Ten million francs, he thought. It was a fair enough price—but he would almost have done this job for nothing.
Chapter Four
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Pam Flaherty said.
I looked past her into my living room and saw what she meant. Not only had I forgotten to turn on the outside lights before going out, I’d also left the inside of the apartment in total darkness.
“Sorry about that, Chief,” I said. I put our bowling bags down just inside the door and felt for the switch. I hit the wrong one and the outside hall light came on, but it provided enough illumination that we wouldn’t trip over anything on the way in. Then I closed the door and put us back in the dark.
“Hey,” Pam said.
I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her toward me. Our arms went around each other, automatically it seemed. They knew the way. They had been there many times before.
“Hey,” she said again, softer this time.
“Hey yourself,” I said, from about two inches away.
We kissed, taking our time about it. Pam’s lovely slender body felt warm and soft against mine, exactly as it always did. Eventually, we came up for air.
“You are now completely in my power,” I intoned.
“And vice versa.”
“Especially vice versa. What else is new? But only because you insisted on going bowling in a miniskirt. I never thought I’d get you out of there in one piece.”
“Hey, whatever works. Besides, it’s too hot to wear pants.”
I bent over slightly, leered, waggled my eyebrows, and waved an imaginary cigar at her. Pam didn’t approve of the real kind. One of her very few faults.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “you might not get out of here in one piece. Want a beer?”
“I’m Irish,” she grinned. “Of course I want a beer.”
I went into the kitchen and turned on the small lamp in the range hood before dipping into the refrigerator.
The Groucho bit was appropriate. I met Pam last New Year’s Eve at a colleague’s house in Yonkers. As the drunken revelry swirled around us, we sat in a spare bedroom, where we shared a bottle of Great Western champagne and chastely watched a Marx Brothers marathon on one of the classic movie channels. (Chastely, because the wedding ring on her left hand precluded any further action along those lines. I’m funny that way.)
Pam was pretty and smart, unobtrusively vivacious in a way I immediately liked, and she knew almost as much about the films as I did. In short, she impressed the hell out of me; and when, somewhere between Animal Crackers and A Night At The Opera, she let drop that she wore the ring as a preventive measure only, I took her up on the implied invitation and asked whether I could call her some time. She said I certainly could, and we’d been seeing each other exclusively and often ever since.
I didn’t know if it was love—didn’t even know whether or for how long it would last—but we were both quite happy to take it one day at a time. Hey, whatever works.
I took two bottles of Red Stripe from the fridge, opened them with the appropriate blade on my Swiss Army knife, and carried the beers out to the living room. Pam took one, and I sat down beside her on the couch with the other. The ambient light from the small bulb on the range hood made for a suitably romantic atmosphere.
We kicked off our shoes, put our feet up on the coffee table, and drank in companionable silence. After six months, our relationship had progressed past the point where we each felt the constant need to keep the other entertained. When the beer was gone, Pam turned on her side and snuggled against me, putting her head on my chest and closing her eyes. She had dark brown hair, and her shampoo, something with strawberries in it, smelled wonderful. It wasn’t, I reflected, the worst way in the world to spend an evening—or a lifetime, I was increasingly coming to believe. I closed my eyes, too, and let myself relax and enjoy Pam’s proximity.
I would happily have left it at that, but I’d also cravenly delayed telling her about Cramer for the last day and a half. I couldn’t put it off any longer. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen…
“I had the world’s craziest job interview yesterday,” I said.
“Really?” Pam said, without moving her head. “I didn’t know you were looking for a job.”
“I’m not. I mean, I wasn’t. Not to begin with. And not really even then.”
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
“Let me try it again,” I said.
Pam snuggled closer and I tried it again. When I got to the part about driving out to Southampton, she stiffened in my arms. I closed my eyes and felt my lips compressing themselves into invisibility. Here it comes…
“Southampton?” she said. “That’s four hours from here.”
I opened my eyes again and nodded. Which did no good at all, since Pam’s head was still on my chest and she couldn’t see me.
“Three and a half, actually,” I said. As though that made a difference. “Cramer’s office is out there. Place looks like a damn maximum security prison. Armed guards, razor wire, the whole schmeer. He—”
“You’d have to move to Southampton, then?”
“Well, to New York. Midtown. That’s where all the real work gets done. Although from what little he told me, I’ll be spending some time on the road as well. It’s a sort of roving reporter billet. Apparently I’m responsible for all of Latin America.”
“Lucky Latin America,” Pam said. “But you hate to travel. You got a headache driving ten miles to the bowling center tonight.”
“I’ve told you before, it’s not a bowling center, it’s a bowling alley. And the headache is from sitting in the sun all afternoon watching high school baseball. Eleven damn innings of high school baseball. I should put in for overtime. Why my idiot boss thought that game would be newsworthy is beyond—”
“Stop deflecting. In fact, just stop.” With a brief and exciting flurry of bare limbs, Pam detached herself from me and went into the kitchen. When she returned, she handed me a Red Stripe and sat down at the far end of the couch. She put her own beer on the coffee table, then leaned back, folded her arms across her chest, and tucked her long legs tightly underneath her. She seemed ten feet away on the eight-foot couch.
