Her auburn hair, normally curled and friz;ed and shriveled up, had an even more electrified look today. Deep-fried hair. Probably caused by humidity, the condition was extreme enough to be taken as a style.
Along a corridor in the Senate wing she moved in her somewhat wary manner behind a group of reporters who were trying to keep up with Lloyd Percival. The Senator, still wearing orange makeup from an earlier TV appearance, answered only certain questions, and those curtly, talking out of the side of his mouth. He was sixty, a large man, beginning to go fleshy, with something of a burdened look about him, small tired eyes blinking above those folds of loose skin.
He wheeled right, strode past an enormous mahogany clock topped by a bellicose eagle, made another right toward a flight of stairs, and as though by hidden signal the reporters stopped pursuing and dispersed, leaving Moll to follow alone, right into an elevator reserved for senators and staff, out into another corridor, around a corner, keeping about seven feet behind him, just so he'd know she was there.
"Out with it."
"Moll Robbins."
"Print or broadcast."
"_Running Dog_ magazine."
"_Running Dog_," he said.
"Yes."
"You people still in business?"
"Barely."
"Capitalist lackeys and running dogs."
"Someone remembers," she said.
He pushed open a large door, looked inside, looked back at Moll, cocked his head, paused and shrugged, saying: "What the hell, come on in."
It was an enormous ornate men's room. No one else in sight. Spotless tile, gleaming fixtures. Faint aroma of balsam fir and lime. Percival stooped over a wash basin.
"I have to get this makeup off."
"I saw it," she said.
"What, the show?"
She waited for him to raise up a bit so he could hear above the gushing water.
"That man seemed confused."
"Who, the moderator?"
She waited for his head to emerge again.
"Yes."
"He's always confused. The fella's all image. He can't talk about something like PAC/ORD. He's a bunch of little electronic dots, that's all he is. The fella's so folksy he ought to do his news show in a living room set, wearing slippers and smoking a pipe, in front of a crackling fire."
Moll took a towel from a shelf and put it in his outstretched hand.
"They ought to hire a kindly old lady to bring him disaster bulletins on a tray with his raisin cookies and hot chocolate."
"See, we thought at _Running Dog_ we'd do something different."
"How different, I'd like to know."
As they spoke Moll had a distant sense of Memorable Event Taking Place, and could hear herself describing it to friends-"_So we're in this U.S. Senate men's room and he's got his head down inside a Florentine marble wash basin and i'm checking out the urinals to see if they have state emblems on them, like Delaware pisses here, and this one's Kansas_"- A toilet flushed down at the end of a long row of stalls.
The stall door opened and an elderly black man came out, fastening his trousers. Moll watched him approach.
"How are you today, Senator?"
"About as well as can be expected, Tyrell, under the circumstances."
"I know the feeling," Tyrell said.
He took a brush out of his white jacket and moved it through the air behind Percival's shoulders and midback, eyeing Moll for the first time, at least openly. It was a look, combined with a haughty shrug, that said, _I don't know what you're doing here but this is the wrong place to be doing it_.
In the corridor the Senator walked at a more reasonable pace.
"We'd like to take a relaxed approach," she said.
"My so-called human side."
"It's fairly common knowledge you spend much of your free time at your Georgetown house. That might be the place to talk."
"I have aides who screen people like you. Why weren't you screened?"
"Will you do it, Senator?"
"_Running Dog_-Jesus, I don't know."
"Our problems are strictly financial. We don't get many complaints about content or format."
"You run nudes?"
"Occasionally."
"Male and female?"
"Female."
"Pubic hair?"
"Airbrush."
They seemed to be coming to a door that led to the street.
"Nice to know the old values aren't dead," he said.
They stood blinking in the sunlight.
"I don't want to talk about the closed-door hearings."
"Truthfully, I'm not the least interested. I want to discuss your other activities, Senator. Your reading habits, your family, your thoughts on contemporary life. Your hobbies, your pastimes, your diversions."
She took a cab to the airport, and about a minute before the plane taxied out to the tarmac to be cleared for takeoff, Glen Selvy walked up the aisle toward her seat, spotting her and nodding. About fifteen minutes into the flight he returned, told her there was an empty row of seats toward the rear of the plane and asked her to join him.
She gave him her limpest category of response, a visual autopsy, but eventually followed.
"Travel to Washington often?"
"Film gala at the Kennedy Center. I do some reviewing. In New York to see Lightborne?"
"I may get around to seeing Lightborne, yes."
"Nice old turkey," she said.
She dozed the last ten minutes of the flight. When the plane touched down she was startled, coming awake abruptly, her hand reaching out to grasp Selvy's on the arm rest. He looked at her without expression, making her feel he'd been observing her precisely that way all the while she was asleep, and she found she liked that.
They shared a cab and sat in stalled traffic for a long time, finally reaching midtown just as daylight was fading. Moll suggested they find a jazz club she used to go to years earlier, somewhere in the stunned landscape of East Third Street. It turned out to be long gone but they found a dive around the corner and went in for a drink.
Selvy took off his tie and jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He began drinking shots of Jim Beam. First he sipped a fraction of an ounce off the top, downing the rest athletically in one swallow. The grimace and flush of pleasure hardearned. Moll started out with scotch and water. Feeling guilty about the water, she switched to rocks.
They talked a while about various things they'd drunk in different places they'd visited around the world. A man sitting nearby, with a bandage around his head, said he was too drunk to go home by himself. This meant they would have to take him home. It was the code of Frankie's Tropical Bar, he said. The man was Dominican. He said he didn't care whether they took him to his home or their home, as long as they took him home. He said he knew who killed Trujillo.
"I believe in codes," Selvy said.
They went out to find a cab. The man with the bandage around his head walked right into a fat woman. She hit him in the mouth. He looked around for something, a weapon. He saw a bicycle and picked it up. In the dark he couldn't tell the bicycle was chained to a fence. He started toward the woman, intending to ram her with the bicycle or to throw it at her. He was jerked back toward the fence and fell on top of the bike, catching his hand in the spokes.
Moll took Selvy by the arm and led him along a line of cars waiting for the light to change. At the end of the line they found a taxi and got in. They headed uptown and then west. Selvy dropped her in front of her building and then went on-somewhere.
Early the next morning he turned up at her door. He strode in, a noncommittal look on his face, and scanned the premises.
"Welcome to Falconhurst," she said.
Brown walls. Espresso machine. Silverplated telephone. Acrylic stepladder. Black banquette. Spherical TV. White plastic saxophone.
"The walls are brown."
"I considered mulatto."