Remember (10 page)

A female voice answered immediately. “Is that you, Mel?”

“Hello, Clee. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong…. Mel, I—” “You’re canceling our date tonight.”

“Listen, honey, I’m sorry, but I have an American picture editor in town, and he—” “Must see you tonight, because he’s leaving first thing tomorrow, and it’s vitally important for the agency,” she finished for him, sounding as if she knew the words by heart.

“You got it.”

“Why don’t you come over later, Clee?”

“It’ll be too late.”

“I don’t mind.”

There was a small pause. He said finally, “I would prefer to see you at the weekend, Mel. If you’re free. We could drive out to the country for dinner on Saturday night. How about it?”

He heard her sigh at the other end of the phone.

She said, after a moment, “Oh all right, then. But I don’t know why I let you do this to me, Cleeland Donovan. Most other guys couldn’t get away with it.”

“Get away with what?”

“Being so elusive.”

“Do we have a date for Saturday night?”

“You know we do, Clee.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, and I’m sorry about tonight.”

He said good-bye and hung up. I’ll send Mel flowers from Lachaume tomorrow, he thought, putting his feet up on the desk, leaning back in the chair and closing his eyes.

Clee felt a surge of relief that he had canceled Flo and Hank, and the conflicting date with Mel as well, by telling a couple of harmless white lies. The truth was, he did not have a business date. But he did not have the head for a fancy dinner party at the Devons’, nor was he in the mood to dine alone with Melanie Lowe, bright and lovely as she was, and of whom he was quite fond. He wanted to be alone, he had a lot on his mind and a great deal of thinking to do. This was the other reason why he had been so pleased when JeanClaude had told him he was free, that he had no other assignments before he left for the States to do the work for Life. He was not only going to take it easy for the next week and have the rest he needed, but he would concentrate on a few personal problems that needed sorting out. One in particular had been at the back of his mind for several weeks.

Opening his eyes, Clee stood up and put on his jacket, then walked toward the door.

He paused halfway across the room and stood for a moment looking at the portrait of Capa. Of all the photographs that had been taken of him, whether in combat fatigues or civilian clothes, this was Clee’s favorite. It was of Capa and David “Chim” Seymour, and it had been taken in a leafy Paris square in the early 1950s. The two friends were sitting on metal garden chairs, and Capa was wearing a raincoat over his suit, a cigarette was dangling from his lips. There was a quizzical expression in his eyes and he appeared to be smiling faintly.

One hand was resting on his knee, and Clee had always been struck by that hand—the long, sensitive fingers that looked so capable. And how darkly handsome Capa was in this picture, the strong masculine features, the thick black brows and hair, the smoldering dark eyes, the seductive mouth all added up to one helluva knockout of a guy.

Capa had been the possessor of a legendary charm and a debonair personality as well as good looks, and it was not difficult for Clee to imagine why Ingrid Bergman and so many other women had fallen head over heels in love with him.

Everything Clee had ever read about Capa had underscored his courage and daring as a photographer, his compassion and humanity as a man.

Once, the British magazine Picture Post, now defunct, had run a photograph of Capa, and the headline above the caption had read, The Greatest War Photographer in the World. And that was what he had been.

It had cost him his life, in the end.

Capa had been killed on May 25, 1954, when he had stepped on a Vietminh antipersonnel mine on a small, grassy slope above a dike, five kilometers outside Dongquithon in Indochina, during the French Indochina war. He had been forty-one years old. Two years older than I am now, Clee reminded himself, thinking of his own mortality and how fragile life truly was in the long run.

In 1955

Life magazine and the Overseas Press Club of America

had established the Robert Capa Award “for the best photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise .” Clee had won the award for his coverage of the war in Lebanon, and it was his most treasured possession. It came in a box lined with blue velvet and it stood on a shelf next to the Capa photograph, set slightly apart from the other international awards Clee had won for the excellence of his work.

