“Pascal,” she began in an awkward way. “We’re friends. We know each other. I hope we trust one another. Once upon a time your work was so…Pascal, why do you do this?”
She looked down at the photographs as she spoke. Pascal’s eyes followed her gaze. He pushed back one lock of dark hair which fell across his forehead—an irritable, careless gesture, one Françoise had seen him make a thousand times before. He was graying a little at the temples now, she saw; there were lines she did not remember, from nose to mouth. For a moment she thought she had angered him. His eyes glinted. She waited for the impetuous reply he would once have given, but none came. He turned, and Françoise thought he intended to leave her question unanswered. Yet at the door he stopped and shrugged.
“Françoise, I work for the money,” he said. “What else?”
“That wasn’t always the case.”
“No. Once I worked for—” He broke off. His expression became closed. “Circumstances change,” he said in a flat tone. It was his final remark, one that told her nothing, and he closed the door on it.
Outside, in the parking lot below, Pascal climbed into his car, switched on its engine, then switched it off. Françoise’s final question had gone unerringly to the heart of the matter, he knew that. For an instant, staring straight ahead of him, seeing no cars, no traffic beyond, no passersby, he looked down into it, this emptiness now central to his life. No optimism, no self-respect, a great deal of self-hate. He felt a sensation of vertiginous despair, then anger with himself.
There was no point in dwelling on this. Self-hate was perilously close to self-pity—and that he refused to indulge. Besides, there was a cure for despair; not drink, not drugs, not women—those exits led to dead ends.
Work, he said to himself, and fired the engine. He slammed the car into reverse, then pulled out, accelerating fast, and made for the airport via the périphérique. Work, speed, haste, an accumulation of detail, these were the cures he now relied upon. They had one supreme benefit. Properly manipulated, they left no time in which to think. Racing for the plane, Pascal congratulated himself dourly: The past three years had made him an expert in this.
Chapter 6
GENEVIEVE WAS WORKING ON a new story about telephone sex. It was Nicholas Jenkins’s idea. Most of his feature proposals concerned sex in one form or another. In the year he had been editor, the News’s circulation had increased by a hundred thousand, so presumably—by that yardstick anyway—Jenkins’s editorial instincts were correct.
It was not, however, a policy Genevieve liked. She found it both sly and cheap. The News was a middle-market paper, not a tabloid, and Jenkins’s new editorial policy involved a balancing act. The saucy excesses of pinup girls were not for the News, so the titillation of a typical Jenkins story had to be disguised. An “exposé” was the form that disguise usually took. Thus could titillation become a crusade. Jenkins was in the process of elevating scurrility to an art form. Genevieve could have put up with the scurrility a whole lot better, she often thought, had it not come so larded with cant.
Her initial research on this new story consisted of calling a representative sample of telephone sex lines, widely and excitably advertised by one of the News’s most sensationalistic competitors. By noon, seated at her desk in the features department, she had been engaged in this activity for more than two hours. Her spirits felt leaden, and her head ached.
Nicholas Jenkins’s theory was that somewhere in England there was the Mister Big of telephone sex. Genevieve’s crusading task was to find this man and expose his activities. According to Jenkins, the man was—or might be—a well-known international entrepreneur whose more legitimate business interests ranged from American modeling agencies to rock-star management…or so Johnny Appleyard had suggested to Jenkins, and Jenkins placed great faith in Appleyard’s tips.
Genevieve placed less faith in them. In her book, Appleyard was an intrusive, ubiquitous busybody with an expensive nasal hobby, a man whose transatlantic tipoffs were one percent hot and ninety-nine percent myth.
