The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  Solange was looking very calm and confident, Reb looking around at everyone with suspicion, and blinking rapidly, just one of the tics he’d developed in his years as a war correspondent. His voice was still used on reports, but rarely did he do on-cam stand-ups anymore because the eye tics were too distracting. He’d been chased out of Iraq because Saddam Hussein thought he was sending Morse code messages with his eyes to an unknown traitor within the palace. My Morse was a little rusty, but I was pretty sure the only message Reb was sending was: I’m insane.

  That’s not a joke. Reb had had a few legendary crack-ups over the years. After he “escaped” from his kidnappers in Beirut, he took to extolling and demonstrating in public the virtues of drinking one’s own waste water. It was one thing to do that in front of a bunch of blasé journalists on a bus in Haiti. It was quite another to do that at the Emmy Awards dinner.

  Jack and his suits shook hands with Solange and Reb. In Jack’s view, Solange smiled at me graciously. Then she turned out of his sight, so only I could see her, and gave me a different look—haughty, imperial. I guessed she was trying to provoke a bad reaction in me that Jack would see. Solange had to be the Queen, all the time. Which was fine with me. Let her be the damned Queen. I was satisfied to be the swearingest princess in all of Christendom. But ever since I became Jack’s pet, replacing her, she had unilaterally decided we were at war.

  Instead of reacting badly, I took the High Road and smiled graciously back at her.

  “Robin, are you okay?” Solange asked with sudden and completely fake concern. “You look really tired. I know you’ve been working really, really hard. Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed now. A lot of us are worried about you.”

  She smiled beneficently while Reb kept glancing silently around the room. Jack was watching Solange and me with interest.

  This was her way of saying I looked bad, and hinting to Jack Jackson that I wasn’t up to the job he had entrusted to me.

  “Have we been working you too hard?” Jack asked me.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m fine, Solange, couldn’t be better.”

  “That’s not what I hear. You know my door is always open if you just need to talk, maybe get a little management advice, a referral to a doctor,” Solange said.

  “Well, I’d love to talk to you sometime,” I said, aping her fake niceness. Despite my efforts to Take the High Road, I couldn’t help adding, “By the way, I spoke to Susan Brave last week. The baby is sleeping through the night, the new house is great, she and Jack are very happy.”

  Susan Brave had been Solange’s doormat … er, producer for many years, until one day, thanks to therapy, Prozac, and suddenly finding some self-esteem, she bolted, leaving Solange for a network job in California, where she fell in love and got married to a fun guy. When Susan resigned, Solange had warned her of the disasters that would befall her if she left Solange and ANN. Few things vexed Solange as much as hearing how happy someone else was, especially Susan. Susan had been the fuckup who made everyone else feel relatively happy and well-adjusted, and it was momentarily discomfiting, having to adjust one’s own self-image in relation to her new one. That’s human nature, I guess, but Solange just couldn’t get over it.

  “Do you really think she’s happy?” Solange asked. “I hear she’s in tremendous denial. I’ve been deeply concerned about her, but haven’t had a chance to call her.”

  Speaking of denial. Susan didn’t take or return Solange’s semiregular calls.

  “No, they are really happy,” I said. “Nice, isn’t it? Gives you faith in love and all that”

  Solange’s usual tactic now would be to mention how happy my ex-husband was with his amazing second wife and their baby, but—ha!—she was shooting blanks because I was so over my ex-husband’s new family, much to my own surprise.

  Instead she said, “It certainly gives me faith. Oh, you know, I almost forgot to ask you, who is the man in the hat you ran into?”

  At that point, Jack said, “Lois!” and wandered off to talk to some conference organizer.

  “Why? Have you seen him?” I asked.

  Solange just smiled and did not answer.

  My beeper went off. It was a message from Jason. “Your place, eight-thirtyish,” it said.

  While I was checking it, Solange and Reb turned and left, without answering my question, to kiss some advertiser asses.

