Sleeper Spy (50 page)

He liked the feel of her head with its crewcut hair resting gently on his shoulder, a sweetly satisfied kid with an older man who had finally gotten the break he deserved. With his left hand resting lightly on her mons veneris, he took the television clicker in his right hand and thumbed his way to the channel that broadcast Viveca’s 9:00
P.M
. news spot. He waited through two commercials as Liana sat up and pulled the sheet to cover a bosom that was more ample than Irving had suspected. “This takes only forty-five seconds,” he half apologized. “She expects me to watch. She read my last book.” Liana, a television reporter-performer from another world and generation, not only did not appear to take offense, but seemed to take a professional interest.

“You’re going to let her go on like this?” The makeup woman was in the control room, nearly hysterical. “She dozed off in my chair, for God’s sake. That’s never happened before.”

“Thirty seconds to air,” the stage manager was saying. “Quiet on the set.”

“You all right, Viveca?” The director was frightened; he had never heard a newscaster stumble through a run-through as if drunk.

“Sure, sure,” the network newswoman nodded, hair perfect, makeup perfect, eyes glazed. “Hell’s wrong with you?”

“Twenty-five, twenty-four …”

“Whereza damn paper scrip’? ’Smatter you guys?”

“This is live, we got no substitute.” The director, frantic, hissed at the producer: “What’ll we do? Prime time, thirty million viewers.”

The producer, who had taken more than his share of abuse from Viveca Farr, shrugged. “It’s her spot. Star knows best.”

On his monitor, the director could see Viveca rolling her head around her shoulders, blinking her eyes like a driver on a dark highway fighting sleep.

“Fifteen seconds.”

“Cue up another thirty-second spot in case,” the director told the technical director.

“Got none. Only the ten-second for the midway.”

“Cue up the last one again, quick!”

“You okay, Viveca?” On set, the stage manager broke the count and looked at her closely. “We can abort. Say the word.”

“Outa here! Um fine.”

“We can’t put her on like this,” the director pleaded. “She’ll self-destruct. Go to black?”

“You go to black, we all get canned,” the producer said. “It’s her ass, not ours.”

“Five, four, three …”

“Roll tape. Come up on one,” the director told the TD, and snapped his fingers: “Take one.” Viveca’s face filled the screen.

“Thiziz News—Newsbreak, Viv’ca Farr ’porting.” She squinted at the words on the Teleprompter.

“Back on one,” the TD said, “come up on two.” A film of rioting in Nagorno-Karabakh appeared over Viveca’s shoulder.

“A institoosh … inst … tooshnal crisis is looming in the UN over ’Gorno Ka’bosh …”

“For crissake, she’s bombed out of her mind!” the director could hear the stage manager’s voice whispering urgently.

“I’m going to black, okay?”

“On your own responsibility, not mine,” the producer snapped. “Nobody’s ever been thrown off this network yet, and I’m not starting with the VP News’s former cookie.”

“Ten seconds to midway commercial. Ready to roll two.”

“Fill screen with the film,” the director told the TD. “At least get her face off.”

Viveca reached the end of the news item and stopped, peering at the prompter.

“Go to two.”

“Can’t, the tape leader is running.”

“Go to the numbers, it’s better than black. Now!”

As the commercial came on, the director whirled in his chair to face the producer. “We have ten seconds to decide. The talent cannot read the prompter.”

“Maybe that’ll sober her up.”

Over his earphones, the director heard the stage manager suggest, “I have a bulletin on paper.”

“Hand her the paper to read,” the director ordered. “Better tell her to intro with ‘This just in.’ ”

“Come up on one. Last chance to save your ass, Viveca.”

“Thiz jus’ in.” She held the paper up close to her face. “Federlzerve announced tonight cancellation of the Op’n Market meeting shed—
scheduled for t’morra. No ackshin on rates for the next month, ’cord’na chairman. No ’splanation offered for the un, unyoosual ’sponemint.”

She looked up and gave the camera a radiant smile, first time anybody in the control room had seen that joyous an expression on Viveca Farr’s always-authoritative face. “Thizis been Newsbreak!”

“Roll thirty-second spot. We’ll come up early.” Viveca started to yawn, and the TD said, “Go to black for three seconds, three, two, one. Come up on two.”

To tape. They all slumped back, the director with his head in his hands, the producer with the frozen smile of a fascinated spectator at the destruction of a career. The makeup woman was crying. All the telephones in the control room started to ring.

Michael Shu, stunned at the news, switched off the television set in the war room at Memphis Merchants and picked up the ringing phone. He knew it would be Irving in Syracuse.

“You see that?” The reporter’s voice was strained. “You see her come apart just now?”

“Yes, but I liked that big grin on Viveca’s face at the end. Reminded me of Charlie Chaplin in the last scene of
City Lights
. She ought to do that more—”

“Schmuck! She ruined herself. It’s all over for her. Her career is shot.”

