Sleeper Spy (9 page)

“Where’s the butler to park the car? Thanks, I can use it.” He took the drink from her hand, knocked it back, went, “Yecch—haven’t you got a decent bottle of wine?” and led the way into her house. “Goddam palace,” he said.

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Pretty run-down, though.” He touched the leaves of a plant. “Fake. Good fake, though.”

She would have to disabuse him promptly of the idea that she was wealthy. “The house is a white elephant,” she said. “Half the rooms are closed off permanently. My family used to own it, and I was a girl here, before my father lost it all and went to jail and died. I bought it back after the market dropped at a foreclosure auction.” She caught herself beginning to talk too fast; jabbering was always a giveaway. She didn’t say the rest—that the house was too much for one maid to clean and she didn’t make enough money to keep up the grounds properly, other than to have the front lawn mowed.

He fitted the description she’d heard of a newspaperman, as looking like an unmade bed. She kicked herself for not having worn jeans; here she was, in a skirt and blouse and Donna Karan cotton cardigan, while he was wearing wrinkled chinos and a loud red shirt, all understated Ralph Lauren without reaching for it.

She got out the Château Talbot, showed him the label.

He gave a pretty-impressed look. “Good stuff, Cordier’s second-best. Eighty-four is over the hill, but let’s give it a shot.”

She shrugged and handed him the bottle, eased out of her shoes, and sat on her feet on the couch. She stripped the cellophane off a new pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Mind if I smoke?” he said.

That threw her. “You mean—smoking bothers you?” Real writers still smoked, didn’t they? She smoked because it gave her something to do with her hands. And it was associated with hard newsmen, and bothered most people on the set.

“I love to smoke,” he said with some nostalgia. “I gave it up. It kills me to see somebody enjoying a good, long drag. Go ahead if you really need to.”

She thought it over, stubbed it out. “Tell me about this sleeper spy.”

“Big fella, loner, high-stakes player, megabucks stashed away. Dedicated commie from year one, maybe did a little wet work along the way. Your kind of guy.”

Viveca wondered what “wet work” was, and if any of what Fein said was true. She used her best question on him: a direct look and a whispered “Really?”

He didn’t go for it. “First let’s figure out how to work together. I never had a collaborator, I’m a born loner. Two divorces.”

“I’ve never been married,” she said. “Either.”

He stopped to weigh her last word. “That’s good, the ‘either.’ I’m a good reporter—nobody’s better, to tell the truth—but a lousy writer. You a good writer? A decent writer? Any kind of writer?”

She pointed to his two books, flatteringly stacked on the lamp table. “Those are well written.”

“Well rewritten, you mean. The copy editor couldn’t handle it. They had to hire someone who worked cheap to rewrite long stretches, punch up all the chapter leads. You can’t write, huh? Either?”

She was not prepared to admit that. “I write most of my own scripts. You probably saw the smart-ass stories that accused me of being a ‘rip-and-read’ announcer. That’s not true. Lot of mean and jealous people in my business.”

“Forty-five seconds is how many words?”

She reached for her pack of cigarettes and lit one in silence. He had caught her in a lie and was enjoying it.

“Look, kid, the Ace says you’re my meal ticket, so I’m for you. If you
can’t write, we’ll find something else for you to do. You can wheedle information out of guys?”

“I have been doing on-air interviews for nearly seven years,” she snapped. “Heads of state. Candidates. Raped women. Great reporters.”

“I hurt your feelings.” After a moment, it occurred to her that Irving Fein, the great questioner, wasn’t going to say anything until she did. She took an ostentatious, unsatisfying drag on her cigarette and inhaled deeply. The expression on his face was sympathetic, which she found infuriating. By being sorry for her for having to be so defensive, he was dominating their first meeting. And still he didn’t say anything.

“If you don’t want to tell me about the fantastic story you’re supposed to have,” she said finally, “we’re not going to get very far.”

“You don’t have to fill up silence,” he said. “You could have outwaited me, and I would have had to blurt something out. You lost that one.”

“Journalism 101?”

