I DREW TO A HALT ON A SIDE STREET IN THE EIGHTH—TAKING CARE to park legally in light of the number of blue-uniformed cops hanging around the precinct. Inside, an end-of-shift officer gave me the stink eye from behind a counter kept clear of debris. Even indoors, he was fully kitted out with Kevlar vest, cuffs, service pistol, night-stick, and tear gas canisters. If this was how they dressed in the bourgeois reaches of the Eighth, I wondered what they wore in the farflung reaches of the Nineteenth or the grim redoubts of the banlieues—chain mail?
“Monsieur Shelby?” I said inquiringly to explain my presence.
“And you would be?”
“A friend.”
“You speak French?”
“Certainly.”
“You understand this form?”
He slid a legal document toward me. The gist was that I would take responsibility for Shelby, Joseph Gerard, pending further inquiries into an alleged incident in the late hours of Sunday when citizens had complained that a man had exited Le Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées and begun disrobing in public. The cops got to him, the officer said, just before he could bare all. It seemed he had been pretty much down to his skivvies and a leather helmet of a type once worn by aviators.
“He was drunk?”
“Fou,” the officer said. Crazy. Mad.
“How crazy?”
“Crazy enough that he told us he was following his star.”
“Anything else?” I asked casually, disguising my relief that this seemed to have nothing to do directly with the Duclos case – just a routine, collegial, public breakdown.
“He gave his name as Gérard de Nerval. Fortunately, we recovered his wallet where it fell from his clothes and discovered the name Joseph Gerard Shelby on a visiting card. Eventually, he accepted that name as his own.”
It was the first I had heard of Shelby having a middle name, and I wondered when he had acquired it. I signed the form. Maybe the fact that he was being held under a potentially false identity would help if the police decided later to take action—or have him committed to an asylum.
Shelby emerged from some back room, disheveled and unshaven. He signed for his watch, wallet, belt, cane, laces from his battered suede shoes, and helmet. He might have been any old drunk emerging from the cooler into the hard light of temporary sobriety, blinking in the brightness and toying with thoughts of vodka.
How could I have begun to explain to the cops who he really was? How could I tell them this was Shelby of Sarajevo, Pulitzer winner, warrior of the fourth estate?
Was he still, in fact, that same person?
There was no way that he could make an appearance in the Star newsroom looking like a clochard from under the bridges of Paris.
He looked at me sheepishly, then tried a grin.
“Don’t ask me to explain,” he said.
“Never explain, Joe,” I said.
“Never explain. Or apologize,” he said. “That’s the motto, isn’t it?”
“You should know. Old sport. Let’s go.”
“Your call, chief,” he said, handing me the keys to his apartment with the docility of a chastened child.
I bundled him into my car and drove back toward the Rue du Cherche-Midi, hurrying to get there before the odor of unwashed human and stale booze overpowered the Jeep’s ambient fragrance of horse and tobacco. Blessedly he had left the Jag parked there—if he had been prepared to disrobe on the Champs-Élysées, who could say what he might have contrived with backup from a 400-horsepower V8 engine?
From the first time I had seen it soon after his arrival in Paris, the apartment surprised me with its neatness, almost fastidiousness—as if Shelby was expecting a notable guest or keeping it in an appropriate condition for some kind of second coming known only to him and, maybe, the ghost of Gérard de Nerval. Maybe I had been expecting a squat, one of those old bachelor pads with noisome mounds of discarded boxers marking the territory in much the same way as a rhinoceros uses its midden, but this was almost House & Garden.
It was on the sixth floor, one below the maids’ level to which Faria Duclos had been consigned in her far less salubrious part of town. A complex set of security codes propelled a carpeted elevator that opened directly into the hallway of his apartment. In the main salon, with its corniced, stuccoed ceiling and burnished floor, lined drapes of dark wine-colored velour were still drawn.
Shelby threw a wall switch that controlled the sound and light systems, filling the place with sensual glows and low-volume, schmoozy tones of Astrud Gilberto. I guessed that, at some stage of his Sunday evening, he had been expecting company, perhaps from Gloria Beeching or an out-of-office equivalent.
He had transferred most of his stuff from its initial entrepôt in the newsroom and had arranged it with a degree of taste that, to my jaded eye, looked feminine—the lamps positioned just so, casting pools of peach-colored light over deep burgundy rugs from the Orient, the spots illuminating the supposedly fake Monet I had seen unloaded in his early days at the Star. There were even vases of flowers, for Chrissakes. It had that feel of good taste I would happily associate with Marie-Claire, for instance, but not with a partner in the crime of news-gathering. I wondered if he ever got around to placing a bloom in the barrel of the decommissioned AK-47, now hanging in a display frame with a discreet brass plaque that declared, “Ceci n’est pas un Kalashnikov.”
