BY THE TIME WE GOT TO LE PRIMEROSE, WE WERE RUNNING LATE but not as late as we might have been. Shelby piloted the silver bullet around l’Étoile with the vigor of a Le Mans veteran, while I clung on in the white-knuckle slipstream at the wheel of my protesting SUV. We ordered our usual start-of-the-day pick-me-ups of caffeine, sugar, and starch. I added a fried egg, and it came with a double yolk, a good omen.
“Parallel,” Shelby said.
I looked at him sharply—what now?
“Parallel destinies. Two yolks, same old hen—which one came first? One mirrors the other. Maybe one’s real, and the other is an illusion, a shadow.”
“It’s a fucking egg, Shelby.”
“You’ll see.”
My cell phone had begun to purr and wriggle. News was happening. We needed to be on it. Journalism needed to be committed. The screen on the cell phone told me Hong Kong was calling. There was a missed call from New York. We were the hinge between the two time zones, Asia and America, keeping the light burning, crafting the news in Nonstop News–Paris Outpost.
Whambo-zambo.
This morning, the hinge was a bit creaky.
Even with our late start, the newsroom was still becalmed and we had the place more or less to ourselves. I scanned the wires for the familiar crop of destruction.
In my more cynical moments—that is, most of the time—I wondered whether there was some grisly poker played among the self-immolators and suicide squads in the badlands: I see your five dead cops, and I raise to ten teenage schoolgirls. I see you and raise thirty police cadets and ten women at a mosque. But in this game, there was a twist: no one survived to collect the winnings.
Shelby was working away feverishly in Homepatch, and I deployed the time-honored water cooler gambit to reconnoiter, bringing him a comradely white plastic cup so as to spy over his shoulder.
Then I wished I hadn’t.
Pirates based in a remote corner of Somalia’s breakaway region of Puntland vowed Monday to launch a campaign against America-bound crude oil and cargo shipping as what they termed their contribution to global jihad.
“First I heard of it,” I muttered.
“A game,” he replied. “Like casting for trout. Homepatch Hunter.”
A pirate leader who identified himself only as Siad Barre told local reporters the campaign would begin soon, adding new perils to the shipping lanes leading from the Persian Gulf through the Gulf of Aden and on to the Suez Canal.
“Where are you getting this from? The Nairobi guy? The stringer in Mog? Hargeisa? Berbera, for Chrissakes?
“Patience, dear boy.”
He returned to his keyboard.
An upsurge in the hijacking of merchant shipping has inspired growing international concern that the price of oil and other cargo could soar—augmenting the woes of American and other consumers at a time of financial crisis—if vessels are forced to divert onto the much longer and costlier route around the Cape of Good Hope.
“No American vessel or vessels under the flag of Washington’s puppets will be safe until prisoners persecuted for their faith are released from Guantanamo Bay and other concentration camps,” Mr. Barre said in a telephone interview from his coastal headquarters in the pirate den of Bossaso.
Mr. Barre has claimed to be the mastermind behind several high-profile seizures of oil tankers and other vessels, whose owners have paid ransom worth millions of dollars. But, apparently fearing retribution from the U.S. Navy’s powerful fleet in the Indian Ocean, he has avoided previous attacks on American shipping and has insisted that his motives are purely financial.
Recent news reports say he has used some of his illicit earnings to buy sophisticated weapons, including ship-to-ship and antiaircraft missiles as well as high-powered night-vision and satellite-tracking technology and long-range fast attack vessels.
“Our war against the infidel can now move to a higher plane,” he said in the interview.
endit
“What shift is the Dullard working?” Shelby asked as he punched Ctrl-S to save his story in Homepatch.
I saw no byline or dateline on the piece. Neither was there any evidence of note-taking or recording equipment to indicate that a telephone interview had taken place at all.
“Early, I guess.”
“Good,” said Shelby, sitting back in his chair with a satisfied half-smile on his face.
“By the way, a limp dick,” he said as I turned back toward to my own workspace.
“What?”
“A limp dick.”
“What are you talking about?”
He rolled his eyes with theatrical exaggeration.
“The second part of the famous hack adage. The two things a hack should never bring home from his travels: a limp dick and bag full of dirty washing. Sound advice, I believe. Especially the former. The lady might forgive the occasional sweaty T-shirt, but you can never explain the flaccidity. Or so I’m told.”