“Hell no, this is postgraduate stuff. Learn, it wouldn’t kill you. I’m secure. We’re not competing.”

“If you’re so secure, why can’t you get a book published by yourself? Why do you need a girl like me as a crutch?”

“I like that, shows a little spirit. But why do you call yourself a girl? You’re thirty-three, I looked it up.”

“Your source is wrong, I’m thirty-two. That makes our average age over forty.” He was probably sensitive about his age, pushing fifty; age was one of the things she was just beginning to get sensitive about. She could zing him on his developing paunch, his furtive slump, his general air of determined messinese; the only thing possibly attractive to her about him was his intensity, a quality she never looked for in men but might be useful in a collaborator. That and his reputation within his trade. The trick to handling him was not to show secret vulnerability—that worked best with network executives—but to keep him off balance by not deigning to treat him as an equal. So he’d written a couple of books and won a bunch of prizes; big deal. She had an audience a thousand times the size of his and made ten times his income.

“Come on now, Irving, cut the fencing.” She did not rise, but crossed her legs and put her bare feet on the coffee table. She had
reason to be proud of her legs, not long, but perfectly proportioned. “Do you have a story or a lot of talk?”

“How could you tell the difference?”

“Don’t patronize me. You’re not the one to judge a reporter in my business.”

“Oh. Your business is different. You deal in pictures, in sound bites. We printniks are grubbing after hard facts about real scandals, and the fuzzy new electronic world leaves us suckin’ hind teat.”

She had him off balance and, carefully scratching an ankle with one manicured toe, pressed her advantage. “If you have something worth working on, I’ll know.”

“I don’t know how much Ace told you, but it’s a big one.”

“Matt McFarland doesn’t like to be called Ace. You’ll have to learn to be nice to your agent. He can make it all happen for you.”

He gave her an unbelieving squint. “Look, kid, Ace loves to be known as the Ace. He tells people not to call him Ace who don’t know him from Adam. The Ace is his shtick, his up-from-the-street attitude. It’s the handle that separates him from the literary types who made agent the easy way with three-hour lunches in ritzy bistros.” He put his heavy shoes on the edge of her coffee table. “The nickname Ace is that little touch that tips the scales to editors who assign profiles. Pretending not to like it is his pose. Don’t fall for poses. Deal with reality, and people will begin to respect you.”

“You know all about poses. Yours is media biggie, strike terror into the hearts of wrongdoers, darling of journalism schools.” He was probably right about Ace; she hadn’t thought of that, and she was beginning to enjoy dueling with this so-secure character. “But there you sit, with your clodhoppers on my good coffee table, in a pose of your own.” He didn’t move them.

“You’re afraid you’re over the hill,” she pressed, “and you’re in debt.” She was guessing, but was sure she was right. “You need one big hit to get back in stride, and you hate having to share it with somebody younger and more hip and much more attractive than you. And you can cut out the ‘kid’ business. I’m thirty-two years old—not thirty-three—and I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen making a damn sight more money than you ever made.”

He drained his glass, set it down, and rose. “Give me my hat, I’m
leaving.” She had pushed him too far; she did not want to lose him; it could be he wasn’t as tough as she thought he was.

“I hurt your feelings,” she mimicked. She poured them both another glass, coming close, then drawing back.

“That was your best line so far,” he said, sitting down again, “and it was the one I wrote. But you delivered it well.”

“And you don’t have a hat.”

“I wasn’t leaving yet. The database says you started as a cocktail waitress at sixteen.”

“You learn a lot fast about men that way.”

“You learn how to belt down that booze, too. No?”

“Let’s see, now. You don’t like my smoking or my drinking. Is there anything else I do that doesn’t please you?”

“I used to be a drunk, too, when I was your age. Very popular in the newspaper business. You either straighten out or you self-pity yourself into oblivion.”

That was a thrust Viveca did not appreciate at all. She had been drinking more than before, but she was sure it was not a problem, and she held it down at dinner before airtime. There was a world of difference between a drinker and a drunk; he needed a zing back.

