“He’s playing this big, huh?”
I faced her again. Caught her swiping at the corner of one eye with a finger. She nodded. “Half the room’s working on Colt, the other half’s doing the snow.”
“Blizzard Hits As Star Newshound Routs Assassin?”
She nodded. “He wants you to write your part of the story, too. Exclusive: How I Fought A Killer And Found God. He’s been calling your apartment to see if you’re back yet. He keeps telling everybody that Wellsey won’t let him down.”
I cringed. “He’s calling me Wellsey again?”
“Head for the hills.” She tried to smile, but it stuck as she looked into my battered face.
I pushed on quickly. “What happened to the tiger banner?”
“Sandler.” Sandler was one of The People Upstairs. The big-boss types we rarely got to see. “Rafferty got fed up,” Lansing said. “He sort of quietly let it drop to Sandler what was happening down here. About a half hour later, Sandler came down and casually asked to see your Borough Prez banner. Cambridge turned beet red. You should have seen him. He …”
It was a game try, but she couldn’t finish. Her lips started to tremble. She turned away, her face to her shoulder.
“Come on, Lancer, knock it off,” I said.
“You look dead,” she whispered. “You look just dead.”
I reached for her shoulder, thought better of it. My hand fell to my side. I stood there stupidly.
Robert Cambridge called to me from across the room. The sound of his voice made every aching part of me ache even more.
“Wellsey! Wells, Wells, Wells.”
Lansing stiffened. With a quick toss of her hair, she walked away from me. She didn’t look back. She didn’t speak another word.
“Wellsey, I knew you’d come in! I knew those old doctors at that old hospital couldn’t hold an old bird dogger like you.”
I gritted my teeth. I prepared the semblance of a smile. I turned to greet him. He looked tall and trim in a dark blue suit. His round face was damned near cherubic with its welcoming grin. His dark hair dangled rakishly on his brow. His face was tan, of course. That winter tan of his never ceased to amaze me.
He swung his hand around in a broad arc to clasp my shoulder. He squeezed it, sending radiants of pain up the back of my neck. His expression turned serious. He considered me.
“So—you look good,” he pronounced. One guy to another. Cambridge is nothing if not one of the guys.
“Thanks, Bob,” I said manfully. “I feel just grand.”
He tapped my shoulder. I fought back a shriek. “You know, the other papers, the radio and TV people, they’ve been calling here for hours. They all want to interview you. They even asked to talk to Lansing and McKay.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You know what I said? I said: Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em. Let ’em quote a police spokesman. I mean, do you work here or what?”
He laughed. I made a noise.
“So, uh, Johnny,” he went on. “You gonna write me an exclusive on your little brush with death?” He smiled deprecatingly as he said this: just another brush with death, old sport.
“You betcha, Bobby,” I said.
“Good, good.” He slipped his arm full around my shoulders now. He smelled better than Lansing. “Now, I’m going to have Wally Wilkinson write the lede …” I cleared my throat. Wilkinson was a reporter Cambridge had just hired out of California. He was, as Cambridge himself might have said, ‘with the program.’ Relatability was his life. When the Chinese pandas came to the Bronx, for instance, he volunteered to cover it. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have recognized a hard news story if it sat on his eyelids. Cambridge continued: “What I want from you is a fast, tight sidebar on the actual events as you experienced them. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“Gee,” I said, “I think so.” After a quarter century in the business, I really felt I was beginning to catch on.
Encouraged by my quick intelligence, the managing editor gave me a little more to handle. “Don’t be afraid to express your feelings. Your shock at seeing Colt killed. Your fear at being stalked by an assassin. Your sense of—of—triumph when you realized you had survived. Am I giving you a sort of idea of what I’m looking for here?”
“It’s beginning to take shape for me, Bob,” I said hoarsely. I coughed. My throat was tightening again.
“Good!” Cambridge said. He slid his hand off my shoulder, slapping my back as he went. This time, I could not suppress a groan of pain. “Think you can have that on my desk by five? Give me a chance to look it over before I pass it on to Rafferty.”