“Go on, then,” she said. “Let’s hear the rest of it.”
Taking a deep breath and trying to ignore the Berlin Wall of her body language, I pushed on, keeping things as upbeat and cheerful as I could. Pam watched and listened without once moving or speaking; even her face was flat and unreceptive. It was like talking to the world’s sexiest mannequin. By the time I finished, I was sweating. And nothing was wrong with the air conditioner.
“You’re going to take the job,” Pam said. She looked down at her beer, but didn’t touch it. I didn’t let that stop me from taking a long swig of mine. I needed it.
“Well, sure,” I said. “Naturally. A hundred grand a year? I’d be crazy not to. Why wouldn’t I?”
“You tell me. Why wouldn’t you?”
“What does that mean?” The words came out instantly and automatically, but even as I said them, I had a sick and certain feeling that I knew exactly what she meant.
Pam waved her hand back and forth, as though erasing an imaginary blackboard. “Never mind,” she said. “But doesn’t the whole arrangement sound a little…Faustian to you?” Pam had been a lit major at Cornell.
“What’s Faustian?”
“Stop it. You know very well what I mean, Paul.”
I snapped my fingers and grinned. “I remember now. Faust is like Damn Yankees, except in German.”
“Be quiet. I’m serious. The way you described Cramer and his surroundings, I pictured someone with horns and a tail. Why was his office so dark? Did he make you sign anything with invisible ink? Or blood? Did you happen to see his feet?”
I laughed. Nervously.
“We didn’t sign anything. And I doubt whether even Cramer’s seen his feet in the last ten years, let alone anyone else. Su
re, he intimidated me at first, but he’s human, all right. You should have seen his face when I straightened him out on Connie Francis and Lesley Gore.”
“Maybe,” she conceded, “but I still don’t like it. How did he know all those things about you? And why should he pop out of nowhere and offer you a job at almost, what, four times what you’re making now?”
One of the many things I liked about Pam was that we almost always seemed to think alike, but I didn’t tell her that those exact questions had been bugging the shit out of me for the last thirty-six hours. Cramer never had gotten around to explaining. And I, idiot that I was, never had gotten around to pressing him on it.
“World’s getting smaller every day, kiddo,” I said. (The kiddo was exactly thirty-seven days younger than I was.) “Most people’s lives are an open book, if someone’s interested enough and has the resources to find out about them. Cramer qualifies on both counts. And he does news for a living. He knows how to look, and where.” Cramer would have been pleased, I thought: I’d quoted him almost verbatim.
“But why you?” she repeated. “You’re a wonderful writer, but you’re not exactly a household name, are you? Just tell me. How did he find out about sportswriter Paul Mallory, out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Come on, Perry Mason, cut it out, willya? Jeez, I don’t know. Maybe he was driving through town one day and stopped to buy a paper. Maybe his chauffeur lives here and left a copy in the front seat of the limo. Maybe anything. Cramer could have found out about me a hundred different ways.”
“Name ten more, then. And what about the money? Why should he offer you such a big salary?” Pam refused to let me off the hook. She wasn’t a reporter, but she would have made a good one. Maybe Cramer should have hired her instead of me.
“I should have asked him that?”
“You should have asked yourself that.”
“I did, you think I’m a complete lunatic? Don’t answer that. I expect Cramer’s job will be a lot more demanding that what I’m doing now. And the cost of living’s going to be a damn sight higher in New York, too. The money’s not really so far out of line, when you stop to think about it.”
Pam pointed her chin at me.
“I haven’t had a chance to stop and think about it.”
Her “I” had more spin on it than a hyperactive gyroscope, and I could almost hear the twang as my last strand of self-control snapped asunder.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that I wish you had talked this over with me first, that’s all.”
“I should have told him no? Is that your expert advice?”
“You should have asked whether you could have a day or two to consider his offer.”
“You’re full of ‘should haves’ tonight, aren’t you? And when I come back after a day or two of careful consideration, he tells me sorry but the position’s already filled. Then what?”
“That wouldn’t happen,” Pam said. “Not if the offer was legitimate. And what do you mean, ‘then what?’ I thought you were happy here. What I don’t like is how—”
I stood up. “What you don’t like is that I have to move to the big bad city,” I almost shouted. “What, I ought to sit around this dump and pull down twenty-nine K a year for the rest of my life? Maybe get promoted to sports editor in twenty or thirty years when someone finally gets around to dying? Wow, that’s upward mobility. I might even get a raise to thirty-three. Let me make a quick phone call and order up the champagne.”
Pam looked up at me, her face sad and her eyes moist. I instantly felt ashamed of myself.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “I shouldn’t have yelled.”
She smiled one-tenth of a second’s worth of “apology accepted” at me. “What I don’t like is how you decided this without taking me into account. Without taking us into account, I mean.”
The anger bubbled to the top again and I jumped all over Pam—not an easy trick when one’s feet are both firmly planted in one’s own mouth.
“Us? Wait a minute. Aren’t you the one who keeps going on how unofficial our relationship is—all that stuff about one day at a time, no promises, no commitments, yada yada yada? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was you I heard talking all these months, wasn’t it?”