“If we do this book together,” she said slowly, “and I say
if
we do it, we are going to keep the hell out of each other’s private life. That’s rule number one. You can pad your expense accounts and go whoring around all you like, the way the database says you do—that’s none of my business—so long as you move the story along.”

“Never missed a deadline in my life. And the expression in the journalism field is to ‘advance the story.’ ”

“Your problem isn’t deadlines, it’s assignments. You can’t get them. And that’s why you need me.”

The muscles in his cheeks worked. “I don’t take assignments. I get stories on my own that force assignments from editors. And I don’t just sit there and look pretty and read.”

“You used to be a big name,” she stayed on the attack, “a power in the news business—how did you make it, anyway?”

“I didn’t make it on my back.”

“You prick!” she yelled, and threw the cigarette at him. She had not slept with anybody to get a job for years and bitterly resented the
charge. But she regretted the loss of control immediately; it gave him the upper hand.

He picked the burning butt off the carpet and looked at it. Sighing at his weakness, he took a puff, inhaled, and coughed before dropping it in her wine, which she had been looking forward to finishing more than she was ready to admit. “So you’re not the Ice Maiden after all.”

“Which is it, then—Ice Maiden, untouchable, iron pants—or the girl who screws her way to the top?” Both reputations had plagued her. “You can’t have both. One or the other,” she said.

He weighed that. “Not necessarily. You can coldly calculate whose bed it’s profitable to sleep in.”

She saw red. The sexist charge of sex use was untrue, at least since she fought her way onto the air, and it was the classic put-down that men she outdid so often used to steal the pleasure out of her success. “What do you know,” she lashed at him, “about what an attractive woman has to go through every day on the set?”

“And don’t give me this phony feminist shit, either.” He picked up one of his books and dropped it in her lap. “I wrote the series on sexual harassment years ago that damn near busted up the Business Council, and you never gave the woman’s movement more than the back of your hand.”

“Here’s your hat,” she said, crossing her arms. This was not going to work out.

“Don’t get up,” he agreed. “I’ll let myself out.”

Irving Fein waited until ten in the morning, flashed a phony ID that said he was over sixty-two, and bought a senior citizen’s fare ticket on the Delta shuttle to Washington. He remembered how he used to do that with the youth fare until he was twenty-five and couldn’t get away with it anymore. He asked himself: Should a reasonably healthy man of forty-eight be able to pass for sixty-two? His face was creased, not wrinkled; hair was messy, not missing. He chalked up to experience his look of knocked-about maturity. The time would come soon enough, he realized with rue, when he wouldn’t have to fake senior status at all.

He could finesse the hotel expense in expensive Washington by sleeping on the couch of a reporter he’d once helped. Figuring the four airline snacks (two for the round trip, two more he could always get by complaining to the stew about the other ones) and what was in his friend’s fridge, the bus to La Guardia and the Metro to D.C., and breakfast at the McDonald’s on the site of the old Sans Souci, he could do the whole trip for under $150. His accountant, Mike Shu, could write that off against a royalty, if he had any royalties coming; lately, his sales never ate up the advance.

He did not feel bad about having to scrimp in a way that most salaried correspondents thought demeaning. No matter how lavish the expense account, Irving Fein would ostentatiously continue to move about on the cheap. Frugality in travel was the way of the transgressor, as Negly Farson, his journalistic predecessor, used to claim. When a newspaper or magazine popped with an assignment, or a producer romancing Vera Similitude hired him as a consultant, Irving would charge top dollar for meals and transportation and pocket the
difference. To fussbudget administrators who asked for verifying bills on travel and entertainment, he gave the excuse of the harried freelance too busy with genuine oh-shit stories to worry about bits of paper, not to mention his need to protect his sources from the prying eyes of the politicized IRS. It was not merely that he was cheap, he insisted to himself—though he was profoundly cheap—nor that he would brook a breach of ethics; his enterprising approach to T&E was a good habit gained in youth and carried with pride into maturity, like beating up on airline ticket agents who conspired to seat him in the middle of a row.