Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

Seated Woman by Jeffry Scott

Here with a story about newspapermen is lifelong newspaperman Jeffry Scott. As many longtime EQMM readers will know, “Jeffry Scott” is a pseudonym the author uses for his short fiction — which he’s been producing for EQMM for more than thirty years. Just like the characters in his new story, Mr. Scott once traveled the globe in pursuit of news. Now he’s mostly to be found in England.

It is not a big canvas as they go, about three feet deep by two wide, rather dull and muddy at a distance and the composition seems odd. Most of the bottom third is filled by a tiled floor — plain tiles — uninteresting.

Then comes the chair, a chunky, peasant-made job with-out curves or decoration, its color only a touch darker than those tiles — unless that’s a trick of the eye, difficult to tell somehow — so it appears to be growing out of the floor like fungus. Perhaps the picture needed cleaning or the on-looker was confused.

I’ve never seen the thing, you understand. We are dealing in hearsay.

Robin Ratcliffe told me all about it and that is how I can describe this painting in considerable detail. Robin wasn’t one for art galleries but he felt seedy one morning-after and needed a washroom in a hurry. Public buildings tend to have them. He was halfway between a bar and a hotel at the time, but the gallery was right across the street so that’s where he went.

He wouldn’t say at the time what city he was in. I think he feared that morbid curiosity might drive me to try my own luck, if I knew the location. With hindsight I believe that the gallery is in New York, west of Central Park. I could confirm that; I have no intention of doing so.

Brits are strange, self-conscious creatures, especially when abroad. Pit stop completed, Robin decided that it was bad form to treat a shrine of culture so dismissively, as if anyone noticed him enter or would have cared if they had done. The place was cool without being chilly, quiet and calm and restful, persuading him to make a token round of the exhibits.

Robin was very much your see-one-Old-Master-and-go-off-home type but he did his best. Works on show were impressively mounted and some forbade viewers to cross red cords fencing a wall-space, but the pictures struck him as no better than passable to mediocre. Bored yet dutiful, he drifted through a couple of rooms and then he found sanctuary as the queasiness struck again.

The gallery wasn’t busy at the time, and a side room small enough to be humanly scaled seemed to beckon. It looked cosy, Robin said bitterly. Settling into a corner of a surprisingly comfortable window seat, he closed his eyes to offset a brief spell of dizziness. He definitely did not nod off, Robin Ratcliffe assured me long afterwards. Then he apologised for raising his voice. (I had not suggested that he’d dreamed what happened to him; he was just understandably... sensitive about the incident.)

The next bit came out during his second or third version of the story. Originally, Robin skipped the part where he opened his eyes. After a few retellings he understood that I wouldn’t laugh at him or, worse still, remain solemn and then speed back to El Vino, the Fleet Street hangout, to announce that Robbo had lost it or, best possible case, turned most peculiar.

Eyes closed, for no logical reason Robin felt uneasy and borderline alarmed. It was an illogical relief to find upon opening his eyes that he still had the side room to himself. He took a deep, reassuring breath. Quietness deeper than a hush had been claustrophobic enough to generate minor panic. He said, inadequately, that it was as if an invisible balloon had inflated to expel all sound and a lot of air from the room.

He was rising from the couch, idly scanning the far wall, because that was the one facing him, when he noticed a darkish mass in a particular frame. Robin took it for storm clouds over a calm sea turned gory by the setting sun. It wasn’t that he liked seascapes so much as that they offered the charm of the familiar. Generations of his family had been Royal Navy and he’d grown up with Squall in the Narrows, Dawn Over the Bay of Bengal and suchlike. Instead of leaving, he walked over to investigate.

Disappointingly, the picture turned out to be a domestic interior, a kitchen by the look of it, probably turn of the nineteenth century. The clouds were — he couldn’t be bothered to make out what they were — and the sunset sea was a tiled floor in need of a damned good scrubbing. Five wasted paces, yet seconds later Robin remained in place.

No expert, as we have established, he was trying to calculate whether this was a very good picture that was easy to overlook or an amateurish effort, out of its league. Its clumsiness could be deliberate and clever, to those capable of appreciating an artist’s intention. Maybe so much featureless floor with everything else crammed in the top right corner was clever, too.

