by Jon Cleary
“There’s nothing worse than an aviary of chattering women at their birdseed,” said Claudine, looking around the room at the well-dressed women, “but here at this club there is a nice sense of security. It is very reassuring to come here occasionally.”
“Do you need reassuring?” said Cleo.
“No. I thought you might. You are amongst women who feel very secure because of their position. If you are going to be editor of the Courier, these are the women you will be talking to.”
Not if I have my way, Cleo thought. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mrs. Roux, but isn’t this club something like a female equivalent of the House of Lords in Britain? A lot of hereditary titles that have no influence at all. There’s Mrs. Fairman over there—” She nodded discreetly across the room at a white-haired woman presiding at a window table. “I recognize her from pictures on our social pages. She’s the wife of a banker, one of our biggest. I don’t think she would have two cents’ influence outside her own home.”
“Mrs. Fairman owns sixty per cent of the stock in that particular bank,” said Claudine. “When her husband goes home he bends his knee when he enters the front door—if he has any sense.”
“Perhaps so. But Mrs. Fairman will still buy only one copy of the Courier. I want her bank’s employees, the five hundred or a thousand or whatever, to buy our paper and not the Times or the News.”
“I can’t object to your ideas for the paper because I don’t know what they are. I do object to your becoming editor because I don’t think you should be thrown into the deep end so soon.”
“When a ship is sinking, Mrs. Roux, there is no shallow end.”
Claudine smiled, safe on dry land, secure in the Colony Club. She knew the girl was right, but she was not going to go off the deep end and agree with her at once. Instead she said, “I hope eventually you will not try to emulate Mr. Murdoch on the Post and buy me out.”
“The columnists will mention my name with Rupert’s because we’re both Australians. I’ll ignore that. I didn’t come to New York to be in his shadow.” Not now, when she was about to step out into the bright sunshine again. “His is an afternoon paper and ours is a morning one. I don’t see us as competitors.”
“I think you’ll always be a competitor,” said Claudine, taking up a spoonful of the salmon mousse. “What do you hear from Alain?”
Does she think I’m going to compete against him somehow? “Nothing. What do you?”
“He seems to be enjoying Paris. He has met up with your friend Mr. Border. Do you ever hear from him?”
“Never.” It was her turn to change the subject: “I’m having dinner with Lord Cruze this evening. He gets in from London this afternoon. Shall I tell him you’re talking to Jake Lintas?”
“You may as well. Are you and Jack back on good terms?”
“Is that Colony Club for, Are we sleeping together again? No, we’re not. It is still a business arrangement.”
She had begun to feel the urge again for sex, but she was giving no encouragement to Jack, still afraid of the demands that would follow. There was plenty of sex available, but she could not bring herself to think of one-night stands. She had gone out one lonely evening and visited several of the better-known singles bars and felt she might have been visiting a cattle market where the bulls and cows did their own bidding. She had gone home convinced there was more Irish puritanism in her than she had admitted. Brigid Spearfield, had she known, would have said another chorus of Hail Marys in thanks.
“I’ll talk to Lord Cruze myself tomorrow,” said Claudine. “He, I suppose, will decide how soon he wants you in as editor. You owe him a lot, don’t you?”
“We all have our debts. Even those of us who inherit what we have.”
“I don’t think I shall put you up for membership here. I think you may feel more at home in one of the lesser clubs.”
IV
When Tom Border, who paid a weekly visit to the Courier’s Paris bureau to read the paper, was told by Chuck Nevin of Hal Rainer’s murder in Kansas City he was greatly upset. He had never been a close friend of Hal’s, but he had been closer to him than to anyone else on the paper. Hal had been his mentor when he had joined the Courier, though they had never worked on police rounds together; it had been a case of the old-timer out-of-towner helping the newly-arrived feel at home. Hal had been the sort of newspaperman Tom admired, the solid, hard-working reporter who kept his integrity and believed, under all his cynicism, that he was working for the public good. His death made Tom feel no better than he had felt for the past year.
Though they were still married, he and Simone were only living together. They made love and they went to cinemas and entertained friends, but Tom had come to feel, with an unsettling sense of guilt, that it was all only temporary; nothing, not even the marriage vows, really bound them. He blamed himself; Simone was blameless. She was everything a loving wife should be; but she was French and in France. She had never really been an adventurer: she had explored the world, but always on an Air France schedule. She did not want to drift, that led nowhere. They should buy an apartment here in Paris, settle down, start a family, build their future so that in old age they would be secure and comfortable. Had he ever seen a really happy old bohemian?
“Chérie, I’m not a bohemian, for crissake! I just don’t want to be tied down to the one place all my life, that’s all. And I’m a long way from being old.”
“I didn’t say you were.” Then she said in French, “Let us speak French. I can argue better then.”
That would be the end of him in the argument. His French had improved in the time they had been living in Paris, but when he used it in public the café waiters and the storekeepers winced and did not stop to listen to him. The French think their language is the most beautiful and precise of all languages and they do not like foreigners abusing it. They would prefer the rest of the world to be as dumb as they often think the rest of the world is.