  How did she know about the man in the hat? Had she or Reb stumbled upon him through their own sub-rosa investigations? If so, that might mean the dead Frenchman and the missing man who gave me the hat were connected.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lots of theories went through my head as I dressed for my date with Gus, before I remembered that Solange was friendly with Benny Winter, who had supplied her with many big-name guests for her shows over the years. Maybe he told her about the man in the hat. That would also explain why he was so well researched on my career.

  Solange was annoying and I resolved to find some High Road way to peacefully coexist with her. Wasn’t like I didn’t admire her. She and a handful of other women had kicked down the doors for women in broadcasting, and they’d had to be tough bitches to do it, and you had to give them credit blah blah blah. And who was I to criticize her? She was a Power Woman who had broken bread with Power Women all over the planet, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, Hillary, and Janet Reno to name a few.

  Checking myself in the mirror, I had to ask myself: Would a Power Woman like Janet Reno, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Golda Meir, or even Solange Stevenson let a man she really didn’t know that well feel her up in a deserted corner of the primitive peoples gallery in the Museum of Natural History? Or pretend to be a newlywed in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel and let a stranger buy her champagne before they went up to his room? Or put on a white plastic micromini naughty nurse dress, seamed hose, and stilettos, and go out to a cheap motel in New Jersey to watch porn movies with an actor and hump like monkeys? For example.

  The risk made it all the better. For some time, I’d been keeping a very low profile, and it would blow me out of the water if the tabloids found out about some of the stuff Gus and I were doing in semipublic places. The News-Journal in particular would have a field day, since it was owned by Jack Jackson’s archrival, Canadian-British-American media magnate Lord Otterrill. They would slam me, a capriciously promoted ANN exec, to get at him.

  But shit, I’m a red-blooded American woman and the moon was just about full in the sky, which turns me into a she-wolf with her nose in the wind, trying to pick up the scent of a like-minded male. I can’t get pregnant because of my screwy fallopians, but my ovaries still go through the motions and some part of my brain still sends out a powerful Seek Sperm message during the full moon. In this state, the littlest thing can rile me, a thunderstorm, a smoldering glance from a blue-eyed, one-armed man on a bus, men discussing weaponry, the word “percussion.” This was especially true once I turned thirty-five, and nature started to put me through my horny teenage-boy phase. It was bad enough going through it as a mature woman. I couldn’t imagine how immature teenage boys handled it, except of course by handling it. Bubba, I guessed, got a lot of shucking.

  At 8:40, Jason still hadn’t showed and I beeped him again and left a message that I was going out, to try me the next day.

  When I got off the elevator, I saw Mrs. Ramirez going out with Señor, and I waited a couple of minutes until she was gone. God only knew what she’d say if she saw me dressed like a nurse in a soft porn movie. On the stoop, I looked both ways for her. Her back was to me, and she was heading toward Avenue B, so I headed east toward C to get a cab. It’s not the best street to grab a cab—gentrification hadn’t firmly taken hold on C as it had on Avenues A and B.

  C was quiet. No cars, few people. A piece of blown paper skipped down the middle of the street. The steady traffic on Fourteenth Street, four blocks away, sounded like the rush of a distant river. I walked toward Fourteenth Street, a sure bet for a cab, and heard a low whistling
behind me. What the hell was that tune? It was starting to grate on me before I remembered—“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from Song of the South. I turned back and saw a lone white man walking behind me, whistling.

  The whistling man was staring at me intently. It creeped me out, and I wished I had some weaponry on me, something more than my pepper spray. Foolishly, I had been feeling more confident lately and didn’t feel the need to be constantly armed anymore. Also, my life was much more hectic, I just didn’t feel like schlepping weaponry around all the time. Nor did I have my cell phone.

  Approaching me were two other men, men in suits, and I felt safer all of a sudden.

