Anonymous Sources (11 page)

I stared at him. Unbelievable. He was blatantly hitting on me. This from a man whom I'd only ever met because he constantly turned up in bed with Petronella Black.

I was still staring, trying to think of a suitably chilling response, when he touched my shoulder and started walking away. “Do come. It'll be good fun. Oh, and, Alex? Great shorts.”

I smiled. I couldn't help it. Lucien Sly might be an upper-class arse, but he was charming.

Mind you, there was no way I was going tonight.

BACK IN MY ROOM I
stood under the shower for a while. Then I toweled dry, ordered tea and tomato soup from room service, and called Hyde.

He was mildly complimentary about my story. Said it was getting some play on the Boston NPR station. Then he asked when I was coming home.

“Tomorrow, hopefully. If I can get on an afternoon flight. It was too tight to get it organized for today.”

Hyde said that sounded fine, that the funeral was definitely set for Tuesday, and that he would have the news admin desk work on getting me access to cover it. Security was going to be crazy. The president was flying up. “Just for the morning. He's got those trade talks in the afternoon. Then he's going . . . Bastard!”

“Excuse me?”

“Bastard cork. Sodding, stupid, son of a . . . Hang on.” Hyde put the phone down. More cursing. Then a pop.

“Hyde?” I checked my watch, did the mental calculation. “Isn't it nine in the morning there?”

“Yes, Ms. James. Nine in the morning on Sunday. You are familiar, I
presume, with the concept of Sunday brunch? At which one might serve such frivolities as a Bloody Mary or a mimosa?”

“You're hosting a brunch today?”

“I never said that. Don't leap to conclusions, James. Stick to the facts.”

“You're making yourself a mimosa.”

“That is one possibility.”

“Or you just woke up in the mood for some bubbly?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.”

It occurred to me that I wasn't exactly in a position to judge someone else's drinking habits. If Hyde wanted to pop a bottle of champagne at 9:00 a.m., that was his business.

I pictured him sitting there. An elegant man, still wiry in his sixties. Sharp eyes. But his defining physical characteristic is a mane of thick, gleaming silver hair. It is never mussed. Behind his back reporters call him the Silver Fox. I wondered what he would be wearing at home on a Sunday morning. I couldn't see Hyde lounging around in a sweatshirt and jeans. A smoking jacket? Some elaborate kimono he'd picked up years ago during a stint in the Tokyo bureau? I couldn't actually imagine him in anything besides the dark suit he wore to the office every day. That may be because I've never seen him outside the office. I have no idea what his house looks like, or his wife.

But in our way Hyde and I have quite an intimate relationship. This is because he knows my secret. Or most of it, anyway. He's the only one besides my parents, and he's known for years, since my early days at the
Chronicle
.

I was hired as a summer intern right out of Columbia. After the summer they offered me a trainee reporter slot. I was assigned to the night cops shift, where I was supposed to listen to the scanner and call around the police precincts every few hours to check what was going on. I was terrible at it. I couldn't make sense of the codes the dispatchers used, and
the big busts always seemed to unfold when I got up to use the bathroom or to make another pot of coffee.

After a while I lost interest. Started calling in sick. And I was sick, in a way. I had started the crying jags earlier that year. Crying, and scratching myself. I would take my fingernails and rake the soft, white skin inside my elbows, down toward my wrists. Scratch and scratch until red welts opened and the blood came. I was too chicken to do it with a knife. One particularly bad week I lay on the kitchen floor for two straight days. Didn't bother to call in sick. Didn't call in at all. I just couldn't move.

On the third day I slunk into the newsroom.

I had prepared an elaborate lie about food poisoning from dodgy sushi.
The salmon nigiri
, I was going to tell them,
I'm pretty sure it was the salmon
. But I was unlucky, or so it seemed to me at the time: Barry, the regular metro editor, was out that week. Hyde Rawlins was filling in. He was still foreign editor then, and I barely knew him. He had a reputation as a hard-ass. He liked to fire people. Our Johannesburg correspondent had lost his job recently for missing deadline. So had an assistant foreign editor. She had confused Mubarak and Mugabe in a headline and then misspelled Hamid Karzai on the front page.

Hyde had spotted me not long after I walked in and summoned me to his office.

“How kind of you to join us today, Ms. James. I hope you're rested. But might I ask where you've been?”

I clutched at my stomach and launched into the sushi story.

I hadn't gotten far when he cut me off. “Save it, Alex. Let me ask again: Where have you been?”

I stared at my feet. Couldn't think of what to say. Then the truth popped out. “I've been lying on my kitchen floor. For two days. I couldn't move.”

He looked interested. “Go on.”

“I—I hadn't really planned to get into this.”

He waited.

“It's because—I—because—of my daughter.”

“Oh. I hadn't realized you have children.”

“No. I mean, I don't.”

Hyde looked confused.

Once I'd started I couldn't stop. It was almost a relief to tell someone. I told him how I'd gotten pregnant at seventeen. The father was a guy I barely knew. Stupid, so stupid. My mother had cried. Said I was ruining my life. Said there would be plenty of time to have babies when I was ready, when I was older, when I wasn't a child myself. I was too far along by then to consider an abortion, and so I'd gone away until it was time.

