She checks the time on her phone.
1:25.
That’s more than eight hours.
Is it over? What happened? She slides off the couch, picks up the TV remote, points it, and flicks. Then she goes over to her desk and taps a key on the keyboard.
Before she calls him back she’d better get some kind of an update.
Stiff from sleeping on the couch, she hobbles into the kitchen and puts on some coffee.
Over the next ten minutes, sipping espresso, and dividing her attention between the TV and the computer, she updates herself comprehensively.
The first shock is that it’s still going on. The second is that Lizzie Bishop has supplanted the Coady brothers as the focus of everyone’s attention. And in what seems to be something of an unfortunate sideshow, Frank Bishop himself has come in for a bit of a hammering.
Does that have anything to do with why he called?
She needs more coffee. She goes and makes some. Then she has a pee. Then she takes a quick shower.
Putting it off.
Because what’s she supposed to tell him? What can she do for him? She’s not in a position to do anything.
When she finally calls him, she does it standing at the window, looking out onto Ninety-third Street.
“Frank? It’s Ellen.”
“Hi. Er… just a second.” She hears some sounds in the background, muffled voices, shuffling. Then he’s on again. “Sorry. Thanks for getting back to me.” He pauses. “I… I didn’t see you anywhere last night, after we got here, I-”
“They wouldn’t let me through,” she says. “I guess you got swept up into it all, but I was held back at the first barrier. And I didn’t have your number. I tried to get a message to you, but… the general atmosphere was pretty crazy. I stayed most of the night, but eventually I just came home.”
“Right.” There’s a pause here as he considers this. “Okay.”
With that settled, sort of, he goes on to tell her about the upcoming Victoria Hannahoe interview and Lloyd Hackler’s involvement and how fucked up it all is. There’s an occasional crack in his voice as he speaks, but there’s a steely quality to it as well.
“So look,” he says in conclusion, “I could use some help. In return, you get exclusive access. Your phrase.”
This time it’s Ellen’s turn to pause and consider.
She’d given up on the story, and with good reason, but it’s funny how things can change in the space of a few hours. Because this is no longer news. That part of the process is over, almost. Now it’s morphing into something different, something that needs to be colored in and dissected and explained before it’s filed away in the public consciousness, archived as the Story of the Wall Street Killers, or the Siege of Orchard Street. With exclusive access to Frank Bishop-and, all going well, to Lizzie-there could be a substantial long-form piece in this.
Pretty much Ellen’s métier.
And it’d be perfect for the next issue of Parallax.
“Yes,” she says, “of course. Give and take. Your phrase.”
The second she’s off with Frank here, she’ll call Max.
“Good. Thanks.” He pauses. “Where are you now?”
She tells him and says that she can be down there in twenty minutes, half an hour.
He tells her that he’ll arrange for an NYPD detective named Lenny Byron to let her through the security barriers. That she should ask for him.
Ten minutes later, chewing on a last bite of stale bagel, she’s out on Columbus Avenue hailing a cab.
When the phone rings, Lizzie’s heart lurches sideways and she stands up at once from the table. Julian shifts slightly on the floor in the corner and groans, as if the sound of the phone is disturbing his sleep, but not enough to wake him up. On the couch, Alex turns his head. That’s all. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say, “You getting that?”
Doesn’t need to.
Because she’s getting it.
Picking it up, clearing her throat.
Loudly.
She has no script this time, no list, and a lot less adrenaline than she had the last time. The truth is, the waiting has been awful and has effectively drained the life out of her. She knows it’s probably been a deliberate strategy to undermine morale in here, and boy has it worked, but little do they know how fragile morale was to begin with.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Lizzie. It’s Tom.”
Tom.
This pretense of friendship is annoying. It’s patronizing. Standing at the table, next to the chair she’s been sitting in for hours, she sways from side to side.
She actually has nothing to say.
“Lizzie?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Have you reinstated Glass-Steagall yet?”
“Er…”
She closes her eyes. Shit, that was stupid. It was flippant. She wasn’t going for flippant. She’s tired. Tired isn’t even the word for it. She opens her eyes. Alex is looking up at her. She shrugs and turns away.
“Well?”
She’s not backtracking now.
“Lizzie, let’s take it one step at a time, okay? But I do have movement on something you asked about earlier, the communications situation?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, we’d like to get your TV back on. There’s something we’d like you to watch.”
Oh fuck.
“What?”
“You’ll find out in a-”
“Jesus, Tom-”
“Look, bear with me, Lizzie, okay?”
He pauses.
She can picture him, Special Agent Tom, huddled over his equipment. What she imagines his equipment to be. She doesn’t know, headphones, recording panels, displays with dials and gauges. He’d love to move in for the kill here. She can hear it in his voice. She’s not stupid. A little bit of veiled flirting, some white empathetic noise, and then bam-
Lizzie, we know we can count on you, and we know you’re under pressure in there, we do, so tell us, quick, the explosives…
She exhales loudly down the phone.
“It’s an interview,” he says, almost whispering. “I think you’ll respond to it. You will.” Before she can say anything, he adds, “Turn the TV on in about two minutes, okay? Fox News.”
And then he hangs up.
There is silence, and stillness, for probably most of the two minutes. Then Lizzie puts the phone down on the table. She walks around to the front of the couch and looks for the TV remote.
“What?” Alex says, looking up, as though he’s stoned, but making an effort.
And then, shit… holy shit-it occurs to her-these motherfuckers are stoned, on pills, sedatives, diaza-, diazap-, benzoap…
Whatever the fuck those things are called.
She’s seen them in Julian’s medicine cabinet.
What else would explain-
“What?” Alex repeats, shifting a little on the couch.
Lizzie rolls her eyes. This has been going on for nearly a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours, but she feels like she has aged ten years in that time, more-aged and changed and moved on, shed personas, past lives, complete versions of herself… grown, expanded, aged, calcified, atrophied.
In a quiet voice, she says, “They want us to turn on the TV. There’s something they want us to watch.”
Alex shifts again on the couch, wriggles for a moment, and reveals that he has been sitting on the remote.
There is another lurching movement from the corner, as Julian rolls over to face the room for the first time in many hours.
Oh, what? The promise of a little TV is enough to cut through the chemical molasses here? To raise these bozos from their self-administered inertia?