War Baby (32 page)

‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ she asked him finally.

He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. They faced each other from opposite sides of the room, the distance complete.

Ryan’s room in the UN Plaza Hotel was a model of opulence, furnished in ochre and gold. From the window he looked out at the stainless-steel spire of the Chrysler building and over the East River towards Queens. Perhaps this was how it felt to live in heaven, he thought. A kind of gilt luxury, detached from the mortals below, far above the noise and smog. It was just a theory, of course. With his track record he supposed he’d never get the chance to test it for himself.

This feeling of detachment had been reinforced since returning to New York. They envied him, he knew, all his old mates; yet they had something he had missed. The grey hair and the lines on their faces had been well earned. They had learned and grown while he had simply repeated the same experiences. Even the edge can start to feel humdrum when you have balanced there all your life.

He picked up the phone and dialed Mickey’s number. She answered it on the third ring.

‘Mickey. It’s Sean.’

‘Oh. Hi.’

‘Did you enjoy the weekend?’

‘Is this a social call? I’m just on my way to work. I’ve got a late shift.’

‘I wondered if you were free for lunch tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be getting in some cot time,’ she said, using an old army phrase.

‘What about breakfast?’

‘I don’t think it would be a good idea.’

‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in town. It would be good to catch up again before I go.’

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘You still there, Mickey?’

‘What do you really want?’

Good question; a difficult one to answer. ‘I’m not trying to move in again or anything.’

‘As if you could.’

‘But we’re still friends, right?’

‘Yes, but not close friends.’

Jeez, he thought. If I were a stand-up comic they’d be throwing stuff on stage by now. ‘Okay, sorry. I’ll call you before I go. All right?’

‘Sure.’

‘Catch you, Mickey.’ He hung up. Well, the silver-tongued devil had finally deserted him. Perhaps she was right. If she had said yes, would he have tried to make room for her in his life again? Or was he just at a loose end for the night?

To hell with it. He’d call Cochrane and go to the Oak Room or the Blue Note or Nell’s; and whatever else happened, he promised himself he would not sleep alone in this massive fucking bed tonight.

Christ. He was lonely.

* * *

I wonder if this is how my parents felt, Webb thought, the night I left for Vietnam. Did they feel this same dread and helplessness? Too late to ask them now.

His gaze moved along the study wall to a framed black and white photograph, a young boy with a crooked school tie, matchstick legs protruding from his school shorts, grinning self-consciously at the camera. Hard to imagine he was once that little, awkward person.

I suppose that was who I stayed, inside anyway, until I went to Vietnam. It was a monumental risk, but it paid off. Surrey to Saigon was about as far as you could travel in those days without actually stepping off the planet. His mother didn’t even know where it was; she thought it was in South America. Neither of them could understand his ambition. His father had thought he was a practically a press baron when he got him into a Chelsea game for free when he was on photographic assignment.

When he gave up his job to go to Asia to chase wars, they thought he was mad. He probably was. But sometimes it helped to be a little crazy; Vietnam led to Washington, then to further assignments in Angola and the Middle East and Central America.

Now the schoolboy in that photograph, only ever an average student, once almost expelled from grammar school for smoking in the boys’ toilets, was a minor celebrity, as much at home on daytime television chat shows as he was on his back porch here in Lincoln Cove.

It was a life mortgaged on risk. The last thing he wanted was someone he loved to try and emulate him. It was just too fucking dangerous.

A flurry of rain slapped against the windows. The mournful sound of a foghorn came from the other side of the cove as a fishing boat made its way through the fog.

He went to the bookshelf and took out a leather-bound photograph album. He opened it at random and stared at a place called Vietnam. It was a country that no longer existed because this Vietnam was permanently at war and was peopled and governed largely by Americans. The main form of transport was the helicopter and the favorite form of dress was camouflage gear or a body bag.

Such a very long time ago.

Jenny was downstairs, her luggage on the floor. She was sorting through it yet again to find items she might safely leave behind. Travel light, he had told her, and she had taken him at his word. Everything she’d need for God knows how long - three weeks, perhaps three years - was now crammed in a small backpack and a green canvas ex-US Army-issue holdall.

She had moved out of her Tribeca apartment and was spending her last night here in Lincoln Cove before the flight to Zagreb in the morning. He said he would drive her to JFK himself.

He held out the black and white photograph he had taken from the photograph album, him and Ryan arm in arm outside the Continental Hotel in Saigon.

