‘I can see that,’ said Susan slowly. ‘But he’s never mean to me . . .’
‘Of course he’s not – he’s an Aussie, and a pro, and a gentleman. Besides, he doesn’t blame you – he understands ambition. He blames Pope, for fucking him about all these years. But don’t sweat it – it’s a storm in a can of Fosters.’ Zero leered. ‘So forget that. Let’s talk about the important stuff. What do slant girls taste like?’
‘Sushi?’
‘Hello?’
‘Susan, I’ve got Joe Moorsom on the line.’
‘OK, Kathy.’
‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’
‘Susan. It’s Joe.’
‘Joe who? Joe Blow?’ She felt used (T. Pope), bored (D. Weiss) and insecure (B. O’Brien).
‘Joe Moorsom.’
‘Oh. Joe Blowjob.’
There was a sullen silence. Fags couldn’t even take a joke any more. Wasn’t that a perversion of nature? – fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and fags gotta take a joke?
‘Very funny. Still, you won’t be able to make funnies at my expense much longer.’
‘Why? Are you having your face done?’
‘No. But maybe you should.’
‘Oh yeah?’ His working-class, masculine smugness really brought out the worst, the brat, in her.
‘Oh yeah. Because I’ve got the goods, Susan. I’ve really got them now. And your little sex bomb’s been detonated good and proper. Now nothing can stop us.’ The line went dead.
She stared at the receiver. ‘Us?’ she said stupidly. This she didn’t like at all; in fact, she was damned if she was going to try to handle it herself any more. Jumping up, she bolted from her office and flung open Bryan’s door. Then she gasped.
Sitting in the editor’s chair, his Hush Puppies on the desk, was Oliver Fane – looking like the cat who not only got the canary but the entire contents of the aviary.
‘What are YOU doing here?’
‘Keeping your seat warm.’ He winked at her. ‘You can do the same for me sometime.’
She slammed the door, marched to David Weiss’s office and flung open his door without knocking. ‘What’s going on?’
‘How so?’ He didn’t look up from his papers.
‘Don’t get piss-elegant with me, you,’ she snarled. ‘Why is that meathead Fane sitting in my chair?’
‘The editor’s chair, Susan. He’s sitting there because my father instructed me to put him there upon hearing of the situation.’
‘Situation?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ He laid down his New York Yankees fiber-tip pen – a pathetic affectation in a middle-class, bookish Jew, she thought – and looked at her. ‘O’Brien’s gone. No notice, no nothing. I could sue his ass within rights, but I’m glad to see the back of him. The man wanted to edit a funny paper, not a newspaper.’
‘He was a damn good editor.’ She glared at him. ‘And your father told you to put Fane there? I don’t believe you. What about me?’
‘Ah. I mentioned this. Despite your low opinion of me, and mine of you, you are the deputy editor of this paper. I mentioned this to my father when I spoke to him. But he didn’t seem to believe you were ready yet. “She’s got to prove herself one more time, and then she gets the gig,” he said.’ David shrugged. ‘I guess that means you have to persuade yet another hooker to spill the beans for the benefit of the front page – either that or off another carny act. My father acts in mysterious ways, his blunders to perform.’
Her head began to spin. She felt dazed, drunk; she staggered forward and caught hold of a chair back. Tobias Pope . . . the mystery was not why he was behaving in this way, but why she had expected anything else of him. Officially, her side of the bargain wasn’t complete. But she had thought they were friends now . . .
Friends! Did a rattlesnake have friends? Her gullibility and disappointment overwhelmed her, and she burst into tears.
She stood there, weeping and hating this weak side of herself. Any minute she expected to hear David Weiss laugh and tell her to go and pull herself together. To talk to her as if she was a woman.
But he didn’t. He came out from behind his desk, put his arms around her and said in a voice of sheer amazement, ‘Susan. You’re human. You’re human.
‘I love you,’ he said grimly as he smoked his king-size cliché afterwards.
‘What?’ She sprang up in bed and knelt, staring at him, her hands on his shoulders.