“We’ll have to move out of this apartment,” he said in stubborn English. “We can’t go on paying this rent.”
“Exactly what I said when we moved in here,” she said in French. “We should not be paying money to landlords, but should own our own home.”
“We don’t have that sort of capital.” The returns from The Vacant Mirror had been good, but not as good as those from his first novel.
“We do. Your latest royalty statement came in yesterday from Gus Green, for both your books. One hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
“We’re going downhill.” Success had taught him new standards of penury.
They went on arguing, something they had been doing regularly for some months. The arguments were never bitter; neither wanted to hurt the other. Everything usually ended in an embrace, but it worried him that they had started to bicker.
Then the phone rang and he reached for it gratefully. It was Alain Roux. “I want to take you both to lunch. Pick you up in an hour,”
He liked Alain, but they had seen too much of him lately. “I have an appointment, Alain—”
“Then lend me Simone, I’ll take her to lunch.”
Simone liked Alain. She was full of the mothering instinct; whenever Tom had a cold she put him to bed and fussed over him as if he had yellow fever. When Alain, limping on his stick, had first come to their apartment her heart had overflowed: he had to be looked after. She said she would go to lunch with him, kissed Tom, their argument forgotten at once, and went into the bedroom to make herself look pretty for poor crippled Alain.
“He’s not poor, he’s a hundred times richer than I am, and don’t mention the word cripple in front of him.”
“Don’t be stupid, chéri.” She was speaking English again, he had been forgiven. “I am a very discreet mother-figure.”
“He has a mother back in New York.”
“She sounds like an ogress, from what you’ve said.”
He went out to the appointment he had invented on the spur of the moment, wandered ar
ound like a lost tourist and finished up in the Courier bureau. Chuck Nevin had become accustomed to his dropping in like this and waved him to the beat-up visitor’s chair. The Paris office still looked as if New York had forgotten it existed. Tom didn’t mind. It put him back in the Twenties, he felt he might look out the window and see Hemingway or Fitzgerald passing by on the other side of the street. With nothing else to occupy him, nostalgia, even for a time he had never known, was as good as getting drunk. Something he had not yet attempted.
“You should go back to New York,” said Chuck Nevin, who would never go back, “and go to work on a paper again. You’re not an author, Tom, you’re a newspaperman. You’ve made your money. Stash it away and go back to real work.”
He had been thinking about it, but only idly. He picked up the press wire sheets lying on Nevin’s desk and ran his eye down the items. The world was still fraying at the seams; he sometimes wondered why it didn’t fall apart. America was embarrassed by the number of postwar Vietnamese refugees. Oil prices were still rising and motorists in the West were angry about greedy camel-riding Arabs who didn’t care how necessary gasoline was to motorists in the West who didn’t have camels as support transport. Political leaders were hinting that they had promised the voters too much and now knew they couldn’t deliver. Bolivia had had its annual coup. Two English footballers had been sacked by their club manager for kissing in the shower instead of on the field. Then he saw the item datelined Hamburg.
He looked up. “Rosa Fuchs has escaped from jail.”
“It looks quite a story. A gang getting a prisoner out of a top security German prison.”
“Are you sending anyone to follow it up?” Chuck Nevin spread his hands, a gesture he had learned from his Gallic family. “Who to send? I’ve got one other man beside myself. He’s down in Italy waiting for the latest Premier to fall or be pushed.”
“I’ll cover it for you. Freelance rates and expenses.”
“I was hoping you’d volunteer—you’ll have a personal angle on it. Freelance rates and minimum expenses. Find a nice gasthof and eat at McDonalds. They should have a McDonalds in Hamburg of all places.”
“You want me to go on foot or can the Courier afford the plane fare?”
“You wouldn’t settle for a hang-glider?”
Tom went home to pack an overnight bag and to tell Simone where he was going. He could not tell her why he was going; he was afraid of exposing his guilt. She was not at home, she had already gone out to lunch with Alain; he left a loving note and said he would call her from Hamburg. Then he went out to the airport, bought a first-class ticket to Hamburg and, when he landed in that city, booked into the Vier Jahreszeiten, a nice gasthof but with no McDonalds attached. He still cared nothing for clothes; but he wasn’t going to wear a hair-shirt. Comfortable guilt was better, but when he called Simone tonight he wouldn’t tell her where he was staying. She was sure to counsel thrift, and in French too.
He felt a certain excitement when he went out to start work on the story. An odd memory dropped into his mind of an old game dog that he and his father would take with them when they went duck-shooting over by Table Rock Lake. The dog would sit around the house all summer like an old man waiting to die, only paying attention to the family when it was fed; then autumn would come and the dog would seemingly cock one eye towards the sky, looking for southbound ducks, then get up and walk around, getting its creaky limbs greased for the hunting that was sure to come. He felt like that old dog now, felt his limbs being greased and his sense of smell sharpened.
The police remembered him and were not glad to see him. Germans hated failure even more than Americans did, he thought; and none more than the police. The world’s criticism of what it thought of as police incompetence at the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 still rankled with the authorities; the Hamburg police did not appreciate the return of one of Rosa Fuch’s kidnap victims to report on her escape from custody. It had been an amazing escape, full of imagination and daring.
