WE KEPT AND WERE KEPT BUSY, MEETING, AS BEST WE COULD, THE demands for information from insurers, the staff, camera crews. Racehorse owners called in for reassurance and were reassured that, even now, their investments were out on the gallops, gulping pure air. Marie-Claire gave television interviews that won sympathy but left the whodunit question unanswered, partly because we had plenty of suspicions but nothing that approached evidence. The mystery of how the marquee caught fire remained just that—a mystery. The forensic teams from the fire service and the police took away any amount of evidence and photographed charred debris from any number of angles. Anonymous investigators in white suits picked through the wreckage. Some of the metal framework had survived, blackened and skeletal. Miraculously, you could still make out the shape of the sofa that had almost become Elvire Récamier’s funeral pyre. The investigators wanted it preserved as a potential crime scene. But, in all honesty, we wanted it dismantled. It was an eyesore, a reminder of how close we had come to disaster.
We wanted every trace of the nightmare obliterated.
In the late afternoon, there was another knock on the kitchen door. It sounded timid and I nearly missed it. When I saw Shelby, his hair singed and patchy, I almost laughed.
“Look at yourself,” he said in response, and I ran my hand over my head, finding rough, uneven patches where they had once been smooth expanses of hair.
“Touché. Come in.”
“Just came to say goodbye. Till tomorrow at any rate.”
“You wanna drink?”
“Tea?
“Tea?”
“Did I hear tea? What a good idea,” Marie-Claire said.
I handed Shelby his copy of Nerval.
“I guess I owe you guys an explanation,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of what I may have gotten you into.”
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Marie-Claire said. “Or should I leave you boys to it? Men’s talk! No place for the ladies!” She spoke in mischievous tones. I was sure she had no intention of missing Shelby’s confession.
“No. Stay, please. If that’s okay with you, Ed? Marie-Claire? No secrets, okay? Maybe surprises, but no secrets.”
Shelby and Marie-Claire settled in around the big sofas in the living room. You could still smell the fire on the air that wafted in through the open doors leading out onto the lawns. I stayed in the kitchen to brew a pot of Earl Grey. When I entered the living room, I had a feeling that a conversation had been suspended at my approach.
“Joe was just asking whether you wanted the full unexpurgated version.”
“Well, maybe Joe could ask me that.” The anger from the previous night stirred and they both looked at me in some alarm.
“Hey, buddy. Sorry. I just didn’t want to lay a big trip.”
“Oh, sure. There’s no big trip. We have a fire that nearly burns the place down. Horses and all. Christ! We nearly lose Elvire in the flames. I find you snorting coke with my wife, and there are no big trips? Did I understand that right?”
“Maybe I should leave,” he said, pushing himself up from the deep sofa with his cane so that he almost lurched into the low table where I had deposited the tea.
“No, you don’t, Shelby. You’ve got a story to tell? Fine. But you’ve got questions to answer, too. Old buddy. Old sport. And I’m going to do the asking.”
I glanced at Marie-Claire. I swear to God that, in that moment, she actually admired me.
“Fire away, man,” Shelby said, then smiled. “So to speak.”
We laughed and things got a bit easier.
Now that my role as inquisitor was established, I didn’t know where to start. Should I mention his parentage, the letters I had seen while snooping in his study? Did that matter? After all, I knew as much as Shelby did about the official documentation. But my real interest lay in the gap in his CV between Beirut and Paris, the missing months that might explain what happened between him and Faria Duclos. Elvire Récamier had hinted, too, that Dullar had an influence, a bearing, a presence in those secret months. There was a big, messy blank, a black hole in my knowledge, and now Shelby was saying he had gotten us into something that he wanted to confess. Did that make us his priests? If we listened to him, would we be drawn in further? Or was he offering a way out? Was he saying, I might be foundering on my own personal bridge, but you can make for the lifeboats?
Above all, was there something in Shelby’s murky past that would somehow explain the events of the past few hours?
“Beirut,” I said finally. “What happened in Beirut?”
“Just that?”
“That and after. Why do you keep clippings about a fire in Beirut? Why is there so much fire in all this?”
Marie-Claire looked at me more sharply now.
“There was another fire?” she said.
“And afterward, Joe? What happened when you dropped out of sight before you came here? What happened with Faria Duclos? Was that to do with a fire? And Dullar, where does he fit in all this?”
Shelby eased himself back onto the sofa, his cane propped beside him like a bishop’s crook.