‘I love you. I’m in love with you.’
She got up, wandered around the room, took her hairbrush from her bag and smoothed her hair. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s very simple. I realized that night after you left – that night you told me about . . . Michèle, and I called her. With the mirage of her purity out of the way, I could see very clearly that I loved you. But I was scared. I’d gone overnight from loving this girl who I thought was an angel – however misguidedly – to loving this girl I knew was a monster. I was terrified. So when I saw you crying – I don’t know. I still think you’re sort of half-monster. But I guess you’re half-human too. All in all, you’re either more or less than human – I can’t figure out which.’
She stood and looked at herself in the full-length mirror, then at him. ‘Both?’
‘Whatever. Who needs the love of a good woman when you can have the love of a bad one? It’s in the good woman’s nature to give love. A bad one – well.’ He patted the bed beside him and smiled. ‘That’s the challenge. That’s the only game in town.’
She was walking on air, on cloud nine, in seventh heaven and thinking in a ceaseless stream of clichés – white wedding, happy ending – instead of the usual headlines when she walked into the Best next morning. She even put her head around the editor’s door and wished Oliver a good morning and a crucial day. He gaped at her in horror and disappointment. Damn the bitch. She wasn’t meant to bounce back like this.
When she found the message to call Caroline Malaise, she was mildly surprised. She had trouble visualizing Caroline rising before noon, let alone calling before ten. Obviously, being downwardly mobile concentrated the mind wonderfully. She called Caroline and was persuaded by her surprisingly brisk urgency to cancel lunch with a motor-mouthed ex-model who had distinct possibilities as a gossip columnist.
She was nevertheless surprised to find Caroline waiting when she walked into Le Caprice at ten past one. She was even more surprised to see Caroline sitting at a table for five. Two of whose seats were occupied by Ingrid Irving and Bryan O’Brien.
She fought panic, greeted a waiter, walked over and looked at them one by one – Caroline, Ingrid, Bryan. Caroline looked at her hands, Ingrid looked back, grinning, and Bryan looked embarrassed.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Sit down, Sue,’ said Bryan.
‘You’ll need to,’ said Ingrid, downing her Pussy-foot in one go and slamming the glass on the table triumphantly. ‘Poor baby. You got so used to picking the sweet soft centres in the big chocolate box of life, didn’t you?’ She giggled. ‘Well, this time it looks like you’ve been well and truly left with a choice between the Montelimar and the Praline.’
‘Who’s the extra chair for?’ Susan asked Bryan earnestly. ‘Miss Irving’s liposuctionist?’
‘No. It’s for me.’
She turned around and saw Joe Moorsom.
NINETEEN
What followed could best be described as a fait accompli in four courses. Her usual numerical vertigo came on quickly, but she could still understand enough to see that Tobias Pope, tycoon, entrepreneur and publisher, would soon be able to add convicted felon to his long roster of titles.
It was Caroline who had first heard him conspiring with his money men in the flat in Lowndes Square; it was Bryan who, after a long round of liquid lunches with Pope Communications corporation men who felt they had been unfairly passed over for promotion, confirmed the story. It was Ingrid who had the front page ready, willing and able to roll and Joe Moor
som who was ready to ask questions in the House about Pope’s suitability to hold a cable franchise.
The meat of the matter was a number so large that when Susan first heard it she mistook it for some phone number on a far continent, vital to the plot. When the words ‘tax evasion’ were added as a dialling code, the number suddenly looked even bigger. Big enough to spell out the end of Pope Communications’ irresistible rise; big enough even to put a big man behind bars.
Bryan finished his narration, and they all looked at her. Their faces were proud and eager, as though waiting for praise.
‘Well,’ said Susan Street, looking down into her third empty martini glass, ‘let me first congratulate the four of you on your act. You work incredibly well together – a seamless dream. You’re quite a bit like the Beatles, all things considered.’
‘Why’s that, Susie?’ asked Caroline curiously. Ingrid shot a daggers glance at the gentle blonde.