Lifting the lid, Clee stared at the award for a second, and he wondered, as he often had in the past, why he felt so close to a man he had never known and yet missed as if he had been a dear friend. It baffled him, but there was no denying that Capa, a dead man, had been the single most important influence in his life.

JeanClaude’s voice could be heard outside in the corridor. Clee shook off his thoughts about Capa and left the room to see if anything was wrong.

“Hey, guys, what’s going on?” he asked, going toward JeanClaude, who was talking excitedly, and Michel Bellond, a partner in the agency and a photographer of talent and courage.

“Rien,” Michel said, and winked at Clee.

“He is right, it is nothing, really,” JeanClaude said and grinned.

“We were just discussing the merits of various restaurants, trying to decide where to have the dinner for Steve,” he explained, referring to another partner in Image.

“Let’s hear the choices,” Clee said. “Perhaps I’ll cast the deciding vote.”

When Clee finally left the Image offices on the rue de Bern, it was drawing close to dusk, that time of day when the sky has changed to twilight colors but has not yet turned black.

He lifted his head as he walked toward the Champs-Elysees and looked up at the sky. Tonight it was a deep blue, almost peacock in intensity, and it had a soft incandescent glow to it, as if subtly illuminated from behind.

Magic hour, he said to himself, using the movie term that best described this time of day, which movie directors and cinematographers loved with such passion because it was especially effective on film.

When he reached the Champs-Elysees he stopped and gazed up that long, wide boulevard, his eyes focusing on the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. The tricolor, the French national flag, was

suspended inside the arch from the top, and ingeniously illuminated with spotlights. It was blowing through the arch in the wind and looked unusually dramatic at this moment. Clee thought the arch was the most moving and magnificent sight he had seen in a very long time, but then the whole of Paris was particularly glorious right now. A large number of the impressive, ancient buildings had recently been carefully cleaned for the bicentennial celebrations taking place this year.

Turning left, Clee strolled down the Champs-Elysees, enjoying the walk after being cooped up in the office all day, he generally felt somewhat constrained when he was not out on assignment. But, whatever the circumstance, he enjoyed walking in Paris more than any other place in the world.

This was his city. He had first come here when he was eighteen and had fallen in love with it. At first sight. He had wanted to come to Paris because of Capa, who for so many years had lived in the French capital, where he had founded Magnum, his photo agency, in 1947 with “Chim” Seymour and Henri CartierBresson. Capa had been his hero since he was fifteen and growing up in New York. That year, 1965, he had read an article about the late photographer in a photography magazine, and ever after he had searched for anything and everything that had been written about Capa.

Clee had first started taking pictures when he was nine years old, using an inexpensive camera his parents had given him for his birthday.

Even when he was a child his pictures had been so extraordinary everyone had been amazed at his talent. His mother and father, and sisters Joan and Kelly, were his willing victims, and had allowed themselves to be photographed day and night doing every conceivable thing, and were his models on special family occasions.

Naturally gifted, sensitive, intelligent, and with an exacting eye, he was completely self-taught. Photography had been his passion, his whole life, when he was a teenager, nothing had changed much in subsequent years.

It was in 1968 that Clee had discovered Paris for himself, and instantly fallen under its seductive spell. That summer he had made up his mind that he was going to live there one day, and he had returned to New York determined to become a great photographer. He wanted to be another Robert Capa if that was humanly possible.

At the time Clee had been working in the darkroom of a portrait photographer in Manhattan, and he had stayed on for only another year.

Through a connection of his father’s, he had managed to get a job on the New Xork Post as a junior photographer. Very rapidly he had made a name for himself on the paper, and he had never looked back.

During this period he had taken himself off to night school several evenings a week to study French, which he knew was an absolute necessity if he was ever to achieve his ambition and live in Paris. By the time he was twenty-one he was fluent in the language. He was also a far better photographer than some of the most seasoned veterans in the news business.