“Everything else” came down to a wooden chair, graceless and putting him in mind of Van Gogh, except that the chair on the tiles didn’t gladden the eye. It’s got something, all the same, Robin told himself, and then he leaned forward, wondering how he could have been so unobservant.

He’d assumed that dark blobs and blotches on the chair made up a poorly rendered coat or shawl thrown over the ladder-back. No such thing: It was an old woman sitting there. At which point Robin Ratcliffe caught on at last.

He was looking at a trick picture, like Magritte’s musical instrument which is also a face. Or those more elaborate novelties: the painted surface is corrugated so that the subject depends on one’s angle. Change that and the subject melts from a beauty in full finery to a solitary macaw profiled on its perch.

The chair thing was so take-it-or-leave-it simple — what I see is what you get and it interested me, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, the artist seemed to snarl — that the concept of a deliberate illusion hadn’t occurred to Robin.

Now that he was studying rather than glancing, it was obvious. The whole thing was a double bluff, overtly naive and unskilled but (cliché, sorry) fiendishly cunning. A visual equivalent to the breed of con man playing the hick to take marks off-guard.

There she was, the old woman, waiting to be found.

Go away, whined a voice at the back of Robin’s mind, and of course he ignored it. Her back was turned to the viewer. Yes, he made out the curve of her spine and a large, lumpy head, except that it had to be one of those coal-scuttle bonnets. An unlikely, awkward blotch of shadow on the side of the chair was her hand, evidently black-gloved.

That accounted for the impression of arrested movement, once the figure came into focus and revealed itself. She’d heard footsteps or the creak of a door and she was about to peer over her shoulder... The longer he stared, the more he saw.

Gloved fingers gripped the chair, and if the shadows dispersed one would find her thin arm braced and straining to swivel the meager body. Okay, done that, a bored strand of his thinking ran. Let’s be on our way.

Urgency wasn’t involved, as it had been with the earlier, near-subconscious pleading to be anywhere but near the old woman. Mission Control sent the message that he was emerging from a medium-bad hangover, not before time, and some food would be appreciated.

Robin Ratcliffe’s tale ended there, first time around, with a hangdog grimace. In newspaper jargon I’d wasted attention on a “delayed drop,” meaning introductory matter unfolded at length — only there was nothing to follow. Politely put, an anticlimax; less politely, he had suckered me into a shaggy-dog story and I’d missed the punch line.

Except that Robin wasn’t like that. The trivial incident — as it seemed at first telling — had impressed him enough to share it. Shortly afterwards, our flight was called or the lift doors opened and the man we awaited stepped out — for the life of me I cannot recall the setting or how we came to be talking about a picture in the first place.

My memory is no worse than the next fellow’s, whoever he is. I have good recall of what Robin Ratcliffe told me over a five-year period. It’s just that I was pinballing around the world at the time, one eye on my watch, waiting for the Tilt light to start flashing — missed deadline or faulty telex machines, on which one relied in the primitive era a quarter-century or so ago. Actually, now that it’s going on paper I do remember where he told me, and belatedly, a connection is made.

Robin started explaining about the art gallery because...

Regrettably, British journalists, Her Majesty’s Press, are a bit of a handful overseas. Some of them, anyway. Repressed individuals may become roaring boys and roaring boys morph into — you get the idea. As my first Foreign Editor told me, “You can claim ridiculous expenses, get thrown out of the country — always good for the image — abduct the women and slaughter the men. The only thing you can’t do is... fail.”

Golly, that pumped me up. Under such pressure, with sketchy knowledge of foreign languages thrown in, no wonder many of the boys (and girls, in their own ways) cut loose after the story’s filed.

All fairly harmless, if rotten diplomacy, and we always pay for breakages.

This is not a digression, honestly. Hacks need a hotel with reliable communications and your average hotel fitting that bill needs guests who won’t frighten the horses. Lottie Totty — Eastern European with a virtually all-consonants name, so that’s what she was to us — perceived a niche market allowing her to charge four-star prices for a decent boardinghouse.

It’s right behind the train station in a European capital. Lottie Totty installed half a dozen telex machines in the basement, beefed up the switchboard, dedicated ten percent of overheads to the Ministry of Posts and Communications, and did terrific business. The city was a hub or crossroads and several times a year the hacks would hurtle in, pack the Pension Whatever, and do wonders for her offshore bank account.

