THAT WEEK—THAT ENDLESS, CRAZY WEEK THAT STARTED WITH A blazing marquee and ended the way it did—was never going to be easy. It was as if all the elements had conspired to ensure that it would be climactic and definitive in ways that no one could have foreseen or even wanted to foresee.
At the Star, the newsroom was buzzing with rumor, gossip, speculation, and downright falsehoods about the impending visit of the bosses from New York along with their newly anointed acolyte, Gibson Dullar. Word had come down that the quartet would want to cut to the chase, get straight down to business. A town hall meeting had been called. Announcements would be made. Costs would be cut. In the newsroom, neighbor began to contemplate neighbor: Who would survive? Who would inherit the spoils? Who would be cast adrift in this Darwinian lottery?
There had been a time—and I was enough of a veteran to recall and rue it—when voyaging executives, untethered from spousal control, made no secret of their expectations of amusement, some European variant on the Congolese music Shelby had once been pressed to provide in Africa. Those who lived in the city were assumed to be denizens of an older, raunchier Paris in the streets around Pigalle, at the Folies Bergère—the Paris of the post-liberation libations in 1945, the Paris that predated it all, stretching back to the crazy, absinthe-fueled poets of the nineteenth century (though people preferred to forget the ravages of STDs that claimed such geniuses as Baudelaire himself). Long before Sweden stole the mantle of permissiveness, Paris was its capital, inventor of the French letter (although the French called it la capote anglaise, which tells you something about reciprocal cross-channel perceptions), French kiss, French knickers, ménage à trois, cinq-à-sept, soixante-neuf, for heaven’s sake—lust by numeric code. This was the Paris that was gay before the word assumed another meaning. This was the Paris that was somehow naughtier than anywhere else, the Paris of the cancan and the glimpse of lacy frills that preceded the offer of thrills, the Paris of saucy postcards and garter belts and pale thighs. Of hard-nosed transactions: cash for relief.
Once, it was easy to keep the head office types happy with reservations at the Georges Cinq and dinner at Taillevent. In the days before cost-cutting, the rule of thumb was to arrange accommodation for the visitors on the assumption that they would never object to a five-star suite even if they knew that perfectly adequate single-occupancy rooms were available. Joe Shelby once told me of a top boss—a capo di tutti capi in the newspaper business—who, when visiting a strange city with an executive or two and a correspondent in tow, would visit their rooms in turn to ensure that no one had a bigger or fancier suite than he did. I knew of a Jerusalem correspondent who routinely lodged her visitors in the Presidential Suite at the King David, where Anwar Sadat of Egypt had been accommodated during the peace talks with Menachem Begin, just to see how her bosses gauged their own importance in the scheme of things. (Only the most honest objected to their sumptuous lodgings and insisted on a simple double.) But the recession and the cost-cutters had put paid to such pricey ruses. These days, we maintained short leases on cramped apartments that visitors were expected to use as crash pads, whatever their rank (within reason, of course). You worried not so much about lining them up with illicit company as ensuring they didn’t forget the door codes and get themselves locked out when the numbers changed, marooned on the same perilous streets of after-hours Paris that their predecessors had explored with such reckless enthusiasm.
On the Monday after the fire, Shelby and I were not thinking, in any event, about the visitors from the Graphic. We had not been invited to the earnest meetings and clipboard brainstorming organized by the Star’s upper echelons to formulate strategy with their transatlantic counterparts.
We were worker bees.
We droned, literally: drone attacks in Waziristan, elections in Iran. A war in Afghanistan. Riots in Urumqi. News never stopped. When you least wanted them, bombs went bang, missiles streaked across the sky, blood spattered on dusty byways. Dictators seized power (though it would really have been news to be able to write, as we did eventually, “Dictator relinquishes power”). Earthquakes shook. Tsunamis rolled. Politicians pronounced. Diplomats dithered. Popes pontificated. Or died. Riots erupted. We took them all in our stride, assigning to each its appropriate cliché, filling in the pointillist canvas of history’s first stirrings, the paint-by-numbers assembling of the daily news.
