ELVIRE RÉCAMIER WAS IN A RUMINATIVE, POST-PARTY, SMALL-hours mood. She had kicked off her scarlet Jimmy Choo shoes and was smoking a home-rolled cigarette that smelled as if its tobacco content was minimal. The dancing was done. The band was packing away its instruments. The waiters had circulated with flutes of Bollinger. The guests had been served many courses of hors d’oeuvres and entrées from the Orient and closer to home, lubricated with the appropriate produce of noble vineyards.
At the prearranged hour, with the midsummer sky dark and building with moist heat, they had made a line to offer their adieux and their thanks. The words “super” and “impeccable” seemed to float on updrafts of flattery. Now, as the chauffeurs nudged the Mercedes and the big Citroëns down the driveway, you could see the roadies who had put the whole set together begin to dismantle tables and chairs, stacking vertiginous piles of soiled china and half-empty crystal glasses into their vans to be taken off to some distant scullery for restoration to a pristine sparkle. Bulging, black, heavy-duty garbage bags were spirited away at the wave of a caterer’s wand. All that would remain to be cleared in the light of day was the marquee—too big and cumbersome to be moved so late at night—and the barbecue pits, whose coals still glowed, fanned by an uneasy night wind that had begun to discomfit the plane trees. Elvire and I sat companionably on a sofa the caterers had somehow managed to forget, alone in a dark and conspiratorial corner of the big tent as its walls and roof rustled like the sails of a great vessel seeking wind and forward motion.
“So what I am really saying, Ed Clancy, is beware of Gibson Dullar. If you are smart, you will not get in between him and Shelby. In Africa they say that when the elephants fight, the grass is trampled. No one will do you any favors.”
“You’re the one with the grass, Elvire,” I said, somewhat testily.
“I am serious, Clancy. I know many things about them both.” She paused, allowing any number of inferences to creep into her silence. “But there is something new, something I don’t understand.”
“New since when?”
“Maybe since Shelby was in Beirut. You know, when he was leaving, the Graphic sent in Dullar to cover some stories.”
Shelby had never told me that. In all the times we had worked together on Nonstop News–Paris Outpost, he had been generous with all his stories—except, I realized, for anything related to his departure from Beirut and the long, unexplained gap in his personal chronology until he pitched up in the newsroom of the Paris Star.
“So they worked together?”
She shrugged to suggest depths of insider knowledge to which I would never be privy.
“By the way, where is Marie-Claire?” she said, out of the blue. “Come to think of it, where is Joe Shelby?”
She stretched out on the sofa and, quite abruptly, closed her eyes and dozed off, exhausted by so much networking and reminiscing and champagne and other substances. Her shoes lay on the wooden deck like discarded playthings in a child’s nursery.
Outside the wind had gotten up a little more boisterously, and there was that hot smell in the air, almost sulfurous, that comes before a lightning storm. I wove a slightly inebriated way along the pathways in between our guest cottages, guided by ground-level electric lights designed to act as navigational beacons. I remember thinking that, while Marie-Claire seemed to have been everywhere at once during the party, never allowing a single guest to feel slighted or neglected, I had not seen her for a while. And, as Elvire Récamier evidently had wanted me to, I realized that I had not seen Joe Shelby for a while either.
“Cuckold” is a terrible word, a double-edged sword, a fine example of the moral relativism of the male: cuckolding a man is an act of chest-beating primeval assertion, perpetuating the gene; being cuckolded negates your life, denies your dreams, whatever Reynolds Packard might have said. Marie-Claire had given me no reason for real suspicion that she had betrayed me, but imagined betrayal is the child of uncertainty and I had never been one to assume good fortune. If you balanced things out, weighed up the pros and cons, why would someone of Marie-Claire’s caliber undo the life she had created for the sake of a chimera like Shelby? And why should a guy like Shelby, a friend through life’s manifold vicissitudes, resolve to do the dirty on his old buddy? The answer came in two words: human nature. At that point in my rumination, I rounded a corner between two of our cottages and came upon one of those sights that haunt you as much as they throw all your calculations out of kilter, leaving you unable to match what you are thinking to what you are seeing.