But I'd lost the baby, I told Hyde Rawlins. She had died at birth. I never even gave her a name. And then I went back to school and tried to forget about her.

For a long time it had worked. And then, suddenly, it didn't anymore. It seemed crazy to mourn a daughter I had never intended to keep; the plan had been to give her up for adoption. But here I was, I told him. Going through the motions of my first grown-up job. And then going home after my shift and sobbing on the floor of my apartment.

When I finished, we had sat in silence for a while.

“I'm sorry,” he said finally.

“Thank you.” I sniffled. “I bet you're wishing you'd let me stick with the sushi story.”

He frowned and shook his head. Then he swiveled around in his leather chair, pecked at his keyboard for a minute, and printed out several sheets of paper. He handed them to me. “This came up at the futures meeting this morning. It's the metro desk's notes so far on the city's new contract for trash collection. Something shady about it. They can't follow where the money's going. I want you to look into it. You can update me directly until Barry gets back.”

I don't know what reaction I'd been expecting, but this was not it. “You're assigning me a story?”

“That would appear to be my job around here.”

“I thought you were going to try to console me. Or else fire me.”

“Still an option, Ms. James. Definitely still an option. But I think right now the best thing all round might be for you to work.”

“Oh.”

“I want you to go get me this story. Knock it out of the park. And when you've nailed this one, you're going to go get the next one. And then the next. See? I need stories. And you, my dear, you need to work.”

So I did.

The trash contract story had taken me months. I learned all kinds of things about racketeering and the cartels that control the garbage-collection industry. The kickbacks flowed in all directions; our graphic-design team had a field day producing flashy charts and diagrams. In the end we ran a four-part series. It won a prize and cost the chief of the Department of Public Works his job. But most important, from my point of view, it kept me off my kitchen floor for a while.

That was five years ago. I am now twenty-eight years old. Hyde has never spoken of my daughter again. Neither have I. He just keeps assigning me stories, and I keep trying to knock them out of the park.

    

    

T
hat night I lay sprawled across the green-and-yellow-flowered duvet of my hotel bed, leafing through the new issue of
Tatler
. It's a guilty pleasure of mine whenever I'm in the UK.
Tatler
is a British society mag, written for and about girls like Petronella Black. If you absolutely must know which West End bar Prince Harry is frequenting, or which caterer can whip up champagne cocktails for a soiree on your Notting Hill roof terrace, or how to score a ticket for the Stewards' Enclosure at the Henley Royal Regatta, then
Tatler
is the magazine for you. Sadly, these are not the concerns that dominate my waking hours. But who can resist living vicariously once in a while?

The July issue featured a cover spread on an Irish starlet I'd never heard of, and a fashion column by someone named Isabella Sterling. Ms. Sterling pronounced that high heels were now officially out, especially stilettos. This autumn, she predicted, fashionistas would be sporting square toes and sensible wedges.

Riiiight
. Isabella Sterling obviously knew nothing about shoes.

I tossed the magazine onto the floor and was just wondering what to do next when my cell phone rang.

I looked at my watch. It was nine at night. I looked at the phone. A London number I didn't recognize.

“Hello?”

“Alexandra James?”

“Yes, who's this?”

“This is Petronella Black.”

Spooky. Almost as if my
Tatler
reading had channeled her.

“I need to speak with you quite urgently,” she said in her posh little accent.

I sat up straight.

“Petronella, if this is to threaten me with your lawyers, I'm really not in the mood. And if you bothered to read my story today, you'd know there wasn't much about you anyway.”

“What? Oh. Good. But this is about something else.”

Something else? “Okay. I'm listening.”

“It's—it's perhaps nothing, but I would prefer not to discuss it over the phone. It's just very strange.”

“Well, feel free to come over. I'm at the Crowne Plaza.”

“No, no, that won't do. I'm down in London, you see. I fly to Boston tomorrow. For the funeral. Why don't we meet for breakfast. Let's say at my club. The Groucho, on Dean Street, in Soho. If you could be there at eight.”

Good grief. The girl was too much. Her private club. And the last bit had been issued not as a request, but as an order.

“Let's say eight thirty,” I said, just to be petty.

Truth be told, I was a little curious what was on her mind. And I was going to London tomorrow anyway, to fly home myself.

Then there was the fact that if I wanted to annoy Petronella Black, there were more enjoyable ways to do so than turning up half an hour late for breakfast.

THERE ARE BAD IDEAS, AND
then there are really bad ideas, and this one probably ranked as one of the worst. But the prospect of flirting, knocking back a few drinks, and irritating Petronella all in one go was too alluring to resist.

By nine thirty that night I was penciling in my lips with a deep-plum color and digging through my suitcase for the highest pair of heels I'd brought. Take that, Isabella Sterling. By ten minutes to ten I was outside the Eagle pub.

Above the main door a blue plaque informed me that Watson and Crick had come here in 1953 to celebrate mapping the structure of DNA. Cambridge is like that. No matter where you go, someone more brilliant than you has already been there and done something far more interesting than whatever it is you're about to do.