‘What’s this?’ she said, surprised.

‘Take it with you.’

She gave him an uncertain grin. ‘You had a lot more hair then, uncle. You were practically a hippy. Haven’t you got something more recent?’

‘You always asked me about your father,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘Look at the guy on the left.’

The blood drained from her face. ‘That’s your friend Ryan.’

He could not meet her eyes. ‘I can’t be sure. I have no proof.’

She sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘Why would you think this?’

She stared at the photograph. ‘I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’

Well, I can’t believe I did, he thought. Perhaps it was watching him flirt with you that day and knowing that you two will almost certainly see each other again in Zagreb. ‘I knew your mother,’ he said. ‘Through Ryan.’

He had thought of telling her a little about his role in that sad episode, but changed his mind. It would sound as if he were trying to make himself appear heroic. If she was going to hate him, let her.

He continued, his voice a monotone. ‘It wasn’t his fault. I’m sure he planned to get you and your mother out with him. But there was a rocket attack a couple of nights before Saigon fell. That was when your mother was wounded. Ryan had been hit in the head by shrapnel a few hours before at Newport Bridge. They out him on a medevac out of Saigon. Dave Crosby and I went looking for you, but we couldn’t find you. Anyway ... That’s what happened. He didn’t abandon you.’

He was giving Ryan a little more credit than he deserved, but what the hell.

‘Did he ever come looking for us?’

‘We all thought you were dead.’

She just stared at the photograph, rocking backwards and forwards, her arms crossed across her stomach.

‘You really don’t remember him?’ On the weekend Ryan was at the cottage, Webb had thought that seeing him again would jog her memory, but there had been no sign of recognition - from either Jenny or Ryan.

‘I remember a man who came to our apartment. But I don’t remember what he looked like. I was just a kid.’

‘I think he was in Cambodia a lot of that time. Vietnam had stopped being news by the early seventies.’

‘Why did he wait so long to get us out?’

Webb said nothing.

Jenny tucked the photograph into the breast pocket of her shirt. She stood up slowly, her eyes unfocused, like a sleepwalker. ‘I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me before. How long have you known? Or did you always know?’

He nodded.

‘Then perhaps it’s best I’m going away,’ she said, and she went into her bedroom and closed the door.

* * *

When he got back from the airport the front door was open and there was a woman sitting on the deck.

He parked the jeep and walked inside. He went to the liquor cabinet, then changed his mind. Instead he went outside onto the deck. The sky was a washed blue and a pale, watery sun was chasing the shadows across the garden.

‘Mickey,’ he said.

‘I took the day off. I figured you could do with some moral support.’

‘Thanks.’

She was sitting in one of the director’s chairs, her legs up on the rail, staring at the harbor. She was wearing a hooded jersey, her hands thrust deep into the pockets. The wind had raised a flush of color to her cheeks. ‘You okay?’ she asked him.

He sat down beside her. His body felt like lead. ‘Not really.’

‘Jenny’s a survivor. One of the best. She’ll be okay.’

‘I hope so.’

She reached out, took his hand. They sat for a while in companionable silence, watching the waves lap against the flat shale rocks.

‘I don’t know if this is a good time to say this,’ she said, ‘but ... I’ve been thinking a lot about us lately. I’ve been making a decision. Want to hear it?’

A seagull landed on the lawn, summoning painful memories. It seemed he had reached a nexus; today had apparently been chosen as the day he must wipe the slate clean and try again, without secrets. He took a deep breath. ‘Before you say anything, there’s something I think you ought to know.’

‘Does it affect us?’

‘It might. It might affect the way you feel about me.’

‘Oh.’ She took her hand away. ‘Then perhaps I don’t want to hear it.’

‘It also has to do with Jenny, and it has to do with Ryan.’

She took her feet off the rail and sat up, as if bracing herself for a physical blow. ‘Okay. Then I guess you’d better tell all.’

McSorley’s Old Alehouse, New York

It was a Saturday night and McSorley’s was packed to the rafters. It was decorated in the style of a turn-of-the-century alehouse, with timber paneling and antique chairs and tables, sepia photographs and cartoons crowding the walls. Halfway along one wall was a wrought-iron stove with a flue that arched over the drinkers’ heads.

It was also known as McSurly’s because of the attitude of some of the bar staff.

