"How was Paris?" she asked. "Comme ci, comme fa. How is it always? The same. Paris never changes." The coffee arrived. The executive vice presidents had their own dining room, which delivered their requests for food or beverages on Villeroy & Bosch china, carried on parent-company-logoed lacquer trays. Semple poured a cup and sipped it.
"Tell me about this story." Sutton did, quickly, without emotion. "Her name is Rune? First or last?" "Some kind of stage name bullshit. She a cameraman with the O&O here in Manhattan." "What does Lee think?" Semple asked. "Slightly more in favor of doing the story than I am. But not much." "Why are we doing it, then?" he asked coolly. Semple's dark eyes scanned Sutton's blouse. She was glad she'd worn the wool suit jacket over the white silk. But only a part of his eyes was seeing her body. What the other part was considering, and what was happening in the brain behind those eyes, was a complete mystery to her. It was one of his most magnetic qualities - that she hadn't been able to fathom him. It was
also one of his more frightening.
She answered, "The girl said, in effect, that if she didn't produce it for Current Events she'd do it independently and sell it elsewhere." "Blackmail," he snapped. "Closer to youthful fervor." "I don't like it," Semple said. "There's no point to the story." He sipped more coffee. Sutton remembered that he liked to sit naked in bed in the morning, a tray resting on his lap, the cup and saucer directly over his penis. Did he like the warmth? she used to wonder. He asked, "What does she have so far? Anything?" "Nope. Nothing substantial. Lots of background footage. That's all." "So you think there's a chance it'll just go away?" Sutton avoided his eyes. "She's young. I'm keeping a close eye on her. I'm hoping she gets tired of the whole thing."
Semple had the power to make this story go away forever, leaving behind fewer traces than a couple of pixels on a TV monitor. He glanced at Sutton and said, "Keep me informed on what she finds." "Okay." "I mean daily." Semple looked out the window for moment. "I dined at a wonderful restaurant. It was off St Germain." "Really?" "I wish you'd been there with me." "It sounds nice." "Michelin was wrong. I have to write and urge them to give it another star." And he uncapped a fountain pen and wrote a note on his calendar reminding himself to do just that.
13
Rune was sleepwalking. At least, that's what it felt like. She'd been sitting at her desk, in the same curvature-of-the-spine pose, for seven hours, looking over tapes. The close air of the studio was filled with the buzz of a dozen yellow jackets, which she'd thought was the video monitor in front of her until she'd shut it off and realized that the buzzing had continued; the sound was originating from somewhere inside her head.
Enough is enough. She stood up and stretched; a series of pops from her joints momentarily replaced the buzzing. She left Bradford in charge of logging in the recent tapes she'd shot and headed outside. Rune walked through the complicated maze of corridors and into the spring evening. She removed the chrome chain necklace of her ID from around her neck and slipped it in her leopard-skin bag.
Outside a harried woman employee of the Network stood on the sidewalk. Her husband - a young professional - walked up to her with their two young children in tow. It had apparently been his turn to pick up the
kids tonight.
The mother gave them perfunctory hugs and then started making weekend plans with her husband. Their daughter, a redhead about Courtney's age, tugged on her mother's Norma Kamali skirt. "Mommy ..." "Just a minute" the woman said sternly. "I'm speaking to your father." The little girl looked sullenly off. Rune gave the kid a smile but she didn't respond. The family walked off. Man, I'm beat, she thought.
But as she walked she felt the cool, electric-scented city night air waking her up and she saw from the clock on the MONY tower that it was early, only eight P.M. Early? Rune remembered when quitting time had been five. She continued down Broadway, past the pastel carnival of Lincoln Center -pausing, listening for music but not hearing any. Then she continued south, deciding to walk home, a couple miles, to get the blood back in her legs. Thinking of what she needed to do for the story. Getting her hands on the police report of the Hopper case was the number one item. Then she'd have to talk to all the witnesses. Get Megler on tape. Maybe interview the judge. Find some jurors. She wondered if there was an old priest who knew Boggs. A Spencer Tracy sort of guy.