I hesitated. This was a little tricky. Cambridge had edited my copy before. Made it more relatable. In one instance, he had made it so relatable that I was nearly sued by an entire county. In the wake of this experience, he and I had come to certain understandings. He was allowed to tell me how to write my stories beforehand. I was allowed to ignore him. He was allowed to make suggestions on the finished copy. I was allowed to stick two fingers up his nose and yank hard if he changed any of it. Normally, all went well. He worked on making the newspaper relatable. I worked on making the newspaper a newspaper. Lately, however, it seemed to me that this arrangement was beginning to weigh on his sense of authority. Added to that, he couldn’t be too happy about Sandler forcing him to banner my Borough Prez story. I feared for the life of my sidebar if Cambridge got his hands on it before the city editor did.
“Well,” I said finally, with a manly chuckle. “I’ll sure try, Bob. I’m still feeling a little low, truth be told, but I’ll do the best I can.” I whipped out a cigarette, lit it, took a drag. I blasted the smoke out in a great haze that spread over us both. Cambridge paled. He does not like cigarettes. He worries about my health, he says. I took another drag.
Undaunted, he pressed the point. “You know, it’s only quarter to three now.… I just want a sense of how to coordinate the whole layout that we’re doing, so if you don’t mind I’d appreciate it: on my desk by five.” He paused. Grinned through another smoky blast. “Okay, guy?”
“Uh …” I said.
“Yo, Pop, you got a visitor!”
The call came from the copyboy, Alex. He calls me Pop. Charming kid. I left Cambridge eagerly. I returned to the glass doors. Alex was there. He pointed me out to a woman who’d just come in. She was small and slender, almost lost in her big cloth overcoat. I guessed she was thirty-five or so. Every year of it was written on her pale face in lines that were carved deep into the corners of her mouth and eyes. Still, it was not an unattractive face. It was pert and sharp, with birdlike features under red hair cut short and bobbed. Her green eyes were bright and clear and intelligent. They followed Alex’s gesture quickly. They measured me with a single glance.
She extended her hand. I took it. The skin of her palm was dry and cold. Up close, I saw she had too much lipstick on. She wore too much blush, and her cheeks seemed feverishly bright.
“Mr. Wells?” she said. She spoke crisply. She seemed to be forcing her smile.
“I’m Wells.”
She took another deep breath. “My name is Valerie Colt,” she told me. “I’m Tim’s wife.”
“They made me come in to identify the body,” she said. She pushed out a sad laugh. “I hadn’t seen him in over a year, I didn’t know if I’d recognize him.”
We were in my cubicle now. I’d pulled an extra chair in there for her. I was seated against one wall, leaning forward, my elbows on my knees. She was seated across from me, leaning back, her head resting against the divider. Between us, my Olympia—the last typewriter in the place, I think—was almost buried under a mass of pink notes headed “While You Were Out.” A metal ashtray was balanced precariously on top of these.
Mrs. Colt closed her eyes wearily. “Poor Tim,” she said. “He didn’t have anyone else.”
I took out my cigarettes. I jerked one between my teeth. I slid another one out for her.
“You were divorced?” I said.
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She nodded, waving off the cigarette. “Five years now,” she said. As I went to put the pack away, she reconsidered, reached for them. I shook one out for her. “I shouldn’t really,” she told me. “The kids don’t have anyone else.”
“How many kids?” I held my lighter up for her. She leaned into it. The flame light ran red through the lines beneath her makeup.
She leaned back again, her head to the divider. She blew smoke at the fluorescent lights. “Two,” she said. “A boy and a girl. Six and seven.”
“That’s a lot to handle alone,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “It’s a lot to handle. Alone.”
I watched her. I waited. I wondered why she’d come.
Her next words seemed to answer the question. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am that you got hurt.” She smiled. It was a tired smile. “Someone always has to—had to—do that with Tim. Apologize, I mean. People got hurt when they were around him. Someone had to … do the niceties, you know? Offer the apologies. Pick up the pieces.”
“Someone like you,” I said.
She took a long drag of smoke, thinking. She let the smoke out with the single word: “Yes.”
“Even now.”
She nodded. “Even now. I mean, he just kept on, didn’t he? All that charm. All that intensity. He was like … a magnet.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she wanted.