“I never heard you complain, Paul. And ‘unofficial’ is not the same thing as ‘unimportant.’ Not to me…although you obviously haven’t made the distinction.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Christ, Pam, you know how I feel about you. That’s why I—”
“I know now,” she said. Very quietly.
“Pam—”
She leaned forward and put her hand on my arm. Her eyes were wide with…what? Fear? Concern? Holy cow, was it love?
“Stay here,” she pleaded. “Don’t do this. Something’s wrong here, I know it is. It’s a mistake. It’s crazy. Call Cramer back. You said you didn’t sign anything. Tell him you’ve thought it over, and you can’t take the job.”
I looked at her. It wasn’t like Pam to get excited without a very good reason. I had a feeling she was right, and just then, I’d have given everything I had to have been able to tell her yes.
Almost everything.
“No,” I said. “I can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I told him I would.”
She turned away, her entire body tensed and coiled round on itself like the strands of a wire hawser. I tried again.
“Pam—”
She swung back to face me. Her eyes didn’t actually blaze, but I felt their heat nonetheless.
“What?” she snapped.
“If you’ll stop being an idiot for two seconds, I was about to ask whether you would come with me.”
Her eyes widened again.
“Come with you? To New York? Are you serious?”
“Sure I’m serious. Why not?”
“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “Bloody marvelous. Come with you to New York. Isn’t that nice. Aren’t you sweet. And do what? Sit and stare at the walls in a shitty little apartment while you go bouncing around the world in eighty days like some kind of demented Phineas Fogg? No thank you. I’ve got a job here that I love, a real job, and you know what else? I even have a life of my own that doesn’t revolve around you—whether you want to believe it or not.”
“Phileas,” I said. Good one, Mallory. Show up the beautiful girl with the literature degree. Easy to see why you’re such a hit with the ladies.
“What?”
“It’s Phileas Fogg with an ‘L’, not Phineas. Everyone thinks it’s Phineas, but—”
“Oh, shut up, Paul,” she said, turning away again. “Just shut up.”
Excellent advice indeed—for all the good it would do me now. I shut up. From down the hall, I heard the air conditioner kick on again. For the next three minutes, it provided the only sound in the room. I know it was three minutes because I spent the time staring down at my watch. Then I heard Pam move and looked up at the sound. Her face had gone from angry back to something along the lines of sad-to-neutral.
“You don’t see it, do you?” she asked.
“See what?”
“Anything, You don’t see anything, that’s your problem. But I was referring to how Cramer sucked you in.”
“Oh, sure. He sucked me into taking that nasty inferior six-figure job. Gee, let that be a lesson to me. You’re being silly. Cramer didn’t suck me into anything.”
“Really? Didn’t you just get finished telling me how he seemed to know everything about you?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“So I hadn’t known you five minutes before you spouted some piece of musical trivia at me, something about a song on a TV commercial. You do it all the bloody time, Paul. Everybody who knows you knows that. Everybody who’s ever been unlucky enough to come within fifty feet of you knows that. You don’t think Cramer knew it, too? You really don’t know what happened?”
“What are you talking
about, Pam?”
She took a throw pillow from the couch and gave its name a whole new meaning. I got my arm up, but the pillow sailed high over my left shoulder and into the kitchen. I heard it bang into the window blinds and plop to the floor.
“How can somebody so smart be so goddamned stupid?” she shouted. “He set you up, you moron. He saw you were getting angry—exactly as he meant you to do, by the way—and then he screwed up that Connie Francis and Lesley Whats-her-name song on purpose to give you a chance to show off so you’d feel better. You didn’t just swallow hook line and sinker, you swallowed the whole bloody fishing pole!”
My stomach did a long slow-motion rollercoaster drop at the realization. Nobody who knew who Connie Francis was could possibly have confused her with Lesley Gore. An eon or two passed. While it did, I remembered that I’d told Cramer that my favorite Connie Francis song was “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.”
How right she was.
“That’s ridiculous,” I finally said. The conviction in my voice wouldn’t have swayed an undecided four-year-old. “I didn’t want his damn job in the first place. And even if I did, I figured I was toast anyway at that point, and had nothing to lose.”
Pam shook her head. “And then he gave you that writing test, didn’t he? You don’t think Cramer saw your high school and college transcripts? You don’t think he had someone talk to your teachers, too? You don’t think he knew you’d blow it away? And you’re a sportswriter. He even fed you a sports scenario to make sure you’d blow it away. The only thing that mystifies me about Cramer is why he’d hire someone who would fall for something so blatantly obvious. Jesus bloody Christ, Paul.”
She twisted her body away from me again. As she did, her blouse pulled itself free from her skirt, revealing about four inches of beautifully-toned midriff. With all the twisting and turning, her obliques were getting a workout tonight if nothing else. Not that they or any other part of her needed it. Looking down at her, I felt myself fill up with equal parts of anger, sadness, and desire. What had Claude Rains said to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca? “How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that. One day they may be scarce.”
It's Always Darkest Page 4