We’d been resident for ten days — an uprising, we were waiting for famous dissidents to flee across the border and they were fleeing in slow motion if at all. Robin Ratcliffe was ousted early on, though he slunk back frequently for fear of missing anything the rest of the pack had scavenged. Lottie shook her head until her cleavage blurred, in the course of refusing to reveal his offense.

The consensus was that it must have been incredibly violent or perverted. Lottie Totty ran — I suppose you could term it a frat house for allegedly mature adults. Our sort of guests helped themselves at the little bar and scribbled the price in an exercise book hanging on a string. You paid well over the odds for your room so what went on there was none of Lottie’s never-mind.

Then Henry Potter lost patience with our rumors. Henry’s older than God, doyen of foreign correspondents. Lottie Totty kept two adjoining rooms free on the top floor and they were Herr Potter’s Suite. The only other guest near him had been Robin Ratcliffe.

“You’re a pack of gossiping applewomen,” Henry Potter declared, three days after Robin’s expulsion. “I complained because the idiot was making such a racket that I couldn’t sleep. Snoring’s forgivable but strangled bloody screams are unacceptable when indulged in at length, nightly. Satisfied, you... children? This correspondence must now cease. The Editor.”

Some of us believed that he and Lottie were more than good friends. Possibly Robin had caught her sneaking into HP’s bower, that would do it. On the other hand, the old boy’s irritation at having his sleep ruined was convincing. Either way, the solution was disappointing. Lurid had been far more fun.

We were at the airport when Robin started edging into his account. The dissidents having refused to oblige, everyone was returning to London. Now that I think about it, his shaggy-dog story was an oblique apology for making a fool of himself at the Pension Whatever. I expect he assumed that Potter had gone into cruel detail, and Robin wanted me to put his nightmares into context. Only his nerve failed, so he just trailed away and thought his thoughts...

Six months after the Lottie Totty affair, there was a small war — little more than crockery rattled and plumage ruffled all round — but my paper is into shot and shell, so off I went. Robin Ratcliffe’s lot were eccentric enough to consider sensationalism A Bad Thing, but a deputy editor had made his bones in the region and considered it important enough to warrant coverage.

There we were, Robin, me, and a couple of thugs from the Daily Dire, out for glory and desperate to beat us and each other, the idiots. He and I took to slipping away first thing every morning and working the story together. (We’d bribed the hotel people twice over to inform us what the thugs were telling the Dire and not inform the thugs of what we’d filed. Their bribe had been inadequate, or our shared resources made it so.)

Slipping away was all very well, but misery likes company and we could have done with the thugs aboard the armoured personnel carrier when it ran into an ambush. Not even an ambush for us, that was the pig of it. Bad enough for homicidal lunatics to try killing a harmless stranger, i.e oneself. To be caught between opposing sets of organised loonies who don’t even know you’re there, stalled in a fold of desert with mortar rounds going one way and a hull-down tank’s shells replying from a quarter-mile away...

Terror turns me glumly thoughtful. At least I don’t wet myself or bite people, which I have seen happen. Robin’s reaction was strange enough to break my trance. One would swear he looked... relief wasn’t quite it, but a weight was off his shoulders. “Funny,” he mumbled, “I never thought it would be this way...”

Then he told me more about the art gallery. We all repeat ourselves at times, and he had every excuse to gabble the first thing in his head. Though he wasn’t gabbling, just thinking aloud. I didn’t stop him because the partly familiar recital provided a distraction and I willed myself to listen carefully, concentrate.

Much later — the tank went away, the mortar team ran out of ammunition or motivation, I was on the plane back to London — I realised that Robin Ratcliffe’s story had changed. Wrong word: Developed was what it had done.

Fleeting unease over, Robin felt pleased with himself, there in the recently airless side room of the gallery. He was no barbarian, the Boring Respectable Paper doesn’t keep them on strength for long, but in the Bible’s phrase he was “as the beasts that perish” when it came to art appreciation.

His sister was an enthusiast and for years he’d tried to see what she did — brushwork and textures, skin tones, handling of light, a painter’s signature palpable in everything save the autograph in a bottom corner. Robin concluded that he was artistically unmusical.

Now, however, he was appreciating nuances and making sophisticated observations. Evidently he was a late starter.

