Lucinda Watkins had been working with Anne Ross Wyler for six years, and never once in all that time had she been able to forget the differences between them. It was not, at all, the way she had expected that to be. Annie didn’t sound Upper Class, the way that fool William F. Buckley did on that television program Lucinda had once found as fascinating as a disaster area. Annie didn’t use a lot of big words or dress up no matter what the time of day or night, either. It was usually Lucinda who ended up fussing about clothes, because Annie quite literally didn’t notice what she wore. She was more than capable of going into the living room to meet a reporter dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized T-shirt that said Bite the Wa x Tadpole in big red letters. The worst was when she had shown up at a Congressional hearing on child pornography wearing a T-shirt that said Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican, and Lucinda had only had forty-five seconds to exchange blouses with her so that she didn’t end up alienating the entire United States House of Representatives. Later, Annie had lectured her endlessly on the fact that the entire United States House of Representatives was not Republican, but Lu-cinda had stuck to her guns that time, and with good reason. They were in enough trouble, on a day-to-day basis, without offending Newt Gingrich.
Where Lucinda saw the difference, and couldn’t avoid it, was in things. Annie did not have a lot of things, and she didn’t seem to care about having “nice” ones, but what she had she was entirely indifferent to. Lucinda couldn’t break a plate or stain a tablecloth without experiencing deep feelings of guilt and panic: guilt because she had ruined something that she had had the responsibility of taking care of; panic because such an accident almost always meant an expenditure that would be difficult to make and injurious to the family budget. She could still remember her grandmother sitting down at the kitchen table working out the figures with pen and paper. So much out of the grocery money; so much out of the bus money; so much out of the money put aside each week to buy the papers: all this, just to get enough together to replace a toaster or a dress that was supposed to last the whole school year but that Lucinda had ripped on the playground the very first day. Life was counting, addition and subtraction, rigidity. A broken milk pitcher was a week with two days of greens, no meat. A ruined pair of shoes was a month without snack money for school and the two meatless days a week on top of it. The only money that never got cut was the money for books. Grandma Watkins insisted on buying them all a book a month, a real one, not from the racks at the drugstore but from the one bookstore in Jacksonville that the owner wouldn’t look down on her in. That had been a ritual as solemn and unbending as the rituals of the Catholic Church, which they did not belong to because the Catholics did not praise the Lord with enough joy, and because it was bad enough being poor in Mississippi without being Catholic on top of it. Lucinda had never, in all her life, ruined a book, and she couldn’t imagine herself doing it. Even the ruin of really bad books made her ill. She had tried and failed to join the Progressive Conference of Philadelphia, because at her first meeting a man had stood up and ripped apart a copy of The Bell Curve. Once, finding a copy of A Wake Up Call for the White Race getting rained on on the ground just next to a bus shelter, she had picked it up and wiped it off and put it in a dry, although suitably out of the way, place. It was not that she did not understand the power of hate, but that she felt the power of books more strongly, and the power of the need to preserve all things and waste nothing, against the day when you had nothing at all.
Annie’s basic attitude to things was not to notice they were there. If they broke, and she had to notice them, she got annoyed at them and threw them away. Then she went out and bought another of whatever it was. Lucinda had known, from the beginning, that Annie was rich, but this approach to possessions had startled her from the beginning, and still did. It was bad enough when Annie swept away a load of broken crockery that had been smashed on the dining room floor—the girls, when they came to stay, were often angry; they screamed; they ranted; they broke things—and drove down to Price Heaven to buy three or four more sets of dinner plates or coffee mugs. At times like those, Lucinda could tell herself that she was being neurotic. A rich woman like Annie didn’t have to worry about the price of a few cheap plates. When it came to the cameras, Lucinda could not convince herself so easily that she was the one who was crazy. Cameras cost money. The cameras Annie bought cost hundreds of dollars, in one case over a thousand, because they were equipped to take night shots without an ordinary flash, to take shots at odd angles, to do all kinds of things that an ordinary off-the-shelf camera couldn’t do. Annie was no more careful about the cameras, or worried about their breaking, than she was about the plates. At least twice a month, she came back with one of the cameras smashed. The johns hated being photographed. If they thought they could get away with it, they leaped out of their cars and chased her. Sometimes it was the cops who took the cameras and ruined them. “Never underestimate the power of a cop on the take,” Annie always said, and Lucinda had come to understand that this was true. Lord only knew, Annie was right to say that the wholesale prostitution of twelve-and fourteen-year-olds would not continue to thrive if somebody wasn’t looking the other way.