A vanload of prison officers, returning from a football match against a police team, had been ambushed by six terrorists. The terrorists had taken charge of the van after gassing the prison officers, who had been relieved of their uniforms and then transferred to a truck which had driven them away to be held on the outskirts of the city for several hours. The van, with the terrorist now disguised as the officers, had been driven to the prison and admitted by a less-than-alert gatekeeper, the one chancing to luck that the terrorists had taken. Once inside they had overpowered guards, got Rosa Fuchs out of her cell and shot their way out of the prison, killing four guards and wounding two others on the way. Rosa Fuchs had been a model prisoner up till her escape.
“She will not like reading any story you may write on her, Herr Border,” said the inspector in charge of the case, meaning the police would also not like reading it. “You were a strong witness against her at her trial.”
“I won’t be writing for German newspapers, Herr Inspector. I doubt very much if she’ll care what’s in the New York Courier.”
The inspector looked relieved; he wouldn’t have to read what Herr Border wrote. He gave Tom all the facts of the escape; or almost all. One didn’t help journalists draw cartoons of one’s colleagues . . . “And we have hopes of an early re-capture of the Fuchs woman and the arrest of those who organized her escape.”
Tom had never met a policeman who didn’t have hopes of an early arrest. He went back to the hotel, wrote his piece on what he had and phoned it through to Chuck Nevin, giving it extra depth with his own reactions to the escape of the girl who had kidnapped him and Cleo all that time ago. He hung up after talking to Nevin, then called Simone. She was upset, almost distraught.
“I called M. Nevin and he told me why you had gone to Hamburg. What are you doing? Trying to get yourself killed?”
“Chérie, they don’t even know I’m in town. They’re not interested in me.”
“That girl, what’s her name? Fuchs? She’ll be interested, if she finds out you’re in Hamburg. You’re a fool, you don’t understand women.”
You can say that again. “I’ll take care, chérie, I promise. I’ll tidy up the story tomorrow and I’ll be home in the evening. How was Alain?”
“More sensible than you.” She was silent a moment, then she said, “I love you. Please be careful.”
He hung up, guilt hanging on him like an iron overcoat. Having tasted news again, he knew that this was not going to be the last time he would go off on his own; he would be pestering Chuck Nevin for further stories to cover, at freelance rates and minimum expenses; he would be spending his novelist’s royalties to satisfy himself as a newspaperman. The old game dog was hoping for a permanent season out there in the swamps where news fell. The Rosa Fuchs escape was as big an event for him as it was for the German prison authorities.
The phone rang. He picked it up, expecting to hear Simone again; then remembered he had not told her where he was staying. It was not Simone, though it was a woman. “Herr Border?”
“Yes.”
“This is Rosa Fuchs.”
How the hell had she known where to find him? Was there some leak in the police department? “How did you know I was here? What do you want?”
“Never mind how I knew where to contact you—that doesn’t concern you. I want to warn you, Herr Border. I have other things to do right now, but some day, if you come back to Germany, I shall kill you. You and Fräulein Spearfield.”
“She is not here with me.” His voice seemed to be shaking in his throat, but it sounded steady enough in his ears.
“Pass on the warning,” said Rosa Fuchs. Then her voice lightened, she laughed, as if freedom were taking hold of her like a drug. “Auf wiedersehn, Heir Border. Take care, as you Americans say.”
She hung up and Tom wondered if he should call the police. Then he decided against it: he would tell no one of Rosa Fuchs’s threat, not Simone, not even Cleo.
Sensibly he left Hamburg next morning,
going no further with the story. Simone welcomed him back as if he were from a war returning: “Oh, I was worried for you! Don’t volunteer again for such dangers—”
He tried to sound convincing. “There was no danger. I went after a story, I got it and now it’s all over. Relax.”
“You promise me there won’t be other stories? Sit down and write another novel.”
Just like that. “I’ll write one after lunch. Let’s make love.”
She was always willing to do that. Then, as they lay in bed afterwards, she said, “I think I am pregnant. Isn’t that marvellous?”
“Great,” he said, and knew he must sound like a cheerleader whose team had just lost the ball game 52-nil. He hastened to sound better: “I mean really great! If it’s a boy, I want him born in the United States, so he can grow up to be President.”
“What’s wrong with being President of France?” She was building up to start speaking in French.
“Nothing, darling,” he said, keeping English in the bed with them. “Let’s make love again. We may get a President for each side of the Atlantic.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said, and he wasn’t sure whether she was trying to give him a lesson in politics or biology.
A week later, when he dropped in once more at the Courier bureau, a note was waiting for him from the associate editor in New York: An excellent story. It brought back memories. We ran it on Page One and dug up an old pic of you to head it—I hope you haven’t changed. Love, Cleo.
Love, Cleo: that meant nothing these days, when everyone was everyone’s darling. And what memories had it brought back to her? Memories of them together in bed or in danger? And no, he hadn’t changed; at least not in his feelings for her. He wrote back, a note as short as hers, polite but distant. But he knew he could never be distant enough from her.