The Canal House Read online

  “So how does McFarland connect with me?”

  “Four months ago a group of tourists were kidnapped from a game park in northern Uganda by some guerrillas called the Lord’s Righteous Army. They’re led by a local prophet, Samuel Okello.”

  “I’ve read about him. He kidnaps children from the villages.”

  “The Red Cross, the Ugandans, and our State Department have tried to contact this group, but they haven’t succeeded. The British sent in military advisers to help the Ugandan army, but the guerrillas killed twenty-three of their soldiers in an ambush. One of the hostages is a librarian from Madison, Wisconsin. Little kids are tying yellow ribbons to a tree on her front lawn. It would be a wonderful story if a journalist could track down Okello and interview him.”

  “And McFarland wants to try?”

  “He thinks it’s possible.”

  “Who’s going to pay him to do it?”

  “He’ll sell the story to the Washington Post and the Telegraph. We’ll get magazine rights.”

  “And I’d be the photographer?”

  “Exactly. McFarland takes a few risks, but he’s been very successful. There’s a good chance he can pull this off.”

  In our business “takes a few risks” meant “he’s completely insane.” I didn’t know if Carter thought he was doing me a big favor, but the situation was obvious. Daniel McFarland was looking for a photographer because everyone else had turned him down. If the Lord’s Righteous Army had already kidnapped some tourists, it would enjoy capturing some foreign journalists. We might find Samuel Okello’s camp, but we wouldn’t be able to leave.

  “Do you want to go to Uganda? I told New York that you’d spent a lot of time there during the Rwandan civil war.”

  “I spent three days in Kampala, then crossed the border at Kabale.”

  “Sounds like you’re an expert.”

  Carter glanced at me, waiting for my decision. Whenever there’s a big choice in life, it’s usually no choice at all. I hesitated for a few seconds, then turned and walked back to the cherubs. “Do I get expenses?”

  “A plane ticket plus fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “When do I leave?”

  “First, you’ve got to fly down to Rome. McFarland wants to meet and see if you can work together.”

  “I can work with the devil, given a limited time frame.”

  “McFarland isn’t exactly the devil. But John says he’s very intense.”

  “In other words, he’s crazy.”

  Carter took out a handkerchief and flicked some dust off his shoes. “McFarland will bring you to the picture, Nicholas. You just have to take it.”

  2 THE ITALIAN SUIT

  I walked Carter Howard back to his office, then caught a bus going to Bloomsbury. It was too damn depressing to sit in my hotel room so I walked across Montague Street to the British Museum. Most of the tourist groups were being herded toward the Elgin Marbles. I threaded my way through a crowd of Japanese high school kids, entered the Egyptian collection, and headed for the ground-floor gallery and the Shabaka Stone.

  The stone is a chunk of black basalt that’s named after the pharaoh Shabaka who founded the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. It’s said to contain a complete account of the creation of the world, but someone carried the stone away from the ruins of Shabaka’s palace and used it to crush grain. A hand-sized divot was chipped out in the center of the stone and little channels radiated from that like the rays of the sun.

  Sitting on a bench, I stared at the faint hieroglyphics rubbed away by some Bronze Age miller. I knew why Carter had hooked me up with Daniel McFarland. Journalists are like gamblers eager to rub up against a winner at the dice table. If Daniel McFarland had the luck to get a good story, then perhaps he could pass it on to me.

  I made a reservation on Alitalia and flew down to Rome the next morning. Ann Weinstein had printed off some of Daniel’s old clips and I read them on the plane. There were two kinds of feature articles about the Third World: “Why? Oh, why?” and “Fancy that!” Daniel had come up with a different approach, a point of view that told the reader “These are the facts. What are you going to do about it?” During the Gulf War he had been one of the few journalists to report on the Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq. His article about the Kurds’ retreat to the Turkish border was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Daniel never placed political statements in any of his writing, but he explained how each army had acquired the guns and bombs used to kill civilians. When you read one of Daniel’s articles, you always felt uncomfortable—and a little angry—about what was going on.