  When I looked again the whistling white man was crossing the street, not looking at me. Man, was I paranoid, I thought, just before someone grabbed me and something smacked down on my head. I was unprepared, had no time to go for my pepper spray. Shielding my face with my purse, I wildly kicked and threw punches—a couple of them connected, sending a stinging pain down my knuckles to my elbow—before I fell into a corner where a redbrick wall met a Dumpster.

  A very large man in a suit loomed over me, followed by a second man, both their faces shadowed. The large man put his boot on my stomach to keep me from getting up. I slumped to the ground, my purse between my face and the cold concrete, which smelled of spoiled food.

  “Don’t make me use the gun,” the large man said. “Where is Atom?”

  “What?” I asked.

  A third man, the whistling man, appeared.

  “Atom! Do you have Atom!” the large man said.

  “You’ve got the wrong person,” I said. “I don’t know what …”

  “Atom!” the man said to me, trying to grab for my purse and knocking it open in the process. I held tight to the purse. A little spray container glinted in the twilight.

  “You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I said. “I’m …”

  One of them smacked me upside the head again. After that dizzying blow on my head, my vision was so fractured that for a moment, before my eyes refocused, I saw a dozen large thugs, arrayed kaleidoscopically, like the opening shot of The Lucille Ball Show. I tried screaming, but I’d bitten my tongue when I got smacked and I choked on the blood in my mouth. All that came out was coughing.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” a woman shouted from down the street.

  In the moment it took the thugs to turn and look, I went for the pepper spray in my purse and sprayed the thug closest to me in the eyes and up his nose.

  “Arrrgh,” he said, or a reasonable facsimile, grabbing his face.

  Using the edge of the Dumpster for support, I raised myself to my knees, and then to my feet, and began to spray another guy.

  “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” the woman shouted.

  “Let’s go,” the whistling man said. They took off in a thunder of boot beats, without my purse, two of them holding their faces. A moment later I heard a car squealing away.

  “Hey, stop!” the woman called.

  A dog yapped. When I looked up, I saw Mrs. Ramirez, with her dog Señor’s leash in one hand and a pearl-handled pistol in the other.

  “Oh, it’s you!” she said, as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

  “Thanks for chasing those men away, Mrs. R.,” I said, dusting myself off.

  “Don’t you thank me, you whore!” she said.

  In the past, whenever she went off like this, the next step would be to bean me with her cane. Now that she had a firearm, I missed the cane, which she no longer seemed to need. That would be typical of my life, if I escaped fistfighting thugs, only to get shot by my elderly neighbor lady.

  “Don’t shoot me, Mrs. R.,” I said, and then took off running, lamely, with a limp from my fall. Mrs. R’s eyes were bad. If she was indeed feeling homicidal, chances were she wouldn’t be able to get off a good shot at a moving target. Mrs. R. hasn’t had a man since around World War Two, doesn’t smoke or drink or have any fun at all beyond judging, misjudging, and slandering her neighbors. Clean living made her mean, but it made her sturdy too. She could really hurt you.

  While running away from Mrs. Ramirez toward my building, I saw the black car carrying the whistling white man and his thugs swing around the far corner and come right at me. Though my lungs hurt, I turned around and ran limping in the opposite direction, back toward Mrs. Ramirez, when a large blue sedan pulled up, cutting off the car with the thugs in it.

  The car screeched to a stop. The passenger side door swung open.

  “Get in,” said the black man in the car. “Jason sent me.”

  Behind me were the thugs. At the other end of the block was my pistol-wielding neighbor. I had to make a snap judgment. I got in the car.

  “I’m Blue Baker,” the man said as he squealed away from the curb.

  The car had bad shocks and was bouncing so much I couldn’t keep the seat belt stable enough to put on.

  “Robin … Hudson,” I said.

  “I know. I was waiting for you on Tenth Street, almost missed you, then I saw you head up Avenue C.”

  “Maybe-we-should-call-the-cops-now,” I said jerkily, between bumps.

  “Can’t do that,” Blue Baker said, pulling another U-ie just before the approach to the FDR, then tearing down a side street.

  “Why-not?”

