Rep’s nod was wearily minimal. But he handed her the disk.
***
It wasn’t long after that—5:15 or so—that Chip Arundel walked into Rep’s office. Rep had dutifully sent him a memo about the Eastman meeting. Such obsessive i-dotting and t-crossing might suggest simple conscientiousness to the credulous, but not to Arundel. The way he figured it, this sniveling little IP wimp was actually trying to turn a throwaway claim into a major splash. And the only possible reason for doing that would be to replace Arundel as the billing partner for Tavistock, Ltd.
Arundel poked around Rep’s desk and thumbed through stacks of papers on the credenza. If there were a note, a phone message, a calendar entry, or a scrap of paper so much as hinting that more was going on between Rep and Charlotte Buchanan than Rep’s desiccated little memos suggested, he intended to find it.
He came up with nothing. A bit nervous now, he checked the doorway to be sure the secretaries were gone. Then he opened Rep’s desk drawers and pawed through them. Nothing but paperclips and ballpoints rewarded his efforts. He turned his attention to the cabinets underneath the credenza. He was in the midst of a fruitless quest amidst legal pads and packages of Post-Its when a noise at the door startled him. Jumping, he slammed the cabinet door. Slammed it forcefully enough to make a thick tome titled Corbin on Contracts tip over on the bookshelf above the credenza. He wheeled around to find himself facing the cleaning lady.
“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”
Nodding, the gray-haired woman emptied Rep’s wastebasket and favored his desk and chair with three or four desultory whisks of a feather duster. Then she left, making exactly the same noise going out as she had coming in.
Arundel took a second to get his breathing under control. Marathon nine-figure merger negotiations were one thing, but petty burglary was more nerve-wracking than he’d bargained for. Deciding that there was no point in searching further, he lifted the fallen volume to put it back in place against the other texts on Rep’s bookshelf.
As he replaced it, he noticed something stashed behind the books. Curious, he pulled it out. It was a videotape in a cardboard sleeve. The title on the label read The Discipline Effectiveness Program.
Arundel shrugged and put the tape back in place. He hadn’t even known Rep had kids.
***
It was after 11 P.M. when Melissa, still bent over the glowing screen of her computer, heard Rep come into the living room. She’d been going through the scripts alone, on her antique laptop. After they’d shared shrimp chow mein, Rep had explained that he had to get to something on their Dell, and that was the last she’d seen of him until now.
“I’m going to have to crash,” he said apologetically. “I’ve been up since five, and I have to be up by six tomorrow to catch a puddle-jumper for Traverse City.”
“What’s in Traverse City?”
“A trademark claim for a client that has to see me between trips to Germany.”
“Day trip?”
“It better be,” Rep said. “If I bill time on two Saturdays in a row I’m going to get a reputation for diligence.”
Melissa glanced at her watch.
“I had no idea it was so late,” she said. “You go ahead. I’ll be in soon.”
“Did you find anything?” Rep asked.
“Pretty much variations on what we’ve already seen,” she said. “But I noticed something funny about half an hour ago and I’ve been playing with it ever since. The disk says it’s almost full, but the bytes for the script versions I’ve found on here don’t add up to that much space.”
“Which means there’s something else on the disk that isn’t listed in the directory,” Rep said.
“Right. And just out of perverse curiosity I’ve been trying to find it. I think I’ll give it another twenty minutes.”
“Okay. I’ll try to stay awake.”
Less than ten minutes later she turned up the unlabeled file. Adrenaline racing, wondering if this could be the smoking gun that showed plain theft by Point West Productions from Charlotte Buchanan, she brought it up on the screen.
She found herself reading a treatment for a movie that apparently had nothing to do with And Done to Others’ Harm or In Contemplation of Death. At least she thought it was a treatment. It was clearly a pitch for a movie, intended to excite interest from studios and agents and people with money. It had the same basic elements and the same breathless style as the handful of treatments she’d read while researching popular culture.
