58
I’ve reconsidered your offer,” Rick said.
The sun was bright in Pappas’s office, glinting off the objects on his desk, the brass shade of his desk lamp, the buttery silver of the picture frames. In the bright light, Pappas gave off one single impression: red. His face was permanently flushed, the skin enraged with spider webs of capillaries.
“Reconsidered my offer?” He said it with amusement, as if Rick had told him he was taking up mime: with a heavy underlining of irony, in scare quotes.
“My father was able to talk at the end, and he told me an interesting story. And now that he’s gone I can safely write an article about it.”
Pappas looked at him for a very long time. Then he grinned broadly. “Okay, Rick, I’ll play. An article about what?”
“About how the Cabrera family was killed eighteen years ago.”
“The who?”
“The Cabrera family.”
He shrugged, shook his head. “And I’m supposed to know these people?”
“They were driving back from Logan Airport through the Ted Williams Tunnel in the middle of the night when something crashed down on their car. An eighty-pound light fixture, heavy enough to smash their windshield and temporarily blind them. And they were killed instantly.”
“That’s a sad story, Rick. But it’s a sad story that happened twenty years ago. You need a hook. Why do our readers care about it today?”
“I’m thinking it’ll be an interesting way to show how crisis management works. Because this was a crisis you ‘managed’ brilliantly. You managed it right into oblivion. You had to. Because if that story ever got out, your client, Donegall Construction, would have been destroyed. There would have been an enormous lawsuit. Criminal charges, too. And no more work for the city of Boston. A few million dollars was nothing to a construction company that could easily have faced a hundred million bucks in legal costs and maybe prison time for a couple of the players.”
Pappas laughed, long and loudly. “Spectacular. You have a talent for fiction, did anyone ever tell you that? Have you ever considered a career as a novelist, now that your career as a journalist is, sadly, over? Your father started talking to you, Rick? He couldn’t speak two goddamned words, the poor guy.”
He must have a source inside the nursing home, Rick thought. One of the nurses, at least, was on his payroll. “But not just my dad. There’s also a very brave woman, a community activist who’s agreed to speak on the record for the first time.”
“Rick, let me tell you a story. A Buddhist parable, actually.”
Rick smiled back. Another one of Pappas’s stories.
“Two traveling monks are about to cross a river. There’s a young woman on the bank who says, ‘Please, brother monks, can you carry me across? The river is too deep.’ The young monk turns away. See, they’re not allowed to touch a woman. But the older monk hoists her up on his shoulder and brings her over. The monks keep going, over hills and dales, and the whole time the younger monk is complaining, ‘Why’d you do that? You know we’re forbidden to touch a woman. What you did was a violation of our precepts.’ And on and on, mile after mile. Won’t shut up. Finally the older monk looks at him and says, ‘I left that woman at the riverbank. Seems to me you’re still carrying her?’”
Pappas’s expression was almost kindly. “My point is, Rick, you need to let this go. For your own sake. Leave it at the riverbank, and get on with your life. I’m telling you this because your father was a man I respected, and I figure I owe him this much. You want to martyr yourself because of what you imagine might have possibly happened two decades ago? Who are you really helping at this point? Whose life are you saving? What good do you think could possibly result from this?”
“It’s an important story,” Rick said blandly.
Pappas abandoned all benevolent pretense. “You’re not writing an article, Rick. I know you. You’re still the weasel who’ll sell out to the higher bidder. What are you angling for, Rick, a bigger payoff? You want another million so you can buy fancy duds and a fancy watch and you can impress another vacuous fashion model? And then why stop there? Why not keep coming back to the well, asking for more and more, right? Well, as I told you at your father’s funeral, this was a one-time-only offer.”
“And I’m turning it down. I’m going to publish this piece with or without your cooperation. But I’d rather have your side of it. I’ve already established that Donegall was a client of yours.”
“Donegall Construction filed for bankruptcy two decades ago!”
“Accounting trickery. They’re more active than ever.” This last part, he knew, was just speculation. That was the part he needed Pappas to reveal, what Donegall Construction had become. “We know you were in contact with TheBoston Globe after the accident. If there’s anything about my account that’s inaccurate, I’d like to hear it now. This is your chance.”
For a moment Pappas looked as if he was seriously considering the proposition.
Then he spoke, shaking his head sorrowfully. “I gave you the golden ticket, my friend. I gave you my personal guarantee that all will be good. And now you come with this? You sit there in front of me, beat up and bloodied and bruised and hobbling like an old lady, and you tell me you want back in the game?”
“There’s no game,” Rick said. “I’m giving you an opportunity to go on the record. You can confirm or deny. What you tell me can affect what I write.”
Pappas’s smile was wide and bright. “This is my big chance, huh? No, actually, this is all history, and as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. And you, sir, are no winner. If the Confederate army had won the Battle of Gettysburg, you think we’d be celebrating Lincoln’s birthday? Every event can be made to mean a dozen different things. But the ultimate reality is determined by the victor. Call it the reality principle. Your father-he had a healthy goddamned sense of reality. Shame you never learned anything from him.”
Rick closed his notebook. “Thanks for your time.” He got to his feet and went to the door.
“You know what your trouble is?” Pappas called out. “You never learned anything from your dad.”
“Yeah?” Rick said at the doorway. “Maybe I learned too much.”
59
How’d it go?” asked Andrea. She was leaning back in an armchair in Rick’s suite at the DoubleTree. She wore black jeans and a crisp white shirt and a pair of gray TOMS. She had no makeup on. Her hair was up, held back with a band. Her attitude made it clear that this was a business meeting at Rick’s hotel, nothing more than that. But the way she was sitting in the chair was more casual than businesslike.
“About how I expected. He came back at me with threats and ridicule.”
“How did you react?”
“He probably thought he scared me off. He’s good at that. That’s his thing.”
“That’s fine. Let him think what he wants to think.”
He looked at his watch. “Probably a good time to get back there.”
“It’s been over an hour, right?”
He nodded and headed back out the door.
At the office tower where the Pappas Group was located, front-desk security wouldn’t let Rick back into the elevator banks. They insisted on calling up to get verbal approval. Rick got on the phone.
“Alex Pappas, please. It’s Rick Hoffman.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Pappas is out of the office.”
“That’s all right. I think I left something in his office. I’m right downstairs.”
Three minutes later he was standing in the reception area of the Pappas Group. A woman in her fifties, thick at the waist, with coppery hair, came out and introduced herself as Pappas’s administrative assistant, Barbara. He walked with her back to Pappas’s office. “He just left for a meeting out of the office,” Barbara said.