“I wish I had all the answers.”
“Then just tell us what you know, Joe,” my wife said, very gently. “It seems to me you owe Ed that. And you owe yourself.”
For a moment, I thought he was choking up, but he coughed and suggested that, perhaps, we might brace ourselves with something a little stronger than Earl Grey tea. I told him we could wait a while for a sundowner. He sulked, then stretched his arms above his head and looked up at the ceiling. If we’d had a grandfather clock, you’d have heard its heavy ticktock. The evening quiet was settling in, the kind of Sunday quiet that is so much deeper than on any other day, as if the world is pausing to draw breath.
Finally, he started.
“Well. They were re-assigning me. Again. New post. Ma’salaam, Beirut. Hello, Web.”
He fell silent, as if marshaling his memories, finally weaving a timeline through the scattered remnants of events.
“So where’d you go?”
Marie-Claire gave me a disapproving look for breaking the charmed circle, but I knew Shelby liked to spin things out, and I was losing patience. For once, we were on my home ground. I set the rules.
“Nairobi,” he said. “I went to Nairobi to see Eva Kimberly.”
“I’ll be damned!”
Marie-Claire looked a little confused. She was not as familiar as I—or the entire press corps for that matter—with the story of Joe Shelby’s betrayal of Faria Duclos to take up with Eva Kimberly. Before Duclos walked away from him, of course. Some people said Joe led a complicated life. But that was something of an understatement.
“Why?”
“We are getting out of sequence here,” Marie-Claire said. “Go back to Beirut. Before Nairobi. Something happens, right? What is it?”
“Well. A few things happen. Good question, by the way. Sometimes you don’t really know why. In my line of work—well, the way it used to be in the old print days—there were plenty of times when you’d finish up in someplace on a whim or an editor’s whim or for some nefarious reason. And you’d check in and check the phone lines and make a few calls. But there always seemed to be someone or other from the traveling circus around.”
“Circus?” Marie-Claire said.
“The press corps, he means the press corps.”
“True enough,” Shelby said. “We were always just circling one another. So you got used to the idea that you’d be in some place and people would drift in and out and you’d bump into them at the Commodore or the Sheraton in Damascus or the Intercon in Kinshasa. You didn’t really ask, I guess. Trade secrets. Whatever.”
“But you lived in Beirut,” I interjected.
“Sure, I did. But I was moving. Packing up. You saw all the stuff I had to crate and ship when it arrived in Paris. Where does it all come from over the years? Souks? Flea markets? The power of accumulation. Show me an oil painting of the Battle of Adwa and I’ll show you a hack who’s been to Addis. We all have the same mementos—Pashtun hats, Iraqi Air Force watches, masks from the Congo, wooden giraffes from Zimbabwe. Anyhow. I packed up my apartment out near the lighthouse in West Beirut and moved into the Commodore for the last few days. Not what it was, of course. Not like the old days. With the boom-boom. And the parrot that did an imitation of incoming—the kind you least want to hear. Makes a whistling noise then—ka-boom! I remember once, in south Lebanon—”
“Okay, Joe. Back on message. You can tell your war stories another time.”
“Sure. Sure, Ed. So I move into the Commodore. Old time’s sake. Sentimental journey. First thing, when I plug in the laptop, the Graphic tells me they’ve sent Dullar to stand in till my permanent replacement arrives. Dullar! Then, I’m heading down to the bar and who do I see walking in—well, limping would be a better description? Faria. Dear, dear Faria Duclos. We spotted each other at exactly the same moment. She was on a zimmer. I was just on the cane. We stopped in the lobby and looked at each other. Stunned, really. Turned out she’d been given a retrospective show by some group in Beirut, showing all her great photos. So there she was. And there I was. Both wobbly. I went across to her and put my arms around her. Kind of like a crazy waltz because I was not standing too steady and without her frame she was as weak as a rag doll. It felt like years since I’d seen her. Wasted years. Wasted muscles! So much to catch up on. She laughed. You know that laugh she had. I was supposed to be mad with her after she walked out after the Gaza thing …”
“Gaza thing?”