With a sigh, she replaced the telephone on a breathy South London girl (French Governess Corrects Your Mistakes). She closed her eyes, buried her aching head in her hands, and considered for the hundredth time just how pleasant it would be to tell Nicholas Jenkins to stick this job. Before his advent at the News, she’d taken pride in the work she did. In the ten years she’d worked in England in journalism, she’d fought hard to establish herself. No fashion coverage, no women’s page fluff, no soft-focus human interest stories. She had wanted to cover hard news, to start out the way her journalist father had. Her ambition—never confessed to her father, whom she rarely saw, and who would have scoffed—was to move up through investigative journalism to foreign reporting. Sam Hunter had covered wars—indeed, had won a Pulitzer for his Vietnam dispatches; why should she not take a similar course? So she had served her apprenticeship but kept that goal ahead of her. One day she would be truly out in the field; she, too, would be there, at the front.
Wars drew her like a magnet, she knew this. To bring back the truth from a war zone seemed to her a tremendous thing. If she could ever do that, she felt she would prove something to herself—and perhaps also prove something to her father, although this aspect of her plan made her uneasy, and she ignored it as much as she could.
And she had come so close to her goal—so very close. All the hard work of her apprenticeship, her years first on a provincial paper, then on the Guardian, then on The Times, finally at the News in its previous more sober incarnation had finally paid off. Nicholas Jenkins’s predecessor, a man Genevieve had admired very much, had given her assignments with teeth. The last story she had covered for him, an investigation into police corruption in the northeast, had won the paper two awards. Her reward, so long sought, was to have been a posting to Bosnia for three months. The day before it was confirmed, that editor was fired and Nicholas Jenkins took his place.
“Bosnia?” he had said in the six and a half minutes he finally spared her. “Sarajevo? My dear Genevieve, I think not.”
“Why not?” Genevieve asked, although she knew the answer, which had nothing to do with her capabilities and everything to do with her sex.
“Because I need you here,” Jenkins replied. “I’ve got some big stories lining up. I’m not ruling out foreign stories—don’t think that. We’ll review the situation in six months….”
Six months later there had been another excuse; a third was preferred three months after that. Now a year had gone by and she was no nearer her goal. She no longer trusted Jenkins’s temporizings, and what was she now stuck with? Telephone sex: a Johnny Appleyard tip. Genevieve glared at the lurid advertisements in front of her. She punched the next number. She would give this charade, she told herself, just one more month. If the assignments did not improve by then, if she was still being fobbed off with this trivial stuff, then she would confront the slippery Jenkins. Some tougher assignments—or, Nicholas dear, you can shove this job.
Meanwhile, she was through to the next sex line—Big Blondes—and another girl was launched on an all too familiar spiel.
“Oooh,” moaned a bored and breathy voice. “I’m all alone tonight. I’m unhooking my bra now. I know I shouldn’t, but the weather’s sooo hot. By the way, did I mention? It’s a forty-two D….”
Genevieve groaned and looked out the office window. The sky was gray. It was beginning to sleet.
“Hot weather?” she muttered. “Lucky for you, sweetheart. Not here, it’s not.”
The recording continued. There was a rustling sound as the girl turned the pages of her script. “I think I’m going to tell you what I’m doing. Oooh yes. I’m undoing my bra now. Oooh, that’s better. I’m just easing it off. It’s black lace, did I mention that?”
“No, you didn’t, moron, get on with it,” Genevieve snapped.
“It’s wired underneath,” breathed the girl. She giggled mirthlessly. “Well, it has to be, you see, because I’m a big gir
l, and it carries a lot of weight….”
“Dammit,” said Genevieve. “What is this—an engineering manual? Get to the point.”
She knew she was wasting her breath. Apart from the fact that the recording could not hear her, delay was the whole purpose of these tapes. The longer the poor sucker kept listening, the greater the profits. There seemed to be hours of this anodyne buildup. The scripts were risible, their delivery amateurish. Genevieve could imagine only too well the kind of businessmen behind them: small-time wise guys making a few bucks on the side from a back room someplace. The more she listened, the less she placed any credence on Appleyard’s tip.