  I changed my money at Leonardo da Vinci airport, then took the train into the city. Newsweek wasn’t paying for the trip so I checked into a cheap hotel near the Stazione Termini. I took a shower, killed a few cockroaches, and tried to contact Daniel McFarland at his three phone numbers. Carter said that Daniel had a home in the countryside north of the city, but the phone rang forever and no one picked it up. The second number was linked to an office answering machine so I left a message there. The final number was for a cell phone, but I kept getting a perky recording in Italian.

  I went to a trattoria in the old Jewish Ghetto and ate two bowls of oxtail soup. When I returned to my hotel, the night clerk bowed slightly and called me dottore as if I were a classics professor who had arrived to study the ruins. Signor McFarland had called and requested that I meet him at the Stampa Estera for lunch.

  I had been there for a news conference a couple of years ago and remembered that it was near the main post office. It was a club, run by the Italian government, for the foreign journalists working in Italy. I took the subway to the Spanish Steps the next day and strolled past the tourists, the North African street hustlers, and the carabinieri dressed in their dark blue uniforms. A flock of pigeons rose up into the sky and I took a picture for the hell of it.

  I found the small building that housed the Stampa Estera and went upstairs. The first floor lobby had a few saggy club chairs and a well-stocked bar. I told the elderly bartender that I was looking for Daniel McFarland and he pointed to the dining room where several people were eating lunch. I’m a confident man behind the camera, but this was a job interview. I took a deep breath and walked into the room.

  When I last saw Daniel at the Café Metropole in Sarajevo, he had a two-week beard and wore blue jeans. Now he was clean-shaven and dressed in a well-cut Italian suit without a necktie. His brown hair was still long enough to show that he wasn’t a corporate journalist worried about his mortgage and pension plan. There was an intensity about Daniel, a way that he watched your eyes and listened to your words that was somewhat intimidating. You knew right away that he was one of those people who burn brightly as they move through the world.

  He got up from the table and smiled. “Nicky Bettencourt.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Daniel McFarland.” We shook hands. “How was the flight?”

  “Short.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Hotel Centro. Near the Termini.”

  We both sat down at the table. “Carter said you were in Bosnia for a while.”

  “Yeah. I knew a photographer who used to work with you.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Victor Zikowski.”

  Daniel looked away and poured some wine into my glass. “Bosnia was tough on photographers. A few months after Victor was killed, I was working with Tommy Boyle and he got hit in the neck with a chunk of shrapnel. The wound messed up his vocal cords. Now he talks like a frog.”

  A waitress came over and gave me a menu. “Stay away from the fish,” Daniel said. “The lamb’s okay, but it varies. I recommend the spaghetti alla puttanesca.”

  “Puttanesca. Whore’s style,” I said. “The perfect dish for a photographer.”

  I thought that we were going to have a private meal together, but a Slovenian journalist and a reporter for a Brazilian newspaper joined us a few minutes later. Daniel ate lunch at the Stampa Estera two
or three times a week and anyone who showed up was welcome at his table. It didn’t take me long to realize that most of the people eating with Daniel didn’t exactly have a real job. They were stringers, squeezing out a living with an occasional article for a newspaper in Finland or a Catholic magazine in Ukraine.

  Whenever Daniel ate at the Stampa Estera, he bought the endless fojettas of wine that the waitress set down in the middle of the table. Everyone was supposed to pay for his own meal, but the bill magically became smaller for the hungry-looking Moroccan reporter and ex-Pravda correspondent with the frayed shoes. Daniel had realized that many of the older journalists hanging out at the Stampa were walking encyclopedias of valuable information. We talked about many things that afternoon, but I remember a long discussion about the Golden Triangle: the opium-producing region in Laos, Thailand, and Burma. The Slovenian journalist and a Frenchman who joined us later had traveled through the area and Daniel was relentless with his questions: How did you get there? What was the best way to hire a guide? How do you offer a bribe to a Thai soldier? Information was received and filed, ready for future use, but he was also funny and charming, and I began to feel a little jealous. Some people can strap on ice skates and glide through social situations while people like me are flailing their arms and grabbing for the rail.

