So she detects a little bias problem in the story’s point of view. And, perhaps more important, the piece isn’t sufficiently discreet. No matter how big the story is, she has no desire to feel on her own back the sights that are presumably trained on Rafferty’s. She needs to get her personal opinions out of the way and make the language more suggestive and less explicit. She needs to make the reader see something she doesn’t actually say. And amp up the tension at the same time.
She reaches out and straightens the small photograph of her daughter, the only personal item in the cubicle, then kisses the tip of her index finger and touches it to the child’s nose.
She has worked most of her way through the story, feeling more in control of the material, when an instant message pops up on her screen. The night editor would like to see her.
She gets up, irritably redrapes her scarf, and threads a path between the empty desks to the office at the far end of the room. The night editor, a fat, balding hack who has gained thirty pounds since smoking was banned in the building, swivels in his chair to face her. He holds up a printout.
“Where’s this going?”
“If you’ll let me finish it,” Weecherat says, “you’ll see.”
“Just tell me. My eyes are tired.”
Weecherat sighs and talks him through the story, painstakingly telling it exactly as she intends to write it, eliminating her personal bias and skirting the occasional misdirection that will allow her to imply more than she actually says. When she finishes, he regards her long enough for her to feel uncomfortable.
He drops the printout on the desk. “So you’re selling me a story that could bring the cops down on the paper if anything happens to this farang. We become the keepers of the keys if things go wrong.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Give me another.”
“I just told it to you. The first person ever authorized to write Pan’s biography is being forced under threat of death to write a character assassination. That meets my definition of news.”
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 thwap. “Don’t tell me what’s material. You’re taking us in a direction that could put us in a courtroom.”
“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.
23
The moment the apartment door opens, Miaow pushes through, saying, “It was on television.”
“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, really?”
“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.
“You should get out of that monkey outfit,” she says.
“Miaow was just telling me that Pan’s little show was on TV.”
“It was,” Miaow says, heading for her room.
“That was fast.” Rose stops at the kitchen counter. “I’m going to make some Nescafe,” she says. “Want some?”
“Have I ever wanted any?”
“Not that I remember.”
“But I might want it at this hour?”
“You’ll never truly become Thai until you learn to enjoy Nescafe.”