Standing at the door to the darkroom, Lucinda hesitated. The red light wasn’t on, which should mean it was okay to go in, but Lucinda had the feeling that Annie wasn’t always careful about the lights. Finally, she knocked. There was the sound of metal things being moved around—what went on in a darkroom Lucinda didn’t know—and Annie said, “Come in.”
Lucinda went in. Annie was sitting on a swivel stool. Print after photographic print was spread out on the long, wide worktable in front of her. She had her retractable art light trained right over the ones in the middle. Lu-cinda closed the door behind her. In spite of the art light, the room was dark.
“Well?” she said.
Annie shook her head. “Ambiguous. Far too ambiguous, unfortunately. And yet I know it was him. I recognized him as soon as I saw him.”
“I still don’t understand why that isn’t enough.”
“It isn’t enough because he’s got friends in high places and they’re not about to let him go down in a way that will make him look bad. Even if he really isn’t one of our own.”
“This is the Main Line stuff you’re always talking about? One of our own?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t taken the car that night. If you hadn’t taken the car, you wouldn’t have been able to follow him.”
“It was too cold a night not to take the car,” Annie said. Then she pushed her stool back until she could reach the switch on the back wall and turned on the overhead lights. In the now bright light, Lucinda could see that Annie was wearing that Freedom FROM Religion button she’d taken to putting on since the national prayer service after September 11. “Crap,” Annie said. “I don’t know what to do about this at all.”
“I don’t suppose you could let it drop.”
“No,” Annie said. “I saw the man pick up a thirteen-year-old girl and pay her twenty dollars to blow him. You know who it was? It was Patsy Lennon.”
“Good Lord,” Lucinda said.
“Yeah, I know. That kid has more issues than National Geographic. She’s a complete mess and an addict besides. But there he was, and there she was, and all I got a picture of was Patsy’s head and his hand on top of it. Maybe I’ll go looking for a telephoto lens. Maybe if they think I’m not there and can’t see them, they’ll go back to being out front about what they do.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t take pictures later, when you got to that party. It seems like everybody in the world is looking for whoever it is who shot your brother.”
Annie sighed. “I was invited to that party, did you know that? Oh, Charlotte’s never been able to stand me, I’m everything she hates about everything, but Tony always insisted. I’ve got the invitation upstairs. I should have gone. I could have stood around at the buffet table buttonholing political hotshots and financial wizards and reciting chapter and verse about their forays onto the Strip. Except that I wouldn’t have gotten anybody but the second-raters. Did you know that? The people who really run things, the people like Tony, know better than to even try something like this.”
“He’s not one of the people who run things?”
“No,” Annie said. “He’s—” She let her hands flutter in the air. She looked, Lucinda thought, incredibly tired. “I’ve often wondered if some of them don’t indulge, anyway. I know the attraction exists. Maybe what people like that do—” She pointed at the photograph in front of her. Lucinda couldn’t see anything in it but blur. “Maybe what they do is find suitable companions for the people who can’t find them for themselves. Can’t because they don’t dare. Can’t you see the headlines? Presidential Friend Linked to Child Prostitution. Head of International Bank Arrested for Soliciting Sex with Minor. The major papers wouldn’t run them, but the rags would. Thank God for the National Enquirer.”
“So?” Lucinda said. “Does it go on?”
“I don’t know. On one level, it seems to me inevitable that it would. On another, it seems to me just as inevitable that it wouldn’t.”
“And I thought you’d know, growing up with those people,” Lucinda said.
Annie laughed. “In my day, there were some things they didn’t tell daughters. There probably still are. I just wish I knew what all that was about. There’s only one reason to rush off for a quickie blow job from Patsy Lennon on the way to the biggest charity ball of the season, and that’s because he’s got the bug and he’s got it bad. He has to be completely out of control. Which poses a lot of interesting questions.”