  The kitchen stopped serving lunch at four o’clock. The other journalists left and Daniel ordered a double espresso. “What’s this story about?” he asked. “Hostages, right? Game parks. Northeast Uganda. The Lord’s Righteous Army.”

  I had drunk too much wine and was feeling fuzzy around the edges. “Why are you asking me? I thought you knew all about it. You told everyone in London that you could find Samuel Okello.”

  “I said it was possible.” He set down the little coffee cup with a sharp click. “As I recall, the hostages were British and American—”

  “And one German.”

  “Good. I can sell the story to a German newspaper, along with the Post and the Daily Telegraph.”

  I followed him upstairs to the third floor where they kept the mailboxes and a soundproof room for TV interviews. Several people greeted Daniel, but he didn’t stop to chat. He led me into a long, narrow room crowded with ten steel desks, each one rented by a different journalist. Daniel’s was piled with stacks of old newspapers and manila envelopes stuffed with clips of old stories. An answering machine was attached to the phone and the little red message light blinked frantically.

  Daniel sat down at the desk and motioned for me to grab a chair. What I wanted to do was go back to my hotel and take a nap, but I sat down. First he pulled up a background story from the New York Times archive, then he took out his PalmPilot and began to call newspaper and magazine editors in Germany.

  Successful journalists are experts in charm and duplicity. Charm to get people to answer your questions, duplicity since you discard the opinions of the person you’ve interviewed and write your own version of what happened. Daniel also used charm and duplicity to multiply his income. Without agreeing to anything specific, he convinced each editor that he shared his or her vision of the world. When Daniel talked to the German editors, the German hostage was a crucial part of the article. As I sat there listening, he sold different versions of the same story to the Frankfurter Allgemeine and two magazines.

  Between phone calls, he sent e-mail requesting payment for previous articles, then played back his voice mail. The first message was from an Italian woman with a cultured voice. I didn’t understand much Italian—aside from ordering food in restaurants—but it was obvious that she wanted to see him.

  “That’s the Contessa,” explained Daniel as he phoned another editor.

  The Contessa left a half-dozen phone messages that were interspersed with the voices of Daniel’s various contacts and two calls from his London banker. She was passionate, then angry, then weeping, and finally shouting. Her last message was short and very formal. She gave a time in English and hung up.

  I still didn’t know if we were going to Africa. “If you want to look at my past work, I’ve got an envelope of photographs back at the hotel.”

  “That’s not necessary. I accessed Newsweek’s archives and looked at your shots. Some of them are pretty good, Nicky. I liked that picture of the severed arm you took in Rwanda.” Daniel shut down his computer. “You and I are going to a party at the Contessa’s tonight. Did you bring any clothes to Rome?”

  “I’m wearing them.”

  “Okay. We can deal with that.” Daniel unlocked a desk drawer. He took out some one-thousand-lira notes and stuffed them into his right pants pocket. A larger wad of ten-thousand-lira notes went into his left pocket. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t want to attend a party, but it felt like part of the job interview. Out on the street, Daniel lit a Turkish cigarette and led me over to the Piazza San Silvestro. About twenty cars were parked in a tight group near the central fountain. An old man wearing a stained overcoat was leaning next to a Ford Fiesta. It looked like he was waiting to steal something. Daniel bowed slightly, called him Signor Posteggiatore, and gave him some money from the one-thousand-lira pocket. I could see that the old man was a “space finder” who spent his time finding spots for illegally parked cars. He returned the bow, pulled a rag out of his pocket, and limped over to an Alfa Romeo Spider. The red sports car was splattered with mud and trash was stuffed behind the two seats. As we got in, the old man wiped the headlights clean and explained how he had defended the car from thieves, policemen, and all the fiends of hell.

