life, you might say. All I had to do was ask, ‘How’s the Congolese music?’”
I could match the story, too, with uproarious yarns told and retold since Reynolds Packard’s day of hungry news executives landing in Paris and demanding a guided tour of Pigalle, saying all they really wanted to do was research the influences that had produced Toulouse-Lautrec’s distinctive backdrops at the Folies Bergère.
For “Toulouse-Lautrec,” read “Congolese music.”
But this latest sortie by the brass was unlikely to offer either of us opportunities for self-advancement or blackmail.
This was a different, more earnest era, clouded by the prospect of financial ruin as newspapers saw their income eaten away by treacherous readers decamping to the web, taking the advertisers and their home delivery subscriptions with them, forcing economies that would once have been considered a poor show, or even bad form.
“With each cut,” one of New York’s finest and bravest editors had once observed, “it becomes harder to keep the scalpel away from vital organs.” (The metaphors of parsimony are always those of the blade.)
The delegation coming our way—and this was what I had wanted to tell Shelby—was led by Curtis, the top executive on the business side, accompanied by acolytes such as Green, the foreign editor, and Potts, the head of NND. I knew them all.
I compared their coming mission to the Star to the work of a mortician coming to settle the dentures of a cadaver in a solemn rictus and apply a touch of rouge to the lips and tweak the shroud before the final voyage to the altar and the sanctimonious eulogy as the doors slid closed and the furnace roared.
Potts, in particular, had always made me think of the unctuous attendant at a funeral parlor, showing guests into a lilac-draped Chapel of Memory to the strains of Muzak, as if burdened by a grief too immense for any solution other than the transfer of assets from the deceased’s family to his bank account.
When the downsizing begins, you always wonder whether you will be the first to be called in for the terminal interview when they summon security to relieve you of your door pass, and your e-mail address starts bouncing back messages. I did not want to become that kind of relic in the debris of the digital train wreck. Partly it was pride, partly sheer terror at what I imagined would be the look of horror on Marie-Claire Risen’s face when I rolled home, drunk and unkempt, with my old metal spike and my potted ficus tree and all the world’s self-pity in a straining box courteously supplied by a solicitous colleague.
What would I tell her? I failed, honey.
I failed you.
But the real news, for Shelby, lay in the identity of the fourth rider of this apocalypse: none other than Gibson Dullar, who was rumored to have been dropping hints to the New York elite about his fluency in French and his experience in those parts of the world that fell under the purview of the NND outpost in Paris. It was not immediately clear whether Dullar had joined the visitors as bag carrier or hit man. Either way, it did not look good for Shelby.
There had been suggestions that whispers of the Argentine Soy Vote Affair had gotten back to New York.
I could imagine Dullar spreading the furtive word, even as he imagined himself replacing Shelby in the boulevards and boudoirs of Paris, not to mention the newsroom of the Star. If word got back to Dullar that his rival had languished for a weekend in a French slammer, the consequences were too awful to contemplate.
I took Shelby’s call, thus, with an unsettling mix of feelings—relief that he had checked in, foreboding about our shared future, and, most of all, a towering pissed-off-ness at the stupidity of his behavior.
If I’m to be brutally honest with myself, there was another ingredient in the emotional stew. Before Marie-Claire took the apartment in the Sixteenth, my worries about our future together had been receding. Although I had once figured she might abandon our cozy domesticity, I had started to believe that she had finally found her niche, come to terms with her restlessness, resolved the quest for some kind of modus vivendi that roughly corresponded to her needs.
But after she took the apartment, I began to wonder—with nothing by way of evidence—whether I had displayed the classic complacency (C for Charlie, C for Cuckold!) that catches out life’s rubes just as they imagine they’ve got things taped.
Of course, there was no obvious correlation between Shelby’s disappearances and her stays at the apartment. But I took to making a turn around the Sixteenth on my way from the office to the farm, just to see if I could spy vehicular evidence of undeclared residence—either in the form of her SUV or in the torpedo phallus of a Jaguar XKR.
The green-eyed monster is a sickening beast.
Your stomach lurches when you see yourself as outsiders would see you—mistrustful, paranoid, a snoop, a voyeur. You hate yourself for the sin of mistrusting your life partner. You start to wonder whether your fear at what you might discover is just a cover for actually wanting to find out the worst.
But you can’t stop yourself.
Sometimes I would find a parking spot and take the old cageelevator up to the apartment, opening the door quickly like some Stasi operative on the hunt for dissidents. I’d check out the place, sniffing at the air—even, for God’s sake, inspecting the bed linen for signs … of what?
Then I’d snap back to my senses and flee, riding home to the stud farm posthaste, wanting to monopolize my spouse in those magical, notorious hours between 5 and 7 before anyone else did.
If she still wished to. If she was home. If it was not too late.
One of my secret visits did, however, turn up a clue.
Exhibit A.
Normally no mail was delivered to the apartment, but this time, there was a large opened envelope addressed to my wife that had contained a shiny brochure for the latest Alfa Romeo Spider sports car. A salesman’s note to Marie-Claire thanked her for her interest and invited her for a consultation on the color, engine size, and optional extras.
My guts squirmed. When had she been here to open the letter? Who had been with her? Most of all, was she preparing to reenter the fast lane she had abandoned when we met? What other telltale signs had I missed? Was her happiness with me too forced, a legend to disguise her preparations?
I looked again through the brochure. The technology had certainly advanced since my old Spider. The performance figures were in a different league, too. But there was the same spirit of freedom, the same zest. As I put the brochure back exactly where I had found it on the coffee table, the light from one of the tall windows fell across the front cover and I thought I detected a slight powdery dusting. I raised the brochure again and sniffed at it. Still not sure, I ran my forefinger over the glossy cover and tasted what I thought was a trace of what I feared.
Exhibit B, your honor.