On the other hand, she’d never seen a treatment with footnotes before. And this one had quite a bit more detail than the customary “Basic Instinct meets Dumb and Dumber” approach. Names and dates and numbingly thorough descriptions studded the text. It read like a treatment written by someone incredibly anal who was really into the story.
The story itself was a political thriller. Its working title was Screenscam. It involved a president of the United States who had gotten several million dollars in campaign contributions from the Red Chinese Army through an intermediary, only to find himself under investigation by a Congressional committee that seemed to be getting inside information from sources in the Chinese government. In between trysts with a zaftig intern, this president had gotten the troublesome Chinese source terminated—literally—by agreeing with Chinese communist officials to pressure a corporate entertainment conglomerate into burying a promising movie due for distribution by a studio the conglomerate owned.
The movie that got buried sounded a lot like Red Guard! And when all else failed, the conglomerate had completed the interment by sabotaging the Oscar prospects for its own movie. Red Guard! again, based on the Rep-spill she had extracted a few hours ago. Except that this went way beyond anything Eastman had told Rep, featuring sinister computer hackers, bribed mailroom workers, and blackmailed vote-counters.
No one as thoroughly steeped in deconstructionist theory as Melissa was could be easily impressed by any form of narrative fiction, but Melissa nevetheless sat back, stunned at the audacity of the plot. Reality had long since overtaken fiction on the scandal escalation front. Stealing nuclear secrets was old hat. Trading high-level security classifications for money from foreign governments wouldn’t seem like a new idea to anyone who’d read the New York Times in the last decade or so. And chubby interns with a penchant for sucking cigars and other things now pretty much defined cliché.
Rigging the Oscars, though, was something else altogether. Even in scandal-fatigued fin-de-siècle America, no one could be blasé enough to shrug that off. Letting a foreign power dictate trade policy or human rights policy was one thing. Giving another government veto power over America’s preeminent cultural icon would be like fixing the World Series. Which, come to think of it, had happened once.
At least.
And they’d made a movie about it, hadn’t they?
Suppose Screenscam was being planned as a cinematic roman à clef supposedly depicting what had actually happened to Red Guard!? That could maybe get happy dust planted in your glove compartment all right, at least if the wrong people thought it might actually happen.
Rep was snoring deeply when Melissa slipped into the bedroom to tell him. She decided it could wait until morning.
Then she thought again. In the morning Rep would be up super early, and Melissa might still be fast asleep. And he’d kiss her lightly on the eyelid and slip out without waking her. She wasn’t going to let him spend a Friday in Traverse City, Michigan, possibly write precipitate memos or e-mails, even conceivably talk to Charlotte or Eastman, without the benefit of this juicy little tidbit she’d picked up. She went into the study to write a quick note she could Scotch tape to his laptop case, where he couldn’t possibly miss it.
His legal pad was still out, lying next to the computer. In small letters in the upper right-hand corner he’d printed, “Jennifer Payne, C/land ScenePlay, Fri-Sat, Doubletree Suites on Wabash.” After a few seconds of denial, she quickly gra
sped the possible implications. An empty spot in her diaphragm quickly gave way to blank anxiety and building anger as Melissa sank into the chair in front of the computer.
Murmuring, “No, no, no,” she snapped the machine back on. Figuring out Rep’s password was just a matter of time. She knew that he changed it monthly, rotating through the first names of nineteenth-century vice-presidents. DeWitt, Hannibal, and Chester drew blanks, but Adlai (for Adlai Stevenson, vice-president to Grover Cleveland) did the trick.
Rep had gotten sixteen e-mails in the less than one hour since he’d announced he was going to bed. And she couldn’t help noticing (well, she could have helped noticing, but she didn’t) that the first one was from a correspondent calling herself (or, ungrammatically, himself) Bienfessee.