  “Let’s lose these assholes, and then I’ll fill you in,” he said.

  Though I couldn’t yet wrestle my seat belt together, he was able to manage a car chase while dialing his cell phone with one hand.

  “Number seven. Is this secure? Good. I’m bringing her in. She took a couple of blows to the head, should be checked out,” he shouted into the phone.

  After he hung up, he plugged in an acid jazz CD.

  Blue Baker was a large black man, so tall and broad across the shoulders that he had to hunch down over the steering wheel and turn into himself to fit into the car. Aside from the cell phone, a notepad, a bottle of water, a stack of CDs, and a box on the floor (which bore a decal that said “You get through life your way, I’ll get through my way”), the car was bare, as if Blue Baker had just acquired the vehicle. It was probably stolen, I thought.

  When the car passed under a streetlight, I noticed he had a gun in his lap.

  Suddenly, I remembered that I had condoms, lubricant, a toothbrush, and a small vibrator in my purse, because I’d been expecting to see Gus. How is this going to look if I die here? I thought. Like I died in my drug-dealing lover’s stolen car while escaping from fistfighting thugs. That’s how I think in times of danger, you see. It’s a variation of the old “wear clean underwear in case you’re in a car accident.” Thank God I was wearing clean underwear at least.

  We’d lost our pursuers and Blue slowed down.

  “Hate car chases,” he said.

  “Can-we-talk-please?” I said. My heart was beating so fast it affected my speech almost as much as the bumpy chase had.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m going to be completely straight with you, Robin. Will you be completely straight with me?”

  “Yes. Can-you-explain-why-you-just-put-me-through—”

  “Take a breath. Calm down. I probably saved your life. You okay?”

  “Yes.” I coughed, and Blue gave me the bottle of water. I drank until the taste of blood was gone from my mouth.

  “How’s your vision?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Reflexes? Memory?”

  “I’m fine, I think.”

  “Well, we’ll get you to a doctor. But if you’re sure you’re okay, I’d like to make a couple of quick stops first. Business stuff.”

  “You said Jason sent you. Where is Jason?”

  “I’m taking you to see him.”

  “Can’t you just take me home, please?”

  “You gotta trust me, darlin’,” he said.

  The intermittent streetlights had a strobe effect on his face as we moved west. His smile was so broad and genuine, his eyes so warm and twinkling, and most of his wrinkles pointed u
pward. Against my better judgment, I did trust him.

  “How do you know Jason?” I asked.

  “I’m part of his cell. You might say I help out when I can,” he said.

  “Cell? A cell of what?”

  “It’s known just as the Organization. All the cells have different names, don’t always communicate with each other, but are dedicated to the same purpose, preserving the planet. Jason can give you more details.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Jason said you’d be home at a certain time, and I went and waited for you.”

  Dewey, he told me, had used him for transportation, contacts, and reefer.

  “Dewey was apparently looking into some missing chimps,” I said. “You know anything about that?”

  “A little. He was on the trail of some bonobos, horniest chimps in the world,” Blue said, laughing.

  “Excuse me? Bonobos are the horniest chimps in the world?”

  “That’s what they say. And it’s a female-run ape society. Gotta love ’em. Know what I’m sayin’, Robin?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and smiled back at this crazy guy who had saved my life and then risked it in a wild car chase. Not the first time I’d been in a car chase, so I couldn’t really hold it against him. “Who coordinates it, this Organization?”

  “Central. Only cell leaders talk to Central. Dewey was this cell’s leader. Jason is trying some back alleys to get to Central.”

  “Where is Central?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Does this Organization have a leader?”

  “It’s funded mainly by some eccentric rich guy. I don’t even know who it is. We call him Hank. The idea is, we protect the Organization and ourselves by having a pretty loose structure, working independently as cells.”

  “Oh Jesus. What time is it?” I asked. “Can I make a call on your phone?”

  “Who you gonna call?”

  “I had a date tonight. I have now officially stood him up.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s okay then. Just be careful what you say.”