Each guest cottage had a divided, stable-type door with the upper half made of four glass panes. There was a low light in just one of them and, positioned at the window of the door so that he could not be seen from within, Gibson Dullar was peering inside, utterly still, concentrating on whatever was unfolding before his Judas eyes like some kind of bush tracker in the presence of a rare and exquisite animal. I came to a halt, with much more stealth and silence than I would have thought myself capable of, working out how I could take up a position to see what he was seeing. I had not seen Joe Shelby or my wife for some time, I realized, and I had no way of knowing how long Gibson Dullar had been absent while Elvire Récamier told her tales and wove her spells.
If anyone had shot a video of the moment, I guess there would have been a pantomime appearance to it, like the sketches in those British children’s comedies when the good guy on the stage turns to the youngsters with their parents in the audience and asks them whether they have seen the bad guy: Dullar standing stock-still; me creeping up on exaggerated tiptoes—Where’s the ogre, children? Behind you!
Surreptitiously, Dullar moved his hands and at first I thought he was fiddling with his fly like some monstrous voyeur. Then I realized he was changing the dials and settings on a slim digital camera, probably to switch off the flash and the illuminated viewing screen that would betray his presence to the people inside. He did not hear me approach.
Clearly visible through the windows of the stable door, Joe Shelby and my wife were at either end of a chaise longue upholstered in deep crimson, unaware of their audience. Shelby had taken off his tuxedo jacket and loosened his bow tie so that it hung like untied bootlaces. He was reading aloud from one of his leather volumes. Marie-Claire was bowed over a glass-topped coffee table chopping white powder into generous lines, a rolled-up bank note at her side. On the floor beside her was her evening purse, lying open, the kind they design to look good and carry little more than minimal cosmetic or narcotic reinforcement. Or had Shelby been the supplier? In my house? Was he the one who had brought it into my home? To deliver to my wife?
“I’ll take the camera, Dullar. Or I can call Shelby. Your choice.”
He spun around, looking at me with unalloyed scorn.
“Poor sap,” he hissed. “Your wife’s playing the field and your buddy is working up to the old rumpy-pumpy, and you defend them.”
“The camera. Now.”
He drew back into the shadows. Neither of us spoke beyond venomous whispers.
“Can’t you see what’s happening? Don’t you want evidence?”
“Nothing’s happening that’s going any further than the two of us, Dullar. Nothing’s happening, period.”
He was a good few inches taller than I was, obviously in shape, buffed. But workout muscles don’t mean all that much in a street fight. What counts is fast movement—the first strike and the readiness to make it.
Marie-Claire had folded a tab of paper, a wrapper, around the dwindling remains of her stash and slipped it into one of those nickel wallets people use for their visiting cards. She wiped clean the surface of the table around the lines she had drawn, as if to remove all trace of the drug, or maybe just to give herself a little extra by licking her fingers. I wondered what Shelby made of that and the thought made me very angry. Red-mist angry.
“The camera, Dullar. Now.”
He drew himself up in the shadows. I advanced, my fists curled, my body bunched to reduce the target area. I felt light on my feet now that I had committed myself.
Most people don’t suspect me of violence—passive-aggressive rage, maybe—but when I am truly incensed, I have been told, there is an air of menace that suggests I will feel no pain as I inflict it.
Over Dullar’s shoulder, I saw Shelby lower the Nerval onto the chaise longue between him and Marie-Claire. Like what? A marker? An invitation? She was straightening the white lines with a credit card—there is a kind of narco-fastidiousness to the coke ritual. When she had gotten the lines straight, she ran the credit card across her lips, then replaced it in her purse. Shelby reached down to his tuxedo jacket and withdrew a slender silver tube. He said something I could not hear. She laughed and waved the curled-up bank note.
“Give me the camera, Dullar. Or I swear I’ll beat you to a pulp.”
For the first time, he looked uncertain. I caught a flicker in his eye, the narcissist’s fear of disfigurement, the coward’s fear of pain. Dullar had written plenty from the war zones, but I wondered how often he had fought for his life, how often he had ducked out of that final step into the Death Zone that Shelby and Duclos had owned as their prime habitat.