We had stringers and staffers out there to beg and cajole, to provide the grand themes and the snippets, the warp to our weft, to create the frail, transient skein of events. So ephemeral! Even the mayfly on the Avre could count on a twenty-four-hour life cycle—three times our allotted span!
On the web, the life of news was counted in nanoseconds before the urge to update trilled along the cyber-conduits that transmitted the commands of distant bosses to the keyboard-tapping fingertips of faraway underlings like Shelby and me.
Post. Update. Post. Update.
The rapid-fire rhythm of Nonstop News–Paris Outpost. Locked and loaded. Rock and roll. Take no prisoners.
It was technology’s fault, of course. Shelby loved to turn back the clock to the time it took half an hour of telex time (hey, old-timer, what’s a telex?) to send a thousand-word dispatch from some remote station as the perforated tape chattered through those huge, rattling machines that were the correspondents’ lifeline to the outside world—a role now usurped by satellite phones and WiFi-broadband-ethernet-whambo-zambo-zippo technology that sends a thousand words before you can blink without the intercession of an operator or technician or clerk or censor. A telex machine, Shelby liked to tell anyone who would listen, was part of a ritual, a liturgy that could not be rushed as it led you from inspiration to execution to deadline and the blessed fulfillment, the release of communion with distant, unseen editors. Like some esoteric rite, the telex machine developed its own codes and language, tracing its origins to the penny-pinching abbreviations of an earlier tongue—cablese—from a time when every single word in a telegram to the head office cost real money, paring English to a brevity that verged on gibberish, a clear advantage in lands where censors scrutinized every dispatch.
Willy-nilly, in the late hours when no one could restrain him, Shelby liked to recite the time-hallowed and possibly apocryphal haikus of the cablese-telexese era.
“Why you unswim sharkinfested waters query,” a Fleet Street editor asked in a cable to a reporter whose rival had begun a report with an account of swimming into Zanzibar through such waters to cover a coup.
Another editor sought to establish the age of an emperor. “How old Selassie query,” his cable read. “He fine stop how you query,” came the reply.
The history of the craft was littered with tales of reporters front-warding warwise, striving to write fullest colorfullest copy soonest, seeking the urgentest replenishment of their expense funds. And offering multitks in adv for the pleasure of a reply.
“Pls ack” stood for “please acknowledge,” as in pls ack the request for a wire transfer of dollars.
“Pls ack asap” meant penury approached.
You wrote your story on your portable typewriter—Olivetti Lettera 32s were a big favorite, but Shelby always had a hankering for the original Swiss-built Hermes Baby, before the factory was shipped to Brazil and the company expired on the altar of progress. You wrote on the reverse side of hotel letterhead if you had no paper of your own—paper!—and you made your corrections in pen or pencil in a legible enough way for a telex operator to read, if necessary. Then you converted the written word on sheets of paper into perforations on a long, looping tape, also made of paper, either using the telex machine itself or, for the more advanced, a blind puncher. The latter machine was little more than a mechanical keyboard designed to punch holes in the paper tape that the telex machine read as text to send to its counterpart in a distant newsroom, like some kind of chattering mating call between antediluvian behemoths.
The slickest practitioners—and Shelby counted himself among them—could write an article straight from notes onto a blind puncher with the telex line open on an adjacent machine and the tape rattling through at fifty baud. If you stopped composing but the machine kept on transmitting, the tape snapped—so there was no greater discipline for the fast-writing, two-fingered, whambo-zambo merchant than an open line and a blind puncher. If you got it right, the first you ever saw in print of what you had written was in the newspaper clippings that arrived by pouch weeks after the event. Sometimes, though, you had to give your composition to an operator, who made the tape for you at her or his own pace, and you stood in line with the rest of them in some dingy PTT office in some hot, humid city to hand over your article packaged in dollar bills to ensure its speedy transmission.
