Anonymous Sources (12 page)

I stepped inside.

He was easy to spot. Lucien Sly and two other guys were at a table in the far corner. Lucien had his head tipped back and was howling with laughter again. I stood there watching him. This was what made him attractive, I realized. You wouldn't trust him for a moment. But he radiated happiness. There was a vitality about him, a sense of someone completely comfortable in his own skin. It was foreign to me, but I admired it.

I walked over.

When he saw me, he stood and pulled out a chair. Wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. Introduced me around. “Alex, meet Peter and Nigel.
Peter and Nigel, meet Alex. Pete, you wouldn't be so good as to go buy the next round?”

Pete had the glazed look of a man who's already consumed one too many. But he staggered off obediently. He returned with four pints of warm beer. They slopped across the wooden table. Then he shook a pack of cigarettes at Nigel, raised his eyebrows in a questioning look, and the two of them stepped outside for a smoke.

Lucien smiled at me. His eyes were warm. He didn't seem particularly surprised that I had come.

“Well then. How was the rest of your day?”

“Fine. Interesting. Petronella called me.”

“Did she? Splendid.” He didn't ask why.

“She asked me to meet her tomorrow.”

“Smashing.”

“Not to pry, but may I ask how long you two have been seeing each other?”

“You may. A few weeks, I suppose. Maybe longer. Off and on. Nella and I aren't exactly exclusive, as you may have gathered.”

“Mm-hmm. What about Thom Carlyle then—did you know him?”

“No. That is, not well. In passing, as it were.” He looked not the least bit embarrassed. “Wretched luck, what happened. Poor chap. Have you figured it all out yet?”

I shook my head. “No. Still trying. There are bits that don't make sense.”

“Like what?”

“Too many to count.”

“Mmm. And must you still fly home tomorrow?”

“Yes. I've got to get back for Tuesday. For the funeral.”

“Rotten business.”

“Yes.”

“So.”

“So.” I kept my eyes on the table and traced my finger along the slippery rim of my glass.

He smiled again. “Allow me to change the subject. Would you think me a terrible scoundrel if I suggested we leave right now so I could take you home and take you to bed?”

“Lucien!”

“Just asking.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to work a bit harder than that.”

“The lady's wish is my command.” He grinned. Pretended to give a little bow. “But you do know where this is going, don't you?”

I did. I'd known it from the moment I'd walked in the door. Perhaps from the moment I'd bumped into him that morning. The anticipation was delicious.

“Another drink then?” he asked.

“Yes. Gin and tonic this time. Hendrick's if they've got it.”

Another two rounds later we left the Eagle. Pete and Nigel had never reappeared. Perhaps they too could tell where things were going.

Outside it was starting to drizzle. The cobbled street was slick and quiet. I pulled my sweater tight around me and started to walk. It was a moment or so before I realized Lucien was no longer at my side. I turned around.

He was still standing outside the pub. Watching me.

“Bloody hell, woman,” he groaned. “Those legs. I could stand here all night, just watching you walk.”

And then he jogged over and picked me up and kissed me. My head was spinning. This was wrong in all kinds of ways. But at that moment—Lord, did it feel good.

AFTERWARD IN BED I LAY
awake.

Dawn would soon come. This time of year in England, true darkness
lasts a few hours at most. I tried to figure out what time I had to get up. Breakfast in Soho at eight thirty, so I'd need to arrive at King's Cross station in London by eight. That meant catching a 7:00 a.m. train from Cambridge. Assuming they left on the hour. I needed to pack. Shower. Check out. None of that would take long. If I was up by five, I should have more than enough time.

I glanced over at Lucien. He was out cold on the other side of the bed. In the moonlight his heavy features—the full lips, the slightly hooked nose—looked softer, graceful even, like a statue, or the profile on an ancient Roman coin. Luscious man. He had been very good. Pure pleasure. Of course, it helped that we would never see each other again. Soon I would be tucked back home in my flat in Cambridge, Mass.

My legs were aching. From the sex or the jog or both, it was hard to say. I let my thoughts wander. My best friend, Jess. I needed to call her and grovel. We'd traded messages, but I still hadn't properly apologized for standing her up outside Shays on Tuesday. My hairdresser. Must call and get my highlights done. Hyde. He'd be wanting another installment on Thom Carlyle. My parents, still living in the house in Brooklyn where I grew up. I should go see them. My daughter. My baby. I still thought of her that way, although it would have been her tenth birthday this year.

I shook my head. Mustn't go down that path.

Mustn't try to make sense of it tonight.

I closed my eyes. I should try to sleep for an hour or two. Tomorrow I could tackle putting my life in order. Yes. That seemed like a reasonable plan. But that was before I knew quite how crazy my life was about to get.

    

    

I
n Harvard Square, Jess Mitchell turned her key in the lock and let herself into Alex James's apartment.

She had come for the shoes, and it only occurred to her now that she should have brought along orange juice and bagels, so her friend wouldn't return home to an empty fridge. Not that Alex deserved any special kindnesses. What she deserved was a good kick up the backside. Jess was still seething about being stood up,
again
.

But that was Alex. Sometimes she just disappeared, as if she had fallen off the face of the earth. She could go weeks at a time. You learned not to ask.