  Daniel started the engine, gunned it a few times, and then we were off, circling once around the piazza and heading down a side street. He drove like a dying man searching for a hospital, racing through every gap in the traffic and occasionally driving with two wheels up on the sidewalk. We stopped briefly for a traffic cop who was defending an intersection and Daniel turned to me. “You can’t hesitate around here.” The cop lowered his arm. Daniel shifted gears and mashed the accelerator.

  It was about six o’clock, but the sky was still blue and pink clouds glowed on the horizon. Slipping through the traffic, we crossed over to the Trastevere district on the west side of the Tiber. The buildings were three or four stories high and the streets were even narrower—it reminded me of Greenwich Village. Daniel hit the brakes and turned down an alleyway, which opened onto a small piazza.

  He walked over to a shop with a tailor’s dummy in the display window, but I didn’t follow him. Although I wanted the job, I didn’t see why I had to jump through this particular hoop. Daniel had charmed the older journalists at lunch. That wasn’t going to work with me.

  “What’s the problem, Nicky?”

  “I’m not buying new clothes just so I can go to a party.”

  “Let them make you a suit. If you aren’t happy with the result, I’ll buy everything back from you.”

  “We’re not the same size.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Grabbing my arm, he opened the door and dragged me into the shop. There weren’t any customers there, just an older man with a walrus mustache. He was sewing a cuff on some trousers while he sat crossed-legged on a wooden table.

  “Buona sera, maestro.”

  “Ahhh, Daniel!” The tailor embraced Daniel as if he were his long-lost son. They stood there jabbering for a while, then the tailor shouted some names. His family lived over the shop and they started descending the back staircase. There was the tailor’s wife, the plump older daughter, the skinny younger daughter, and the tailor’s teenage son. Daniel greeted them all—kissing the men and squeezing the women’s hands. He said something in Italian and everyone turned around and stared at me.

  My grandparents were Portuguese and I’d inherited their black curly hair and brown eyes. I had assumed I was going to get taller when I reached puberty, but it didn’t work out that way. I have short legs and I could lose some weight. I hate people looking at me and I especially hate people taking my photograph. When I rented a tuxedo for my sister�
��s wedding, I looked like a dwarf waiter.

  Now the whole damn family was staring at me and discussing my body. They got into a loud argument about my shoulders and Daniel had to intervene. The tailor kept circling me, measuring me with his tape and murmuring in Italian.

  “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “He says you’re an interesting challenge.”

  “That’s a nice way to put it. Just tell him to sell me a suit and we’ll get out of here.”

  Daniel translated what I said and everyone laughed. The tailor scribbled some instructions on a piece of paper and gave them to his son. The young man hurried out of the shop and I heard the whine of a motor scooter speeding away.

  The younger daughter went upstairs for a few minutes, then came back down with a bottle of Frascati wine and a pair of gray wool pants.

  “Italians admire English gentlemen,” explained Daniel. “So that’s the style we’re going for here. You’ll look conservative, but elegant.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  “Have some wine, Nicky. Sit back and enjoy it.”

  I tried on the pants and the tailor pinned up the fabric in various places. When he was done he tossed the pants across the room to the older daughter and she began altering them on an antique sewing machine. The tailor’s wife brought out another bottle of wine along with a suit coat. It looked all right without alterations, but the fitting lasted an hour. Everything was discussed endlessly. The cuffs. The pockets. The lapels. More wine.

  Daniel filled up my glass, joked with me, and complimented the tailor. An Italian would have said that Daniel was gentile—kind or polite—but the word meant much more than that. Daniel was graceful. He could make you feel better about yourself and eager to display your best qualities. I envied him, but I hadn’t forgotten about the photographers he’d worked with in Bosnia, one dead and the other talking like a frog.

  It was almost nine o’clock in the evening. I tried on the pants, a new shirt, and the suit coat. A scooter screeched to a stop outside and the tailor’s son ran in with a silk necktie and pair of shoes. I got completely dressed and the older daughter smiled at me. She moved back a wood panel and all of a sudden I was looking at myself in a full-length mirror.