‘‘I mean,’’ she continued, “he just kept on charming people and running off on his dangerous adventures and … and people followed him. Cameramen always wanted to work with him. Officials always wanted to talk to him. Women always wanted to … to be with him. They followed him. And somehow … somehow, they always got hurt. They got shot or … or arrested or …” She lowered her gaze to me. “… or abandoned,” she said. “And he just kept on, unhurt, untouched, as if he were under some kind of invisible protection. Until now.” Her eyes blurred as the tears welled suddenly.
“You must have loved him very much,” I said. It sounded lame even to me.
“Oh!” With a short, quick, stabbing motion, she killed her cigarette in the ashtray between us. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Poor woman. Poor woman carrying a torch for a man who ditched her five years ago. A man who was never really there to begin with, always … always off somewhere, some other country, never … Damn.” She had laid her purse down next to the chair. She reached for it quickly now, unsnapped it, brought out a tissue. She dabbed at her cheeks with an expert gesture, caught the tears before they carried her mascara away in black streams.
“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” I lied.
She snuffled once. “Do you know where I live, Mr. Wells?” she said. “Do you know where I live with my two children? I live in one-half of a brick house in Astoria. One bedroom. One bathroom. A yard no bigger than a square of carpeting. I’m a teller for a bank out there. I can just barely afford what I’ve got. Between the rent and the day-care … he never …”
I crushed out my cigarette carefully, slowly, watching my hand, giving her time to recover.
“And now that he’s gone, I’m sure there’s nothing left for me. I’m sure he spent it all on … the fine hotels and the fine food and the fine liquor that the … the sources and the women liked.” A lock of red hair fell forward on her brow. She brushed it back impatiently. The motion brought her face up again. She looked at me blankly, as if something had just dawned on her. “You won’t write this, will you? I didn’t mean …”
“You want to go off the record,” I said.
“That’s right. I want to go off the record. Can I do that? Is it too late to do that?” An edge of panic crept into her voice.
I shook my head. “It’s not too late.”
“I didn’t … I heard you had to say it first. I thought maybe …”
“Politicians have to say it first,” I said. “You can say it now.”
She smiled a little, nodded. “I say it now.”
“Fine.” I lit another cigarette. She didn’t take one this time. I leaned against my desk, rested an elbow on it. I glanced down at the messages strewn atop the typewriter. I saw the name Chandler Burke written on one of the pink sheets. I looked up at Valerie Colt. “Mrs. Colt,” I said without thinking, “why did you come here? Why did you come here to talk to me?”
She was sitting, just then, very erect. Like a little girl. Her knees were pressed tightly together. Her hands lay clasped in her lap. She was smiling slightly, ruefully, as if she were almost amused at the bitterness of her situation. Her green eyes were still glassy with a sheen of tears, but behind that there seemed to me to be a kind of nakedness. I knew, looking at her, that whatever she was about to say would leave her exposed and vulnerable, completely stripped of pride. I wanted to lay my hand upon her mouth and hush her. But whatever she wanted from me, it had driven her this far. She could not go back. She could not help herself.
“I came here …” she said, stiffly, primly, as if reciting. “I came here to find out what he said. At the end. If he … mentioned me, at all. At the end? Just … something, you know? Anything he might have … said, I …” We could hardly bear to look at each other. “Now,” she said, her chest rising with a breath. “Now do you understand why I’ve come? Why the poor, deluded woman has come?”
I grappled with it for what seemed a long time. People went by the cubicle’s opening. The business of the city room seemed to press in on the little space. The seconds went by.
“Mrs. Colt,” I said finally. “It was so fast. He—I mean, he died so fast, there was no time …”
“But before that.” She no longer bothered to hide the sound of panic. “You were with him before that, the police told me, you were drinking with him, he must have talked to you, you must have talked about … about … things …”
“Well … I …” I moved my hand about helplessly. The cigarette held between my fingers left a spiraling trail of smoke. “Yes,” I said. I forced my mouth into a slight, self-effacing smile. “You have to understand, I was a little the worse for the liquor, I …”
“Yes,” she said eagerly. “You didn’t remember … everything … of course, I …”
“That’s right, I … forgot, we … We talked of you at great length, in fact … quite a lot, he, uh, Tim, he spoke very, very fondly of you, in fact, I …”
“What did he say? Please. What did he say?”