A staff job on The New rork Tines followed in 1971, but when he was twenty-three Clee left the paper. He had decided to become a roving photojournalist covering Europe, and worked as a freelancer for a number of American and English magazines.

Naturally, he had chosen to base himself in Paris, and two years later, when he was twenty-five, he had started Image. Banding together with two other photographers, he had hired three darkroom assistants, a secretary and JeanClaude, who managed the agency. Michel Bellond, a Frenchman, and Steve Carvelli, an American of Italian descent, were his partners. Less than a year after Image had been founded, Peter Naylor from London be

came the fourth and last photographer to join the group as a partner.

Right from the outset, Image had been successful, quickly garnering big international assignments, commanding high fees for the star photographers and soon winning a clutch of awards. After fourteen years it was still going strong with the four original partners and several staff photographers, along with additional darkroom assistants and secretarial help. And it had become one of the most prestigious photo agencies in the world.

Clee was well aware that his family had been dismayed, even distressed, when he had become an expatriate and settled in Paris. At the time, he was regretful of this, but he had never had any intention of changing his life. It was his own to live the way he saw fit. In the early years his parents and sisters had come to visit him frequently, and whenever he had gone back to New York he had spent as much time with them as he could. And he still did, whenever he was there.

Despite the fact that he had defied his father and had not gone to college, choosing instead to plunge into the world of the working photographer, they had remained truly good friends.

Second-generation Irish, with an analytical mind, a golden tongue and the gift of gab, his father, Edward Donovan, had been a successful, well-known attorney in Manhattan, and highly respected in the field of criminal law. He had died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1981, and Clee, like his mother and sisters, had felt the loss acutely. Ted Donovan had been very much a family man, a devoted husband and a loving father.

To Clee’s considerable relief, his mother had managed to cope with her grief rather well, and quite bravely, he thought, thanks in no small measure to his sisters’ offspring. Both Joan and Kelly were married, and between them they had three daughters and one son. Martha Donovan’s grandchildren had become her life, and she appeared to be at peace with herself these days.

Clee’s thoughts stayed with his mother as he hailed a passing cab, got in and gave the driver his address. He must call her this weekend and let her know he would be in New York in late July, tell her that they would be seeing each other soon. This would please her as much as it pleased him. They had remained close over the years, and he knew she worried about him a great deal, especially when he was in a combat zone. This was only one of the many reasons he stayed in constant touch with her wherever he was.

Within a short time the cab was turning into the rue Jacob in the sixth arrondissement, that charming part of Paris known as the Latin Quarter.

It was here that Clee lived in a fourth-floor apartment of a handsome old building.

Clee sat on the sofa in the living room, the lights dim, the Mozart disc on the player turned low. He nursed a beer, lost to the world as he pondered his personal life.

Nicole Wells. He repeated her name to himself in the silence of his head. She had become a problem. A nagging problem, as it so happened.

For two years they had been copains—best buddies in the truest sense.

In Beijing he had saved her life. Inside himself, everything had changed.

He no longer thought of her simply as his best buddy. She was a woman he cared about as a w07nan. He had realized this when he had put his arms around her on the steps of the Martyrs’ Monument in Tiananmen, after pushing her away from the approaching tanks. In fact, he was so filled with relief that she was

safe, for a moment all of his strength had seemed to ebb out of him. Momentarily undone by this surge of unprecedented emotion, he had been incapable of saying a word. Nicky had thanked him, and he had turned her face to his and looked into those cool, appraising blue eyes. Suddenly he was brimming with feelings he did not fully understand.

Ever since leaving Hong Kong he had tried hard to shake off these feelings, but without much success. Off and on, they had continued to both confuse and trouble him, but he was aware of the reasons to some extent. He and Nicky had drawn closer and closer—in fact, had grown to love each other as a brother and sister. Now his emotions were engaged on a different level, and he was not sure what to do about it.