“Who am I talking to? Mr. Health Nut? Mind your own business.”
“A little honest commentary, a small morsel of advice. Abuse is my lot.”
“Your feet would hurt too if you ever walked more than twenty feet a day.”
Kaiser lit another cigarette. “Did it work out?”
“Yes.”
“That surprises me. But then, you are always a surprise, Rita.”
“Why? Didn’t you think I’d get the guy?”
“No. It was a wild-goose chase to start with.” He paused thoughtfully and removed his glasses, squinted, rubbed his brow. He yawned then, a noisy, wide yawn, and shoved the glasses back on the bridge of his red, drink-distended nose. “The odds, little Rita, were against you. But you’re very good, I think I’ve told you that once or twice—”
“Yeah. It beats giving me a raise—”
“You make enough, you live, you eat and sleep, you buy bad shoes, what more does a woman want? But you’re hungry, Rita, and I won’t be able to keep you much longer—”
“I like it here.”
“Seymour Hersh liked Pacific Press Syndicate but that didn’t stop him from going to the New York Times. I don’t think that’s for you, though, Rita, you’re not the type, it turned out Sy isn’t the type either. But there’s no doubt that you’re going, on and up, to bigger and better things. Perhaps the New York Daily News, that would be it, I think.”
“That’s not it,” she said, suddenly annoyed. She stopped rubbing her foot. “Let’s cut the shit anyway.”
“Little Rita,” Kaiser said with fondness rumbling in his voice. “As you put it. Let’s cut the shit. Now, how did you get to our reverend gentleman?”
She smiled. Kaiser was her audience, her father-confessor, her only colleague trustworthy enough to confide in. Kaiser would understand; Kaiser would appreciate. The trouble with being an investigative reporter rather than a regular newsman was that, to be any good at the game, you had to keep your mouth shut. So Kaiser had explained long ago as he began her course of instruction in the Washington game. You had to get used to being lonely, he said, out of the mainstream of the rat-pack journalism that is the most fun of all — the press conferences, the gangbangs in the halls of Congress, the bragging and swearing in the bars after the story was delivered. No, Kaiser said as he explained Rita’s game, you are entering a cloistered order; you have to keep secrets growing until their time; you labor in a hidden garden and work in the darkness, hoping for a day when the work will all pay off.
Kaiser was her escape valve, she knew. Kaiser replaced all the fun of the other reporting life.
“The CIA had him buttoned up in room twenty-one forty-three at the Watergate Hotel. Appropriate, huh?”
“A very nice hotel.”
“How would you know?”
“I think I was there when it opened. On a freebie, of course. Yes. And then later, when our greatest President and greatest crook had his little problem. But, go ahead.”
“They had to let him out sometime, so I waited. He couldn’t stand being in the room all the time. It was just a matter of waiting. He took a walk.”
“With company, of course.”
“Of course. There were two of them. You know the kind: They have little buttons in their ears, they hear voices all the time.”
Kaiser smiled. “Our modern-day Joans.” He rubbed his ink-stained hands together. “And little Rita got their photographs. ‘Take yer pitcher, mistah?’ ”
“Sure I did. I’m getting better with a camera all the time. When I started here, I didn’t know I was going to have to be all things to all men.”
“Not all men. Me, Rita, just me. A well-rounded girl. You’re certain to attract a good man.”
“You know the sidewalk behind the hotel that leads down past those bushes? That little woodsy setting? That’s where I got them.” She pulled a yellow cylinder out of her pocket and put it on the desk.
“Delightful, delightful.” Kaiser’s voice soothed like fine sandpaper on soft wood. The room was blue with cigarette smoke; he lit another unfiltered Camel.
“Leo Tunney,” she said. “He looks like a ghost.”
“One picture is worth… ah, worth something I would guess at the moment. Not day after tomorrow but right now.”
“And him. I got him, too.”
Kaiser blew the smoke out of his lungs with a violent cough. When he had finished hacking, he managed a smile.
“Surprise you?” Rita asked.
“You are a constant surprise.”
“I walked right up to him.”
“Marvelous. Dangerous and nervy, you are a dangerous woman, Rita. Just when one thinks, when one says, ‘Oh my goodness, this is an attractive little piece of cake, doesn’t she have nice legs, I like her face, a really pretty face, deep with some intelligence to it, like a cat’s face,’ just then you think, well, I’d guess she wasn’t half dumb after all, you surprise. Constantly. Insistently. Did you get him in the garden behind the hotel?”
“No. I didn’t want the Button Ears to jump me with no one around. I wanted someplace halfway public where they couldn’t get away with too much muscle.”
“And the camera? What did you do with the camera?”
“I dropped it in the bushes before I made my duck. I took out the film. I didn’t pick it up because I was afraid they might get me if I stopped for it. I had to get out of there.”
“From the beginning, Rita.”
“They came back into the hotel, from the back entrance. I walked up to him. I had the Sony on but it took Button Ears a moment to figure out what was going on, they weren’t expecting me. I asked him the only thing I could think of.”
“And that was?”
“Where had he been for twenty-one years?”
“Marvelous. Neil Armstrong, who labored long and hard to find the right words to say as he stepped on our beloved, American moon, could not have done better. The direct approach. It never fails.”
“It fails all the time but this time I guess I threw them off just enough. The whole thing happened so fast I wasn’t even sure he had heard me. He looked at me — Father Tunney, I mean — well, Kaiser, I could write a sidebar on just that, on the look on that man’s face.”
“Was there lust in his heart?”
“Cut the shit,” Rita said.
“Your favorite expression, it suits you. As you say. Go on.”
“What a beautiful face, Kaiser. He looked like a baby, you know what I mean? Just like a baby, a new baby, all open—”
“He drooled?” Kaiser asked, grinning viciously.
“You’d laugh at a funeral.”
“Funerals are laughing matters, Rita. I delight in the misfortune of others; I’m paid to do so. Please, Rita, I’m just trying to bring you down gently. You’re overwrought.”
“He said, ‘I was lost. In the jungle.’ Just like that, I got it on the tape. I said, ‘You didn’t know how to get out?’ He just stared for a moment, I could see the Button Ears were starting to make a move, he said, ‘I was there, inside. I saw the wars, all of them. All the horror.’ ”
“Marvelous,” rumbled Kaiser. “That’s really very good.” He nodded his head, grinning, the cigarette smoldering in one sausage fist.
“And then one of the Button Ears made a grab and pushed me. He tried to grab the Sony. I smacked him.”
“Good girl.”
“The second one hit me. Here.” She touched her blouse, indicating her left breast. She had examined herself afterward, in a gas station washroom. She had a bruise where she had been struck.
“And how did you get away?”
“The priest. He said, well, he told them to stop it, that he hadn’t come back for this. Something like that. He put out his hand to stop the second one — the sadistic sonofabitch who hit me here, here in the chest — I guess he got thrown off balance—”