The Canal House

by Mark Lee

  “Tell her I’ll never do it again.”

  La Signora accepted my apology and brought us a tray of food. She laid out two loaves of hard-crusted bread, a jar of blackberry jam, a bowl of black olives floating in brine with cloves of garlic, a basket of figs, a chunk of prosciutto, and some whitish yellow caciotta cheese.

  I went into the house and washed my face and hands beneath the faucet at the kitchen sink. The water was cold and smelled faintly of limestone. I dried myself off and took a look around. The house had a flagstone floor and plaster walls. A propane refrigerator, stove, and water heater were in the kitchen, but there were no electric lights. Baskets hung from hooks in the ceiling and they were filled with garlic, onions, potatoes, dried red peppers. A photograph of the pope wearing a cowboy hat and chaps was taped to the wall over the sink.

  The kitchen opened up to a living room with a stone fireplace that was big enough to cook a pig, a saggy couch, a leather easy chair, and a coffee table with stacks of old magazines and paperback books in several languages. One doorway led to the bathroom, which contained a toilet and a rusty bathtub. A second door led to Daniel’s bedroom where I saw shelves with music CDs and more books.

  The farm wasn’t connected to a power line, and light came from candles and kerosene lanterns. Daniel’s laptop was on the coffee table along with a satellite phone and a short-wave radio. The house looked like a comfortable place to live, but something felt wrong. When I came out of the bathroom I realized that there wasn’t a single memento in the house. No Masai spears from Africa or silk prints from Thailand. No faded pictures of mom and dad in a sailboat or a snapshot from a ski trip to Austria. If Daniel McFarland had a personal life, it didn’t show.

  But then I glanced into the bedroom and saw a framed photograph hanging on the wall over the dresser. Wrong again, I thought. Maybe it was a picture of the Contessa lying topless on the beach in Capri. Daniel was still outside, talking to the old lady. I slipped into the room, approached the photograph, and for a moment I stopped breathing.

  It was a black-and-white photo of Daniel and Victor Zikowski in what looked like Bosnia. They were walking down a muddy road together. Knit caps. Heavy jackets. Someone must have said something funny or maybe they had just survived another confrontation with the Serb militia. Daniel was smiling and Victor’s mouth was open as he laughed.

  Why had he placed this here? The photograph was probably the first thing Daniel saw when he woke up in the morning. Was this a guilty man’s daily penance, like a priest whipping himself for past sins? Or was it merely proof that another man was dead and he was lucky enough to survive?

  I went back outside and sat at the table. “How you feeling?” Daniel asked.

  “Slow.”

  “Have some breakfast. La Signora always makes enough for five or six people.”

  He put a plate in front of me and I started to eat. The sun was floating up from the horizon like a bright orange balloon but we were sheltered within the arbor. I mashed up some of the olives and made a sandwich. After my second cup of coffee and some prosciutto, I began to feel better.

  That morning in the arbor, Daniel appeared more relaxed and less calculating. Bracciano was his home. While I ate breakfast he passed me dishes and went inside to find some butter.

  “Carter Howard told me one thing about you,” Daniel said. “A couple of years ago you were covering a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Then the police moved in and people started fighting.”

  “Right. I was sitting on top of one of the bronze lions, taking pictures. And some kid started bashing me on the head with—”

  “With a cricket bat?”

  “Did Carter tell you that?” I smiled. “It was just a piece of plywood that was used to make a protest sign.”

  “But you didn’t do anything? You didn’t jump off the lion or stop the kid from hitting you?”

  “I hadn’t found the picture yet.”

  Daniel nodded and poured some more coffee. “So what do you think about when you take a photograph?”

  “If I’m moving I don’t want to trip and fall on my face.”

  “Other than that.”

  I mashed some olives on a slice of bread. “Sometimes it’s just a job. Take the shot and go home. But usually I’m trying to capture an image that carries its own energy. A good photograph is almost radioactive. You’re flipping through a magazine and suddenly you see a picture that burns its way into your brain cells.”