Almost nose to nose with the canvas, all Robin could make out was an uneven layer of old paint, mainly black where it wasn’t a dismal reddish-brown — the tiled floor — and indefinably tarnished or bloomed. No sign of the woman, and if he hadn’t known a chair was there... Too close, so he retreated again, expecting to decode what had been there before.

Except — ah yes, there it was. One’s eyes needed to adjust to the altered distance. Chair and woman present and correct. A sitter in both senses of the term; Robin smirked. No doubt of it, he’d made a breakthrough. Until this morning the notion of understanding that the artist had captured arrested motion like that would have been beyond him.

It really was amazingly clever: Had this painting been a photograph taken one second later, then the old lady would be on her feet and looking out from the frame. Robin’s mouth dried and his breath caught. The din and vibrancy of the avenue was paradise when he found himself at the foot of the gallery’s imposing steps, and harsh sunlight had never been more welcome.

He shirked explaining what had happened; there was a jump-cut between gloating over connoisseurship and running for his life.

The personnel carrier’s engine caught at last, and this time the clown failed to stall it. We backed up very fast; the little-more-than-tin box kept bouncing off the mini-valley’s crumbling banks but kept going. I was too occupied in silently thanking Whatever There Is to wonder what had made Robin flee from that painting. Sorting the ins and outs of an ambiguous anecdote had low priority.

Then the paper found a better war for me just up the road by Foreign Desk measurement, meaning two countries away. The Boring Respectable believed in finishing anything they started. I didn’t see Robin again that year or for most of the next.

I heard about him, though. He’d always been an amiable character, so when he started getting snappish and cutting up rough, people noticed. One morning three different chums on as many different papers rang me with exciting gossip. Robbo Ratcliffe had gone crazy and assaulted the Church Correspondent at the Boring Respectable, of all targets. Simon Trimble, his name was; we’d trained together in the provinces.

Anyone more inoffensive was hard to imagine. Lack of personality decreed that there was no Trimble to like or dislike, let alone assault with violence. He was just a fact on two legs, reasonably effective at his job.

The first caller alleged that Robin had broken Simon Trimble’s jaw; the second had Simon being rushed out of the newsroom with an eye dangling on his cheek; the third didn’t specify injuries but understood that S. Trimble was on his way to surgery as we spoke.

It’s never as bad or good as wild rumors insist. Trimble wanted to get at a phone, Robin was in the way and deep in thought, Trimble tapped him on the shoulder... A split second later Robin was helping him off the floor and Trimble knew what it was like to have a broken nose.

“You startled me,” Robin mumbled. And to the newsroom at large, “He startled me, all right?”

It wasn’t, of course. By ill fortune the Boring Respectable’s editor and Lord Somebody the proprietor, lunching the deputy prime minister in the boardroom that day, were giving him a tour en route to the trough, and witnessed the disagreement. Worse yet, the paper had been running a long, tut-tutting campaign on behalf of civilised behaviour in all ranks of society.

Robin Ratcliffe’s exploit, an instant legend (journos are a pack of old applewomen, Henry Potter hadn’t slandered the trade), was pounced on by Private Eye, the satirical magazine: There was a cartoon of two chaps walking past a stately-home entrance with an ambulance outside — “They’re expecting a reporter from the Boring Respectable...” one says to the other.

The BR hates landing in Private Eye and media-watch columns of the opposition. Punching a blameless colleague is gross industrial misconduct within the meaning of the relevant Act of Parliament. The union can’t do a thing if you’re fired and employment tribunals don’t want to know. The Boring Respectable tempered justice with mercy: Robin was given a year’s severance pay and escorted off the premises.

In an elegant phrase I picked up from the U.S. military, my friend had screwed the pooch. He’d joined the Boring Respectable straight from university, he had worked for no other paper and what was more, he’d never wanted to. In that era, Fleet Street jobs were easier to come by, but whether he could be happy or even much use at my shop, for instance, was dubious.

The chance didn’t arise because he laid low after the notorious Fistfight at the BR Corral. Ring his flat and the answering machine never inspired him to call back.

Sadie, my wife, predicted that Robin was finished. She is the bright half of the partnership, a watcher who sees more of the game. Keeps pouring the drinks, listens more than she talks. Sadie pointed out that the Ratcliffes were a modestly moneyed clan and Robin had a trust fund from some grandma or other.