‘Well, there’s the pretty one –’ She looked at Caroline. ‘And the clever one –’ She looked at Bryan O’Brien. ‘And the boring one –’ She held Joe Moorsom’s stare. ‘And the plug fucking ugly one. Who shall be nameless.’
‘I’ll push your face in, you bitch!’
‘Isn’t that a coincidence? I’d push yours in, only no one would notice the difference. Yes – between the four of you, you just about make up one whole person. Congratulations, as I say.’ She raised her empty glass to them, mockingly.
‘Do you know what Gore Vidal calls irony?’ spat Ingrid Irving. ‘The weapon of the powerless.’
‘That wasn’t irony, you stupid bitch, it was sarcasm. Which you’d know if you ever read anything more taxing than Horse And Hound.’
Ingrid lunged across the table at her.
‘Ingrid, Susan!’ said Bryan urgently. ‘Stop this! We’re grown up people – we shouldn’t be behaving like this. Strewth, even I know that!’
‘Then how should we be behaving?’ Susan turned to him. ‘Excuse me, Bryan, but what exactly was the point of this? Why are you and Caroline doing this to me? I can understand the motives of those two twisted bits of work – of course they hate me. It’s called envy and misogyny. But what did I ever do to either of you? Answer me that.’
It was Caroline who answered. ‘Oh Susie, I’m sorry. It’s nothing personal. It’s nothing personal. It’s him we want. You’re just in the way.’
‘Think of yourself as the John Connally of journalism,’ said Joe Moorsom with an excruciatingly smug smile. ‘You’ll feel better that way.’
It was a smart line, Susan reflected as she left Le Caprice at a trot. Still, he didn’t look quite so smart with a raspberry pavlova running down his face.
‘So he did it.’ David Weiss smiled coldly and whistled slowly. ‘Ooo-eee. The crazy bastard really went and did it.’
‘You’re talking as if you knew he would.’
‘I knew he wanted to. Tax – it was his big thing. Being made to do something – only the IRS had the power. As he got richer, so fewer people could tell him what to do. But the richer he got, the more they could take from him. It drove him crazy. I remember when I was a kid, these big dinners at our place in Connecticut; he’d take a drink too many and, instead of going on about the Russian or the blacks, he’d go on about tax. It was his demon. Compulsory communism, he called it; the malignant tumour in the tender flesh of freedom. The noose that squeezed the juice from the nation’s finest. Oh, he was a real poet when it came to tax. I remember Maxine weeping into her vichyssoise at dinners for twenty-four people, most of them New York Jews and New England Democrats. Well, they were all loaded but they weren’t used to that kind of crazy talk; they had a sense of noblesse oblige. My father didn’t.’
‘Because he basically believes that all men are born equal and therefore no one owes anyone anything,’ she said, surprising herself with the indignation in her voice.
He looked at her nastily. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion. All I know is what I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears. Tax was his Rosebud in reverse what made him tick. But I thought he’d be content just mouthing off and offending polite liberal company. The crazy bastard . . . with all his money, dodging doesn’t make a speck of difference.’
‘It was a matter of principle,’ she said stubbornly.
‘Principles? My father thinks a principle is the head of a college.’
‘You think that because you think the only principles are liberal ones.’ She reached for the phone. ‘You don’t understand him, or this world we’re living in. I’ve got to call him.’
‘No.’ His hand covered hers stiffly. ‘If you pick up that phone, you may as well get out my Swiss army knife and cut my balls off.’
‘But—’
‘No. I’ve got to work this out myself, Susan. You got rid of Moorsom the first time; you had the clairvoyant killed.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘No.’ He held up a hand. ‘Don’t deny it. I know you. Just spare me the details, that’s all I ask. But I’ve got to do this: I’ve got to earn my pay for once in my life. I can’t be Maxine’s little boy, or Michèle’s little boyfriend, or Susan’s little sidekick, or my father’s little son and heir forever. And I’ll always be his son till I can be his saviour.’
She giggled.
‘Does that sound melodramatic?’
‘A bit. A bit like one of those biblical Bruce Springsteen songs.’
