3

It was a sign of my deep state of denial, combined with temporary post-sleep amnesia, that when I woke up the next morning to the sight of the parchment Desiderata poster on the ceiling above my bed, I had forgotten about Kanengiser.

“The headlines at this hour: After years of decline, the murder rate is up in New York,” intoned the very serious voice of the announcer on 1010 WINS All-News Radio. “But air pollution levels are down, and the forecast says, rain all day.”

“Well, there’s a mixed message for you,” I said to Louise Bryant. “My chances of being killed immediately and violently are up, my chances of being killed slowly by lung disease are down, and either way, it’s going to rain all day.”

Louise didn’t even open her eyes. The cat responds to only two sounds, that of the can opener and that of my singing (any song, as long as the lyrics are her name sung over and over).

It was raining all right. Through the water-smeared window, the street was a blur of gray people going to work, moving like blobs of mercury on glass, rushing past the guillotine on the sidewalk without even seeing it. What a great day to stay at home and be unconscious, I thought, but I couldn’t call in sick. A bad flu season had eaten up my sick days for the year by February. If I took another day, especially for mental health reasons, it would end up as another black mark on my permanent record.

“Dr. Herman Kanengiser, gynecologist and member of the District 27 community board, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his midtown office last night. Police say they have no suspects at the moment,” said the guy on WINS.

Oh yeah, I thought. Dr. Kanengiser.

I’d been feeling all right, but being reminded of the murder brought me down. I turned off the news—too depressing—and put on a tape of bouncy, pick-me-up tunes to fortify me as I showered, checked myself for signs of necrotic fascitis, and worked myself back into that excellent state of denial.

Perhaps my bathroom mirror said it best when it sloganeered: AVOID UNPLEASANTNESS.

There would, however, be no avoiding the Kanengiser murder. When I got to work, the whole place was buzzing with it. Normally, the murder of a nonfamous doctor would cause barely a ripple in the ANN newsroom. Oh, it might attract some prurient interest and inspire a few sick “dead gynecologist” jokes among the dark-humored newsroom drones, but otherwise no one would notice. When you’re trafficking in news from places like Sarajevo, one dead doctor in New York doesn’t mean much. Life is cheap in Casablanca. Unless of course it happens in your building.

MURDER ON 27, screamed a poster on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway leading to the newsroom. Democracy Wall is where we post employee news, gossip, jokes, weird letters from fans, and odd but true news stories. It “belongs” to the workers.

I skipped the terse bulletin about the murder and scanned the wall instead for news of the executive meetings, rumors about the reshuffle. There was nothing.

“Did you hear about the murder…,” producer Susan Brave said, coming up beside me at the wall.

“Can’t talk now,” I said. “I’m late.”

I was, in fact, running late for a mandatory security meeting that morning.

“You’ve probably already heard that a doctor on the twenty-seventh floor was shot and killed last night,” Pete Huculak was saying when I walked into the conference room and took a seat in the back next to Dillon Flinder.

Pete was the security chief for Jackson Broadcasting and its affiliated enterprises, which included ANN and the JBS building itself.

“I don’t want you to be alarmed. Our security is very good. The security for the commercial floors was pretty relaxed—the tenants wanted it that way so their customers could come and go freely—but something like this couldn’t happen in the broadcast facilities,” Pete said.

A skeptical murmur swept the room. True, after the World Trade Center bombing, our founder, Georgia Jack Jackson, had installed Star Trek airlock doors leading into and out of the broadcast facilities, as well as a vast system of video surveillance cameras, all of which gave the place a combination biosphere-prison farm atmosphere.

Despite this, there had been a number of security breaches and other disturbing incidents that put everyone a bit on edge. First, shortly after the new security force came aboard, someone had taken advantage of the transition to swipe a bunch of purses, including mine. Our TV psychologist, Solange Stevenson, had been menaced by an elderly Kansas widower who showed up at ANN, waved an unloaded hunting rifle, and complained that Solange was sending him secret messages (on that special frequency they shared) accusing him of homosexuality. Someone had broken into anchorwoman Bianca de Woody’s dressing room and stolen her wig, two pairs of her shoes, and her spare underwear. And Kerwin Shutz, ANN’s right-wing talk-show host, had been getting these perplexing phone calls that sounded distinctly like someone farting for about a minute before hanging up.

(Contrary to a popular rumor, I did not make those calls.)

As if that weren’t bad enough, ANN’s senior war correspondent, Reb “Rambo” Ryan, recently “grounded” after a disturbing incident in Haiti, claimed someone had taken a potshot at him as he was walking down Eighty-fourth Street.

Pete couldn’t do much about that, but we all felt he could do more about building security, which was why the on-air “Talent” had got together and demanded this meeting. The death of the doctor the night before gave it added urgency.