Standing in a line in Kinshasa, at the big, grimy old post office on the Boulevard du Trente Juin in the days when it was still paved with asphalt, before the jungle reclaimed the sidewalks, Shelby had heard an old-stager ahead of him—Wilkinson of Interpress—remark, “My God, those cobwebs were here in the sixties,” and he prayed he would never grow so old himself as to acquire such wisdom.
Telex rooms were generally public spaces. Usually outgoing stories were printed on a double roll with a carbon copy (Granddad, what’s a carbon copy?) that remained on the machine when the sender had left the building. Shelby once told me of a trick he had developed called the Wireroom Switcheroo when he began to suspect that a colleague (not Dullar this time) was reading his carbons to steal his exclusives after Shelby had taken his turn on the telex and moved on. He devised a way of leaving bogus stories on the telex roll to see who picked them up. And sure enough, the maneuver worked. It took only one story killed and retracted in utter humiliation—“Mobutu Hands Fortune to Mother Teresa”—to prove the efficacy of the switch.
There were censors to deal with, too. In N’Djamena, they insisted you produce your punched tape so they could run it through a disconnected telex machine and read what you had written before you were permitted to hand it in—with dollars or Central African francs—for transmission. So you punched two tapes, two versions of the same story, one unctuously cleaving to the official line, the other spiked with the acerbic observations of a cynical correspondent. You handed the innocuous one to the censor and the unedited one from behind your back to the operator. Then you waited for the answer back that told you the article had been received. And you typed in the hallowed words that functioned pretty much as the Nunc Dimittis: O Lord of News, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.
“Pls ack all rcvd ok”
“Rcvd ok”
“Tks”
“Bibi”
“Bibi”
Thus concluded the duet of sender and receiver, ending this tenuous tryst across continents.
Your article had been transmitted and received. In the parlance of reporterdom, you had filed—meaning you had sent your story, not filed it away in some manila folder in a cupboard. You had fulfilled your pact with your bosses, earned your crust. You were free. The night was yours. In those days, no BlackBerry or sat phone or cell phone would hunt you down.
Shelby liked to recount a story from the old Congo days.
As representatives of supposedly competing wire services, he and a colleague had attended a news conference in a room lined with dainty, gilt chairs that also contained the only two live telexes for a thousand miles. A government flack dressed in the uniform of a general was explaining in a mixture of French and English how rebels in the southern province of Shaba were being repulsed by the deployment of what he called “elite pygmy bowmen.” No matter that the pygmies stood less than four feet tall, while the elephant grass of Shaba reached three times that height. No matter that the rebels had left of their own accord and were, at that moment, rolling back to their base in a convoy of looted family sedans, pillaging and raping as they went. Pygmy bowmen, the general insisted, had turned the tide.
“You mean pygmies, really? I mean, like pygmies. Elite pygmies?” Shelby said, rising from his chair and backing toward the telex machines at the back of room.
“The little men?” his colleague asked, rising too and heading for the telexes. “Les petits hommes?”
“Oui, les petits hommes,” the general said with magisterial forbearance.
“Avec les arcs et les flèches?”—with bows and arrows?—Shelby asked, backing up more rapidly now.
“Les flèches empoisonnées?”—poisoned arrows?—the colleague from Reuters inquired.
“Oui, avec les flèches empoisonnées.”
That final detail was too much. Deadlines were looming. The poisoned arrows were the clincher. But by the time the rest of the hacks reached the telex machines, Shelby and his competitor from Reuters were already on open lines to head office, monopolizing the communications, typing frantically, neck-and-neck, graf-by-graf, in a high-stakes derby: “Elite pygmy bowmen armed with poisoned arrows routed rebels in the war-torn southern province of Shaba Tuesday …”
These days, there were no deadlines. The web was infinite. Every nanosecond offered an opportunity to tweak, transmit, recast, relede, revamp. The formal, single deadline was replaced by an infinite deadline. Ergo, you were never free, the night was never yours. As with multiple orgasms, there was always the technical possibility of another judder, another release.