“Gaza. We’d split up. Me and Faria. Then we got back together after I got sick. Then she left again. So I was pissed. Then she got sick. But I hadn’t seen how sick she was till that day in the hotel lobby. Back in the Commodore. Back in Beirut. Walking wounded. Then, of course—surprise, surprise—in walks Gibson Dullar holding a catalogue from her show. ‘Fantastic, Faria,’ he’s saying. ‘Great stuff! Genius!’ And then he sees me. ‘I didn’t know you were here already, Gib.’ ‘No worries,’ he says, ‘got in early. You know me. Don’t like to miss the show.’ ‘So how’d you hear about the exhibit,’ I asked him. ‘Didn’t you know,’ he says. ‘Didn’t they tell you? The Graphic was a sponsor. I’m here as part of the committee. More to the point,’ he says, ‘aren’t you supposed to be shipping out?’ So there we all were again. Back where we were in ’Nam. Circling. Again.”
I made to head for the drinks tray, but Marie-Claire beat me to it. She splashed single malt into crystal tumblers and poured herself a glass from a leftover bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet that had escaped the caterers’ cleanup.
“I’m sorry, Ed. I should’ve given you a heads-up. But I guess I was too embarrassed.”
I peered into the peaty depths of Talisker.
“So that’s why you went to Nairobi? Because of Dullar?”
“It kind of gets worse,” he said. “Quite a lot worse, as a matter of fact.”
The evening had begun to ease toward the gloaming. I moved around the lounge switching on the big, fabric lamps that Marie-Claire had installed. It made the place look cozy.
She and I had instinctively positioned ourselves on one of the super-stuffed sofas and Shelby had gotten up to stretch his legs, then settled back in a maroon leather wing chair with a small, spindly table next to it to support his drink. He raised his glass and held it to the lamplight, then lowered it without drinking.
“The fire, Joe. Tell us about the fire. The fire in Beirut.”
This time he took a decent slug and a deep breath.
“Back up a bit. The problem was,” he said, “that I couldn’t love her anymore. Not in the way I had. Not in that fiery, passionate, consuming way. I always thought I would love her whatever happened, but when I saw her like that with her shriveled legs …”
“Maybe I should leave?” Marie-Claire said.
“No. Stay.” I don’t know who said it first—me or Shelby.
“It was too much. What she was, I was going to be. Sooner or later. The nerves would give out. The muscles would fade. Maybe it was something in the water in ’Nam or Rwanda or someplace. Maybe it wasn’t even the same thing with us both. The same illness.”
It was almost too intimate. You can know a guy for years without getting too personal. Then, when they start really talking, it get’s a bit squirmy. I just wanted to keep the narrative on track, without all the emotional meanderings.
“So you split?”
“No, Ed. I didn’t. Not then. Not right away.”
“And the fire?”
“I’m getting there. Jeez. You’ve been on Nonstop News too long—cut to the chase, the boom-boom, the death toll! NND rules! What happened to storytelling, Ed? Sorry. But you know what I mean. Just the context with me and Faria for Marie-Claire. The history. That’s what I remember most. But there was still something. Something really big. Not passion like there had been, all physical and the heart will follow. Something deeper. A spark. Possibilities. But when you have been through everything we had been through together, and when you’ve been through separations when all you thought about was her, you don’t just draw a line. The passion of the body isn’t everything.”
He paused and glanced speculatively from Marie-Claire to me and then back to her.
“Well. Maybe that doesn’t apply to you love-birds,” he laughed, making a joke of the blushes he brought to her cheeks. “Not yet.”
“Go on,” Marie-Claire said.
“It was different. Maybe for the first time I wanted to protect her, to just be there, to read poems for her—she was the one with the thing about Nerval, by the way. I was not sure if she wanted me like that. She didn’t want me doing the nurse stuff, for sure. But if I was just kind of there to hand her a glass of wine, or make sure we had a table booking for dinner, or to listen to her and talk to her about what had happened in all those places, or to hold her—just hold her in my arms—she seemed sort of happy with that. And I was happy, too, now I think of it. We didn’t have to be up all the time. We didn’t have to be scanning the wires for some crazy bang-bang someplace to head out to. We just enjoyed being together and we knew that we were where we were meant to be. If that isn’t a hopeless cliché.”
“You know what I think, Joe?” Marie-Claire said. “I think what you are talking about is a kind of love that people yearn for and never achieve.”
“Like Darby and Joan?” I interjected. Maybe sneered would be a better word.
“No, Ed. Not like Darby and Joan. Like us. Like we’ll be.”
Now it was my turn to blush, but Shelby seemed to have missed our little exchange and was plowing ahead, determined to get confession over and seek his absolution. Or another jolt. Or maybe he was not even with us at that point, cruising a parallel world, trying to work out why he had missed so many chances.