Webb, Crosby, Cochrane and Doyle had made their way there in a taxi after leaving the Seventh Regiment Armory. None of them wanted the evening to end.

And besides, there was still the rest of the story to be told.

‘I don’t believe you left it at that,’ Cochrane was saying. ‘I know you. You would have tried something else to stop Jenny leaving.’

‘She’d made up her mind.’

‘I’ve met her,’ Wendy Doyle said. ‘In Sarajevo. An extraordinary young woman.’

Crosby was getting boozy, Webb noticed, the kind of drunkenness people fall into when their brains are already addled by a lifetime of abuse. This was more like the Crosby he knew; the debonair adventurer of earlier had disappeared. ‘Ah, Bosnia. Perhaps in twenty years’ time we’ll be having a Sarajevo reunion. Maybe there’ll be a television series and compilation album. Music from the Bosnia era.’

Webb shook his head. ‘I doubt it.’

‘And so off she went to war,’ Cochrane said. ‘Your little war baby. What happened to her?’

‘I don’t really know much about the first part of the story,’ Webb said. ‘I didn’t go to Bosnia until much later. Perhaps Wendy here can tell it.’

Doyle smiled. ‘Not really. I didn’t know her then. Besides, I wasn’t in Zagreb long enough. I was trying to get through to Sarajevo. I only spoke to Ryan for a couple of minutes. I just remember seeing this Eurasian girl standing in the foyer of the Intercon looking completely lost. My God, she looked like a kid. I couldn’t imagine how she was ever going to survive.’

‘And that was where she met Ryan?’ Crosby asked Webb. ‘Well, that part of it was inevitable, I suppose. And if he hadn’t been there, I’m sure she would have gone looking for him.’

‘Well, come on,’ Cochrane said to him. ‘Don’t keep us in suspense. I’ve always wanted to know what happened there.’ Webb shrugged and smiled. ‘I only got the story second hand, of course. But I’ll tell you what I know.’

Zagreb, Croatia, December 1991

‘Most wars literally, not merely photographically, go through people’s living rooms.’

Charles Mohr, war correspondent

‘Nothing makes an easier lead sentence

than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby

in a typhus hospital.’

P. J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell

Jelacic Square had been, before the war, one of the city’s most pleasant squares, closed to traffic and surrounded by stately cream and grey Habsburg buildings. It echoed to the sound of tram bells and the cries of balloon sellers; skateboarders with fluorescent watches weaved their way through the crowds, money changers worked the tourists.

But now the Ustashas had taken over the square, wearing
Ante Pavelic
T-shirts, clustering around the granite tiered lampposts to hawk the Croat-language newspapers that enshrined their fascist philosophies while their radios blared ‘Ostaski Becarac’, the nationalists’ street fighting song.

The statues in the nearby cathedral had been winched down from the walls and transferred to storage in anticipation of air strikes. There were long queues of refugees outside the Caritas office. All the shops in the centre of the city had
God Protect Croatia
plastered across their windows in stick-on white letters.

The people of Zagreb obsessed about news, reading
Vjesnik
or the
Vecernji List
, listening to Zagreb TV in cafes and bars, the bulletins interspersed with patriotic music and videos of Croat soldiers running through wheat fields in slow motion firing AK-47s, the empty cartridge casings somersaulting out of the magazines to the music of ‘Brothers in Arms.’ All the talk was of Vukovar, a town in eastern Slavonia that had become Croatia’s Stalingrad. Now it was just a pile of rubble.

The war was creeping closer.

* * *

There was a bizarre festive atmosphere in the Press Centre in Zagreb’s Intercontinental Hotel. Correspondents, photographers and television news crews were planning their days at the front with all the enthusiasm of children going on an outing. Every major news organisation was represented: the Guardian, Reuters, the BBC, the Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, UPI, IPA, CNN, El Mundo. Guides and interpreters were hastily arranged. Other journalists were occupied at one of the two press conferences currently under way. Those with a greater sense of self-preservation were spending their war in the bar, taking their information from the eavesdropped conversations around them and the thrice-daily English-language news bulletins on Croatian radio.

Ryan was in the foyer, planning his day’s itinerary, when he saw her. She was wearing a fur-lined bomber jacket, olive-green fatigue pants and hiking boots. She looked utterly lost, he thought, like a kid on her first day at a new school. No friends to talk to and no idea where to go for her first class.

After he had overcome his initial surprise he got up and walked over. ‘Jenny,’ he said.