I knew then—and so did he—that if it came to fisticuffs, I would prevail. And there would be noise—the sound of knuckle on nasal gristle, for instance—that would bring Shelby and my wife out of their Nervalesque cocoon, their chemical tryst.
Shelby had crossed from the chaise longue to a music player. He made to turn down the lights, but Marie-Claire gestured for him not to. She looked at her watch as if impatient.
I advanced closer to Dullar and grasped him by his fancy jacket. My face was very close to his—so close that, beneath his all-year tan, I could see a fine latticework of facial surgery. No wonder he didn’t want his features rearranged. Again. I had the collar of his leather jacket scrunched in my fist and pulled him toward me so that he was close enough to head-butt—the favored tactic of the smaller guy to bring the big guys down a peg or two. The thought exhilarated me, as if one blow would expunge years of slights and put-downs from arrogant shits like Dullar, wipe out the images of my wife and Shelby, level the score. I felt my neck muscles steeling, like a cobra preparing to strike. He sagged like a rag doll, but I held him up by his jacket to keep his pretty face in range. You could see the panic in his eyes. Fear. The sudden knowledge that I would do exactly what I was threatening to do, like a poker player urging you on to raise so that he can clean you out. He made as if to strike.
“Try it, Dullar. Just try it.”
His first uncurled. His arm fell back.
“Take the fucking thing. When this gets out—and I’ll make sure it does—no one’s going to take the word of a coke-snorting two-timer against mine.”
I was sorry he folded so quickly. I had truly wanted to do harm. To him. To anybody.
I reached for the camera. He dropped it to the ground, grinding it onto the stonework of the path with his heel so that it splintered and cracked into shrapnel shards. He pushed past me and I braced my shoulder for the impact. But he slid by like a wraith, melting into the darkness along the path. There was something in the way the shadows enfolded him that recalled my visit with Faria Duclos and the mystery man who mistakenly thought that many roses, bought from a store in Paris, could ever eclipse a single stem in ’Nam.
I bent to retrieve the pieces of Dullar’s camera, stuffing them into a pocket. I leaned back against a wall and the whiskey wooziness came back, reinforced by a vomit-flavored cocktail of adrenaline and rage.
How the fuck could they do this? Cocaine behind my back, and then what else on the menu? And the humiliation: Every time Gibson Dullar looked at me henceforth his eyes would say, I saw them, Clancy, Joe Shelby and Marie-Claire playing footsie; I saw them whether it’s on camera or not, and I can tell who I like, when I like.
I shoved open the door.
“Okay, kids. Party’s over. Home time. Goody bags. Finito.”
Joe looked up at me. If he was surprised at my intrusion, he did not show it.
“Hey, Ed. A line? Feel like a line?”
Marie-Claire had vacuumed one strip of white powder and was holding out the rolled bank note to me.
“Sure, Ed. Here. Join the party,” she said. But she knew me better than to think I would accept.
“Party, some goddamn party.”
I was roaring and slurring all at once. It’s true what they say about the color of anger, except with me it seemed more of a rainbow burst across the spectrum. I had left the door open, and outside I could feel the wind rising, hotter. A distant artillery clap of thunder shuddered across the sky.
“There was one thing, Marie-Claire. Just one. And look at this shit. And as for you, Shelby, this is my wife. This is my life. This is what I have and want to keep, and you want to drag it all into your fucking drug-crazed netherworld.”
The speech surprised even me.
“Edward, there was nothing. Only this.” She gestured to the chemical trace.
“Only this? Only? Snorting coke with this prick? After everything …” My oratory had forsaken me.
“Ed, Ed. Please,” Shelby pitched in. “It’s not what you think. It’s not how you think. Honestly. I would never …”
“Do you know who saw you? Do you?”
There was never time for them answer to that.
The mist around my eyes was painting the sitting room of the guest cottage a kind of orange and pink that flickered and cast exaggerated shadows. On the paving outside the cottage, I heard the first spatter of rain spitting and hissing like oil in an overheated skillet. Nearby, in the closest stables to the cottages, a fretful whinnying superimposed itself onto the sounds of the storm.
Alarms began to clang. A siren howled. Someone shouted: “Fire!”