“She did sound a little tipsy—”

“She was sloshed, plastered, and the sharks in her business smell her blood in the water. Where’s Dominick? Is he with you or up in New York with her?”

“I have a number to reach him at in San Diego.”

“Patch me through fast. If that poor kid is stupid enough to get blotto for all the world to see, she’s stupid enough to do worse to herself when she comes to.”

The accountant was glad Irving’s reaction to Viveca’s career catastrophe was closer to sorrow than anger. He dialed the number Dominick had left. As it started to ring, Shu reminded Irving that the patched connection would not be secure and added, “As soon as you finish with him, call me back right away. There’s something else we have to talk over.”

“I saw it, Irving,” said Dominick. “We get a live feed by satellite out here. Yes, it was awful. I’m trying to get through to somebody at her studio on the other line.”

“She’ll be all right as long as she’s smashed,” the distraught Fein told him, “but when she sobers up and finds out what happened on the air, God knows what she’ll do.”

“Her job is all-important to her,” the banker agreed. “The disgrace will hit hard.”

“How fast can you get to her? I’m socked in up here in Syracuse. No plane out till morning, and the train takes all night.”

“I’m chartering a Gulfstream from here. Should get to her place by midmorning.”

“I’ll meet you at her house in the country. Stay in touch on the way, you hear? Use Mike Shu in Memphis as the contact point—he’ll stand by the phone. We can’t let her out of our sight.”

Ace went directly crosstown to the studio as soon as he heard the terrible news from Irving. Viveca, he was told by a red-eyed makeup woman, had been bundled into her limo after the broadcast and had left moments before.

“Is there any actual evidence that she was under the influence of alcohol?” In his youth, Ace had been trained as an attorney; though he had not negotiated her television contract, he wanted to be ready with a contractual defense should the network seek to dismiss her “for cause.”

“I didn’t see her drinking, if that’s what you mean,” said the woman seated next to the empty barber’s chair in the makeup room.

“You couldn’t smell liquor on her breath.” His question was in the form of a statement to be refuted.

“She likes wine, you know, not hard liquor. No, I couldn’t smell anything. You’re really her agent, not from the press?”

Ace presented his card. On the monitor in the makeup room, he watched a rerun of Viveca’s forty-five-second broadcast; the technicians were making copies, salable souvenirs of a memorable debacle. “She was obviously not herself,” he allowed cautiously, inwardly
dismayed at the public exposure of his client’s apparent but unproven alcoholism. Ace had always suspected Viveca drank too much, but that was true of many of his clients and was rarely career-ending. Assuming the makeup woman would be sought out for a statement by reporters and network lawyers, he implanted a thought and phrase in her mind: “Could it be plain exhaustion, a mental lapse brought on by overwork and some unexpected stress?”

“I’ll say that if you want and it helps her,” the woman told him. “But she was pretty woozy when she came in. Fell asleep in the chair, which never happened before. Even when she’d been having a few.”

Sounded to Ace more like drugs, which would be worse for her reputation; plenty of good newspeople drank too much, but narcotics was death to reputation and might also be cause for summary dismissal. He came at it another way: “Could somebody have slipped her a mickey?”

She looked at him, uncomprehending. “Slipped what?”

“Mickey Finn” was apparently not in the current vernacular. “Could someone have surreptitiously put something like a drug in her coffee? Someone who did not wish her well?”

“Plenty of those people around here. But if you want the truth, it looked to me that she came in here with a load on.”

“You don’t know that,” he reminded her. “All you’ve told me you know for a fact is that she exhibited all the appearances of exhaustion, and it seems to me her producer and director were derelict in their duty.”

“Producer made a sexist crack in the control room.” The makeup woman told him about “the VP News’s former cookie” remark, which he commended her for remembering. He suggested she make a contemporaneous note of it immediately. “Where did she go?”

“Home.”

“Pound Ridge?”

“I think to her apartment on Central Park West.”

Ace marched out of the studio and directed his driver to take him to her nearby pied-à-terre. He recalled her saying that she couldn’t stand personal humiliation—that she would rather be “dead or slinging hash in a diner” than be mortified. She dreaded such mortification above all else, Ace recalled. At the time he had dismissed her professed horror of humiliation as showbiz hyperbole, but now her dire phrasing and the rash of recent suicide reports caused the agent concern.

The doorman said she had not returned. From his car, Ace telephoned her Pound Ridge home and spoke to the housekeeper, who said she was not expected that night. Determined to leave nothing to chance, Ace directed his driver to take him to her home. It was a long trip and the hour was late, but he thought her life could be in danger. In the limo racing up the parkway, he phoned his report to Irving Fein in Syracuse, then to various network executives, who showed various shades of shock, along with that guilty thrill of pleasure in another’s misfortune that the Germans called
Schadenfreude
. He was glad he had an ironclad contract for her on the book project: that might be Viveca’s primary source of income next year, provided she and Irving could deliver a book. Television networks contracted for personal services, but book publishers contracted for a product.