Ah, well, now, sure I'd be knowing the boy Randy and I'll tell you, he helped out in soup kitchens and took care of his mother and left half his allowance in the collection plate every Sunday when he was an altar boy . . .
A lot to do. She walked through Hell's Kitchen. Her head swiveled as she went down Ninth Avenue. Disappointed. The developers were doing a number on the area. Boxy high-rises and slick restaurants and co-ops. What she liked best about the neighborhood was that it had been the home of the Gophers, one of the toughest of the nineteenth-century gangs in New York. Rune had been reading about old gangs lately. Before she got waylaid by the Boggs story, she'd been planning a documentary on them. The featured thugs were going to be the Gophers and their sister gang, the Battle Row Ladies' Social and Athletic Club (also known as the Lady Gophers). Not a single producer had been very interested in the subject. The Mafia and Colombians and Jamaicans with machine guns were still the current superstars of crime, according to the media; and there wasn't much demand for stories about people like One-Lung Curran and Sadie the Goat and Stumpy Malarky.
Her feet were aching by the time she got to her neighborhood. She stopped outside the houseboat, looked at the dark windows for a moment. Behind her another family walked past, a mother and father and their child, a cute boy of about five or six. He was asking questions - where does the Hudson River go, what kind of fish are in it - and together the mother and father were making up silly answers for the boy. All three of them were laughing hard. Rune felt an urge to join in but she resisted, realizing that she was an outsider, When they had passed she walked up the gangplank and inside the houseboat. She dropped her bag by the door and stood listening, her head cocked sideways. A car horn, a helicopter, a backfire. All the sounds were distant. None of what she heard was coming from inside the houseboat, nothing except her own heartbeat and the creak of boards beneath her feet.
She reached for the lamp but slowly lowered her hand and instead felt her way to the couch and lay down on it, staring up at the ceiling, at the psychedelic swirls of lights reflecting off the turbulent surface of the Hudson. She lay that way for a long time.
An hour later Rune was sitting in an overheated subway car as it stammered along the tracks. She did an inventory of the tools of the trade in her bag - a claw hammer, a canister of military tear gas, two screwdrivers (Phillips head and straight), masking tape and rubber gloves. Her other accessories included a large bucket, a string mop and a plastic container of Windex.
She was thinking about the law too and wondered if the crime was less if it wasn't breaking and entering. If you just entered and didn't break. It was the kind of question that Sam could've answered real fast, but of course he was the last person in the world she would ask that particular question.
She imagined, though, that it was a distinction somebody'd thought of already, and just because you didn't jimmy any locks or crack any plate glass, the punishment wasn't going to be a hell of a lot less severe. Maybe the judge would sentence her to one year instead of three. Or ten instead of twenty.
The longer term probably. It wasn't going to help her case that it was government property she had her eyes on.
The building was only a few doors from the subway stop. She climbed out and paused. A cop walked past, his walkie-talkie sputtering with a hiss. She pressed her face against a lamp post, which was covered with layers and layers of paint, and wondered what color it had been in earlier years. Maybe some gang members from the Gophers or Hudson Dusters had paused under this very same post a hundred years ago, scoping out a job.
The street was empty and she strolled casually into the old government-issue building and up to the night guard, cover story and faked credentials all prepared. In twenty minutes she was out, having exchanged the mop and pail for the bulky manila folder that rested in her bag.
She paused at a phone stand and pretended to make a call while she flipped through the file. She found the address she was looking for and walked quickly back to the subway. After a ten-minute wait, she got on board an old Number Four train heading toward Brooklyn.
Rune liked the outer boroughs, Brooklyn especially. She thought of it as caught in a time warp, a place where the Dodgers were always playing and muscular boys in T-shirts sipped egg creams and flirted with tough girls who snapped gum and answered them back in sexy, lazy drawls. Big immigrant families crammed into narrow shotgun tenements argued and made up and laughed and hugged with hearts full of love and loyalty.