He thought she would be both relieved and delighted to see him, to find at last an ally among the chaos. But she wasn’t. The smile of recognition seemed reluctant.

‘Sean,’ she said.

A stiff embrace. ‘What are you doing here?’

She indicated the UNPROFOR press accreditation on her jacket.

‘The Times sent you?’ he asked, knowing that was impossible.

‘I’ve gone freelance.’

‘Here? It’s not the best bloody place to start.’

‘It’s a war and it’s on the front page.’

‘Hugh let you go?’

‘I’m twenty years old.’

He put her belligerence down to fear. But there was something else about her attitude, something he could not fathom at all. Strange.

‘How long have you been in Zagreb?’

‘A couple of days. I’m still getting myself organized.’

‘Let me buy you breakfast,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can help you out.’

* * *

‘The first thing you have to remember,’ Ryan told her, ‘is that twenty-one journalists have already died covering this war. Sixty three died in Vietnam, but that was over about twenty-five years. This place has chalked up a third of that total in about six months. I’ve been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Angola, El Salvador, the Gulf War - I reckon this is the most dangerous assignment I’ve had. The Serbs are deliberately targeting us. Go out there in a car with a press sticker on it and you might as well draw a bulls-eye on the side. Have you got yourself a flak jacket?’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I don’t have the money.’

‘I’ll get you one.’ She started to protest but he held up his hand. ‘You can pay me back later. Or I’ll work it into my swindle sheet somehow. I’ll say mine got flogged. It happens all the time. The baggage handlers at the airport steal them and sell them on the black market. The bloody things weigh about twenty kilos, probably more than you do dripping wet, but it could save your life.’

‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘It’s just the kind of bloke I am. Look, I’ve known Spider a long time. I owe him a couple.’

She put her spoon in her coffee cup, toyed with it. It had gone cold.

‘You need a few basic items,’ he said. ‘Are you planning to take snaps?’

‘I’m not an expert. But I’ve got a camera.’

‘Got condoms?’

She stared at him. ‘We’re in a war zone. Safe sex wasn’t my first priority.’

‘You put your used films in them to stop them getting wet. I suppose Spider’s made sure you’ve got the rest of it. Flashlight, Swiss army knife, that sort of thing?’

She nodded.

‘What about morphine?’

‘Drug parties?’

‘You get yourself shot up, you won’t think it’s a joke.’

‘I have a basic first aid kit. Field dressings, rubber tubing for tourniquets.’

‘You’ll need cash in German marks, British pounds and Croatian dinars. I hope you brought plenty of spare film. One roll costs two hundred American in the lobby.’

‘Uncle even gave me a spare camera. An old Leica 3-C.’

‘Good.’ He shook his head. ‘What did he think about you coming here?’

‘He was against it.’

‘I bet he was. You must be out of your mind.’

‘Fast track to the top.’

‘I’ll give you another cliché: Easy way to get killed.’

‘Uncle always said he was one of the few people the Vietnam war was good to. He said it was a simple equation: you have to be in the right place, at the right time, and not die.’

‘Yes, you too can be Sydney Schanberg. Is that what you want?’

‘I don’t want to be doing court reports the rest of my life.’

‘Let me tell you a story. Last week I met this Pommy bloke. He drove out from England in a clapped-out twenty-year-old Vauxhall Viva. A Photographer of Fortune, he called himself. He was here three days, sold two photographs to the AP for about forty bucks each, and on the third day me and a photographer from Sigma loaded him into a box. Or the bits of him that were left, anyway. He couldn’t afford a flak jacket either.’

‘You’re not going to frighten me away.’

‘No, I’ll leave that to the Serbs. Have you got yourself an interpreter?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, how about I save you some money. You come with us today. Be the sorcerer’s apprentice.’

‘I don’t want to be anybody’s apprentice.’

‘Believe me, when you’re green as you are, you need all the help you can get. Put your pride under your flak jacket. It’s the first thing that gets blown away.’

She looked frightened all right, he thought. Fear is something you can smell. But she was a survivor. Webb had told him her story; there had to be some tempered steel in there somewhere.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him.

‘You’re my mate’s kid, for Christ’s sakes. What would Spider say to me if I let his little girl get hurt? He’d never forgive me.’

‘I’m not his little girl.’

Ryan shrugged and laughed. ‘Well, you’re somebody’s little girl,’ he said easily.

Jenny didn’t even smile.