“But of course there were still stories to do and if I didn’t do them, Dullar would do them and that would annoy me. Dullar hated what was happening with Faria and me. I mean really hated it. You could see it in his eyes. But I still went out now and again to do stuff in south Lebanon. I was doing a big series on militias—old-style leftists, jihadis, whatever. Crazies with guns. Like the one they gave me, Ed. You know, the AK.” Marie-Claire looked questioningly at me, but I just shrugged. “And that was how the tragedy happened. Hubris. That’s what causes tragedy. Right? Hubris? Tragic error. You make a mistake, and at the time you can’t tell it’s a mistake because you can’t really see. You act in a way that maybe you know you shouldn’t. And it changes your life. Act A leads to Acts B and C and D. A chain of inevitabilities all leading in one direction. To disaster. To tragedy. And when that moment comes—I mean, this is where Aristotle and all those theory-mongers get it wrong—you are supposed to be purged. Catharsis! But it’s not like that. The bodies are left on the stage but you are still standing to take the rap. It’s all your fault. And you look back at that moment, that tragic error. And what you get is guilt. Because suddenly, looking back, you can finally see clearly, you can see how your behavior triggered the whole thing. And you can’t understand why you behaved the way you did. Except that you did, and it started this chain of events and at the end of it, the bodies are on the stage and you can’t breathe them back to life and it’s all your fault.”
He spiraled awkwardly out of his chair, unsteady on his feet but nimble enough to turn away from us. His shoulders heaved a couple of times.
We waited in silence until he was ready to continue. He returned to his chair, drained his glass. Without being asked, I refreshed it. Night had fallen, but we never closed the drapes so you could see our little tableau reflected back to us in the big windows.
“I’d taken a suite, of course, just like the old days. Two bedrooms. Sitting room. Two baths. All mod cons. Second floor. I hadn’t told anybody when she moved up from the single room on the first she’d been given for the exhibit, so no one knew she was there. Our little secret. Well, one day I’m coming back from Tyre or Sidon or somewhere, and as I get into the lobby, Dullar is stepping from the elevator door looking kind of smug. But when he sees me, he looks surprised. Actually, shocked. Now I think of it, he looked stunned. ‘Didn’t know you were out,’ he says. ‘Why would you?’ I replied. ‘No reason,’ he says. He goes his way. I start to go mine. Then the elevator doors slam shut. Fire alarms ringing. Waiters and bellhops scurrying around. Fire. ‘Where?’ I say? ‘Second floor. At least Faria’s safe,’ Dullar says, but I’m hobbling and limping for all I’m worth for the stairwell. Second floor! The fire’s on the second floor. And that’s where I’ve left Faria. With a bad leg you don’t cover too much ground, but when you have to, you dig deep and I was digging hard. So I get to the first-floor landing and Dullar’s behind me and scuttles off to the room where Faria had been. But I kept on going and he shouts, ‘Don’t be a fool, Shelby, the whole floor’s on fire.’ And I shouted back, ‘But Faria’s there, for Chrissakes.’ He says, ‘No, no. She’s on the first!’ But I knew better. By the time I got to the second-floor landing the walls are on fire but it looks like you can get through so I figure I have to go on. The idea that she was trapped in that inferno. My God. It was too much. And that’s what I remember.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I knew I had to get to her. I didn’t care if I fried. I had to be with her. At the end. I had to save her. It was my fault she was there, goddamn it.”
He made no attempt now to hide the tears. His face had dissolved. All of those craggy, wrinkled lines went loose. Thin rivulets trickled down his cheeks. A teardrop fell from his chin and landed in the dregs of his whiskey glass.
“I keep trying to figure it out. It’s like, you know, one of those cop movies where someone has stolen the surveillance tape. Or put it on a loop. So you keep seeing the same thing and you can’t figure out what’s been cut out. What’s missing. One minute I was trying to get down the corridor. Flames everywhere. Clothes alight. The next I’m looking up into the face of some Lebanese paramedic in the hotel lobby through an oxygen mask and he’s patching up some big wound on the back of my head. And the next thing I’m in an ambulance en route for the ER.”
“And Faria?”
He was silent, rummaging through his pockets for something to wipe away the tears. He looked at us both with Labrador eyes and Marie-Claire fumbled in her purse for a pack of tissues.
“Faria? What happened to Faria, Joe?” she said.
He didn’t reply immediately, drawing breath in deep gulps like someone coming up from a dive.