“Just enough to keep him afloat, not enough to stop him feeling sour and hard-done-by, down the road.” She gave me a hug. “That’s why I stick with you — nothing like a working-class boy made good, they toil away from force of habit. Class isn’t everything, my love.” I’m sure she was just teasing.

It’s much easier to uphold “No man is an island” when doing nothing troublesome about it. I kept telling myself I’d hunt him out and gee him up, give him a name or two to approach — without making the effort. Robin might still be hurting and resent my intrusion, was the cop-out.

Gradually he slipped to the back of the filing cabinet. About a year later my shop offered a David Hockney reproduction lithograph for free, featuring it on the cover of the Saturday color supplement. Tiled floor, a director’s chair half in sunlight, lots of blue California sky. It put me in mind of Robin through being so unlike his hoodoo picture, and I wondered for all of ten seconds what that had been all about.

While no sounder on art than Robin, I have been known to put my nose into the occasional gallery. Now that I bothered to notice, there were no end of interiors and still lifes in myriad styles showing furniture and flooring. Half-consciously I would think, Not that one or It’s a plank floor or Can’t be those tiles, they’re glowing, really gladden the eye.

Sadie was first with news of Robin Ratcliffe. She heard from a mutual friend just back from vacation that Robin was living in Mexico as an upmarket beach bum, supposedly involved in a jet-ski rental venture but hardly knocking himself out over it. “Told you so,” Sadie said. “Trust Robbo to go to seed in a good climate.”

A similar report surfaced a long while afterwards, only this time Robin was loafing around the French Alps.

Then in the mid ’seventies we ran into each other during a baggage-handlers’ strike at Heathrow Airport. I’d been looking at Robin, among other castaways, for minutes before recognising him. Terrific tan and hair so sun-bleached that I’d taken it for a peroxide job.

He was pleased to see me and I was inquisitive, so the long delay became acceptable in a flash... Robin was on his way back to Cyprus, where by implication he was based these days. Good jumping-off spot for the entire Middle East, he said in a slightly defensive way I found puzzling.

Ah, great, I said, so you’re back in the business — what, freelancing, running other freelancers, where do you fit in? Vague and evasive, he talked of looking around, weighing up the market and seeking a niche; or maybe he’d try writing a book instead. Sounded uncannily like bone idleness to me.

Still, he was talkative enough on other matters, and I couldn’t decide whether to be embarrassed on his behalf — Robin was pushing forty, addressing someone digging his heels in at the approach of the big five-oh — or amused and compassionate. He enthused like a teenager. He had Met Somebody and she’d turned his life around.

“God, Charlie, fate and chance, eh? None of us knows what is for the best... It seemed the end of the world when the Respectable fired me but if they hadn’t, then I would never have met An — Annabelle — and that... Brrrr! Makes my blood run cold.” Robin laughed joyously enough to draw attention to us.

He had it bad, poor chump. They do, eternal bachelors of the heterosexual persuasion, on falling in love at last. Annabelle (Robin produced the hastily-altered name without hesitation next time around) had been the making of him, he enthused. “I was in a bad way, on the sly. It crept up on me. Well, that picture obsession... did I ever tell you about a picture that gave me the horrors?”

There’d been fleeting references, I agreed with a poker face. Robin was only half listening, a fault with besotted lovers. “My mind was... I dunno, an attic full of garbage I’d let pile up, cobwebs and dead flies and Lord knows what.” Another of those good-to-be-alive laughs. “She spring-cleaned me! Came along, opened all the windows... Oh, I wish you could meet her, you will one day.”

A little of that lasts me ages. “Married, I take it?” Why else would Robin stumble over naming her, but he gaped at me. He was rusty; good reporters don’t need too many clues.

“Yes,” he conceded, slightly cast down. “It’s not sordid, mind you. He’s old enough to be her father, it’s a hollow marriage. His career depends on having a wife; in fact, Annabelle’s probably the main reason he has a career. He’s agreed to divorce her as soon as he retires — I don’t want to talk about it.” But of course he did do, avoiding the goddess’s awkward marital status but extolling her peerless worth.

His mistress, Robin asserted with a trace of reproach, had been the only person to perceive that he was a seriously sick puppy. “She nursed me, just by talking, and turned me clean around. Somehow I’d let things warp me out of shape, you see. I mean, that gallery thing... Annabelle says the first thing we’ll do when she is free, is go to New York so I can spit in that old hag’s eye — metaphorically, of course.”