She yawned, hung up on Big Blondes, and tried Swedish Au Pair. Such a feast of stereotypes. Swedish Au Pair also had a South London accent. She sounded dyslexic. Two-syllable words were giving her problems. When desperate, she whirred a vibrator. She was describing her panties, at length.
“Give me a break,” Gini moaned.
“You’re the wrong sex for this story.” One of the men from the news desk leaned over her shoulder and pressed his ear to the receiver. “Why didn’t Nicholas give it to me? Good God, who is this?”
“It’s number thirty-five. Swedish Au Pair.”
“She sounds as if she comes from South London, not Stockholm.”
“They all sound like that.”
“Bloody hell. What’s that?”
“Her vibrator. Again. She lets it buzz for thirty seconds. They all do. I timed them.”
“Nicky wants you. Now. In his office.” The news-desk man was already bored. “He says drop everything, something’s come up.”
“He should write these scripts. He has the perfect style.” Genevieve replaced the receiver.
“It’s lunch,” said the newsman, drifting away. “He says if you’ve made arrangements, cancel them. You have to meet some photographer, and it must be important. I overheard his secretary making the arrangements. Editors-dining-room stuff.”
Genevieve groaned. She stood up. “That’s the afternoon blown. You’re sure he said me? Since when did you become his messenger?”
The news-desk man gave her a languid salute. “Aren’t we all?” He turned and threaded his way down the room, through the ranked word processors, the ranked desks.
When God summoned, you went. Gini took the elevator to the fifteenth floor. She stepped out onto thick Wilton carpeting. From here the large windows overlooked docklands: there was a gray view of cranes, girders, the river, and Thames mud.
She made her way through the outer office, through the inner office. As she approached the sanctum itself, the door was thrown back and Nicholas Jenkins emerged looking powerful, pink, complacent, and svelte.
“Ah, there you are at last, Gini,” he said. “Come in, come in. Charlotte, get Gini a drink.”
Charlotte, his senior secretary, made one of her rude minion faces behind his back. She moved between Gini and the open doorway. Gini remained rooted to the spot. She was staring into the office beyond, where a tall, dark-haired man stood by Nicholas Jenkins’s desk. The office became silent; the air moved, flickered, became excessively bright.
“Come in, come in.” Nicholas bustled around her. He drew her through the door. He was leading her across to the man, who had turned and was regarding her equably.
“Gini, I want you to meet Pascal Lamartine. You’ll have heard of him, of course….”
Gini took the hand that was being held out to her. She could feel the blood draining from her face. She shook Lamartine’s hand and released it quickly. She had to say something—Nicholas was staring.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard of him. More than that—we’ve met.”
“A long time ago,” Lamartine put in, in a polite neutral tone. His accent was unchanged. Gini could still feel Jenkins’s eyes resting curiously on her face.
“Years ago,” she said rapidly, taking her tone from Lamartine. “I was still at school. Pascal is an old friend of my father’s.”
“Oh, I see,” said Jenkins—and to Gini’s relief lost interest at once.
Years ago, in Beirut. And he had never been a friend of her father’s—quite the reverse. Her father might have won that Pulitzer for his Vietnam work, but by that time fame and bourbon had made him soft.
“An old war horse,” he would say, easing himself into the first highball of the day, holding court in the Palm Bar at Beirut’s four-star Hotel Ledoyen, surrounded by fawning cronies. There was her father, sluicing bourbon and anecdotes, and there she was, silent, ignored, and embarrassed, averting her eyes from the spectacle, watching the ceiling fans as they rotated above his head.
An old war horse, an old news hound, a forty-six-year-old boozer. Her father, a living legend, the great Sam Hunter—worshipped by the rest of the press corps. These days he relied on stringers, helpers. Once a week he took a taxi to what he called the front.
And there, on the edge of the group, was a young photographer. He was French, introduced by an Australian reporter, the man from UPI at his side. Pascal Lamartine, aged twenty-three and already on his third Beirut trip. She had seen his photographs, and admired them. Sam Hunter had also seen them and dismissed them at once.