Shelby levered himself upright with his cane, spilling the last vestiges of the cocaine. Marie-Claire rose with him. I spun around. Beyond the cottages, flames were running up the guy-lines of the marquee and its side walls had caught light.
The whinnying was building into a crescendo of fear.
“Sunset Strip!”
Marie-Claire tore off her high heels and began to run, clutching her shoes in one hand and her purse in the other, her stockinged feet flying over the gravel.
The way the marquee had been erected, it stood well clear of the stables where the champion horses were pampered and quartered. But the tent had caught fire in the stormy wind that sent a choking wall of sparks and dark smoke reeking of burned chemicals toward the horses, spreading panic among them.
We had given most of the staff the night off. Only a handful of stable lads came stumbling from their dormitory block. The storm was building, with the rain howling in gusts through the trees of the estate. The festive lamps in the trees of the driveway swung crazily, caught in the tortured branches. From the marquee, the sparks had begun to swirl upward, as if caught in a Wizard of Oz twister, flying toward the stables where all I could immediately think of was the dry hay in the stalls that housed not just Sunset Strip but also many other winners and one or two also-rans, as well. Marie-Claire propelled herself through the rain, wind, smoke, and cinders. How could the fire have started? An ember, maybe, from the dwindling barbecues, fanned into life by the quickening wind on the skirts of the storm. Did that matter? If the fire spread to the stables, the horses would not stand a chance. Suffering aside, everything Marie-Claire had worked for would go up, quite literally, in smoke. But it would be the lurid, gruesome death of Sunset Strip that would seize the headlines: the top French racehorse grilled in an accident redolent of negligence. Marie-Claire was not just a businesswoman; the loss of her charges would destroy her, body and soul.
In the distance, above the storm, I heard the first sirens of the sapeurs-pompiers and wondered in this slow-motion moment of random impressions and random events beyond all control whether the gates had been closed and padlocked after the last guests, whether the fire service could get through.
Then we found our savior. Gibson Dullar was leading the skittish, prancing Sunset Strip from the stables out into the fresher air as Marie-Claire sprinted toward them through the gathering downpour and the stable staff began evacuating the loose-boxes.
“This what you’re looking for?” he said with casual gallantry, smirking toward Shelby and me.
But there was no time for smart-aleck ripostes. The rain made no apparent impact on the blaze of the marquee. Flames had spread from the walls to the roof, probing into every dark, secret corner where the bars and dance floor and musicians’ stages had been.
Where I had left Elvire Récamier, sleeping the death sleep of marijuana.
I turned quickly. There was no hint now of the whiskey stumbles. Vaguely I heard Shelby’s voice calling to me. But no one else knew what I knew about the somnolent Elvire. The entrance to the marquee was an archway of flame, but there was no other way into the choking smoke-filled cavern that had been our party venue.
I shouted to Shelby.
“Elvire—she’s in there.”
He made to move toward me, then came to a halt. Stock-still. Frozen.
“Elvire. We’ve got to help her.”
But he seemed not to hear me, as if something much more important had just occurred to him and he wished to give it his full attention.
I threw off my jacket and ran into the inferno. Above my head flames crackled along the crossbars of the steel frame that provided the marquee’s skeleton. Everything burned: the bunting hanging from the ceiling, the dark silk of the lining, its golden stars eaten by fire. Sheets of silk detached themselves and fell from the roof. Part of the dance floor seemed to be smoldering. A trestle table stacked so recently with champagne had become a blazing altar. I tried to remember where I had left Elvire and turned toward the corner where I thought she was resting. I hoped it was not her final resting place. Above the sofa, I saw a section of the marquee lining caught in a frame of fire. If it fell, it would be too late. But the smoke was catching my throat. My eyes were stinging, running with tears. The heat was on my skin. I smelled something that reminded me of burning hair, then realized it was probably my burning hair.
I plunged forward to the sofa. Elvire was just waking, woozy and confused, as if the nightmare incineration around her were some crazy dope dream and if she blinked often enough she would wake from it. She rose, then fell back, coughing, reaching distractedly for her fancy shoes.
“Gotta go, Elvire. For fuck’s sake.”
“The shoes. Jimmy Choo.”
“Fuck the shoes!”
“Choos. Not shoes.”