“Faria burned,” he said. “She burned. When the fire guys got to her she had swathed herself in wet towels somehow and was trying to make it down the corridor on her Zimmer frame when a chunk of ceiling landed on her. That’s what they told me. By the time I found out what had happened, she was already patched up and medevacked to Paris, courtesy of Gibson Dullar and the Graphic. I got out of hospital after they finished stitching me up, checking for internal bleeding, concussion. I even bought a ticket for Paris, but when I landed at Charles de Gaulle, I chickened out. I couldn’t face her. I couldn’t face what I had done to her. As if there hadn’t been enough. There was a flight to Nairobi so I hopped on that. Cowardice! That’s what it was. Pure cowardice. The great two-fisted war correspondent and I had failed her so badly. I couldn’t face the way I had let her down. I should have protected her. It was my fault she was in that room. The fire was intended for me, not her. But I failed her. And I knew that so I just ran. When I saw the fire in the marquee last night, that’s why I couldn’t go with you right away, Ed. It all came back. The fear. The smell of fire. Jesus, that stink.”
“But the fire. How did it start?”
“There was evidence of arson of some kind. They put it down to some crazy leftist group I’d been writing about. The Graphic sent Dullar and a team of reporters to do our own investigation. And that’s what they came up with, too. Arson by loonies.”
“I don’t remember seeing that story.”
“Internal. They kept it internal. At Dullar’s request. To avoid embarrassment for the Graphic. That was his reason. Apparently.”
“And did they say who commissioned it?”
“Commissioned it?”
“Who ordered up the hit?”
“No.”
“Wasn’t that weird? I mean in a place like Beirut where there’s always some worse guy to rat on the bad guys?”
“Strange. You know, you’re right. No one ever got fingered.”
“But you ran.”
“All the way to Nairobi, where, of course, Eva Kimberly refused to see me. Naturally enough. But I was out. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I did some traveling on the old routes, down to the Cape. Figured I’d write some pieces on the way but never did. For the first time in my life, the stories didn’t seem to matter the way they used to. I heard some stuff from Paris on the grapevine. About the burns. The only thing that made sense was the Nerval books they salvaged from the suite after the fire. She kept them in one of those aluminum suitcases that hard-core hacks and photogs used to schlep around. Fireproof. Waterproof. That’s why the books inside didn’t burn. She’d already been medevacked so they brought them to me when I got back to the Commodore and I threw them into the suitcase when I left Beirut. Figured I’d give them to her in Paris. But of course, I never got there to see her, so they stayed with me and I started reading. Like Nerval would explain how to get back to her. It was as if the poems salvaged part of her, started explaining things. About loss. About that terrible feeling when you know you will never get back what you had. ‘Rends-moi le Pausillipe et la mer d’Italie.’ You know, in Voyage en Orient there are two guys who meet as buddies and get up to all kinds of mischief—Hakim and Yousouf. And then they become rivals over the same woman. But it turns out they are brothers and they still end up destroying one another. So it all made some kind of sense. And the poems made me think of her. She was in them. Sometimes, on the road, I got so steeped in them that I couldn’t think of anything else for days.”
“Sounds like a breakdown to me,” I whispered, but Marie-Claire scowled at me and turned to Joe.
“On maybe a prosaic note, Joe, you said that after the fire, there was a wound on the back of your head. But if you had fallen forward, how could that happen?”
“I’ve been thinking that myself. I mean, it was a bad wound. Concussion. Scans for brain damage. The works. And when I ran into the fire after Ed put me to shame last night, I had a sudden memory that I wasn’t alone when I got to that corridor in Beirut. Someone else was there. Or something. Some ghost.”
“Ghosts don’t do head wounds,” Marie-Claire said. “Ghosts don’t give you concussions.”
He stayed for dinner and we talked some afterward, just the two of us after Marie-Claire pleaded an early start and reminded us we both needed to be on the road at a reasonably respectable hour to drive in to the office.
He probed about Ivar Bild. Was he some crazy Swedish euthanasiast or what? What was that about an autopsy? What was all that supposed to mean? Had she died of natural causes or what? Was he to blame? “Guilt, Ed. Guilt kills. I killed her by not going. I could have saved her.”
“Come on, man. Her death was a medical thing.”
“What did she say? Was she expecting me to be there?”
Should I tell him what Bild had told me—that he was forgiven, absolved—or was it too late for that to make a difference?
“She loved you, Joe. What the hell do you think she was expecting?”