Melissa wasn’t going to read Rep’s e-mail—the kind of e-mail that, she now began to suspect, he generally used his firm’s laptop to retrieve, precisely so she wouldn’t be privy to it. But if he’d spent several hours indulging himself in a childish fetish while she was wading through dreary redrafts of badly written working scripts for a second-rate movie for his benefit, she was going to be big-time honked off. And hurt. With a few mouse-clicks she called up the last five sites visited from the computer.
The list did absolutely nothing for her disposition. The Disciplinary Wives’ Club. Shadow Lane. WHAP! (Women Who Administer Punishment). Sex.sociality.spanking. Christian BDSM. In many other contexts it might almost have been funny, but she wasn’t laughing.
She was, instead, standing up and sweeping Rep’s attaché case and legal pad furiously to the floor as she choked back angry tears. How could he? How the blankety-blankety-blank COULD he? In a scarlet-tinted instant fantasy she rousted him from bed, pulling the sheet out from under him to dump him on the floor like the husband in some screwball comedy from the forties, venting her rage and hurt at him, and then just as implausibly beating him up. Just slapping him silly. No, she thought bitterly, he’d probably like that.
This brought a mordant laugh, and the laugh rang down the curtain on her cathartic fantasy. She let out a long, cleansing breath and felt her temperature drop. She picked up his attaché case and legal pad and replaced them beside the computer. She went mechanically through the process of shutting down the computer as she allowed herself a few wholehearted sobs. By the time the screen went blank, depression had replaced rage. When she climbed into bed a few minutes later, she left the maximum possible amount of sheet space between herself and her childish, timid, self-absorbed husband.
Chapter 9
Friday was when it all finally hit the fan.
Rep reached Charlotte Buchanan on his digital phone around 8:00 Friday morning, roughly halfway through a ride in what was apparently the only cab serving Traverse City International Airport.
“So how was Kohler?” he asked as casually as he could manage.
“The part I saw was heavy on toilets,” she said.
“Something to be said for convenience, I suppose.”
“The sales meeting was at The American Club, which is a five-star resort with a world-class golf course. Or so they tell me. Personally, I’ve never been able to see the point of golf, especially on a cloudy day. So after the crack-of-dawn plant tour I begged off my morning foursome, which basically left me free until two o’clock. Unfortunately, the only other thing to see in Kohler, Wisconsin—and I mean the only other thing—is the Kohler Company’s museum of bathroom fixtures. So I’m now a mini-expert on the history of toilets.”
“Yesterday was a bit more productive for me,” Rep said. “I spent most of it with Aaron Eastman. We should talk.”
“Great, let’s talk. Shoot.”
“Not over a digital phone,” Rep said. “We could end up sharing our thoughts with anyone in two states who has a police scanner or a short-wave radio. How about Monday at the office?”
“No good. I transitioned from road warrior to program marketing support about three months ago, and Monday the first program I’ve really contributed to is being presented. That shoots the whole day. Plus I have to put some major face time in at THQ on Saturday and Sunday helping the presenters put the finishing touches on it, so I can’t even come by your office over the weekend.”
Rep was dismayed to realize that he’d understood every syllable of Buchanan’s suit-speak, and wondered if he were turning into Arundel-Lite. “THQ” was Tavistock Headquarters, and the stuff about transition from road warrior meant that she was now working on putting promotions together for salespeople to use instead of traveling on sales calls herself. Rotating Buchanan through key departments would be a standard way of grooming her for a senior executive position in a few years.
“What it comes down to,” Buchanan continued, “is I’m pinned to Tavistock and the house until Tuesday.”
“Tuesday it is,” Rep said. “Nine-thirty?”
“Fine.”
Rep tapped his phone antenna pensively against his cheekbone for a few seconds after ending the call. Yesterday afternoon he’d learned that Buchanan had spent the day within easy driving distance of Milwaukee. Now it transpired that none of her Tavistock colleagues could verify that she’d actually been in Kohler for much of the morning and the early afternoon. For a delicious moment he imagined trying to break her story by cross-examining her about the history of toilets.