  “Have you ever shot a picture like that?”

  “Once or twice. I’d like to do it all the time.”

  Daniel stopped talking and we sat there listening to the cicadas. It was still early in the morning and the sun was at a low angle. The atmosphere filtered the light and it felt soft and warm. At the north edge of the farm, I could see a dirt driveway and a windbreak of cypress trees. The south property line was a hedgerow of thistles and blackberry bushes. The slope led past the two garden terraces to a steep ravine and beyond the ravine were rolling hills covered with dark green vegetation.

  Daniel finished his coffee and brushed the crumbs off his jeans. “If you want, I’ll give you the tour.”

  “Okay. Just don’t ask me to pull weeds.”

  La Signora’s one-room cottage was at the top of the hill, near the road that led to the village. Directly below the cottage were rows of grapevines, the tendrils curling around rusty wire stretched on fence posts. Daniel inspected the grapes and mentioned La Signora’s homemade wine. “It tastes awful, but she thinks it’s delicious,” he said. “Don’t hurt her feelings, Nicky. If she pours you a glass, try not to spit it out.”

  As we ambled down the slope he explained that the Lazio region was the home of the Etruscans, a cultured civilization that was eventually conquered by the more practical Romans. During the Renaissance, various papal princes owned most of the land and this hillside had been a pasture for some of the horses raced at the Palio up in Siena. The farmhouse was for the horse trainer and his family.

  After the property became available, it took Daniel two years of negotiations to arrange the deal. He moved in, installed the propane tank and a septic system, then went away to cover the fighting in Bosnia. When he came back he discovered that La Signora had left her son-in-law’s home in the village and moved into the gatekeeper’s cottage at the top of the hill. The old lady had swept out his house, watered his garden, and harvested the olive trees. One night a carload of locals had showed up to steal Daniel’s furniture. La Signora stood at the front door and screamed at them, reciting the names of their parents, aunts, and uncles going back three generations, every possible dead ancestor who would be dishonored by this shameful act until the burglars took their crowbars and drove away.

  Daniel helped La Signora in the garden whenever he was home. The wet terrace was the one closest to the house. There were rows of zucchini and tomatoes, green beans and garlic, and an herb patch with mint, sage, basil, and oregano. Flowers grew around the border of the garden—white and pink mallows, irises, daisies. On the lower dry terrace, Daniel had planted olive, fig, and hazelnut trees.

  It was getting warmer. The sun burned a hole in the sky while pale yellow butterflies fluttered over the dead grass. Daniel covered his sports car with a waterproof tarp and then we followed a dirt path down the slope to the ravine. A little stream trickled around brown and gray boulders, then passed beneath a collapsed stone bridge.

  “This is my Roman bridge,” Daniel said. “It’s about two thousand years old.”

  “You own it?”

  “It officially belongs to the Department of Antiquities, but they don’t seem to know it’s here.” We stepped off the road, walked through the grass for a while, and paused near the foot of the bridge. It had been built with bricks and blocks of sandstone. Everything was straight-edged and organized in the Roman manner, except for the broken section and the rubble in the stream.

  “It was constructed by the Roman army for the legionnaires. They’d land on the coast aft
er fighting in some foreign country, then go to the springs at Viterbo to get healed. When everyone had rested, they marched down to Rome.”

  I sat down on a chunk of white marble. “Sounds like a good system.”

  “It’s always worked for me in the past. These days, it takes me longer to recover.”

  “Stop flying around. Become a bureau chief.”

  Daniel watched the bees circle around a patch of wild mustard. “We’re paid to be witnesses, Nicky. Lots of journalists write about the center of the picture, but some of us need to see what’s going on in the corners.”

  “You’re an idealist.”

  “Not at all. I don’t believe in politics, religion, faith, hope, or charity.”

  “But you believe in a good news story?”

  “Yes. Exactly. A good news story—with pictures.”