* * *
After his piratical fantasies in Homepatch, Shelby had written an undeniably poignant story about 237 would-be migrants from Africa whose leaky vessel had overturned in the Mediterranean Sea somewhere between Libya and the Italian island of Lampedusa—the gateway to a fantasy Europe where jobs grew on trees, insults were unknown, and social safety nets scooped up the stragglers in webs of unquestioning benevolence. There was something about Shelby’s language that stirred memories of an earlier time.
Their own lands were broken, and so they resolved to embark on a journey to salvation. But they had not reckoned with the desert winds that howled offshore and churned an unfamiliar sea into a maelstrom …
My first reaction was to edit without mercy—“The dead were largely economic migrants aboard a leaky ship …”—but the style of his writing reminded me of the way Shelby had gone about his trade for most of his working life.
I remembered one of his stories from someplace in Burkina Faso where the Sahara had begun to encroach on the green lands to the desert’s south.
The small plane he chartered from Ouagadougou to reach his far-flung interviewees had been engulfed in a sandstorm that blotted out the sky, the land, the airstrip. He had asked himself whether he had perhaps terminally miscalculated the equation that balanced exclusive news against the risk of reporting it. But what he saw convinced him that the journey was worthwhile.
They came across the emptiness that hooves had turned to dust, the women of a distant tribe, without men but with children, astride donkeys, 30 or 40 of them.
From afar they might have seemed to be warriors, adrift from medieval times, robed in darkness and menace. But, no, they told an outsider, they had not come with hostile intent to this village in the north of a poor country. Neither did they wish to beg or intrude. That day, they said, they had covered 30 miles in their flowing black robes and had now arrived, seeking water lilies from a swamp to take as food …
Reading it later, a diplomat, steeped in the cynicism of the trade, asked him why he felt the urge to be the “avenging sword” when his job was to report the news. And Shelby had replied that, as far as he was concerned, the news alone could never provide the whole story without a peppering of outrage and passion, without a powerful, irresistible urge to tilt against injustice and oppression and the unfairness of a planet that rewarded greed and trampled on suffering.
In his time, Shelby himself had been jailed in far-flung places, expelled by unsavory regimes, praised in the citations for human rights prizes that he preferred not to accept, not so much out of modesty as embarrassment.
But in the persona he adopted for general public consumption, there was no room for compassion. He insisted, for instance, that he had dashed off the Burkina Faso article perched on a gilt chair at an antique desk in the Crillon in Paris on his way back from his Saharan assignment before handing in his sheaf of typescript at the Reuters bureau to be sent to New York—and then repairing to La Coupole for dinner.
Yet his record showed that he had never balked when the truly oppressed and irredeemably downtrodden chose him as the chronicler of their desperation, the balladeer of their woes.
For all that, I edited his piece about the sunken migrant vessel without mercy and figured he was in a rage about my slash-and-burn revisions when he walked into my office and slammed the door behind him.
“Seen the site?”
I clicked onto the screen that always displayed the Graphic website. I got a shock.
High on the home page—the main display—was a familiar byline above an eerily familiar story.
Pirates Threaten Jihad
By Gibson Dullar
Pirates based in a remote corner of Somalia’s breakaway region of Puntland vowed Monday to launch a campaign against America-bound crude oil and cargo shipping as what they termed their contribution to global jihad …
“Scroll down,” Shelby barked.
I checked out the bottom of the story. A tiny line in blue italics read: “Joe Shelby contributed reporting from Paris.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“I mean, he’s gone too far, for Chrissakes.”
I was about to offer agreement in equally blasphemous terms when the news wires began to put out breathless one-line bulletins on another screen that I kept open to view urgent, breaking news.
“URGENT—American cargo vessel captured off Somalia.”
“NEWS ALERT—Maersk line vessel with 18 American crew seized by pirates”
“BULLETIN—Maersk Alabama nabbed with skipper and crew.”
“Oh boy,” I said.
My office door opened again, and Marcel Duffie strode in.
“If you guys spent less time gossiping and more time reporting, you’d score the kind of scoop that Gibson Dullar just did with the pirate interview, don’t you think?” he said. “I mean, he actually forecast this. And what were you doing?”
“As a matter of fact …” Shelby began, but Duffie had already bustled on to spread the word of our abject failure.