Only now that he could mock what had poisoned his peace of mind did Robin Ratcliffe tell me the full story of that gallery visit. He was celebrating release from self-generated torture, and championing his lover as a miracle worker.

He spoke of the previous Robin Ratcliffe as he might have of a stranger to be pitied for falling prisoner to a bizarre delusion. The recollection was punctuated by his head-wagging, “What an idiot!” or “That gives you an idea of how much trouble I was in.”

He was walking away from the camouflaged woman in the chair, still considering the concept of arrested motion and its depiction on canvas, when Robin stopped dead.

A voice, clear although unspoken, enquired coldly: What makes you so sure that she is not moving behind your back? His shoulders crawled and breathing took a conscious effort. Robin didn’t fear or suspect or torment himself with an impossible fantasy. He simply knew that behind his back the old woman was shifting on that beastly chair.

He did not want that to be so, he really didn’t. Crushed by overwhelming, imperious dread, Robin’s fear was total. If he ever saw her face... That would be bad, very, very bad.

It wasn’t horror-movie stuff, the new Robin Ratcliffe broke off to assure me. He hadn’t expected a stripped skull within the dark cage of bonnet, or a hideous face deformed by hatred and malice. It was just that if she set eyes on him, and he met her gaze...

“That’s the crazy part, I had no idea what would happen next, apart from it being unthinkably... well, not in my best interests,” said Robin, cocky enough now to be fake-pompous. “And there was something else — she’d been waiting for me. She was set there to recognise certain people, God knows how many or why, and if I hadn’t happened to wander in I’d have been safe. I mean, how daftly weird is that?”

Hence the subsequent nightmares. He’d be back in the gallery, but it was a split second after meeting the painted woman’s eye and indescribable ruin was his next heartbeat away.

At the nadir of what he recognised as a nervous breakdown, Robin no longer needed to be asleep for the nightmare to grip. He could be on a Tube train or the treadmill in the gym and freeze, screaming inwardly while awaiting the worst. It was Simon Trimble’s bad luck that Robin was in the middle of one such session when Si nudged him...

Yes, I said, but we hadn’t finished with the original thing. What did he see when he was forced to confront the painting?

“Now I’ve got you at it — there was nothing to see, man. Paint on canvas.” Robin pulled a face. “But I didn’t have the guts to prove that,” he admitted.

He’d stood there, crouched and wincing, shaking, until to his horror his head started pulling round towards the far wall of the side room. “Think iron filings and magnet.”

What broke the spell was the sight of the edge of a now-familiar frame, right at the corner of his eye. “I’d made it all so real — the old crone was in charge, but I was so spit-scared of her that I wrenched away in a panic. It felt... physical, like the air was sticky, might as well have been Velcro, I swear I felt it catching and parting around me. But I was frantic, and suddenly I was falling over my own feet because it was easy to move again. I ran like hell, straight out of there.”

I had hand luggage — sensible foreign correspondents travel light, it saves vital time at the other end — and Robin’s cases were aboard a truck somewhere out in the airport triangle, so we parted a few minutes later. He gave me an address in Cyprus and said to look him up next time I passed through.

I was pleased that he’d come out of the tunnel, but human nature made one prefer the old Robin Ratcliffe, moodiness, neurotic delusions, and all. The spring-cleaned model looked ten years younger; obviously he was footloose and getting plenty of fulfilling, non-meaningless sex. Naturally I envied him like mad.

And little more than a year later he was dead.

Having sprained my ankle, I was copy tasting for the Foreign Desk while somebody was on holiday. The AP item was in the U.K.-side follow-ups basket before I did a mental double take and retrieved it. Two sentences with a Beirut dateline: Robin Ratcliffe, British businessman, killed by a gunman in the street. Ratcliffe had moved to Lebanon only three months ago, and he was believed to be a victim of mistaken identity.

British papers made a little more of it than that, though not much.

I was shocked, but once that passed, not unduly surprised. Lebanon had long been martyred by a political-religious civil war and the Palestine Liberation Army’s presence and influence weren’t helping. That made it a good place for a freelance reporter to operate and a bloody awful one for life expectancy.