Jess turned and walked into the kitchen. It was a pretty flat, wide windows looking out over stout birch trees and the Charles River. She checked the fridge. Empty. Alex was a decent cook, actually, but she appeared to survive on a diet of coffee and take-out spicy tuna rolls. And gin. Jess checked the freezer. No bottles. Probably the same strategy as Jess adopted for chocolate: best not to keep it around, or it would just get consumed.

The bedroom was a total state. Alex must have been in a hurry when she packed for England. Dresses, apparently considered and discarded, were strewn across the bed. Lipsticks littered the top of the dresser. Books were pulled off the shelves and dropped in piles on the floor. It looked as if a tornado had blown through. Appropriate.

“How
is
the Force of Nature?” Jess's father would ask when his daughter's best friend came up in conversation. You knew what he meant. She had a ferocity that was either reassuring or quite frightening, depending on whether it was directed at you.

Take the night a man broke into their student flat. It had happened their sophomore year at Columbia; the two girls had just moved in together. Around four in the morning they had been woken by a crash. In the shadows of the hallway they found a man. Big, mean looking. Jess remembered the jolt of terror she had felt, the instinct to flee back into the bedroom, bolt the lock, call the police. But Alex had charged him. Just run at him, pounding him with her fists. Insane. He had kicked her off but she kept attacking, until he must have decided it wasn't worth it, and he ran, back out the door and into the night. Alex had stood there, sweat and adrenaline steaming off her skin. And Jess had understood that her friend had a side to which Jess did not have access.

That said, the girl had great shoes. Jess rummaged around the closet until she found what she had come for: a slinky pair of Bruno Maglis with thick, gold heels. Fabulous. They would go perfectly with the outfit she had planned for tonight.

She left her friend a note on the kitchen counter:

Welcome home, Stranger
.

I am holding your gold Brunos hostage. Part of your punishment for ditching me at Shays. You can make it up to me over dinner when you get back. Your treat. The Indian place?

Grumpily yours
,

J

ACROSS THE RIVER IN BOSTON,
Hyde Rawlins tightened the belt on his silk kimono and poured himself another glass.

The champagne was an indulgence he permitted himself on the weekend. During the week he tried to stick to dry white wine. He kept a bottle chilled at all times, in a small refrigerator tucked behind the sofa in his office. Another flagrant violation of newsroom regulations. Personal fridges were banned, both because they gobbled up electricity and because their stashes attracted mice. But Hyde doubted the mice were interested in sauvignon. And he liked to pour himself a generous glass every evening, just to take the edge off the workday.

Reporters were sometimes invited to join the ritual. They could tell—based on whether he used their first or last names when calling them into his sanctum—whether they would be sharing his wine, or one of the less attractive offerings from the private fridge. Over the years that Hyde ran the foreign desk, it had become something of a competition among the reporters to bring him back a bottle of the most revolting local tipple they could find. A long-fermenting bottle of guava brandy from Namibia was considered the unofficial winner. The collection also included a terrifyingly yellow Italian limoncello, a vile Danish liquor called Gammel Dansk, and a home-brewed Mongolian spirit that
smelled like paint thinner. After a trip to see her relatives last year, Alex had proudly contributed a bottle of Buckfast, the fortified wine favored by Glasgow soccer hooligans.

Hyde relished summoning reporters who hadn't managed a byline in a couple of weeks. He would watch them squirm as he poured himself a glass of good wine, smiled pleasantly, and then pointedly replaced the bottle in the fridge. They knew what was coming: a healthy measure of the guava brandy. The routine was obnoxious, but effective. The reporters nearly always found a way to file a story the next day.

Hyde enjoyed running a newsroom, for the most part. His heart wasn't in local news, it was true. But through creative accounting and the grim determination of Hyde and few of the other old guard, the paper managed to cling to its Washington office and to six foreign bureaus: Beijing, Jerusalem, Cairo, Mexico City, Berlin, and London. If you could count old Charlie Swift in London as a bureau. Really, Hyde should shut down Berlin and open Islamabad. It was where the story was now. But he couldn't stomach the idea of not having a single reporter on the Continent. It was bad enough he'd had to shut Paris and Rome. It killed Hyde to run wire copy from the great cities of Europe. But at least he was still in the game. Well into his sixties, he retained a boyish amazement that he'd found a profession where you actually got paid to travel the world, interview interesting people, and write about it.

He missed being out in the field. Hyde was unlike other star reporters of his generation in that he'd never hankered for the life of a war correspondent. As a young man, he had watched his contemporaries break news from Vietnam and did not envy them. Danger and bloodshed did not appeal. Instead, he preferred to install himself in elegant flats in cosmopolitan cities. Then he would set out to meet the people who made them tick. He was a beautiful and a fast writer. He saw that while one could keep busy covering the never-ending cycles of coups and floods and currency devaluations, the way to really capture a place was to write about its people. The foods they ate, the sports they played, the gods
they worshipped. His eight-thousand-word Sunday-magazine article on the renaissance of Chianti—filed after three weeks of “research” in Tuscany and accompanied by an expense report staggering enough to earn him his own cost code in the paper's accounting office—remained a standard to which the interns aspired.