The end began with such odd, old machines as Portabubbles and Tandys and Zeniths—the forgotten tools of a dying trade, Shelby used to say. For my part, I hated this correspondent chat about means of communication—one of those themes that they used to think was mesmerizing. How many times had I stifled a yawn when they started talking about their road warrior kits and the time so-and-so got his alligator clips inexplicably clamped on his most tender parts?
I had heard friends offer one another cryptic guidance about the correct color combination of the hidden hotel room wires that would produce a connection: “Athens, Grande Bretagne, green and yellow” or “Diyarbakir, Kervansaray, le rouge et le noir.”
And I had heard them tell rivals: “Athens, GB, red and black, old chap. Never fails.”
Sometimes, as an editor awaiting their stories’ arrival in Paris, I imagined them with their early dial-up communications, setting ur-laptops to pulse- or tone-dialing, inserting 9s or 0s to bypass hotel internal loops (who wanted to send the story to laundry or room service?), then crouching over acoustic cups to listen for the faint screech of a carrier signal calling out across the ether for an answering mew from within the simple circuits of 1980s technology, cursing and swearing when the transmission failed and they had to crawl anew behind the nightstand to reconnect on different shades of old wire.
Then, later in the bar: “Filed?” “Brown and blue, my dear. Nothing to it.”
I had nothing against the old-timers eking out their remaining years with tales of derring-do. For some of them, that was pretty much all they had left. But these early tales from the barely discerned front lines of technology showed just how easily those veterans had been seduced by the first siren calls of their own demise. Innocents, they had jettisoned their typewriters, embraced their laptops, and come to realize only too late that, with every hookup and download, they renewed their Faustian pact with a future that did not include them.
Give me Shelby’s pigeon story anytime.
As we worked that day, Shelby seemed to have forgotten about fire, guilt, failure. He was spruce, cleaned up, Stakhanovite. When he caught me looking at him ruminatively, he gave me a thumbs-up, then hit the keyboard again like a concerto pianist working up to a tricky bit of Beethoven. But I wasn’t thinking of music. I was thinking of the look in Dullar’s eyes after the fire at my spread. I was beginning to wonder if there had been some dark spell in Kolwezi or ’Nam or Beirut or someplace that had ensnared Dullar and maybe Shelby, too.
Too much bang-bang.
Too much boom-boom.
Too much gazing into the sightless eyes of bodies “frozen in the unseemly abandon of sudden death” (Shelby, circa 1980).
Too many questions without answers “when the senselessness was simply overwhelming” (Dullar, circa 1990).
Long after their exposure to human barbarity, even old-timers who had seen it all snapped awake with sweating, quivering flashbacks or smelled the sickly sweet rot of cadavers in the odorless aircon of sanitized hotel rooms. The skyscrapers of New York and Frankfurt became sniper nests, and they ducked for cover in doorways among strolling shoppers and bonus-laden bankers.
When a car backfired close by and he jumped involuntarily, one of the old Africa hands excused himself by saying to me, “Sorry, old boy. Still jittery from Matabeleland.”
Some of them were still jittery from everywhere.
These days they called it post-traumatic stress disorder. But those words had yet to achieve currency in the times that bred Shelby and Dullar. If their jangled nerves played tricks on them for a while, it was the price they paid for the adrenaline of strangers’ wars, for the joy of serial survival. It was the price of bearing witness so that the horror would not go unchronicled and people far away would learn a passable truth and would not be able to say nobody told them that the human race was so flawed. It was a price worth paying if you thought you were the avenging sword.
Some, like Shelby and Dullar, thought they could hack it forever, ignoring the press of memory building behind the barrages of denial, imagining they would never succumb to their ghosts and nightmares. As if they could play Russian roulette forever and never draw the loaded chamber.
The smart ones, I figured, hung up their notebooks and their Kevlar and their cameras before it was too late.
Bibi
Bibi