Pete and his personally assembled army of fifty company cops marked the third step in the year-long fortification. Keeping nutty fans and nutty terrorists out, not to mention busting cigarette sneaks who defied the company-wide ban on smoking, was a tough job.

It was the opinion of the masses that Pete was not up to it. Before Pete took over our security a few months earlier, he had done bodyguard and security work for a few celebrities in Hollywood, including Georgia Jack, when Jack was out there trying to buy another movie studio.

Jack had hired Pete capriciously. Jack did that sometimes. Met someone at a cocktail party, got drunk with him, and the next thing you know, he’s head of security, or of the Documentary unit, or, in the case of my boss, Jerry Spurdle, of the Special Reports unit. Jack stood by his capricious hires to the bitter end, too damn proud to admit to making mistakes. That meant we were stuck with Pete for a long time.

So Pete’s reassurances rang hollow.

“We all have to be aware and keep an eye out for each other. If you see anyone suspicious lurking around, you have to let us know immediately. Hector, get the lights,” Pete said, and one of Pete’s deputies, the one we knew as Barney Fife, flicked the switch.

What followed was a slide show of some of our most dangerous known fans. Most of these we knew by name, like Donald Forcus, an ex-con who was carrying a very big torch for Bianca de Woody (a bad bit of luck, him being an arsonist and all). Donald had what my Aunt Maureen would call an “unfortunate” face, reminiscent of a cartoon duck, which made his given name all the crueler.

Also easily recognizable was Hank, the fan who was stalking Dillon Flinder. Hank was an unemployed drifter who had lost a series of jobs because he would only walk backward.

“How does he stalk you?” I whispered to Dillon. “With a mirror? Or does he just walk backward until he bumps into you?”

“I’ll see Hank coming a mile away,” Flinder conceded. “By the way, I hear you’re going out with Fenn Corker when he comes to town.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember. Is it true?”

“Yeah.”

“Why, Robin? He’s such an ass. Yet you won’t go out with me.”

“I know too much about you, Dillon,” I said.

Dillon was known for his admitted sexual adventures with large fleshy fruits, and it was just too weird to me, dating a man who had dated a watermelon.

After the slides and a short film on self-defense, the lights came up and Pete went to the blackboard and began writing platitudes down for us. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Be alert!

“Better safe than sorry,” he said about six times during his little lecture. Afterward, he asked for questions and I was so tempted to put up my hand and say, “Duh, is it better to be safe? Or sorry?”

What a waste of time this was, not that I had anything against wasting time. The more time I spent in this boring meeting, the less I spent with my boss, Jerry Spurdle, who was living proof that the people inside television are just about as nutty as those outside television, maybe more so.

Some of the biggest nuts in the business were, in fact, inside this very room. In the front row, Sawyer Lash, fresh off his overnight shift, was nodding earnestly at Pete’s every salient point and taking notes. Known as the network’s dumbest anchorman and biggest goody-goody, Sawyer’s star had risen for a while during our Time of Troubles at ANN a year earlier. But it had fallen again quickly, and now he was back in the netherworld of overnight news updates, where viewers were less likely to notice if he confused Liberian rebels with librarian rebels.

A few weeks earlier, someone had sent Sawyer a sick gift—a dead sparrow in a plastic hosiery egg. And that was from someone who claimed to like him.

Just in front of Dillon and me, Dave Kona was talking softly to Solange Stevenson. Solange was a huge security headache, not only because as a TV psychologist she attracted a deeply disturbed viewership, but also because she actually invited clearly insane people onto her TV show, with bad results on more than one occasion. Like the time she reunited all those adopted people with their birth parents on her show and a fistfight broke out. Or the time two rival girlfriends of an imprisoned serial killer got into a hair-pulling catfight on the show and gave Solange a bloody nose when she tried to intervene.

As for Dave Kona, he was just twenty-three, hadn’t been on air long, and so hadn’t really had time to attract a cadre of deranged fans.

Too bad. The supercilious pip-squeak was after my job.

“When I was guarding Barbra …,” Pete said, segueing into one of his war stories.

My attention wandered further. Pete’s other deputy, Franco, had just come into the conference room and was hulking by the door. He was bigger and stronger than Hector, but he didn’t inspire much confidence either. Franco was famous for getting lost while on patrol.

I’d never noticed it before, but Franco sure had a lot of hair in his ears. Big tufts of brown hair stuck out of his ears. I’d never seen that much hair in someone’s ears before. Where did it come from? It looked like it was growing out of his brain. His head must be full of hair, I decided. I hadn’t noticed his hairy ears before because he’d worn his hair over his ears, apparently for a reason. But Pete had ordered haircuts for all the company cops the day before and Franco, being a good Boy Scout, complied.

