— You look terrible, she says, and touches his face.
— I don’t feel great.
— What’s this all about?
He loves the British abruptness of her Jamaican accent, the rhythm softened by the tropics. And the aroma of her ebony body as he steps forward and hugs her. Her muscles are tense. She knows. He figures she must have known from the tone of his voice when he called from the Chinese restaurant.
— I have to leave right away, he says. For Miami, then maybe another stop.
— The Times website says the grand jury reports in the morning.
— My lawyer will handle that.
She stares at him.
— You’re going on the lam, aren’t you? she says, chuckling in a dry way. It better be to Saturn, Myles. ’Cause they’ll find you.
— The lawyers can get a delay. We’re preparing new evidence. That’s what they say.
He inhales, then breathes out slowly, thinking: The lies are coming very easily now, aren’t they? I never even told the lawyers. And Sandra doesn’t believe a word.
Sandra turns her back and pads on bare feet to the narrow oaken table that serves as a bar. Compton knows every inch of this small apartment, which is hers and hers alone. Sandra isn’t rich, but she isn’t poor either. She takes down a big salary, plus bonuses, at that advertising agency in the Lipstick Building on Third Avenue. She was a vice president there for four years before he ever met her. She owns this apartment too, and pays the mortgage and the maintenance herself. A year ago, when he offered to come up with the maintenance for her, and maybe pay off the mortgage, her eyes went cold, with a hint of insulted anger, and she said, in an icy way: “No, thanks.”
Her anger that night made him feel like an asshole, but filled him with respect for her. Now Compton sits down and she brings him a scotch and soda. He holds it, then ventures a sip. That’s all, he thinks. A sip. No more.
— How was the party? she says.
— Fine, fine, he says. You were right. Cynthia Harding is a fine woman.
— You didn’t mention me, I hope.
— My lips were sealed.
He glances at the bedroom where, so many times, she has taken him out of himself. The door is open. The bedding is rumpled. His right leg begins drumming hard, until he wills it into stillness. She surely must have been asleep when he called from that pay phone in the restaurant. He wants to take her to the bed, to make love one final time. And thinks, no: It’s time to go.
— I won’t see you again, will I? she says, still standing, looking down on him.
He slides the glass under the chair, then stands. And embraces her again.
— Of course you will.
And kisses her neck. His hands grip her small breasts. He presses against her. Feels himself getting hard.
— You’d better go, she whispers.
When he returns to the wet street, the driver is standing in a doorway facing the car, smoking in the cold. On the sidewalk, some loose pages of the Daily News are soggy with rain. Compton sees a woman across the avenue, wearing a thick down coat and a fur hat, walking a small dog to a fire hydrant. The dog lifts its leg. There are many parked cars, but no passengers are visible in their shadowy interiors. The driver stomps his cigarette twice and opens the door. Compton slides in. The engine starts, and they move up Madison Avenue, the windshield wipers moving slowly. He leans back, feeling empty. The tale is almost over, he thinks, the final act in the long sad story of big money. Or my own life in the Big Casino. Hedging all bets. Bundling shit and proclaiming it platinum. Bringing in all sorts of private players and handing them the dice. I never should have handed them to the Bulgarian. He placed his bets. And lost. Big.
The lawyer said, Never ever do business with a Bulgarian.
— Why not?
— Google “Bulgaria,” the lawyer said. More crimes per capita than any nation on the planet, Myles. They got guys there make the old Mob look like Quakers!
But he went to see the Bulgarian anyway, in a plush two-room suite at the Stanhope, across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum. Expected a thick-necked muscle guy, with shaved head, oozing menace. Instead found a sparrowy little man with rimless glasses, squinting at the paperwork like someone from the IRS. About sixty years old. Asking a few questions in accented English. And the return is what? The main bank is where? Myles heard a toilet flush beyond the door to the second room, but no goons appeared. The Bulgarian’s face was all lines. Finally, he looked up from the papers, removed the glasses. He smiled in a thin way, said “Deal.”
The Bulgarian’s eyes were a pale blue, like hotel mouthwash. The eyes were not smiling. Myles knows now that he should have fled. Instead, he shook the Bulgarian’s hand. “Deal.”
In the limousine now, Myles thinks: Fuck it.
I’m through with it all.
Except I’ve got enough dough to last me the rest of my life.
At 81st Street, across from the Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor, Compton sees a small shadowy man hurrying along in a space between parked cars, heading downtown, as if being pursued. He’s in a wheelchair. Covered with a poncho. In the streetlight, his face is chalk white. The light changes. The limousine moves north. The rain falls harder, mixed with grainy pebbles of ice. The driver shifts to the faster swish-swish, swish-swish of the windshield wipers.
1:05 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. North 8th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Wheeler hunches over the keyboard, a small gnarled man in a denim shirt and pale blue briefs, black socks, no shoes or slippers. His screen is framed with small Post-its that seem like leaves of a designer’s tree. The computer faces a wall covered with larger scraps of paper, a collage of more Post-its, invitations, index cards covered with scrawled notes, jammed into rain-damp plaster with pushpins or tacked up with Scotch tape. The only thing on the wall that’s not paper is the clock. Wheeler glances at it. Another hour. Hickory dickory cock…
Wheeler is alone in this one-bedroom in Williamsburg. He can afford larger but he loves the sense of a cell in a monastery. The radiator is knocking, dwarfed by gray metal file cabinets, disorderly shelves of books on movies and music and theater, hundreds of them, and CDs and DVDs and some old LPs: they are Wheeler’s true monastic walls. He has two land lines, and his cell phone lies open. So do two laptops. Waiting for bulletins. From the competition… Gawker. Jossip. Jim Romenesko… None of them have what I have… Wheeler’s thick glasses are clamped on the bridge of his nose. Time to work. He lays out Post-its and index cards beside one computer. He types in the name of the column and the website: CelineWire.com. And the date.
He is always tense when he begins the column. But he is relieved that he no longer has to write about Lindsay Lohan Paris Hilton Britney Spears. Well, maybe Lindsay if she kills herself, becoming another celebrity martyr. All three as dead as hip-hop… Politics the thing now, and Media, full of the new Names, waiting for verbs…
But tonight, folks…
Tonight Freddie Wheeler is ecstatically happy. Tonight the subject is Briscoe… The old hack… Shitcanned me, when?… Two years ago now?… I got more hits on the site yesterday than he sold papers… Told me that night he needed the space, and the money, for news, like I don’t write news… Said the old three-dot stuff is long over, deader than Walter Winchell… Take a look at me now, Briscoe… Take a look at the website tomorrow… Like most people will… And you’ll be the lead item… I promise… Take a fucking look.