“Gotta shower,” Shelby said, waving me toward a kitchenette.
“Amen,” I replied, but he did not seem to hear.
“Joe,” he said. “Fix joe. Joe for Joe.”
I placed a large hexagonal Italian coffeemaker on a low light and listened for the shower. The hiss of hot water fused uneasily with a sound it took me some time to recognize as singing.
From the depths of his humiliation in the police precinct, Shelby was rebuilding, like one of those molten silver pools in the Terminator movies that re-forms into humanoid shape even after an express train has careened through its previous form. His voice gathered strength and confidence. He worked his way through an off-key rendering of “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.” The choice of ditty made you wonder whether Shelby really saw himself strolling “along the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air,” as the song put it, with the girls all sighing and dying to draw his attention.
His apartment opened onto a modest outdoor deck that looked across a large inner courtyard, most of the time in complete privacy. Shelby had installed a small outdoor refrigerator with ice-making facilities and a generous stock of his favored Menetou-Salon dry white. He kept hard liquor and crystal glasses in an old, weather-beaten cupboard made of some African timber called yellowwood. Looking out from the wicker armchairs, you usually saw only the closed and shuttered windows of other apartments across a wide courtyard. But one evening—one of those close summer evenings when you strain for any breath of cooler air across the hot roofs of the city—I was distracted to see a young woman in a summery top and shorts, perched on a windowsill with a guardrail at half height. At one point she stepped down and, with a casual indifference to our presence, began to undress.
“Some neighbor,” I said.
Shelby contemplated her with a look of painful regret and near bemusement.
“Lorelei, I call her. That’s her room. At the back of the hotel where she works. I had dinner there one night and she waited my table. I recognized her and I guess she recognized me. I smiled. We chatted.”
I peered judiciously into the large Jameson he had poured me.
“So. Anyhow. The next time I’m out here, it’s late. I just have a candle burning. I’m on my own and I pour a jolt. It’s pretty dark and there’s a bedside light in her apartment. But she comes to her window and peels off. Silhouetted. Naked as the day she was born. And I know she’s looking at me.”
“So you went back to the restaurant?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“What for, Clancy? What the hell for?”
That evening, as we sat over late drinks, she returned and stood in silhouette, her back arched and her head flung back. I could not tell whether she was clothed. But she held the posture as if we did not exist. Shelby peered across at her.
“‘And should I then presume? And how should I begin?’” he said.
“‘Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?’”
“I never had you down as a Prufrock,” he said with an uncharacteristic hint of admiration.
“Nerval wasn’t the only wordsmith, you know.”
“Careful there, Clancy! Heresy is a punishable offense.”
Soon he would emerge from the shower refreshed, drink his coffee and mentally consign the night’s adventure to the growing catalog of episodes about which he preferred to be in denial. I would be expected to ignore it, too. Truth was becoming elastic.
With little time to snoop, I made a beeline for the study across the central high-ceilinged hallway. The workroom was more what I would have expected from a onetime alpha male. The walls hung with trophies and souvenir photographs of Shelby and his buddies posing in their familiar hellholes. Here they all were, at the bar of the Commodore in pre-jihad West Beirut; under a sun-filtered bamboo awning at some hotel in Africa, looking solemn and smug; in wooden pirogues, poled across the Chari River from Chad to Cameroon. There were the individual, post-interview shots, too: Shelby with the King and Queen of Jordan in Amman, Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, Boris Yeltsin in Moscow; in the ruins of Grozny with some wild Chechen in an astrakhan hat; alongside an Afghan warlord in his Pashtun headgear, swathed in cartridge belts. I couldn’t help thinking it was like one of those shrines that stalkers build to worship the targets of their obsession—except that Shelby’s altar was dedicated to himself.
In a mess of file folders and old-fashioned postal correspondence on his writing desk, I noticed a paper wrapper smeared with white powder. I ran my finger over it and touched it against my upper gum, which turned instantly numb. The sensation, the chemical purity of the smell, transported me back to my discovery at our apartment in the Sixteenth. Shelby’s powdery trail across his desk offered one more reason to keep him away from my bride.
