LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      I

       PARIS, SEPTEMBER

      The persona Tony Hampton had presented to the world had been dazzling. Intrepid war photographer, one of the most brilliant photojournalists of this decade, courageous, charismatic, a handsome and divine ladies’ man, raconteur par excellence, bon vivant, and most generous host.

      But there had been another side to him. He had been a liar and a cheat and he had undoubtedly led a double life. This is what I now truly believed even though I had only my own intuition to go on.

      Maybe Jake wouldn’t entirely agree with me, but I felt quite certain there had been a much darker side to Tony. Being in the bosom of his family at the memorial service earlier today had convinced me of this. And I was now absolutely positive he had never been divorced from Fiona. From his family’s behaviour, and all that they had said, I placed him right in their midst until he left London in July. It was then he had come to Paris to pick us up, so that we could head out to Kosovo together. And he had been happily ensconced in their midst, from what I deduced.

      I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom, and I reached out, picked up the photograph of Tony in its silver frame. I held it in both hands, staring at his face. He stood there on the deck of the sloop anchored off St Tropez last year, squinting in the summer sunshine. So dashing, so debonair…so enigmatic…

      And I couldn’t help wondering about him, wondering about his complicated life, and what it had been all about in the end.

      He would have been a psychiatrist’s dream, I thought. Put him on a couch for analysis and God knows what he would have spilled. Or would he? Psychotics didn’t always do that, did they?

      Psychotic.

      The word hung there. Silently, I repeated it in my head, considered it carefully, asking myself why it had popped into my mind. And yet it did seem appropriate, didn’t it? Tony was psychotic.

      I put the photograph back in its given place on the desk, leaned back in my chair and stared off into space. In the far reaches of my mind, I’d had Tony Hampton under a mental microscope for a good part of the day, and I didn’t like what I’d seen; nor did my conclusions about him elate me.

      He was not just a liar, telling small white lies – didn’t we all do that at times? – but a pathological liar telling real whoppers, lies that were dangerous because they could conceivably do damage to people, cause them great heartache, change their lives and not always for the best.

      That deep-seated lying had probably become a way of life for him. He couldn’t stop because he couldn’t help himself. Then again, he had needed to lie for his own protection. He had spun a web of deceit he couldn’t crawl out of; he had entrapped himself with his complex machinations.

      Then there was his adultery. It had been compulsive, excessive, a dominant force in his life, and it had obviously grown out of hand over the years. It became an addiction, I was sure.

      I hadn’t needed Jake to inform me today about the many women Tony had been involved with before me. I was well aware of his countless affairs; after all, we’d worked together, travelled together on various assignments.

      Naturally Tony had tried to keep these women under wraps, and a secret, because his private life was his private life. It was none of my business, in his opinion. Nor was it Jake’s business either, and so he had striven for privacy.

      However, I could put two and two together, and come up with six, just like everyone else. Tony had always underestimated me and so had Jake. Just because I never discussed Tony’s international sexual dalliances didn’t mean that I didn’t know they existed. I did know, and I didn’t care. After all, I wasn’t in love with him then, not involved in that way. This knowledge hadn’t changed my opinion of him in those days. I thought he was a great guy, a good human being, and naturally I admired his talent as a photojournalist. It was more than that really; I considered it an honour to work alongside him.

      But to think Jake believed I hadn’t known about Tony’s very busy love life…how ludicrous that was. I was much smarter than he imagined, than Tony imagined. I suddenly wanted to laugh out loud at the mere idea of it.

      All those women…and one in particular whom I had known and disliked.

      II

      It was April 1996, and for once Tony and I were on assignment without Jake. He had gone to New York to deal with his divorce from Sue Ellen Jones, the famous model, and Tony and I had flown out to the Middle East for our respective news-photo agencies. We were in Lebanon to cover the new hostilities which had erupted between the Israelis and Hezbollah.

      The long and fierce civil war was over by that time and things were beginning to mend, beginning to get back to normal, and then the skirmishing had unexpectedly started once more.

      For the first time in fourteen years the Israelis had attacked Beirut directly, using laser-homing Hellfire missiles shot from four helicopter gunships off the coast.

      The Israelis were not the aggressors, though. They were actually responding to Hezbollah’s recent bombing of their country. And that war of attrition had started up again because Hezbollah had then retaliated after the missile attack, sending forty rockets smack into the middle of Israel. And so it went…

      One lovely spring day – late in the afternoon – Tony and I were sitting in the bar of the Marriott Hotel in the Hamra district of Beirut. I suppose I’ll never ever forget that day, because we had had such bad news about a colleague of ours, Bill Fitzgerald of C.N.S., one of the American cable television networks. He had disappeared several days earlier, and none of us knew what had happened to him. We were all a bit nervous and concerned, and afraid for Bill.

      Two of his crew, who had been with him out on the streets, had seen him grabbed by three young men, who had hustled him into a waiting Mercedes and then driven off at breakneck speed. The two crew members had been alert, and at once they had jumped into their car and followed in furious pursuit. But the Mercedes had disappeared – into thin air. It was nowhere in sight and they hadn’t been able to find it.

      Since then there had been no news about Bill, and none of the terrorist organizations had claimed his kidnapping. Who had snatched him, and for what purpose, we did not know.

      But as we sat around in the bar that day, drinking with a group of international correspondents, all of us were offering theories and speculation was rampant…

      III

      ‘Islamic Jihad,’ I had said all of a sudden, glancing around the table at my companions. ‘They’ve got him.’