‘Hey, I love Bruce Springsteen. Don’t you? Say you do. I always think a marriage can go horribly wrong if the parties concerned can’t agree over Bruce Springsteen.’
There. He’d said it. She knew he would. Once you knew how to bring out the worst in a boy, a proposal of marriage was only a scruple away. ‘I love him. But I’m wary of his position in modern life. Isn’t Bruce Springsteen what men believe in when they stop believing in God, politics and football?’
He roared. ‘Baseball, you bitch! Susan, you slay me.’ He kissed her, holding her face between his hands. ‘Listen, I’m going to work this out. Don’t tell Dad, OK?’
‘Don’t tell me what?’ asked Tobias Pope.
They turned to gape at him.
He raised one hand, wiggling his fingers in slow motion. ‘Hi, children. What’s this you’re not going to tell me? Never mind, it’ll keep – I’ll have it as a nightcap. I love surprises. Come along, Susan. I’ll be in the car. And quick. You know how I hate to wait.’ He closed the door. Automatically she began to gather her things together.
David Weiss stared at her. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I have to.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s my boss. I have to go with him.’
‘To fuck?’
‘NO!’
‘But you told me you were fucking him. Remember? You told me how much better than me he was.’
‘I was lying.’
‘So I’m better than him?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never slept with him. I was lying about that.’
‘You liar.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Then why should I believe you now?’
‘I have never fucked your father. Or your mother. Or your girlfriend Michèle, even though she was hanging there like a human buffet ready to take on all comers.’
He slapped her.
She backed off, rubbing her cheek. ‘I’ll say it one more time. I have never fucked Tobias Pope. I was lying when I said I had. I’m not lying now.’
‘Then why are you going to him?’
‘Because . . . we have a deal.’
‘About fucking?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘So you are fucking him!’
‘NO!’ She screamed it.
‘Go on.’ He opened the door and pushed her out. ‘Go to him, you lying bitch. Go and do all the pair of you are good for – go and roll in the stinking mud and rot. I could forgive you for fucking him before, when I wasn’t playing straight with you – but not now. Forget it. Don’t worry, thou
gh – I’ll save this lousy paper for both of you. He’ll have his investment back, and you’ll have your precious little editor’s chair to come back to. But I won’t be here. I’m not working for that man any more. The man who stole my life. The man who stole my wife. I’d rather lick out toilet bowls for a living.’ He came after her and pushed her skidding down the corridor. ‘Go on. Go and make an old man happy. You can’t make anyone else happy, that’s for sure. Because you’re evil. You’re evil.’
‘You are’ screamed Maxine Weiss Pope in 1958 as she slammed the door of the master bedroom of the penthouse on Central Park West. ‘EVIL!’
‘But why?’ asked the young Tobias Pope quietly, as though reasoning with a crazy person. ‘Why, darling?’
‘Asking me to sleep with a whore! A negro whore!’
‘But Maxine, you’re a fully paid-up member of the NAACP. What’s the problem, angel?’
‘You do not ask that thing of a women you love, Goddamnit!’
‘Then who do you ask it of? Someone you’ve got no feelings for? Isn’t that a pretty cold and exploitative thing to do, Maxine?’
‘Just go take a walk, you crazy sick bastard!’ Maxine was at the end of her tether now, he could tell; the fruity, yeasty rasp of Brooklyn had at last burst through the taut refinement of her uptown voice with all the subtlety and relish of a cheerleader bursting through a paper drum.
‘Maxine, Maxine.’ He fell against the door, his blond face snubbed by it. ‘Oh, Maxime,’ he said drunkenly, though he hadn’t touched a drop; his wife always had that effect on him. He pictured her leaning against the door, her fists clenched, her wrists scarred: golden-skinned, black-haired, with eyes the colour of a hot toddy. She looked like one of those beautiful mid-western brunette WASPs who were always chosen by Hollywood to play Hebrew heroines in its best biblical epics. In her white silk peignoir, her flesh would shine with righteous indignation; he could almost taste its colour and sheen. How he loved her.
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