Next to the wrapper, a Visa Carte Bleue from his French bank had been tossed aside, still bearing a rime of the same white powder. I ran it across my nostril, then licked at it gingerly, wondering what exalted sensation she drew from it yet, like a cautious swimmer unwilling to take the plunge in wild waters, a toe half in the water. I thought I felt something, a buzz, a shift of focus, an edge. Was that it? Was that all there was?
In full Holmes-and-Watson mode while Shelby showered, I continued my search, turning up an overnight courier pouch containing an official-looking envelope made of brown recycled paper. I shook its contents onto the old partner’s desk that Shelby once told me he liberated from the Graphic’s bureau in Cairo. There was a cover letter in bureaucratese: pursuant to your letter of, etc., etc.; under the Freedom of Information Act of blah-blah. There were redactions highlighted in thick black slabs to blot out the names of other people who had seen the documents, faded stamps with the words “classified” and “not for unauthorized transmission” and “NOFORN.” Some of the pages were typed on the personal letterhead of the American consul general in Paris. A scribbled note on a separate, unmarked sheet of notepaper said: “Guess this evens the score, Joe. This time, we really are quits!”
I recognized the name below the signature as that of a high-ranking State Department official notorious for indiscreet liaisons and mischievous behavior in the tropics.
In the shower, Shelby had abandoned the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo to become Marlene Dietrich, falling in love again, never wanting to …
The documents were in chronological order. A birth certificate, issued by the French authorities in the down-at-heel Clichy district of Paris, listed the birth of a child called Shelby. The given names were Joseph Donald Gerard. A handwritten scrawl described the father as “inconnu.” The mother was identified as Jenny Colon. A scribbled annotation in the same handwriting suggested that the maternal moniker could be “an alias or stage name.” Issued only a matter of days later, a formal certificate attested to the child’s adoption by a couple called Labrunie, he American, she French, residents of Paris, living at a smart address on the Avenue de Suffren, near the Eiffel Tower, in the Seventh. The mother’s only stipulation on giving away her child was that the infant should retain the surname she wished for it: Shelby. Finally, a naturalization document confirmed the child as one of Uncle Sam’s own.
In the shower, Shelby had switched to German—“und sonst gar nichts”—but in the documents he was a mix-up of French and American, a transatlantic chimera.
I shoved the documents back into the envelope and tried to figure how Shelby might have felt discovering these crude building blocks of an autobiography that had been projected quite differently in public. From his study, the high windows looked out beyond the courtyard over rooftops leading across the chimney pots of Paris with their little covers known as chinois (they looked like the traditional shallow hats of Chinese peasants in the rice paddies) toward the Eiffel Tower in whose shadow Shelby had been raised. In all the time I knew him, he had not even hinted at a Parisian childhood. I should have guessed from his faultless accent in his long conversations with Faria Duclos that he had a special affinity, but I had not inquired closely, the way guys don’t. I had just believed his myth, and maybe, in the end, he had been tempted to believe it, too.
Had he suspected all along that he had been abandoned at birth, a mother’s reject, father unknown? Maybe he had not even known those details himself until the batch of documents from some dusty archive in the American consulate had arrived in his postbox. Or maybe he had known it and preferred not to acknowledge those roots, until curiosity—or an intimation of mortality—got the better of him and forced him to confront his history. I glanced again at the FedEx pouch. It had been couriered to a mail drop in Beirut—a common enough ploy in the kind of place where the postman might run off to join a militia or get shot on his rounds by someone from the rival gang. The date stamping was smudged, but it looked to me like it had been marked for delivery well before Shelby’s arrival in Paris. Were the contents the magnet that had drawn him to my city? Or was there something else in those dark months between his documented departure from Lebanon and his known arrival in France?
My snooping put me in a delicate position. It was always a professional and personal courtesy among people like Shelby and me to allow other people their legends, their cardboard-cutout personae. We lived for the present, the next bar, the next adventure. We indulged each other’s Peter Pan pretensions. We didn’t pry.
Another scrap of documentation caught my eye. It was a page torn from the Beirut newspaper L’Orient–Le Jour, carefully preserved in a sealed plastic folder like some kind of evidence bag. At first I couldn’t fathom it. Then I noticed a faint pencil mark next to one of the items in the run-of-the-mill Faits Divers catalogue of petty crimes and minor stuff. A headline proclaimed (why do headlines never just say things?) “Incendie à l’Hotel Commodore.” Fire at the Commodore. It told how a blaze consumed a corridor of the hotel just off Hamra Street in West Beirut. Three journalists escaped, two of them unharmed, one suffering from burns. It did not identify them by name, but I had an awful feeling I had seen some of the damage during my clandestine visit with the woman in the wheelchair.