She fell back again, unconscious from the smoke. I tried to lift her, but unconscious, she was deadweight and I would struggle to drag her to safety. I tried to revive her, slapping her cheeks but getting no response. I cursed Shelby—why had he not ridden to the rescue like he did in his war stories? Maybe because his tired yarns were all talk, myths, figments. Les Chimères. Maybe his self-invention had limits when it crashed up against the buffers of reality. I felt my knees buckle. I tried again to lift Elvire, sling her over my shoulder in some kind of fireman’s lift, but that didn’t work either.
If I left her, she would die.
If I stayed with her, so would I. And who would look after Marie-Claire then? That, at least, was a no-brainer: the line of suitors would stretch around a city block. Twice. And I would be charcoal. Like the fish in the Avre. Or Hakim’s Cairo.
But I knew that I could not leave a fellow human being to burn even if I burned with her. I had to stay with her, in the hope that salvation would arrive from somewhere—the fire brigade, God, Joe Shelby.
Joe Shelby. Delirium had come with the inhalation of toxic fumes. An imaginary Joe Shelby was at my side, mouthing soundless words, his hair fringed with a halo of fire. The avenging sword. This would be my last vision: a pretend friend sending a pretend double to help while I was alone.
Until the pretend friend started to bellow. And Elvire miraculously became lighter, raised aloft on some heavenly trajectory. My strength had doubled, trebled. She was vertical now. Unconscious but no longer deadweight. My dream friend began to move and I with him, Elvire between us.
We each took an arm over our shoulders on either side of her, lifting her off the ground. From the roof, spars of the framework, red with heat, fell through the smoke, remnants of blazing fabric clinging to them like phantom pennants. The smoke was thicker and the archway at the entrance was now only fire. Off to one side, there was a gap, a hint of a place where the flames seemed less impenetrable. I looked across Elvire’s lolling head to my imaginary friend. We had died, clearly, and this was the final challenge, to brave the wall of fire that blocked the route to Paradise. If we failed, the flames would be eternal, infernal. This was the tipping point between heaven and hell, and we were lighter because we were no more than spirit beings, straying in the flames, seeking a home for lost souls.
“Now, you assholes. Now. Run,” Elvire said, sounding anything but spiritual. I felt heat like a steel plate bolted onto my face. Distractedly, I watched the hair on my arm turned into spirals of brittle charcoal. We ran. Through the smoke. Through the fire. Visions of orange and vermilion demons reaching out to hold us back, enfold us, take us into a final embrace of incineration. We ran, stumbled, zigzagged, lurched. Almost dropped Elvire. In a flare-up of satanic light, I saw Shelby’s features locked into a fixed rictus as if he was laughing hugely. A final arc of fire rose before us but it was too late to change course and we ran through it. Into clean air.
Rain in sheets.
The worried faces of Marie-Claire and Gibson Dullar, hair flattened by the downpour.
Her makeup had run, but the pearls still glowed. There were ambulance crews. Paramedics. Fire crews had hitched up their hoses and were training great jets onto what was left of the blazing marquee. The water arched and fell onto the flaming hulk in clouds of sudden steam. I coughed and spluttered. Elvire vomited, then turned on me accusingly.
A paramedic made to hook her into an oxygen mask and set a drip in her arm, but she struggled free.
“My shoes. Where the fuck are my Choos?” It sounded like “Where ze fook are ma chuz?”
Then she focused on Shelby.
“Joe, You saved me. From Charlie. At last.”
The lady had sung, but not quite the aria she had been planning. She looked at Shelby with glowing eyes. I almost forgot to be pissed with her for leaving me out of the hero-grams. “That was close, Ed.” Shelby’s face was black. “You’re the hero. You led the charge.”
I didn’t mention my earlier act of unsuspected courage, facing down Dullar.
The front of his fancy evening shirt had turned into a crisp of burned fabric. His armpits ran with sweat. Someone had recovered his tuxedo jacket, and he hung it over his shoulders, fumbling for a pack of cigarettes.
“Guess it was easy after ’Nam.” I was trying to joke, and he cracked a lopsided smile.
“So now you know what it’s like under fire, Clancy, you desk-bound warrior,” he said.
