“It’s beautiful. L. S. A. Mulligan showing his sweet side?”
I shrugged and lifted her hair as she fastened the clasp behind her neck. And then she kissed me.
Later, there was a new kind of pillow talk. Veronica wanted to discuss the future.
“What’s next for you, Mulligan?”
“I’ve got some incorporation papers to recheck.”
“No, no, not that. What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”
“Oh. First off, I want to get my divorce finalized.”
“That would be good place to start.”
“Then I want to sit in the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park with my best girl and watch the Red Sox win the World Series again.”
“Your best girl? Would that be me?”
“It would.”
“Then what?”
“Then I can die happy.”
“Hey, be serious for a minute, okay?”
I thought I was being serious, but what I said was, “Okay.”
“You’ve been in Rhode Island for a long time, Mulligan.”
“All my life.”
“Isn’t it time you moved on to something better?”
“Like what?”
“The Washington Post? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal, maybe?”
“Move someplace where I can’t get the Red Sox on free TV? Besides, you know what the newspaper job market is like. Those rags aren’t hiring; they’re laying off.”
“Yeah, but they always have room for an investigative reporter with a drawer full of awards.”
“Nobody wants to hear about a ten-year-old Pulitzer, Veronica.”
“Yes, they do,” she said. “And your Polk was just two years ago.”
“Um.”
“What about television news? CNN, maybe.”
“With my face?”
I waited for her to protest, but she didn’t. Instead she said, “Wolf Blitzer is no prize either.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Think about it, baby? What would you be doing with your life if you could do anything you wanted?”
“I’m doing it,” I said.
“You actually like it here?”
“Naked next to you? Are you kidding?”
“Be serious!”
I grinned. “Do you know how Rhode Island got its name, Veronica?”
“No, but I bet you’re going to tell me.”
“Actually, I’m not. Fact is, nobody knows for sure. Historians have poked into it for years, but all they’ve come up with are a few half-baked theories.”
“So?”
“So one of them goes like this: Rhode Island is a bastardization of Rogue Island, a name the sturdy farmers of colonial Massachusetts bestowed upon the swarm of heretics, smugglers, and cutthroats who first settled the shores of Narragansett Bay.”
Veronica snickered and tossed her hair. I liked it when she did that.
“They ought to change the name back,” she said. “Rhode Island is boring. Rogue Island has pizzazz.”
It’s also apt. For more than a hundred years, pirates slipped from Narragansett Bay’s hidden coves to prey on merchant shipping. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Rhode Island shipmasters dominated the American slave trade. During the French and Indian War and again during the Revolution, heavily armed privateers skulked out of Providence and Newport to seize prizes with little regard for the flags they flew. After the Civil War, Boss Anthony, a co-owner of The Providence Journal, kept his Republican machine in power for decades by buying votes at the going rate of two bucks apiece. Around the turn of the century, Nelson Aldrich, a former Providence grocery clerk immortalized in David Graham Phillips’s “The Treason of the Senate,” helped robber barons plunder the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, a Providence mobster named Raymond L. S. Patriarca was the most powerful man in New England, deciding everything from what records got played on the radio to who lived and who died. And Mayor Carroza’s predecessor, the honorable Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr., recently did federal time for conspiring to run a criminal enterprise, also known as the city of Providence.
“Of course, we do know how Providence got its name,” I said. “Roger Williams christened his city in thanksgiving for God’s divine guidance. Cotton Mather’s suggestions, ‘the fag end of creation’ and ‘the sewer of New England,’ mercifully didn’t stick.”
“And this is why you like it here?”
“I grew up here. I know the cops and the robbers, the barbers and the bartenders, the judges and the hit men, the whores and the priests. I know the state legislature and the Mafia inside out, and they’re pretty much the same thing. When I write about a politician buying votes or a cop on the pad, the jaded citizenry just chuckles and shrugs its shoulders. That used to bother me. It doesn’t anymore. Rogue Island is a theme park for investigative reporters. It never closes, and I can ride the roller coaster free all day.
“Besides, if I tried to write about some place I don’t know, I could never do it as well.”
“Sure you could,” she said. “Think of how much fun you’d have going after all the crooks in Washington.”
Washington? That was the second time she mentioned Washington.
“You’ve applied to The Post, haven’t you?”
“Let me tell you something about my family, Mulligan. My sister Lucy? She starts Harvard Medical School in the fall. My brother Charles? At thirty he’s already a VP at Price Waterhouse. Me? I bust my ass covering ‘the fag end of creation’ for a third-rate newspaper that pays me six hundred dollars a week. Daddy feels so sorry for me that he sends me five hundred a month, and I’d be living like you if I had the pride to send it back.
“My parents are ambitious people. When I told them I was going to be a reporter, they sat me down and told me I was making a big mistake. When I wouldn’t listen, they didn’t nag or threaten. After I graduated from Princeton, they paid the whole bill for Columbia J-School and never once complained. But I think they’re a little ashamed of me. I want them to be as proud of me as they are of Charles and Lucy. I want to be proud of myself. I’m my parents’ daughter, Mulligan. I’m ambitious, too.”
The speech was nice, but I was more concerned about when I’d be sleeping alone again.
“So what did The Post say?”
“I sent them my résumé and clips a month ago. Last week, Bob Woodward called me. Bob Fucking Woodward! I flew down yesterday for an interview. Bob says he loves my instincts, loves my writing, loves my reporting, especially the Arena stories. And with the pressure he’s under to hire minorities, you know damned well he loves it that I’m Asian. From the way he stared at me, I could tell he also likes the way I look.”
This was all happening too fast. I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. “So when do you start?”
“He said he’ll have an opening for a federal-courts reporter in a month or two. I’d write daily news briefs for the Web site and news analysis pieces for the paper. It’s a great job, and it’s mine if I want it.”
“Now you’re going to say you told him about me.”
“Better than that. I wrote a kick-ass résumé for you and gave it to him with a package of your best clips.”
“Did you also tell him that I’m Chinese?”
“Mulligan!”
“Would it help if we got married and I took your name?”
“Please stop with the jokes. He wants you to call him. Will you at least think about it? I love you, baby. I don’t want to lose you.”