The following year I learned that for myself, during five weeks in West Beirut, covering the Israeli army’s siege and its sequel, Chairman Arafat and Co. turfed out. Interesting times, as the Chinese put it. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds — and how splendid it was to get out of there.

Don’t quote me, but I’m a fair feature writer and a poor reporter. Survival depends on sticking with better ones, which is how Digger Purnell and I became joined at the hip. It used to be a rite of passage for many Oz hacks to spend awhile on a British paper and I’d eased his way through mine, until Digger sprinkled vodka into the managing editor’s wastebasket and set it alight, “to liven up the stuffy bugger.” That was too rich for our blood and he was off on his travels once more.

Digger settled in Beirut before the civil war began; he spoke fluent bad Arabic and any local he didn’t know, he knew of. A sound man, the hooligan.

We were having dinner at the Commodore one night — out there in the cement garden with its emptied, dangerously deep, slipper-shaped swimming pool and the parrot doing perfect imitations of incoming artillery rounds — and maybe an empty chair sparked an association of ideas. “Did you see much of Robbo Ratcliffe when he was here?”

“Not as much as some saw.” Digger’s a professional Australian and they can be wearing. Digger in cryptic, I-know-and-you-do-not mode is even worse, so I didn’t bite.

“Doesn’t matter, I just wondered what the heck he was doing here.”

“He was shagging somebody’s wife,” Digger informed me matter-of-factly. He said that the husband was an executive of a company I have no intention of naming, to protect the adulterous. “Yeah, Robbo followed her wherever her old man was posted, like a little doggie. When they were here, before things got really bad, she’d sneak over to Cyprus for fun ’n games. The Mister was sweet provided they didn’t carry on under his nose.

“But madam found better fish to fry and stopped going to Cyprus. So Robbo upped sticks and based himself here, bloody fool. Somebody, uh, found that unacceptable.”

“You mean...?”

“Put it this way: He got blown away by a man in military fatigues and a barracks cap. PLO or local militia, moonlighting. The job cost twenty pounds sterling, I know that for a fact.” (Later, gingerly, I tried the concept on a PLO officer for credibility, and his verdict was, “Twenty? Some of my men would do it for a pack of cigarettes. Or a kind word.”)

That night, uncertain whether Digger Purnell was making it up as he went along, to impress me with insider stuff, I objected, “You said the husband didn’t mind.”

“Typical dim pom, never listens! Chilly Willy wasn’t around anymore, was he. He’d been posted home-side, she stuck around for a while. It was her new fancy man, scared Robbo might get her back.” Digger cackled and cocked an eye over the candle in its red glass globe. “I wouldn’t have minded a punt at her myself, she was tasty, but I dropped that idea after what happened. Fine chance, anyway — after Robbo got himself scragged she shot straight home to hubby. So the guy who paid the piper invested twenty quid for nothing. Serve him right. Your round, Charlie.”

That was a weird siege: West Beirut was cordoned off and under sporadic attack from land, sea, and air (gunboats with missiles), yet there were quiet spells and it was a relatively large area. One needed wheels, meaning a taxi.

Sharif was my driver. He’d owned a restaurant and a decent house by what had been the St. George’s Hotel, and some rental property, and now he had his car. Like many of them, not your standard cabbie. I don’t know how he discovered that I’d known Robin Ratcliffe — nothing stayed private around the Commodore, the waiters listened out and everybody was somebody’s kinsman, a cousin or thereabouts.

One morning we were rolling along Hamra, the main shopping street, when Sharif observed, “Mr. Robin was a nice man. A happy man.” Here he sighed heavily, obviously thinking that he had been the same, longer ago than he cared to remember. “He lived in one of my apartments, the Is-ra-aelis got it last month, it was the last of them. I had many flats.”

I made a neutral sound. Terrible thing to say, but true: He was lucky compared to some. Still had his skin — and the Mercedes. Sharif pulled over. “I saw it happen. Over there. No, here on my side.” His tone was casual, much as you’d use when indicating a minor landmark to a tourist.

“I was in Hamra constantly when I had businesses, that is how I saw it happen, there where I point. It was a restaurant,” he added helpfully. We were looking at a hole in the frontages where the remains of an industrial-size freezer and a catering range showed through heaped rubble and charcoal beams bulldozed towards the back.

A sole surviving chair, the aluminium, stackable kind, leaned drunkenly out of the gap and a stray mongrel was lifting a leg against it.

