“The priest?”
“The priest, yes, he got thrown off balance, he fell down, down on one knee, and a crowd started to gather. The other Button Ear pulled back, he leaned down to help the old man up — you should have seen him, Kaiser, this frail old man—”
“I will see him, Rita, in your words, in your photographs.”
“I made my duck then. I wasn’t going to get any more by hanging around and for all I knew, they’d have me arrested. But I got out, I told you I had to leave the camera—”
“You must retrieve it. I’ll retrieve it—”
“—so here I am. I don’t know how long this is good for, but it’s all mine, Kaiser.”
“Are you sure? Excellent, excellent. No one around when this transpired?”
“Mine, I said. No one. I think the Washington Post had sent someone over to the Watergate earlier, I don’t know if they knew anything or if they were just checking out all the places, but he didn’t get anything. Everyone is still camped out at Agency headquarters in Langley.”
“And now the real work begins,” Kaiser said. “And the problem.”
“What problem?”
“What do we do with it?”
“What do you mean? We write it.”
“It’s nine minutes to midnight, Rita. This is hardly the moment to start selling this to the papers.”
“Hold it.”
“Hold nothing, Rita. The first rule of successful and profitable journalism: Hold nothing. If you have the story today, use it today. If you wait until tomorrow, someone else will inevitably have the same story.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“It depends, ludicrously enough, on your abilities as a photographer. The photographs must turn out.”
“Television? Are you going to give this to television?”
“Bucks, Rita. Big television-sized bucks.”
“But what about the story? I still have a story to write—”
“Ah, pride of authorship, the complete reporter. Yes. There’ll be a story but that comes in the afternoon. You’ll be famous, Rita, a celebrity of the moment.”
“Fuck famous,” she said. Her face had flushed in that moment and her green eyes gleamed. She realized she was angry and that she was tired and it might end up in tears. But she wouldn’t allow that to happen. She had light red hair — almost too light to be called auburn — but it seemed to become more red as she felt the anger rising in her. At times, her fine-featured face looked delicate, but now it looked tough and determined.
“Rita,” Kaiser warned. He waved his cigarette in front of her. “This is a business, Rita. I can call Stu at home, Stu with NBC, he’ll be getting up anyway for the Today show in a couple of hours, he can get the ball rolling, we’ll receive full credit and we’ll still have plenty left over to sell to the newspapers in the morning. But you know and I know that I can’t sell to the papers right now.”
“Then hold it, I told you—”
Kaiser lit another cigarette while the first still smoldered in a tiny ashtray on the desk. “What makes you think Father Tunney is still in the Watergate Hotel at this moment? Where do you suppose they will take him tonight, now that you’ve spotted him?”
“I don’t know.”
Kaiser closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them, he did not see Rita. “Three programs,” he said aloud, but to himself. “Three beautiful networks. What can I squeeze them for? My God, Rita, get to the closet and get those pictures developed.” His fist banged the desk. “Did they follow you? Do they lurk without?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Anything is possible at the Creep Intelligence Agency. Oh, that those photographs turned out. Please God, let Rita’s pictures turn out and I promise I won’t play with myself on the Rock Creek bus anymore.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Look, honey,” Kaiser said. “There’s maybe ten grand in this thing. We can hustle television, hustle the syndicates. Tomorrow the world — the Omaha World and the Chicago Tribune and the New York Post or the News and… Rita, I told you I would make you a famous reporter and so you shall be. And then you’ll leave me, leave the nest, I can feel it in my sad old bones, you’ll thank me and leave poor old Kaiser all alone, going away to Knight-Ridder or—”
“Anything to stop this.” She smiled. “I’ll do the pictures. Is there any coffee?”
“If you have a clean cup, we have dirty coffee. I made it an hour ago.”
“I’m glad you’re getting exercise.”
He reached for the phone and dialed the area code of Long Island.
Rita went to the Mr. Coffee machine on top of a filing cabinet, and opened the top drawer and removed her cup, a child’s milk mug that said “Rita.” It was the first thing she had purchased the first day on the job. The glass coffeepot had long since been broken and replaced, for reasons of obscure economy, with an aluminum saucepan. She poured the dark liquid in her cup and stirred in a little nondairy creamer. The mixture tasted as bad as it looked; flecks of powder floated on the surface of the coffee.
Rita Macklin stared at the cup as she wrote the story in her head. She saw the words coming together, first in the lead, then in the second paragraph. She was never afraid of writing; she never had a “block”; the words were always there, always waiting for her, if she had done the work. It was like planting a garden, watering the black soil, waiting for the first burst of green shoots pushing through the clods of earth.
She went to the closet they used to develop film in emergencies.
She was so lost in her own thoughts — in recording her impressions of the past two days, turning the random flashes of light into orderly rows of words — that she did not even listen as Kaiser began to pitch the sleepy man from NBC.
4
The tour operators in Rome were on strike again. There had been a bombing the afternoon before in Milan, at the Galleria near the great cathedral, and two people had been killed. The bombing was blamed on the Fascists this time and they claimed credit for it; so the unions, which were mostly Communist, chose to protest the act of terror with a strike. The trains of the national railway would not run this morning but service would resume in most places by midafternoon; the truck drivers would strike in the afternoon but work in the morning; and the tour bus operators decided to strike all day. In this way, the city and the country were merely inconvenienced; it was the traditional Italian labor action.
So the great square in front of St. Peter’s Church was relatively empty on this sunny, warm October afternoon. The independent city-state of the Roman Catholic Church was located on Vatican Hill in Rome and though it was close to the center of the ancient city — just across the lazy Tiber, a brisk walk down from the turrets of Castel Sant’Angelo — most tourists felt intimidated by the enclave and claimed they were unable to visit the Vatican unless they were escorted there by tour bus.
All of which suited the two priests who walked together in the colonnade encompassing the square. They spoke together as they walked, their heads low, their arms behind their backs.
Franco Cardinal Ludovico was the older man but it would have been difficult to tell that by his bearing and appearance. Both wore plain black cassocks in the manner of Italian priests because Ludovico eschewed the signs of rank — the crimson robes, for instance — that would have differentiated them. Ludovico was fifty-six years old but his face was unlined, his hair thick and black, and his build was still as slender as it had been when he first became a priest thirty-five years before, in the northern port city of Genoa.