“Maybe your brother knew about it,” Lucinda said. “Maybe your brother was going to make a public stink about it. So this guy—”
“Shot him? Over that? I doubt it.”
“Somebody shot him,” Lucinda pointed out. “And you were there. I mean, Annie, think of the timing. You were right there. You must have seen whoever it was go right through the gates in front of your nose.”
“I know.”
“And he went through the gates, before your brother was shot. Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then,” Lucinda said, but she didn’t know what she meant by it. Well, then, you should go to the police and say something about it. Well, then, you should start tracking this guy and see what else you can find. Well, then, you should take care of yourself and butt out. Annie was staring down at the best of the prints, the one with Patsy’s head with the hand on top of it.
“Well, then,” Lucinda said again. “You might just consider covering your ass. Go to the police and get this over with. Because if you don’t, and somebody noticed you there, you’re going to get yourself in a huge amount of trouble.”
Annie sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I’ve got a better idea, better than going to the police. I should have thought of it before. Do you have a volunteer that can cover for you this morning?”
“No,” Lucinda said. “Not until this afternoon. Why?”
“I want you to go with me. We’ll go this afternoon. I should have thought of this before.”
“Thought of what?” Lucinda said, but it was no use. Annie was packing up her prints, bustling around, cleaning up, as if nothing more unusual had happened in the last several days than that one of the johns had actually been arrested. It was impossible to talk to Annie when she was like this. At least, this time, whatever she had on her mind was unlikely to cost a great deal of money.
Annie put the prints in a big manila envelope and the envelope in the locked top drawer of her filing cabinet. Lucinda went out into the hall and thought about calling child protective services to let them know what Patsy Lennon was up to, again. There were some people who never seemed to be doing anything but learning to be dead.
Kathi Mittendorf had been holding her breath ever since the night Anthony van Wyck Ross was murdered, and since she’d known about that murder long before most other people in the city, she was beginning to feel light-headed.
“You know what they’re like,” Michael had said when he’d called, his voice sounding muffled as always and surrounded, this time, by wind. “They’re going to look for the first likely candidate to pin it on, and we may be that candidate. We’ve got a lot of literature out there. We’ve been making a lot of noise.”
More to the point, Kathi thought, there was the problem of all the explosives, and of the guns and ammunition in the basement. She had no idea what kind of a gun Anthony van Wyck Ross had been murdered with, but she had some of nearly everything on the premises, each piece bought separately and by seemingly unconnected people over a period of nearly three years. Even with warning, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to get rid of it all on short notice. There was the problem with the licenses too. Everything she had was li-censed—except, of course, for the explosives, which were straightforwardly ille-gal—but none of it was licensed to her, and no two pieces of it were licensed to the same person. It was easy as cake getting around the licensing laws if you knew what you were doing, which Michael did, but it was not so easy explaining where you’d gotten everything if you got caught. There was also the problem that one stockpile led to another. They tried very hard to construct the kind of organization the Illuminati themselves had pioneered, with small cells isolated from other small cells, nobody knowing more than three or four of the others, most hermetically sealed off from the rest, but it hadn’t worked out. They needed each other too much. It was hard being among the very few who knew what was really going on in the world. It was too easy to panic when you realized what you were up against: the assembled forces of the great in the world, the banks, the foundations, the armies. Even now, after all this time, Kathi found herself waking up in the night in a cold sweat, sure as hell that every noise she heard was one of them tapping his way into her house, bugging her phones, filling the air of her living room full of hypnotic gas. The one thing Kathi feared more than any other was that she’d become like those people who drifted into the movement and then drifted out again. Either they saw the truth and didn’t want to believe it, or they were gotten to, nobody knew how or why. Kathi thought it was a little careless of them to hold their meetings in public and to advertise them, even if only in the little local weekly papers. They were everywhere, and They did not take chances. America on Alert was so open, it almost had to be infiltrated. Someone in the membership had to be working for Them.
“Timothy McVeigh was set up,” Michael Harridan had told her, the first time she spoke to him. “Never forget that. It’s the best protection you have against being set up yourself. They want the American people to believe that we’re the ones who are dangerous, that we’re a bunch of kooks who’ll blow a bunch of babies to hell just because of our paranoia. That’s their word for us. Paranoid. That’s what they said about Randy Weaver and David Koresh. But they weren’t paranoid. They were right.”