  Daniel turned away from the bridge and headed back to his farmhouse. When I didn’t get up, he stopped at the edge of the road and waited for me. If Daniel had just assumed that I was going to travel to Africa, I would have told him to find somebody else. But that morning he looked tired and a little desperate. For some reason, he had to leave this beautiful place.

  “Come on, Nicky. Let’s go.”

  I waited for a few seconds. Then I stood up and followed him.

  3 THE DAY AND NIGHT BAR

  I flew back to London the next morning and told Carter to authorize a check for my expenses. I don’t carry a lot of clothes when I’m traveling, but I make up for it in film and photographic equipment. I have nine cameras, but I store them at a shop near Shepherds Bush Green. Over the years I’ve developed a theory that the more equipment you take, the fewer pictures you shoot. After changing my mind a few times, I decided on an Olympus digital and my favorite Nikon with three extra lenses.

  Daniel arrived a few days later. We picked up our visas and took the tube to the Daily Telegraph offices at Canary Wharf. We met a sleek young editor named Jeremy who took us downstairs to a bistro for lunch. All the editors in the room were sipping Chablis or Margaux, and Jeremy ordered quiche Lorraine. He mentioned the Telegraph’s web site eight times, then told me to get “good visuals” in Africa. The drink-a-pint-and-sweat-a-story days of Fleet Street journalism were definitely fading away.

  Later that afternoon, we stopped in at the Newsweek offices. Carter brewed some tea while Daniel was talkative and charming. On the way back from the men’s room, I caught Ann Weinstein putting on lipstick and brushing her hair before she entered Carter’s office. It didn’t seem like the beginning of a flirtation. There was something about Daniel’s presence that made everyone want to stand a little straighter and become part of whatever he was planning.

  IF YOU’VE NEVER worked with a reporter before, you try to find out about them as you travel to the story. After the third glass of wine, people begin to talk about their marriages or how much they hate their job. I asked Daniel a lot of questions on the flight to Nairobi, but I got very little information. He had two younger sisters. His father had been a supply sergeant in the air force and the McFarland family had moved to a new post every three years. When Daniel was a junior in high school, his mother discovered that she had liver cancer. Sergeant McFarland refused to take care of his wife, and Daniel had to nurse her. Daniel was the only person in the hospital room when his mother died, and then the family fell apart like a defective piece of machinery. His father got transferred to Alaska, the two sisters went off to live with an aunt, and Daniel was on his own.

  He’d brought along a half-dozen tapes for his cassette player so I did manage to learn about his musical tastes. All great musicians, he explained to me, had recorded a handful of pure moments in which they connected to something powerful. Usually they were searching for that moment, but sometimes it just came to them accidentally during one performance when a special song or the people they were playing with pushed them to a different level. They were still themselves, with the same desires and frustrations, but during that time the music floated clear of them and became an independent creation.

  “Sounds interesting,” I told him. Perhaps I looked skeptical because throughout the flight, Daniel kept taking off his earphones and slipping them over my head.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked. “Right now. That?” I had to admit it was some wonderful music—a trumpet solo by Miles Davis followed by a Puccini aria sung by Maria Callas—but I could never hear the moment. It was like someone trying to talk to you about God.

  At Kenyatta airport we hired a taxi. Nairobi National Park stretched out on one side of the highway and suddenly we were in Africa. In the distance I could see herds of zebras and gazelles clustered around a water hole. It was dry season. Two girls wearing pink dresses filled a plastic jerrican in the road ditch. A matatu roared past us, crammed full of passengers, their faces pushed against the glass.

  We checked into the New Stanley Hotel in the center of the city. It’s the kind of place where the towels are frayed and there’s always a black beetle waving its antennae at you in the shower stall. The next morning I went downstairs to have breakfast at an outdoor café. I watched the city buses and Peugeot hire cars challenge each other as they roared up Kenyatta Avenue. Africans hurried to work, pushing past schoolboys wearing white shirts and blue shorts. Backpackers from some blond country stared at the café bulletin board while two Japanese businessmen sweated over their omelets. The Kikuyu waiters, old and proud, considered it a badge of honor to ignore me as long as possible.