So who were the other two?
More to the point, did I really want to know?
I looked again at the tear sheet. The date at the top of the page predated Shelby’s departure from Beirut by a matter of days.
“Bang-bang, you’re dead,” Shelby said.
I turned from the window. Across the desk, he was standing in the doorway with a faded African kikoyi wrapped around his waist, his wet hair plastered on his head, the AK-47 removed from its moorings and pointed toward me.
“Is that thing loaded?”
“I’m not that glad to see you, Clancy.”
“You know, that damn rifle may be dangerous. You should ditch it.”
The coffeemaker in the kitchenette hissed and gurgled, demanding immediate attention.
Shelby tore open a consignment of laundry, packaged with ribbons and heavy tissue paper, from a particularly high-end establishment in the neighborhood. He pulled out a crisp white shirt and pressed, faded Levi’s in the old-fashioned heavy, high-waisted cut with a button fly that you hardly ever see anymore, and repaired to his boudoir.
I took another opportunity to snoop. On his desk, a leather-bound, original-looking copy of Nerval’s Voyage en Orient was open at a page where, as far as I could gather from a very quick scan, a guy called Hakim had reentered his own palace on the banks of the Nile in disguise and found a party underway at which a mystery man was sitting with the woman of his dreams: his sister Setalmulc! I wasn’t sure who Shelby was most likely to imagine himself to be. I flicked a few pages backward and forward—Hakim sulks, Cairo burns, Hakim dies. Not pleasant reading.
Another guy got a mention, Yousouf. In the denouement he turned out to be Hakim’s half-brother, but you only found out after a mortal fight over the same woman.
And fire. Again.
Always fire in the Orient—Cairo for Hakim; Beirut, it seemed, for Faria Duclos.
If I had one thing to thank my parents for—and that was a big if—it was that, after their initial experiment with procreation, they never tried again to give me a brother or sister. In my childhood, I sometimes felt peeved about that. But the story of Hakim and Yousouf and Setalmulc convinced me that, really, one was enough.
Shelby’s choice of reading made me feel unaccountably anxious. But that may just have been because Marie-Claire had begun to talk about maybe having a few old friends over for a fiesta of some kind. A big party with lights and candles and music—just the same as Nerval described in his Oriental memoir.
Next to the book, there was another volume, a more recent version of the collected works from the Pléiade series by Gallimard. Its green bookmark ribbon had been left at a section of Aurélia where Nerval began to describe an episode in which he resolved “to search the skies for a star that I thought I knew, as if it had some influence on my destiny.”
Here began, for me, what I will call the dream pouring out into real life. Finding myself alone, I rose with some effort and resumed my journey towards the star, never taking my eyes from it. As I walked I sang a mysterious hymn which I thought I remembered from some other existence and which filled me with ineffable joy. At the same time, I abandoned my earthly clothing and spread it around me …
I wondered if the cops who arrested Shelby on the Champs-Élysées had figured that it was just his dream pouring out into real life.
As I read on, a slip of paper in Shelby’s own handwriting fluttered from the pages.
I broke my own heart
When I broke yours.
Isn’t that what the faithless plead?
Isn’t that their spell to stem the guilt
That crushes them anyhow?
I just had time to scan the title—“For F.D.”—before he reappeared.
“Reading the master?” He was kitted out in pressed denim, scuffed but expensive Italian suede loafers, and a buckskin jacket slung over his shoulder. He took the book from me and folded it closed.
“Fancy laundry,” I replied, gesturing to his stash of clean clothes.
“Let me give you a tip, Clancy, about traveling, especially for a full-blooded man like yourself.” His voice had slipped into an accent resembling a faint Irish brogue, as it often did when he pronounced my surname. He lit a cigarette and inhaled.
“There are two things a man should never, ever bring home to his beloved from a spell on the road. One of them is a bag full of dirty laundry. Hence that.” He gestured to the neat rows of folded shirts and ironed boxers, then fell silent.
“And the other?”
“The other what?”
“The other thing a man should never bring home after a spell on the road, along with a bag of unwashed clothes.”
“Come on, Clancy. Use your imagination. Work it out!”
There was no hint of an explanation or an apology for the mess he had gotten himself into—or thanks to me for getting him out of it.