Kathi had wanted to put up a little shrine to all of them, a long line of framed pictures, on the wall of her bedroom, but eventually she had decided against it. If she got arrested, or blown away by the enemy, they could use those pictures to “prove” that she was insane and dangerous. If you were insane, they could do anything they wanted to you. You didn’t have any rights, the way you did if they arrested you in the ordinary way. Michael said there were hundreds of people, maybe thousands, locked away in mental institutions whose only real crime had been to understand what the Illuminati were doing and tell other people about it.
“Paranoid is a wonderful word,” Michael said. “They call it a disease. The symptoms are anything they want them to be. One minute you’re on the street, getting people to really look at what has happened to America. The next minute, you’re in the loony bin, and the only way they’ll let you out is if you agree to stop talking about what you know.”
The problem was to strike a balance between being clean and being careful. Kathi couldn’t help herself. Her nerves were shot. She wasn’t Michael Harridan. She wasn’t a professional on a mission. She was an ordinary forty-five-year-old woman, a little dumpy now at the beginning of middle age, easily tired at the end of a long day. She was only important because she knew what she knew, and because Michael trusted her. When the call came, she got Susan and went to work hiding the things they had to hide. They put the explosives in big black trash barrels in her basement and covered them with clothes that were so badly mildewed it was hard to be in the same room with their stench. They put the rifles in odd places that only women would think of: in the old washing machine that hadn’t worked in all the time Kathi had rented this house; at the back of the cedar closet behind a cracked panel that opened into the hollow wall. All the walls in this house were hollow. It was a house that would be considered very shabbily made even today. It had probably been considered a gimcrack mess in 1894, when it was built. The Illumi-nati were operating here in those days too—in fact, George Washington himself was a tool of the Illuminati, a thirty-third-degree Mason who was head of his local lodge—but it took a long time for a population to be habituated to the internal rot the Illuminati had decreed for all human lives.
“They think in centuries,” Michael always said. “Most people think in days, or maybe weeks. They take their time. If they didn’t, people would catch on, people would get frightened. Instead, it all looks normal. We make fun of the kind of people who talk about how things aren’t as good as they used to be. We treat them like cranks.”
Kathi had not been able to give up all the guns. She could probably have hidden everything she had and hidden it well, but if she had, it would not have been available to her if something drastic happened. She hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something drastic was going to happen any moment now. There was a homeless man who rummaged through the garbage cans on her street every morning. He looked a lot more alert than he ought to, and lately he’d been staying closer than ever to her door. There were all the security cameras at work. Price Heaven photographed everything, even the ladies’ changing rooms. There wasn’t a moment when management couldn’t zero in on anybody anywhere in the store. There were the transcripts she had made of the recordings from the party where Anthony van Wyck Ross had been killed. She still had them, the original and five copies, in the bottom drawer of the desk she kept in a corner of the dining room so that she could do her bills every month. She was sure they had been disturbed more than once while she was away from home, and that the desk had been moved too. It made her feel sick to her stomach to think of somebody coming into her house while she was away and going through her things. She’d rather have SWAT teams storm her front door.