  I ordered a pot of tea and a basket of mandazi, the little semisweet doughnuts they serve all over East Africa. Maybe I should eat healthy food, but all rules are suspended when you’re working. As I popped a mandazi into my mouth, Daniel threaded his way through the tables and sat down beside me.

  “I’m going to see if I can find the local Newsweek stringer. I’ll meet you at the hotel around four o’clock. We’ll go over to Reuters and talk to Matt Vickery.”

  “He’s the bureau chief?”

  Daniel nodded. “I knew him in Bosnia, but I haven’t seen him for two years. Matt was doing an article about the fighting in Algeria when his car hit a land mine. He was badly burned and almost didn’t recover.”

  “Why is he still working?”

  “What else is he going to do? The management at Reuters felt they owed him a favor because he got injured on assignment. When he requested the East Africa Bureau, they gave it to him.”

  I spent the morning looking for Maloprim, the backup malaria drug you take with chloroquine, then returned to the hotel and slept. Daniel knocked on my door around four and we strolled over to the Reuters office on Moi Avenue. Car exhaust and charcoal fires diffused the light and added a brownish haze to the sky. Nairobi feels like a small town; you can walk through the central area in about fifteen minutes. The architecture is a mix of glass skyscrapers, clunky Victorian mansions, and functional concrete block buildings. With each visit, the city seemed to become shabbier and more crowded. I saw a few more prostitutes in bright red dresses, a few more street boys selling Makonde wood carvings, a few more young mothers whispering, “Mzungu, mzungu,” as they shifted their babies to their hips and extended their hands.

  The Reuters East Africa Bureau was on the fourth floor and a young Indian woman wearing a blue sari sat at the desk in the reception area. The glass door on the right led to an equipment room filled with printers, radios, and sat phones. I could see two African journalists working in a small office on the left.

  “Good afternoon. We’re here to see Mr. Vickery.”

  The young woman turned and spoke to us with a precise British accent. “Mr. Vickery is not seeing anyone.”

  “I’m Daniel McFarland. I talked to him on the phone this morning.”

  “And he agreed to meet with you?”

  “Of course. That’s why we’re here.”

  “I’m Miss Patel, Mr. Vickery’s assistant. He did not inform me of this appointment.” She looked carefully at Daniel as if he was trying to trick
her, but then she got up and slipped through a third door.

  We waited a few minutes until Miss Patel returned. “You are Mr. Vickery’s friend?”

  “We worked together in Bosnia.”

  “But you have not seen him since his accident?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “You are quite fortunate. Mr. Vickery is having a good day.”

  She opened the door and I followed Daniel into a shadowy office. All the lamps had been switched off and the only illumination came from the thin strips of afternoon sunlight that glowed through the Venetian blinds. A rolltop desk was shoved against the wall in one corner of the room and a dark shape sat in a high-back leather chair. I couldn’t see Matthew Vickery’s face, but I heard his voice, thin and raspy, like a man who had walked all day without water.

  “You have to count the bodies. That’s part of the job. You drive out there and count the bodies before they swell up and villagers bury them.”

  I closed the door behind me and the room got a little darker until my eyes adjusted. Lights glowed on the buttons of Vickery’s telephone. A black cord led up to a headset.

  “I don’t care how you get there. Walk if you have to. Pay someone to carry you all the way from Kinshasa. And don’t try to fake the story because I’ve got an instinctive sense for fiction. The AP will go to that village. Agence France-Presse will count the bodies. And if what they file is substantially different from your article, then I’m going to hire another stringer.”

  The doctors in London had transplanted skin from Vickery’s back to his burned face, and the surface was uneven and scarred. A baseball cap covered his bald head. Black pants and a white cotton shirt hung loosely on his body like a skeleton wearing clothes.

  “Do you like your job, François? Or let me rephrase that: do you like my checks? Of course you do. I’m not paying you for rumors from the matutu drivers or the official twaddle from some government minister. I’m paying you to count the bodies and decide who won the battle. Comprendez-vous?”