“Under fire? That was in the fire.”
“Like the fire in Cairo, Ed. Hakim’s fire. Never forget that.”
Before I had time to offer some Nervalian response, Dullar spoke up.
“Must have been something, a spark, from the barbecue pits,” he said.
Shelby and I looked at one another, then at Dullar. In all the drama, he seemed to have remained collected, his pressed jeans and buckskin jacket barely sullied by his adventure in the horse trade. When he spoke to us, he seemed to be looking—maybe staring—at a far-distant point over our shoulders. It made me think of the expression they used to use for shell-shocked vets—the thousand-mile stare that comes with having seen too much.
Marie-Claire moved toward me and took my hand and smiled.
“I’d kiss you but you look like”—she struggled for a comparison that would work in English—“like a coal cellar.”
“Cigarette me, Joe,” I said.
Shelby flipped a Marlboro from his pack and I took one. Dullar was in quick-draw mode with his fancy gold lighter. I noticed that it was set to issue a long jet of flame, not the usual demure flicker.
Then my guts heaved and I passed out.
* * *
I came around in time to stop an overenthusiastic ambulance crew from taking me to some hospital or another. I said I would be fine. I said all I would need was a shower and some deep breaths. Someone talked about the perils of smoke inhalation but we all ignored him. Marie-Claire had taken control. You would never have guessed where she had been—or what she had been doing—a little while earlier. But then, on that night, little whiles stretched into lifetimes. One of the stable lads had brought a quilted jacket, and it was draped over her shoulders. She said a firm good-night to Gibson Dullar, thanking him for rescuing her prize racer but making clear his services were no longer required, save as a chauffeur for the still queasy Elvire Récamier. I guess most people would have welcomed a little hospital treatment after what she had been through, but Elvire had survived worse in the battlegrounds of Baghdad and Beirut. I kissed her on the cheek and heard her say, sotto voce, “Merci, Ed.” With Dullar at the wheel, her crazy little car bounced down the driveway and was gone before anyone could ask him too many questions about the chronology of his evening.
Once in my own bedroom, I took a long hot shower and scrubbed smoke and debris from my body. Afterward I tried to comb my hair as I would normally have done, but part of it had disappeared, leaving my head looking kind of patchy. I wrapped a towel around my waist. Marie-Claire was peeling off her fancy evening wear, now stained with rain—ruined, probably. Her eyes were still a bit starey. Her hair was wild, unkempt from the frenzy of rescuing the horses and the drenching rain. The pearls still glowed around her neck. The choker I had gone broke to give her had not broken.
I wanted her back as she had been. For me only. Exclusive rights for both of us.
I advanced and caressed her shoulders. I was not much taller than her, so I could look into her eyes, the pupils slightly smaller than they should have been. I leaned forward to kiss her.
I had survived. She had survived. Somewhere I had read about the irresistible urge of trauma survivors to reassert their hold on life when they have looked death in the face. Now I understood that it was no myth for either of us. She pushed me back onto a silk rug on our marital bedroom floor and straddled me, her hands on my shoulders, her legs looped around mine so that she could move back and forth as if on one of her mounts. But I wanted fulfillment, too. I had waited. Saved a life. Risked my own. Seen her snorting coke with Shelby, saving horses with Dullar. There was a whiff of other men on her that I needed to expunge, banish, obliterate. I pulled back from her and she looked surprised, aggrieved. Then I laid her back. She made to remove the pearl choker, but I stopped her, pinning her arms.
“Look at me,” I said when her eyes closed again. “Look at me.”
She obeyed.
“Who are you looking at? Say my name.”
“Ed, Ed Clancy. My love.”
“For how long?”
“Forever. Look at me, Ed. Tell me who you belong to.”
“To you.”
“Who am I? Say my name. Say you belong to me as I belong to you.”
“Marie-Claire Risen, I belong to you.”
“Then show me,” she said.
After the dawn peeked over the charred skeleton of the marquee and the staff readied the horses for their exercise, we finally could inspect the damage properly. I had allowed Shelby to stay on in one of the cottages and his Jaguar, presumably with the AK-47 in the trunk, was still where he had left it in the parking lot, but there was no other sign of him. Marie-Claire and I stood in our robes, our arms around each other, looking out at the treasure we had come so close to losing. If the fire had leaped to the other buildings—our home, the stalls, the fencing of the paddocks—we might not even have been able to survive it together as a twosome. Instead we had hung on to something, reclaimed and recovered ourselves.