The bottom line was this: Kathi no longer felt safe going anywhere, even to the bathroom, when she wasn’t armed. She had therefore armed herself, out of the huge cache in the basement, as soon as Susan had left for the evening and she was alone with the nightly news. By then, of course, there were news bulletins flashing by every few minutes. CNN and CNBC were reporting the story as if it were a political assassination, which it might well be. Kathi knew nothing about pistols. She couldn’t have recited the name of any to save her life. She’d simply picked out the biggest, blackest one in the pile, passing by the smaller “ladies’ guns” that might have fit more easily into her everyday purse. She was sure bigger guns would pack more of a wallop than smaller guns. Bazookas and howitzers were huge, and they packed more of a wallop than rifles. It took her nearly an hour to get the gun loaded. She didn’t know what any of the terminology was supposed to mean. She didn’t know how to match the gun with the bullets that belonged to it. Some bullets didn’t fit into the chambers, so she discarded them. Some bullets fit but were wrong for reasons she could not divine. Every time she found what she thought was the right ammunition, she took the gun up to her bedroom and fired into a big stack of pillows she used to prop her head up when she did Penny Press Fun and Easy Puzzles before dropping off to sleep. The gun kicked back against her hand painfully. She’d had no idea that firing a gun could set your bones on fire. Some of the bullets didn’t fire at all, though, and there was no pain then. Some of the bullets seemed to half explode inside the chamber. Eventually, she discarded any bullet that did not fit exactly. Too loose a fit, she decided, was just as bad as too big to fit at all. It was only when it was all over, and she had the bullets she needed, that she wondered if she could have done herself some real damage by experimenting the way she had. Maybe one of the bullets that rattled around too much could have made the gun blow up in her hand. She had no idea. She only knew it hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to her that she might have been heard by somebody in the neighborhood. All the houses here were very close together. When neighbors heard gunshots, they didn’t come over to check, but they did sometimes call the police. She sat down on her couch and waited for three hours to see if somebody would come to the door, but nobody did. Maybe none of her neighbors was home. Maybe none of them was paying attention. Kathi had a vision of them all sitting in their living rooms, glued to their TV sets, listening to the first reports of the shooting. By then, CNN had camera crews on the spot. Kathi could see the tall wrought-iron gates that closed off the house. CNN must have had a helicopter too, because there were aerial shots of the house itself with dozens of police cars parked in front of it. People came and went on the ground: women in evening gowns; policemen in uniform; men who might have been guests or detectives or FBI agents.
“All men wear uniforms,” Michael always said. “That suit and tie that men wear to work is a uniform. So’s the T-shirt and jeans they wear on the weekends. The trick is to narrow choices without letting you realize they’ve done it. They don’t like individuality, those people. Individuality is dangerous to them.”
Kathi should have been at Price Heaven right this minute. Ten to six was her usual shift—but only four days a week, because Price Heaven didn’t hire anybody full-time if it could help it. She had called in sick today, in spite of the fact that, being part-time, she would not get paid for being out. She had put the gun, fully loaded, into the big canvas tote bag she’d taken to carrying instead of her purse. There were laws against carrying a concealed weapon on the streets of Philadelphia, but they were the Illuminati’s laws. One of the first things the Illuminati tried to do was to disarm the population. A disarmed population was unable to fight back.
The bus was bumping along on streets she didn’t know. Like most people, she rarely left her own neighborhood except to go to work, and then she had a fixed routine for travel. She kept the tote bag on her lap with her hands wound through the handle. She had to physically prevent herself from reaching in to touch the gun. It gave her that much reassurance. The houses were nicer here than they were in her part of town. Most of them were brick. The people seemed to be better-dressed too. Either they had good dark coats that went all the way down past their knees, or those quilted-looking parkas people bought from L.L. Bean. Katy Davenport had had one of those parkas when they were together in school.
The bus pulled up to a stop. Kathi consulted her three-by-five card—she always wrote notes to herself on three-by-five cards; they were harder to lose than Post-it notes—and realized she was at her stop. She got up and waited for the bus’s back door to open. She had the impression that people who got out the back door were less conspicuous than people who got out the front. On the street, she looked around, checking the street signs. In the rich towns out on the Main Line, there were sometimes no street signs at all. If you didn’t know where you were, you didn’t belong there.
“There are people who think they’re well-off,” Michael said, “but they only think that because they don’t know how really rich people live. Really rich people live as far out of sight as they can. They don’t want people to know how much they really have.”
Kathi consulted her three-by-five card again. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was here. Maybe there would be a diner where she could get a cup of coffee and some toast. It was just about all she could afford if she expected to have enough money to take the bus home. She folded the three-by-five card in half and put it in the pocket of her jacket, which was nothing at all like an L.L. Bean parka. Cavanaugh Street, she repeated to herself, in her head. Then she turned in the direction of the yellow police barriers that had been set up along the sidewalk two blocks down.