***
“I’m not upset,” Melissa said as she strode at forced-march pace through the thicket of bookshelves that separated Reed University Library’s tech support office from its tech support supply room.
“Don’t tell me you’re not upset,” Krieg panted in her wake. “In the last ten minutes I’ve heard you utter two profanities, one blasphemy and a barnyard obscenity. That wouldn’t get me through the first page of the average junior term paper, but it’s about a year’s quota of foul language for you. Reppert’s acting like a jerk, isn’t he?”
“No,” Melissa said. She bent over an open file drawer and began to look for boxes of number 14 printable acetate, but she found it hard to maintain the modest concentration that this straightforward chore demanded.
I understand his little hobby, she kept thinking. His own small vice. I’m not going to begrudge it to him, and I’m not going to get all pissy about how he shouldn’t need anything but me. Everyone uses fantasies during sex. Heaven knows I do, and some of them are a lot wilder than anything WHAP! ever dreamed up, I’ll bet. But if he were going to kiss off Charlotte’s case for the night, why didn’t he just invite me to bed instead of having me do busywork while he enjoyed himself solo? And even if he had to surf through cybersmut, how could he make an appointment with someone while he was at it—especially without telling me? And is it really just an appointment or is it a date? Maybe I’m seven pounds overweight—okay, twelve pounds—and maybe I’m marking time as a techie and teaching a just-for-fun course once in awhile when I should be getting super serious about finishing up my Ph.D., dissertation, but still—
She stopped, because her fingers had, without conscious help from her brain, stumbled over a thin box of number 14 printable acetate. And because the inside corners of her eyes were starting to smart. Self-pity was far more addictive for her than marijuana. She could wallow in it deliciously for hours if she let herself. Also, Krieg was saying something else, and Melissa supposed she should at least pretend to be listening.
“I don’t know if this helps, Melissa, but sometimes I think men just have no conception that certain feelings women prize even exist. It’s not insensitivity, it’s nonsensitivity.”
That’s very helpful, Melissa thought, while turning what she hoped was an interested expression toward Krieg. Why don’t you write it up for the Publication of the Modern Language Association?
“On my last go-around with Tavistock, for example—out-sourcing AV, remember?”
“Yes,” Melissa said. “Make change your friend.”
“Right. Well, one of the younger guys who was going to lose his job
kept coming on to me. I interpreted it as anxiety-displacement, about his career, you know, and tried to be sympathetic without letting things get to the point where I’d have to check Indiana’s age-of-consent statute.”
“Uh-huh,” Melissa said. Punchline? Melissa thought.
“It turned out,” Krieg said with a fatuous chuckle, “that all he wanted was my grass connection in California. His video editing skills had already gotten him a grunt job with a production company in L.A. He wasn’t interested in my body at all.”
“Imagine that,” Melissa said.
“I’m not suggesting that he should have been,” Krieg assured Melissa. “It’s just that any woman would see instantly that it was a very rotten kind of thing for him to do, and I don’t think he even spotted the issue.”
“Louise,” Melissa said patiently and with the complete sincerity of a naif lying in a good cause, “even though Rep is a man, he hasn’t done anything rotten.”
“That’s the kind of thing you’d say even if Reppert had committed full throttle coitus with a cheerleader swinging from a trapeze in your living room while you fixed dinner in the kitchen,” Krieg said, leaning forward and lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “But I for one will not gainsay your construct.”
“Thank you,” Melissa said. “That’s very non-objectivist and counter-patriarchal of you.”
While Krieg was smiling demurely in gracious acceptance of this compliment, another female voice intervened from twelve or fifteen feet away.
“Ms. Pennyworth, there you are,” the voice half shouted. “We need your help.”
“Not now, dear,” Krieg interjected protectively. “Whatever it is, it can wait. Is this help with a paper or something for one of my classes? You have a one-week extension, effective immediately. Don’t bother Ms. Pennyworth. Go have a smoke or whatever it is people your age do to relax these days.”
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