The neighborhood that she now slipped into, along with the crowd exiting the subway, was quiet and residential. She paused, getting her bearings. She had to walk only three blocks before she found the row house. Red brick with yellow trim, two-story, a narrow moat of anemic lawn. Bursts of red covered the front of the building: Geraniums, sprouting everywhere - they escaped from flowerpots, from terra-cotta statues in the shape of donkeys and fat Mexican peasants, from green plastic window boxes, from milk containers. They bothered her, the flowers. Someone who'd appreciate flowers like this was probably a very nice person. This meant Rune would feel pretty guilty about what she was about to do.
Which didn't stop her, however, from walking onto the front porch, dropping a paper bag on the concrete stoop and setting fire to it.
She rang the doorbell and ran into the alley behind the house and listened to the voices. "Oh, hell. . . What? ... The boys again . . . That's it! This time I call the cops . . . Don't call the fire
department. It's just . . ."
Rune raced up the back stairs and through the open kitchen door. She saw a man leaping forward fiercely and stomping on the burning bag, sparks flying, smoke pouring out. A chubby woman held a long-spouted watering can, dousing his feet. Then Rune was past them, unnoticed, taking the carpeted stairs two at a time. Upstairs she found herself in a small hallway. First room, nobody. Second, nobody. Third, chaos. Six children were staring out the window at the excitement below them, squealing and dancing around. They all turned to the doorway as Rune walked into the room and flipped the light switch on. One of them cried, "Rune!"
"Hi, honey," she said to Courtney. The little girl ran toward her. A chubby boy of about ten looked at her. "What'sis? Jailbreak?" "Shh, don't tell anybody." "Yeah, right, like I'm a snitch. Got a cigarette?" Rune gave him five dollars. "Forget you-" "-saw anything. Right. I know the drill." Rune said to Courtney, "Come on, let's go home." She pulled the girl's jacket off a hook and slipped it on her. "Are we playing a game?" the little girl asked. "Yeah," Rune said, hustling her out into the corridor, "it's called kidnapping."
The prison yard was segregated. Just like the city, Randy Boggs thought, hanging out there at nine the next morning. Just like life. Blacks one side, whites the other, except on the basketball half-court. The blacks were mostly young. A lot were do-rags or stockings over their hair or they had cornrows. They stood together. Strong, big, sleek.
Yo, homes, quit that noise. Wassup? Mah crib. I ever tell you 'bout mah crib? Hells yeah.
The whites were older, crueler, humorless. They looked bad - it was the longer, unclean hair, the pale skin. They too stood together. Black, white. Just like the city. A lot of the men were exercising. There were weights here though the hierarchy didn't allow for democratic use among all prisoners. Still, there were always push-ups and sit-ups. Muscles develop in prison. But Boggs hadn't made a fetish of exercise. Doing that'd be an acknowledgment of where he was, and what he was. If he didn't stand in line for the thirty-pound dumbbells then maybe he was somewhere else. Maybe he was someone else.
"Amazing grace, how sweet thou art . . ." An a cappella black gospel group was practicing in the yard. They were really good. Boggs, when he first heard them, wanted to cry. Now he just listened. The group wouldn't be together much longer. They'd walk in two months, four months and thirteen months respectively. "I once was lost but now I'm found . . ."
The singers started a second verse and someone nearby yelled, "Yo, shut the fuck up."
He smelled fireplace wood smoke. He tried not to think of the last time he'd sat in front of a fireplace. Thought about that girl from New York. The little girl with the big camera. He sat quietly. He smoked some though since he'd been in he'd lost his taste for smoking. He'd lost his taste for a lot of things. He sat for five minutes thinking about the girl, about the story, about prison, about the sky before he realized that the prisoners he'd been sitting with were no longer next to him.
Boggs knew why they'd moved and he felt his skin crackle with fear. Severn Washington was sick. Got the flu bad, was puking all night, and was in the infirmary. If Boggs knew it everybody knew it.
He looked around the yard and saw the man immediately. Juan Ascipio was back. He wore a red headband and a fatigue jacket over his jumpsuit. Two other prisoners walked beside him. Boggs had no idea why Ascipio wanted to kill him. He was a newcomer, a dealer who'd been convicted of the assassination of two rivals. He wasn't a big man and he had a face that when it smiled might make children comfortable. A kind face, the sort you want to please. But the eyes, Boggs had noticed, were grinny-mean and chill.