Ryall Wyndham had been waiting most of his life to be famous, and now that it had happened, he didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t that he minded the attention. There were people who got rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights syndrome, but he wasn’t one of them. It hadn’t occurred to him, at first, the kind of capital he would be able to make of this. He’d only wondered if he was going to be in for endless hassles of a legal nature, because there he was, just a few hundred feet away, and there was that prick Tony Ross exploding into pieces right in front of his face. The problems of a legal nature that he had envisaged were strictly of a procedural kind. It hadn’t hit him until much later that he might be considered a suspect, not only because he’d been on the spot but because he’d been so public about the fact that he’d loathed Tony and all of his works. Of course, a lot of people loathed Tony Ross. Anybody in a position like that made enemies, without even trying, and on top of that Tony had the whole class thing: good-looking in an emaciated, English sort of way; tall and lean; good at sports; good with women; intellectually accomplished. Intellectually snobbish, that was what Ryall thought, but there was no way to fight that manner when you were confronted with it, unless you had it yourself. Ryall was one person who never misquoted that line from Hamlet that most people mistakenly thought said “to the manor born.” It wasn’t “to the manor.” It was “to the manner,” and that alone made Ryall convinced that Shakespeare was a genius. There was something there he could write a book about some day. If you told a woman like Charlotte Deacon Ross that you thought Shakespeare was a genius, she’d think you were a middlebrow hick, and that would be the end of your invitations to her “intimate evenings.” The only way you could redeem yourself would be to give a lot of money to one of her projects. Ryall did not have that kind of money. Charlotte herself gave 150,000 dollars a year to the opera alone. Women who wanted invitations were known to give a fifth of that, first time out. For Ryall, there was no substitute for staying an insider. He might consider Shakespeare a genius, but he’d never say so where anybody could hear him, and he would always know the name of the literary genius of the moment. The literary genius of this particular moment was Cynthia Ozick, who wrote excruciatingly thin little novels about alienation and spiritual dislocation, laced through with Yiddish folklore. Charlotte liked Cynthia Ozick because Cynthia Ozick had once been quoted, in Esquire, saying, “I am not entertained by entertainment.” It was the kind of thing the queen of England would say. Charlotte liked that, in spite of the fact that she thought of the queen of England as hopelessly bourgeois.
I am now making no sense whatsoever, Ryall thought, staring into the small screen of his television set. The very chicest thing was to have no television at all, and Ryall hadn’t had one until three days ago, when he realized he wanted, passionately, to see himself on all these television programs he was doing. He wanted to see himself when the show aired, and he wanted to see himself on the videotape they gave him a day or two later, like a souvenir. He’d had to buy not only the television set, but a VCR as well, and that had left him not only dangerously out of pocket but upset as well. Apparently, nobody was buying videotapes anymore. They were buying DVDs. The clerk in the Radio Shack Ryall had gone to had been as disdainful as Charlotte Ross when confronted with a tourist from Topeka who “really loved art.” Ryall didn’t care. He only wished he’d bought a bigger set, so that he didn’t have to scrunch up his eyes to see himself on the screen. In a couple of days, he was supposed to be on Larry King Live. Practically everybody watched Larry King Live except those women who were too chic to own a television set, and their children watched it. He had no trouble imagining himself at the next big fund-raiser—when one of those women had the guts to give one—with all those college kids hanging off his elbows while he talked about what it was like to schmooze over coffee with Jesse Jackson and Barbara Ehrenreich.
The tape had come to its natural end. All he could see on the screen was fuzz. The cell phone he had plastered to his ear was humming. Nick Braden-ton was lecturing him, again. He stepped forward and hit rewind. He wanted to watch the tape again. He wished he had bought a bigger set. He wished even more than he hadn’t lost the remote for this one. The tape finished rewinding and he hit the play button again.
“Are you listening to me?” Nick said. “I talk and I talk, but I don’t think you ever listen to me.”
“I’m listening to you.”
“I’m your editor,” Nick said. “I’m responsible for you. And you’re behaving like an ass.”
“I seem to be doing all right,” Ryall said. On the screen, there was a sudden sharp picture of himself, only a few seconds long, being introduced to the viewers. He did look like Porky Pig. He half-expected the camera to pan around to his behind and catch a view of a curly little tail poking out from the seat of his trousers. God, it was embarrassing.
“You’re making yourself suspect number one in the biggest shooting of the year,” Nick said. “Or maybe of the decade. You’re plastered all over everything from the National Enquirer to Crossfire, and the only thing that ever comes out of your mouth is just how close you were when the bullets hit.”
“I was close when the bullets hit,” Ryall said. “I saw his face explode in front of my eyes.”
