The Last Manly Man (10 page)

“How many miles you think you've traveled in this thing?” I asked.

“Quite a few,” he said, not looking at me. There was not a speck of lint on his beige-and-scarlet elevator operator uniform, complete with gold braid on the shoulders.

“You like your job?” I guessed.

“Yes I do, ma'am.”

“What do you like about it?” I asked him.

This seemed to rattle him, but finally he said, “It's a good job and … my father did it before me.”

“All his life?” I asked.

“All his life,” he said.

Then he clammed up.

There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him. Like, how does one go up and down in a little closed room for forty or fifty years without going stark raving mad? What did you want to grow up to be when you were a little boy? What is that mysterious quality men have that makes women put up with all sorts of crap from them? But I sensed my questions weren't welcome. It was possible this was what he wanted to be when he was a little boy because his father did it. When his father got into the elevator business, it would have been early in the century, when the Otis elevator was the cutting edge of high technology. It had certainly been the hit of the 1893 World's Exposition (that, plus the amazing lightbulb and the first long-distance phone call, from Chicago to New York). It must have been very exciting to go whooshing up the inside of a building in those early days.

He did not speak to me again until we got to the penthouse and he said, “Here we are. Good evening.”

“Thank you. Enjoyed that,” I said, not knowing what to say. “See you on the ride down.”

The elevator opened up into a lobby with a reception desk, surrounded by what I assumed was bulletproof glass. After checking my ID, the security guards buzzed me through a thick steel door.

I'd never been up here before, though the penthouse was legendary, the place where Jack kept a duplex apartment/office. He lived here between marriages and shack-ups, as he was now. He'd recently been ditched by his longtime girlfriend, actress Shonny Cobbs.

We were fifty-some stories above Manhattan, in a huge space with wraparound windows overlooking the steaming, jewel box city—except for one window, which was a transparent map of the world, with little green lights in countries where Jack had holdings, and little red lights where he did not. Suspended from the ceiling was a line of monitors, one for each of Jack's many networks and a few for those of his competitors.

It was a little after five and already the room was full. Jack was over near the bar. The place was crawling with ANN executives, women's conference honchos, moguls, sponsors of the women's conference, and on-air talent from Jack's various networks, stars all of them, except for me and Norma, a cafeteria lady who looked like a younger, toothier Moms Mabley. Jack, surrounded by a bunch of guys in suits, was talking to her, and waved me over.

“This is Norma, Robin,” he said. “She's the one who told me about the Flintstones thing. This is Joseph, my head lawyer; Cal, my speechwriter; Larry, my ethicist. Dr. Larry, I should say, guy's got a Ph.D. in philosophy. This here is Robin, the girl I told you about, knows how to urinate standing up.”

Norma said hello to me, before she excused herself to go back to work in the cafeteria, or as newsroom wags knew it, the Bad News Café. As she was leaving, their Royal Minuses Reb and Solange came in and headed our way.

Solange was looking very calm and confident, Reb looking around at everyone with suspicion, and blinking rapidly, just one of the tics he'd developed in his years as a war correspondent. His voice was still used on reports, but rarely did he do on-cam stand-ups anymore because the eye tics were too distracting. He'd been chased out of Iraq because Saddam Hussein thought he was sending Morse code messages with his eyes to an unknown traitor within the palace. My Morse was a little rusty, but I was pretty sure the only message Reb was sending was: I'm insane.

That's not a joke. Reb had had a few legendary crack-ups over the years. After he “escaped” from his kidnappers in Beirut, he took to extolling and demonstrating in public the virtues of drinking one's own waste water. It was one thing to do that in front of a bunch of blasé journalists on a bus in Haiti. It was quite another to do that at the Emmy Awards dinner.

Jack and his suits shook hands with Solange and Reb. In Jack's view, Solange smiled at me graciously. Then she turned out of his sight, so only I could see her, and gave me a different look—haughty, imperial. I guessed she was trying to provoke a bad reaction in me that Jack would see. Solange had to be the Queen, all the time. Which was fine with me. Let her be the damned Queen. I was satisfied to be the swearingest princess in all of Christendom. But ever since I became Jack's pet, replacing her, she had unilaterally decided we were at war.