“That asshole Shelby.”
“He’s your best friend. He’s the only one who ran into that fire after you.”
I did not tell her that he had hesitated, had let me go on alone.
“Brought coke here, for Chrissakes.”
“He didn’t bring the coke, Ed,” she said gently.
“I guess I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it. So now?”
“Now that particular party is over.”
I hoped she meant for good, but she didn’t say it in so many words. I wanted to ask her a lot of questions, about our apartment in the Sixteenth, about the brochure for a sports car, about the company she kept, but I was no interrogator, more passive cynic than active inquisitor. Her assurances seemed enough. If you cannot trust the person you love, then maybe you do not really love her at all.
But I could not quite let it go.
“And the Alfa?”
“Alfa?” she said with an expression I could not quite fathom. In retrospect, I guess you would say there was something of a sparkle in her eye.
We dressed and lingered over coffee. It was time to reassure our workers and inspect the horses as they returned from reestablishing the routine of their exercise. Soon enough, there would be insurance inspectors and police officers and specialist fire service investigators arriving to ask questions, harvest forensic evidence. There had already been calls from the sporting newspaper L’Équipe. A clutch of camera crews made camp at the main gate. As a journalist, I knew that a fire at a stable full of champion horses was a story. A big story. It would affect the betting, lengthen odds, sow doubt about runners and riders.
In my early days on sport, I had covered the saga of a rabid dog reported to be prowling Louisville on the eve of the Kentucky Derby. Any amount of high-end bloodstock was imperiled by the threatened snap of canine jaws. I kept up with the news for days, feasting on the byline vanity that grips the practitioners of my trade until the last of the final editions, the end of the print run when their personal press-room goes dark forever.
It was my story. I owned it. Every development came to me first. Then a veterinarian let slip that a sample of the dog’s saliva, collected after a failed attempt to track it down, had shown it to have something called dumb rabies—the kind that locks an animal’s jaw before it can infect another. The race horses, in other words, were safe. The dog would die before it could harm anyone. The panic was over. Technically, the story died the minute the veterinarian broke the news to me. But writing the story would mean the end of the bylines, the glamour, the congratulatory slaps on the back from editors craving exclusives, the extra dollars in my bank account.
I had a choice: break the news and end the run, or maintain my silence so the story might linger a day or two longer with my name all over the sports pages and my wealth increasing exponentially. The decision I made will haunt me to the grave—and remain my secret until then.
I mean, it was only a goddamn dog, for Chrissakes.
Now, as an owner of bloodstock, I was not relishing facing my professional colleagues, the mask of their friendship stripped away to reveal the merciless fangs of the newshound, and I kind of hoped that Marie-Claire would take it upon herself to bamboozle them, feeding the beast without betraying the questions that remained from the awful blaze.
There was a knock at the kitchen door. One of the cleaners had found a leather-bound volume along one of the pathways: an early edition of Nerval’s Voyage en Orient.
I leafed through the pages, looking for the references to Hakim and Cairo that Shelby had made just after we emerged from our own conflagration. There was a line that Shelby had underscored in pencil: “That terrible night, when the sovereign power took the trappings of revolt, when the vengeance of heaven used the weapons of hell.”
Shelby had said “Hakim’s fire.” And in this old work by Nerval, it was Caliph Hakim who ordered the fire that consumed his capital: “Fire, fire everywhere in this city …”
Cairo was burned by arson, and I had a memory of Dullar’s lighter set to produce a flame, not a flicker.
* * *
I went through my jacket pockets in preparation for dropping it at the dry cleaner on the way to work the following morning. In the wreckage of Dullar’s camera, I found the bent shape of a high-capacity SD card. A film camera would never have survived the impact of being smashed under Dullar’s heel and the exposure of its innards to even a hint of light. But I wondered, in these digital days, how robust the digital successor to Kodak Tri-X or Ilford HP5 would be, and how long it would keep its secrets.