“Save it for cable. You know and I know that if you really had been that close, you wouldn’t have stood there watching Tony Ross’s face explode. You’d have dived under the nearest table and done your best to be invisible.”
Ryall sniffed. “Maybe you underestimate me, Nick. Maybe I’m not just some poof society gossip columnist.”
“Have I ever called you a poof?”
Ryall didn’t answer.
“Shit,” Nick said.
If Ryall had had the remote, he would have been able to freeze frames to study what he was doing wrong. He was too jumpy. He talked too fast. His face was too animated. You wanted to be larger than life when you went on television, but not too larger than life, because then you looked—cartoonish.
“Try to pay attention,” Nick said. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your sex life, your social life, or your sexual orientation. I do care about having my office invaded by a bunch of FBI agents who need a quick fix and think they’ve got one in my least retiring regular columnist. This is not a game, Ryall. Got that? Tony Ross wasn’t just Charlotte Ross’s husband. He was the head of one of the world’s most influential investment banks. He’s had dinner at the White House as a matter of course for the last four administrations. The first lady was on her way to his front door when he got offed, and the offing looks a lot like a professional hit. This might, just might, have some connection to international terrorism, if only because of Ross’s exposure on the globalization issue. So when you go around telling everybody and his cat that you looked right into Tony Ross’s eyes at the moment he was hit—”
“I did look into his eyes.”
“—a few people, like those FBI agents, and the Bryn Mawr cops, get to thinking that the reason you knew enough to be staring at Tony in the first place was because you were either in the process of shooting him or because you had prior knowledge that he was going to be shot. And when you put that together with the fact that this mess has been the biggest boost to your career since the day you first learned how to use a computer, some people—”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ryall said. “Nobody would shoot anybody just in the hopes that it would give his career a boost. Nobody would even think of it.”
“People think of everything.”
“Besides,” Ryall said, “you already said it. It looks like a professional hit. I couldn’t carry out a professional hit if I wanted to. I can’t even hit skeet.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be the kind of argument that impresses anybody. Look, Ryall, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to save your ass. You’ve already got them so focused on you they can’t think about anybody else. Tone it down a little.”
“I don’t have any reason to tone it down a little,” Ryall said. He sounded constipated, even to himself. “I’m only telling the truth.”
“You’re only saying what you have to say to keep getting asked back to those programs,” Nick said. “This isn’t going to work, Ryall. You’re not going to be the next Greta Van Susteren.”
“I’m only telling the truth,” Ryall said again. Then he pulled the cell phone away from his ear and switched it off. He could hear Nick’s voice coming out of it right to the very end. He didn’t care. He could always say they’d been cut off. Nick wouldn’t believe it, but he wouldn’t press the issue. It happened with cell phones all the time.
On the little screen, a tiny, overanimated version of himself was jumping and squirming on the padded seat of a guest chair. He hadn’t understood how the camera would catch and magnify his every mood. He didn’t just look like Porky Pig. He looked like Porky Pig on amphetamines, sixty seconds before a serious psychotic break. Nick was wrong. He would be the next Greta Van Susteren. He had been plucked out of relative obscurity by the crush of great events and a major news story. By the time it was over, he would be familiar to everyone in America. It astonished him to realize just how much he wanted this. It went deeper than any other emotion he’d ever known. It brought him bolt upright in the middle of the night and made it impossible for him to sleep for more than four hours at a time. It was the miracle he’d been waiting for, and he hadn’t even known he’d been waiting.
God, he thought. What I wouldn’t do to be rid of every last one of them. It was too bad that this wasn’t a case of serial murder, so that he could watch them dying in agony one by one. He would reserve a very special death for Charlotte Deacon Ross, who looked down on the English royal family and thought that Ryall Wyndham existed only to provide an uncontroversial escort for women temporarily unaccompanied by their husbands—that, and just the right amount of just the right kind of publicity, when she decided she wanted publicity.
The tape had run its course again. It had only been a half-hour talking heads show. Ryall pushed rewind and waited for the tape to scroll back to its beginning. He pushed play again and pulled up one of the chairs as close to the screen as he could manage. It was a question of studying and working and thinking and planning. If he did everything right, he would be released.