“Pictures? Who gives a damn?” It was one of his favorite refrains. “Spare me the Leica leeches, please God. One story’s worth a thousand pictures, I’ll tell you that. This stuff—today it rates an easy tear, tomorrow it’s wrapping trash. But words—they stick. They lodge in the goddamn reader’s goddamn brain. Genevieve, remember that.”
The contempt was mutual, she had known that at once. The Frenchman was introduced; he made some polite remark. He stood on the edge of the group. Some sycophant made some sycophantic joke, and her father was launched.
The Frenchman watched him quietly. He never spoke once, but Gini could feel the eddies of Lamartine’s dislike. She was young and naive, and she loved her father very much. The ceiling fans revolved; on and on her father talked, and Gini’s heart shriveled inside her. The young Frenchman stood there, silent and stony-faced. He made no effort to disguise his contempt.
Gini could feel Beirut on her skin now, in a newspaper dining room. She could smell Beirut—honey and pastries, arak and coffee grounds, cordite and mortar dust—while the English staff served them an English lunch. Nicholas Jenkins was speaking, but over and over and through his words came a richer sound—the clamor of the Beirut streets.
Machine-gun fire and the cries of street vendors; the liquid voices of the bar girls; the creak of louvered shutters, the sudden drum of summer rain, the Western songs seeping out from the dance halls, the thunderclap of bombs and wail of Arab ululations. She could feel it now, that new foreign land, that dry, rasping heat.
Pascal Lamartine had lived in a room by the harbor. It was next door to a bar, over a cheap dance hall: twelve feet square, bare as a monk’s cell, all his pictures filed in boxes. There was a mattress on the floor, two chairs, and one table. When she went to the room, she found that the dance-hall music from below filtered up. It made the air move and the floor vibrate like the deck of a ship. Several times, in the evenings, she’d stood at his window and watched night fall. When darkness came, the fishing boats left the harbor beyond, and the dancers below began their routines. She could hear the murmurs of their male audience, soft as distant thunder, a million miles beneath.
She’d imagine then, waiting, how it would be if Pascal did not come back. She’d hear the bomb, see the sniper, live his deaths. She would count the seconds, the clink of glasses from the bar, the passersby in the streets, whispers in foreign tongues. And then the door would open, and Pascal would come back. Quick, my darling, he would say, or she would say, please be quick.
Smoky twilights; neon seeping through the shutters. She could smell his skin now, recollect the detail of his gaze, feel the touch of his hand. She closed her eyes, and thought, dear God, will I never forget?
Years ago, another place, another life. She had encountered Pascal just once since.
Jenkins was drinking Meursault. He drained his glass and continued speaking. Beirut receded: This was some briefing, a new assignment. For the first time, Gini began to listen to what he said.
“…total confidentiality.” He smiled. Nicholas Jenkins, thirty-five, pink-cheeked, baby-faced, growing plump. He wore rimless nuclear-physicist-style eyeglasses. His bonhomie never quite disguised the fact that Jenkins was on the make.
“No leaks,” he continued, stabbing the air with his knife. “Anything you discover, we check it once, we check it twice. Make doubly sure. We can’t afford any errors. This story will be big.”
He looked from Gini to Pascal. He pushed his quail aside, half eaten. “I’m using you, Pascal, because I want pictures. Pictures equal proof. And I’m using you, Gini, because you have certain contacts.” He paused, and gave a tight secretive smile. “You’ll understand when I give you a name. Then you keep that name to yourselves. You don’t tout it at dinner tables. You don’t leave it in a notebook in the office. You don’t stick it up on a computer screen. You don’t use it on the office phones. You don’t trot it out to wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, favorite dog—you’ve both got that? Radio silence.”
He gave them both an impressive glance. “You work together on this. You start today, and you report to me—to me and no one else, under any circumstances. Understood?”
“Understood, Nicholas,” Gini replied, thinking what a self-dramatist he was.