Instead of reacting badly, I took the High Road and smiled graciously back at her.

“Robin, are you okay?” Solange asked with sudden and completely fake concern. “You look really tired. I know you've been working really, really hard. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed now. A lot of us are worried about you.”

She smiled beneficently while Reb kept glancing silently around the room. Jack was watching Solange and me with interest.

This was her way of saying I looked bad, and hinting to Jack Jackson that I wasn't up to the job he had entrusted to me.

“Have we been working you too hard?” Jack asked me.

“Not at all,” I said. “I'm fine, Solange, couldn't be better.”

“That's not what I hear. You know my door is always open if you just need to talk, maybe get a little management advice, a referral to a doctor,” Solange said.

“Well, I'd love to talk to you sometime,” I said, aping her fake niceness. Despite my efforts to Take the High Road, I couldn't help adding, “By the way, I spoke to Susan Brave last week. The baby is sleeping through the night, the new house is great, she and Jack are very happy.”

Susan Brave had been Solange's doormat … er, producer for many years, until one day, thanks to therapy, Prozac, and suddenly finding some self-esteem, she bolted, leaving Solange for a network job in California, where she fell in love and got married to a fun guy. When Susan resigned, Solange had warned her of the disasters that would befall her if she left Solange and ANN. Few things vexed Solange as much as hearing how happy someone else was, especially Susan. Susan had been the fuckup who made everyone else feel relatively happy and well-adjusted, and it was momentarily discomfiting, having to adjust one's own self-image in relation to her new one. That's human nature, I guess, but Solange just couldn't get over it.

“Do you really think she's happy?” Solange asked. “I hear she's in tremendous denial. I've been deeply concerned about her, but haven't had a chance to call her.”

Speaking of denial. Susan didn't take or return Solange's semiregular calls.

“No, they are
really
happy,” I said. “Nice, isn't it? Gives you faith in love and all that”

Solange's usual tactic now would be to mention how happy my ex-husband was with his amazing second wife and their baby, but—ha!—she was shooting blanks because I was so over my ex-husband's new family, much to my own surprise.

Instead she said, “It certainly gives me faith. Oh, you know, I almost forgot to ask you, who is the man in the hat you ran into?”

At that point, Jack said, “Lois!” and wandered off to talk to some conference organizer.

“Why? Have you seen him?” I asked.

Solange just smiled and did not answer.

My beeper went off. It was a message from Jason. “Your place, eight-thirtyish,” it said.

While I was checking it, Solange and Reb turned and left, without answering my question, to kiss some advertiser asses.

How did she know about the man in the hat? Had she or Reb stumbled upon him through their own sub-rosa investigations? If so, that might mean the dead Frenchman and the missing man who gave me the hat
were
connected.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lots of theories went through my head as I dressed for my date with Gus, before I remembered that Solange was friendly with Benny Winter, who had supplied her with many big-name guests for her shows over the years. Maybe he told her about the man in the hat. That would also explain why he was so well researched on my career.

Solange was annoying and I resolved to find some High Road way to peacefully coexist with her. Wasn't like I didn't admire her. She and a handful of other women had kicked down the doors for women in broadcasting, and they'd had to be tough bitches to do it, and you had to give them credit blah blah blah. And who was I to criticize her? She was a Power Woman who had broken bread with Power Women all over the planet, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, Hillary, and Janet Reno to name a few.

Checking myself in the mirror, I had to ask myself: Would a Power Woman like Janet Reno, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Golda Meir, or even Solange Stevenson let a man she really didn't know that well feel her up in a deserted corner of the primitive peoples gallery in the Museum of Natural History? Or pretend to be a newlywed in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel and let a stranger buy her champagne before they went up to his room? Or put on a white plastic micromini naughty nurse dress, seamed hose, and stilettos, and go out to a cheap motel in New Jersey to watch porn movies with an actor and hump like monkeys? For example.

