He nods slowly, as though considering her argument. “And what’s this mystery information? The stuff you’re leaving out?”
The nape of Weecherat’s neck suddenly feels cold. “You don’t need to know,” she says. “It won’t be in the story.”
His index finger snaps against the edge of his desk with a
“Oh, don’t be silly. If the police do come to us, we’ll tell them everything. We can’t be sued for libel if the police demand the information, and you know it.” She hears the pitch of her voice and takes a step back in an attempt to lower the temperature. A question occurs to her. “What are you doing reading this? You don’t usually monitor stories in real time.”
His gaze drifts past her, and she has to fight the urge to turn and look over her shoulder. The tips of his fingers land in the middle of the printout and scrabble it back and forth over the surface of the desk. “You’re right,” he says at last. “Don’t tell me. It’s probably better that I don’t know.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He stands, picks up her printout, wads it into a ball, and drops it in the trash. “Didn’t I? Sorry. Go finish your story.”
Back at her cubicle, she rereads what she’s done, types in a few minor changes, and then finishes. She spends twenty minutes fast-forwarding through her tape of the conversation to make sure she’s quoted Rafferty accurately, and then pushes “send.” After she gets up and hefts her purse to her shoulder, she turns to look across the dim room at the bright window in the night editor’s office and finds him looking at her.
She gives him a cool but proper fingertip wave. He nods and swivels his chair to turn his back to her.
The moment she is gone, he swivels around again and gets up. He goes to Weecherat’s cubicle and picks through the things in her drawers until he finds her tape recorder. He opens it and checks that the tape is inside. Then he returns to his office.
Traffic is thinning at this hour. Weecherat steps into the street and extends an arm, palm down, and pats the air to signal a cab. One pulls out from the curb a short distance away, swings into the traffic lane, and swerves toward her. She glances down to gather her shawl so it won’t catch in the taxi’s door, then the glare of headlights brings her eyes up and she sees the cab bearing down on her. The two steps she manages to scramble back, toward the safety of the curb, put her directly behind a parked truck, and that’s where the cab hits her, slamming her against the lower edge of the truck so hard she is almost cut in two.
The driver flicks on the wipers to clear blood from the windshield and shifts into reverse. The transmission lets out a squeal of protest. Something is caught beneath the truck. The driver throws his door open, climbs out, and slams the door on his thumb. He yelps in pain, opens the door, and lopes away into traffic, dodging between cars and holding his injured thumb close to his chest.
As traffic whisks past the scene, Weecherat’s buttercup scarf flutters in the windstream.
The moment the apartment door opens, Miaow pushes through, saying, “It was on
“Then I guess it really happened,” Rafferty says, standing in the bluish fluorescent light of the hallway. He puts a hand on Miaow’s head. “Don’t you have something to say to Mrs. Pongsiri?”
“Thank you,” Miaow recites dutifully. “I had a very nice time.”
“It was a little holiday for me,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. She is wearing full evening makeup and a silk robe in all the hues of the rainbow, plus a few that were deleted for aesthetic reasons. Her apartment, the lamps mysteriously sheathed with colored scarves, gleams behind her like a Gypsy caravan. “This is the first night in months I haven’t gone to the bar.”
“Were they really naked?” Miaow says. Her eyes are so wide he can see white all around her irises, and the evening’s excitement seems to have driven away the clouds that have been hovering over her head. “I mean,
“Close enough,” Rafferty says. “Thank you, Mrs. Pongsiri. I’ll baby-sit your bar girls some evening.”
He gets a flirtatious smile and a disapproving shake of the head. Rafferty doubts there’s a man in the world who could mix messages like that. “You wouldn’t say that if your wife could hear you.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he says. “And she’s not going to hear it from anybody here either. Is she, Miaow?”
“Why couldn’t I go with you?” The petulance returns.
“No kids allowed. Just a bunch of rich people standing around sneering at each other. Bye, Mrs. Pongsiri.” He leads Miaow down the hall. “Anyway, it was all boring except for the two minutes you saw on television.”
“The garden was pretty. I would have liked it.”
“It didn’t smell as good as it looked.” He opens the door to the apartment and steps aside to allow Miaow to precede him. As he closes the door, Rose comes out of the bedroom, already in shorts and a T-shirt.
