"Not even some bread?" Thaddeus asked. "Olive oil is a relatively benign monosaturate." She wondered if Kitty had taught him that, or if he had unplumbed depths. Shaking her head no, Tess grabbed an apple, sawed off two thick slices of bread, poured a healthy slug of white wine, and carried it all to her rooftop. She would rather have her own solitary picnic than be an unwanted guest at someone else's.
Her dinner finished, Tess felt so cozy in her wallow of self-pity that she decided to smoke a joint. She didn't pay much attention to the harmonica tune wafting up from the alley below. Fells Point had no shortage of panhandlers who tried to pass themselves off as musicians. And this was a particularly overachieving busker who seemed to fancy himself the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica, segueing raggedly from "The Star-Spangled Banner" to a blues song. Oh say can you see…that my woman done left me. No, this was a song about a good woman, someone who washes out a man's knife wound and doesn't mind when he leaves in the morning, having drunk all her whiskey and left nothing but a bloodstain behind in her bed.
"Oh, shit." She knew this song. It was Jonathan Ross's mating call.
That should have been number five on this fall's list, Tess thought. Stop seeing Jonathan. She could, she knew she could. It was her choice to let him in. She flicked the last bit of joint off the roof, crawled back inside, and pressed the buzzer that let him in the side door.
Jonathan took the stairs two at a time and began kicking the door lustily, his harmonica still wheezing in his teeth. She knew by the sound of his cowboy boots on the door that he had come to crow. Tess experienced Jonathan only at his extremes-cocky and in need of affirmation, or depressed and in need of affirmation. Once, in conversation with Whitney, she had compared her Jonathan encounters to eating Oreos without any filling.
"Well, that's what you sign up for when you keep company with men who are virtually engaged to other people," Whitney had said in her blunt way. "Licked-clean Oreos."
Tonight the plain chocolate cookie in question had brought, along with the harmonica, a bottle of mescal, a Big Mac, and a large order of fries. He pressed the warm, grease-stained bag into Tess's middle as he hugged her, giving her a wet kiss tasting faintly of salt and Hohner Marine Band steel.
"Oh, you shouldn't have," Tess trilled in falsetto, cradling the brown paper bag. "Let me get a vase for these fries."
He grabbed the bag back from her, growling deep in his throat, and began to cram French fries in his mouth by the fistful. When obsessed at work Jonathan sometimes forgot to eat until his need for food became so acute he almost fainted. Once he did find sustenance he guarded it as jealously as a dog. Tess knew what a hunger like this meant.
"Big story?"
"Huge," he said around a mouthful of fries. "Enormous. Gargantuan. Pulitzer material. Do they give the Nobel in journalism? I'll win that, too."
Tess felt her stomach lurch. Feeney, damn Feeney. If he had told Jonathan about her call, Jonathan might be following the same lead now. He would find the mystery man with the Louisville Slugger first. He would solve the murder. He would win.
"Abramowitz?"
Jonathan held up his hand as if he were a traffic cop, motioning her to wait while he worked his way through the last handful of fries. "Better. Much better than any dead lawyer."
He offered Tess the mescal bottle, but she shook her head. With a glass of wine at her side and a half-joint still in her system, she had enough substances going. Jonathan took three swallows, then began pacing back and forth, bent over in an unconscious parody of Groucho Marx.
"Tell me," Tess wheedled, unconvinced Abramowitz was not part of it. "You know you're dying to tell someone."
"No. Not yet. I don't have it on the record yet, but I will. I will!" Jonathan dumped a shot of mescal on the Big Mac, then consumed the burger and his own special sauce in three bites. Like Kitty and Thaddeus gulping summer sausage, Jonathan's appetite had little to do with his stomach.
"Give me a hint. Tell me something. Tell me how big it is."
Jonathan stopped pacing, if not chewing, and considered her question. "It will change…everything. It will be like a coup, by journalism. Killers will roam the streets of Baltimore. Institutions will be suspect."
"And the president will resign, right? You don't have to hype your story to me, I'm not the page one editor. And I'm not buying it."
"You'll buy it eventually. You'll take your fifty cents down to the newspaper box and you'll buy it along with 300,000 other people. No, make that a dollar fifty and 500,000 people. This is a Sunday story, all the way. The New York Times and the Washington Post will woo me. Movie producers will want the rights. Actors-the dark, brooding, romantic kind-will vie to play me." He grabbed her hands and pulled her to him. "Reporters will want to interview you, because you knew me."
"My dream come true." Tess pulled away. Jonathan oversold all his stories, so it was hard to know if this one was truly special. But something told her the little boy who cried wolf-this little boy who called, "Extra, extra, read all about the wolf!"-was going to come through this time. He had unearthed a journalistic treasure. And she was the first to know, the unnamed native servant, following the great white hunter into the forbidden temple and watching in pagan terror as he contemplated a sacred object she had never dared to touch. Once he lifted this golden artifact from its perch, nothing would be the same. The earth would move, the temple would rumble, and Jonathan's future would be made in the brief moment when he decided to run with his treasure. And he would run with it. Of that she had no doubt.
Still, she could not give him the satisfaction of seeming impressed. "I'll believe it when I see it. As you said, you don't even have anything on the record."
"But I will. You know I will," he said, pulling Tess down on top of him, a new hunger in him.
The imminence of fame and success was an aphrodisiac to Jonathan. He was tender and insatiable, as if Tess embodied the dreams hovering close. They made love once, twice, three times, drinking mescal shots between bouts of lovemaking, talking of everything but the source of Jonathan's excitement. They still had not slept when Tess's alarm went off at 5:30 A.M., summoning her to the boat house.
"Skip your workout for once," Jonathan murmured wetly into her neck. For once Tess did, although she had a slight twinge of guilt about Rock. He worried when she missed practice, assuming she must be gravely ill.
She made a pot of coffee and they climbed to the roof to watch the sun rise. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees overnight as a cool front moved through, and Baltimore looked glorious. No polluted haze over the harbor, just a clear, almost white sky, the kind that would deepen to cerulean blue as the day wore on. A bright red tug moved slowly across the harbor. The bay was green gray. Even the seagulls looked fresh and clean. Tess felt closer to Jonathan than she had in years, as if they were the couple they had been in their Star days. She tried not to think about his girlfriend, waking up alone somewhere outside D.C. At least she assumed the girlfriend woke up alone. Maybe their relationship was more complicated than she knew.
"Great view," Jonathan said admiringly. "Some people pay two thousand dollars a month for this view, and you get it for almost nothing."
"Yes, I lead such a charmed life."
"Well, you do, you know. I've always envied you."