The risk made it all the better. For some time, I'd been keeping a very low profile, and it would blow me out of the water if the tabloids found out about some of the stuff Gus and I were doing in semipublic places. The
News-Journal
in particular would have a field day, since it was owned by Jack Jackson's archrival, Canadian-British-American media magnate Lord Otterrill. They would slam me, a capriciously promoted ANN exec, to get at him.

But shit, I'm a red-blooded American woman and the moon was just about full in the sky, which turns me into a she-wolf with her nose in the wind, trying to pick up the scent of a like-minded male. I can't get pregnant because of my screwy fallopians, but my ovaries still go through the motions and some part of my brain still sends out a powerful Seek Sperm message during the full moon. In this state, the littlest thing can rile me, a thunderstorm, a smoldering glance from a blue-eyed, one-armed man on a bus, men discussing weaponry, the word “percussion.” This was especially true once I turned thirty-five, and nature started to put me through my horny teenage-boy phase. It was bad enough going through it as a mature woman. I couldn't imagine how immature teenage boys handled it, except of course by
handling it
. Bubba, I guessed, got a lot of shucking.

At 8:40, Jason still hadn't showed and I beeped him again and left a message that I was going out, to try me the next day.

When I got off the elevator, I saw Mrs. Ramirez going out with Señor, and I waited a couple of minutes until she was gone. God only knew what she'd say if she saw me dressed like a nurse in a soft porn movie. On the stoop, I looked both ways for her. Her back was to me, and she was heading toward Avenue B, so I headed east toward C to get a cab. It's not the best street to grab a cab—gentrification hadn't firmly taken hold on C as it had on Avenues A and B.

C was quiet. No cars, few people. A piece of blown paper skipped down the middle of the street. The steady traffic on Fourteenth Street, four blocks away, sounded like the rush of a distant river. I walked toward Fourteenth Street, a sure bet for a cab, and heard a low whistling behind me. What the hell was that tune? It was starting to grate on me before I remembered—“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from
Song of the South
. I turned back and saw a lone white man walking behind me, whistling.

The whistling man was staring at me intently. It creeped me out, and I wished I had some weaponry on me, something more than my pepper spray. Foolishly, I had been feeling more confident lately and didn't feel the need to be constantly armed anymore. Also, my life was much more hectic, I just didn't feel like schlepping weaponry around all the time. Nor did I have my cell phone.

Approaching me were two other men, men in suits, and I felt safer all of a sudden.

When I looked again the whistling white man was crossing the street, not looking at me. Man, was I paranoid, I thought, just before someone grabbed me and something smacked down on my head. I was unprepared, had no time to go for my pepper spray. Shielding my face with my purse, I wildly kicked and threw punches—a couple of them connected, sending a stinging pain down my knuckles to my elbow—before I fell into a corner where a redbrick wall met a Dumpster.

A very large man in a suit loomed over me, followed by a second man, both their faces shadowed. The large man put his boot on my stomach to keep me from getting up. I slumped to the ground, my purse between my face and the cold concrete, which smelled of spoiled food.

“Don't make me use the gun,” the large man said. “Where is Atom?”

“What?” I asked.

A third man, the whistling man, appeared.

“Atom! Do you have Atom!” the large man said.

“You've got the wrong person,” I said. “I don't know what …”

“Atom!” the man said to me, trying to grab for my purse and knocking it open in the process. I held tight to the purse. A little spray container glinted in the twilight.

“You've mistaken me for someone else,” I said. “I'm …”

One of them smacked me upside the head again. After that dizzying blow on my head, my vision was so fractured that for a moment, before my eyes refocused, I saw a dozen large thugs, arrayed kaleidoscopically, like the opening shot of
The Lucille Ball Show
. I tried screaming, but I'd bitten my tongue when I got smacked and I choked on the blood in my mouth. All that came out was coughing.

“Hey, what's going on?” a woman shouted from down the street.