“Well, he spoke about how fond he was of you. What a wonderful wife you were. He said, I remember now, he said …”
“Oh God!” It was a soft cry, but on the instant it escaped her, she pitched forward. She doubled over in her chair, her hands coming up to cover her face. Her whole body shook as she sobbed and sobbed. “Oh God,” she said again. “Oh God, oh God. Eleanora! Eleanora!”
I sat and smoked and watched her cry. I did not touch or speak to her. I did not think it would help. She sobbed for about a minute. The sobbing steadily slowed. She fought for breath painfully, swiping at her cheeks with one hand, unsnapping her purse with the other.
She laughed through the tears. “And now I’m a mess on top of everything, right?” she said gamely.
I smiled.
Her red forelock dangled limply. Her eyes were becoming swollen. Her cheeks were already shadowy with smeared mascara. She dabbed at the shadows with her tissues. She took out a circular compact and opened the top. Peering into the mirror, she smoothed the shadows away. She was still sniffling, but the tears had stopped.
She returned the compact to her purse, snapped the purse closed. “I’m sorry,” she said. She did not look at me.
I shook my head. “Forget it.”
“It was foolish of me to come here, to look for … for something you couldn’t give me, no one could give me. No one but Tim. I was an idiot.”
“We’ll all be in jail when they make that a crime,” I said.
She forced a smile. “Well!” she said decisively. She
stood up. She still hadn’t raised her eyes to me.
“Who was she?” I said. I watched her closely. “Eleanora. Just out of curiosity. Who was she?”
She gazed at her shoes. Cheap flats, I noticed. Tan, well worn. The shoes of a woman who was on her feet all day. Finally she lifted her face. Her voice was squeezed back in her throat, back where she was holding the unfallen tears. “She was the woman he loved,” she told me. She made a little noise filled with humor and despair. “Oh, she was a lot more than that, I guess, by the time he finished with her. By the time he finished building her up in his mind, romanticizing her, she was … everything. Everything Tim loved.” She laughed. Not a happy sound. “In Tim’s mind, Eleanora was adventure and work and I don’t know what all. His youth. She was more than any living woman could have been to him. More than I could be anyway.”
“You mean she’s dead?”
Valerie Colt nodded. “So I gather. I didn’t know that much about her, of course. Only that he called for her at night. Only that he sometimes … called her name when he was with me.” Her face contorted. She raised a crumpled tissue to her eyes for a moment. This time, the tears did not come. She lowered her hand. “Other than that, he didn’t tell me very much really. I mean, she was my rival, after all. And it isn’t easy competing with a dead woman, let me tell you. It isn’t easy.” She laughed and sniffled. Her words came quickly in her high, hard voice. She seemed relieved to be talking about it.
“I guess not,” I said. “But who was she? Did he tell you anything?’’
“Oh … yes, sure. I mean, there was a time, after he came back from Sentu, when he spent most of his time writing letters, contacting ambassadors, trying to find her. He had to tell me something then.”
“Is that where he met her? Sentu?”
She nodded. “That’s part of what she was to him: the memory of that first success, that first adventure. She was some sort of a nurse there, I gather. Something like that … I don’t really know.” She sounded surprised when she said this. She’d probably lived with the woman’s image so long, she was startled to find out how little she really did know. “He met her in Sentu and I guess they … fell in love … and she died when the rebels came into the capital. I guess … I guess that’s all I know for sure. I don’t think even Tim was sure what actually happened to her. Just that she couldn’t get through the rebel lines. And that he couldn’t find her.” Now the tears were gone completely. Now she looked at me undaunted. “I lived with Timothy Colt for a year before he went to Sentu. I lived with him and Eleanora for five years afterward. I don’t really care who she was, Mr. Wells. I’m sure she was … beautiful and … and brave and … and whatever else.” She slung her purse over her shoulder. She raised her chin proudly. “But I was real,” she said. “And I was there. I was always there.” She moved to the entrance of the cubicle. “I’m sorry if I made a fool out of myself.”