There’d been a canopy, and the chairs stood at tables in its shade, with little bay trees in tubs to divide them from passersby. Sharif saw his tenant Robin Ratcliffe pause outside the restaurant. A man in olive-drab had been some distance behind. Once he was closer, he drew his pistol and shot Robin through the head, hardly breaking stride to do so.

The gunman kept walking. Everybody in the vicinity sat tight until he went down an alley, although he had holstered the weapon while his target was hitting the ground. The incident was not uncommon in civil-war Beirut and a certain etiquette had emerged.

I knew the alleged motive for the killing and I expect Sharif did, too, but we dropped the subject by tacit agreement. However, he took to pausing outside the ex-restaurant if we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere and Digger was not in the car.

It got on my nerves but I kept quiet in case Sharif put a higher value on life than I’d assumed, and it was his way of signalling regret. Towards the end, when the PLO was on its way out and American and French and Italian troops — feathered headgear when they landed, very dashing — held the ring, Sharif pulled over and this time he mentioned something else.

“It was strange,” he said meditatively. “I wanted to speak to Mr. Robin, that was why I was watching. I meant to offer a long lease at a good rate, he was a tenant I wanted to keep.

“A delivery was finishing, and soon there would be space to park, but I didn’t want to get blocked in. If Mr. Robin looked round, I could call him over, talk of the lease. He was staring at the window of the restaurant.

“There was nothing to see, the blinds were... the strips were joined, it was just a shut blind, the place was closed. But he was looking, looking.” Sharif made that catlike hiss some Lebanese emit to signal incomprehension laced with impatience. “What else could make him stare — empty tables, empty chairs?

“He could not have seen the soldier coming, he was looking the wrong way. But he did see, though his back was turned, he shouted, ‘No, no!’ and covered his eyes just as the soldier shot him. Strange...”

And we rolled on, with me speechless and... preoccupied, you might say.

No, I do not believe that the Seated Woman escaped from the canvas and crossed the world to ambush Robin Ratcliffe in Beirut. He didn’t see her where his reflection belonged in that restaurant window, or find her in one of those metal chairs, invisible to anyone but him.

It’s insulting to even suggest that I might consider the notion. I am a twenty-first century adult, after all.

Admittedly Sharif had no reason to lie to me. I am confident that he didn’t, for that matter. Nonsense is talked about death meaning less in the Middle East — the stereotype is hard to sustain if you attend funerals there. But death is taken differently, maybe because there is so much of it.

Sharif had accepted his tenant’s demise and when we talked he was mildly puzzled by the Englishman’s last moments, that was all. Making my flesh creep was not his intention.

With my modern-adult hat on, it is obvious that Robin saw the gunman’s reflection and reacted. Or the whole thing could have been happenstance — he sneezed, say, moving suddenly, and Sharif misinterpreted what he saw. That must have been it, of course it was.

On the other hand, the woman made of shadows was the end of Robin Ratcliffe, one way or another. He said it himself: If that picture hadn’t preyed on his mind he’d never have lashed out and been fired from the Boring Respectable, and then he would not have met the woman he called Annabelle, earning his appointment with a bullet. It makes one think, though I’d rather not.

Of course I refuse to consider the supernatural. Only...

Quite recently I was in New York on an assignment and met a charming woman of a certain age who took a shine to me. All harmless, naturally, I’m a married man. He said. We shared one of those days when everything goes right and middle-aged fools go a little crazy. Manhattan in springtime, say no more.

We were strolling down never mind which avenue when she clutched my arm and exclaimed, “Oh, my very favorite place, let’s go in.” I looked at the steps and I saw the name of the place carved in the granite lintel... I knew what I’d encounter there, just knew it.

The next bit is humiliating. I made a thing of slapping my brow and cursing, and said sorry, terrible rudeness, I’d just remembered something incredibly urgent demanding my attention at the bureau, not a second to waste. I didn’t hear what the lady replied — though from the tone anger and contempt were in there — because I was jogging away before she could comment.

I am a rational being and therefore I do not believe in the Seated Woman. But supposing she knows better, and believes in me and a message I would much rather not receive? Wiser, surely, to steer clear and remain ignorant as to which of us is correct.

Copyright ©; 2005 by Jeffry Scott.