Maybe he didn’t get his hair cut, I thought. Maybe he just grabbed on to those tufts and pulled his hair down through his ears.

“Are you paying attention, Robin?” Pete asked suddenly, and I jerked my head and nodded guiltily. “We all have to be alert.”

“Yes sir.”

“These common household items can aid in your self-defense,” Pete said, listing a fine-toothed comb (run tooth-side under an assailant’s nose, it could slice right through the septum and cause a massive nose bleed), an umbrella, and a can of hair spray.

Kid stuff, I thought. I have a self-defense system that makes the DEW line look like a spite fence. In addition to the poison ivy I grow in my window boxes as a kind of burglary disincentive program, I keep a bottle of cayenne-spiked cologne, an automatic umbrella, and a number of small weaponlike appliances around, such as an Epilady hair removal system and a high-velocity glue gun with two settings, stream and spray, so I could give an attacker a face full of hot glue at ten feet. This last marked an escalation of the arms race for me. I wasn’t ready to join the masses and get a real gun.

“Be careful,” Pete said, dismissing us.

Wish I’d thought of that.

“Did you hear about the murder on the twenty-seventh floor?” Louis Levin asked me as I passed through the giant human pinball game that is the ANN newsroom. I was on my way to Special Reports.

Louis, a disgruntled news producer, was sitting in his wheelchair at the afternoon producer pod, a stationary island amid streams of people carrying armfuls of videotapes and news copy, pencils clenched in their teeth, rushing to get the news on the air.

“Yeah, I heard. I just came from the security meeting.”

“What was the mood of the room?”

“Scared,” I said.

“You know who’s really scared? Reb Ryan. He’s been on a tear about this murder for the last hour,” Louis said. “He thinks he’s a sitting duck here.”

“I wouldn’t believe anything he said.”

“Well, Reb’s crazy, but he has a point,” Louis said. “If someone has been able to get in to kill a gynecologist, what’s to prevent a crazy fan from getting in to shoot an anchorman, or a methodical terrorist group from getting in and taking over a broadcast beamed around the planet?”

“Don’t say that too loud. You know management is looking for ways to boost our ratings.”

I didn’t tell him that I was one of Kanengiser’s patients, or near-patients. Louis ran the oldest established permanent floating rumor file in New York—a locked file known as Radio Free Babylon, with constantly changing passwords— which moved around within the ANN computer system. Why invite controversy and sick jokes?

Besides, I wanted to avoid the whole subject of the murder as much as I could without arousing suspicion.

I changed the subject. “Any news from the executive suite?”

“Not yet,” he said, as an intern handed him some wire copy. He scanned it quickly and then said, “The meetings are very hush-hush.”

“Louis, here’s the AOA on the new school prayer bill,” an edit assistant said, handing Louis a tape.

(AOA stands for “Any Old Asshole,” known in more polite circles as MOS, “Man on the Street.”)

Louis took the tape and popped it into the monitor on his pod while talking both to the edit assistant and to me. He has the amazing ability to conduct two or three conversations simultaneously without losing the narrative thread of any of them.

“My best source is on the job, though,” Louis said, winking at me. Louis didn’t know it, but his best source was my best source, Phil the omnipotent janitor. Louis didn’t have any new information because Phil had been out with flu the day before.

The phone rang on Louis’s desk. “I’m listenin’,” he said when he answered. “No. Haven’t seen her.”

He hung up and turned to me. “That was Jerry. He wanted to know if you were in the newsroom. I lied.”

“Thanks.”

“Who’da thunk Jerry Spurdle would become such a big success? Great ratings, big moneymaker, and on top of everything else, he won that ACE award. Bet he really has a swelled head. How is it, working with him these days?” Louis asked.

“Oh … you know.”

Louis was goading me, expecting me to say something like, “He’s more fun than a flesh-eating virus.” But I clammed up. If you can’t say something nice and all that. Anything I said about Jerry was bound to end up in the rumor file, and I didn’t need the trouble because, as you know, my troublemaking days were over.

Louis gave me a sad look and shook his head.

“You know,” he said, “Jerry’s been bragging that he broke Robin Hudson, the rogue filly.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

“He says, like all women, you can be subdued by a strong hand, metaphorically speaking. I dunno, Robin. You gotta do what you gotta do, but your reputation is suffering with the troops. They think you’ve sold out to that sleazebag.”

“Why do I have to hassle with Jerry? The job’s being done without me. Tamayo drives him nuts and I can concentrate on my work. Besides, Dean Wormer has me on double-secret probation. Another mess-up and I could be working the cash register in the cafeteria for the duration of my contract.”

“You were the rogue filly,” Louis said, wistfully.

The Rogue Filly. I think he knew I’d like the sound of that.

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