The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  ‘What didn’t they like?’ God, she could do without this. She gazed over his shoulder, desperately seeking a glimpse of her friends.

  ‘Said it wouldn’t resonate with the Chinese public. It’s such bullshit, Maddy. I told them the most particular stories are always the most universal. If it means something to someone in Peoria, it’ll mean something to someone in Guangdong. The trouble is, if they won’t distribute, no one will fund. It’s the same story every time—’

  She showed him glazed eyes, but it made no difference. He was off. So lost was he in his own tale – narrative, he’d call it – that he barely looked at her, fixing instead on some middle distance where those who had conspired to thwart his career were apparently gathered.

  With an inward sigh, Maddy scoped the room. The group that caught the eye had occupied the club’s prime spot, perhaps a dozen of them gathering against the wide picture window that made up the far wall. Their laughter was loudest, their clothes sparkling brightest. The women were nearly all blonde – the exception was a redhead – and, as far as Maddy could see, gorgeous. Cocktails in hand, they were throwing their heads back in laughter, showing off their long, laboriously tonged hair. The men were Chinese, wearing expensive jeans and pressed white shirts, set off against watches as bejewelled and shiny as any trinket worn by the women. Princelings, she concluded.

  She hadn’t realized the Mail Room had become a favoured hangout for that set, the pampered sons of the Chinese ruling elite who, thanks to the garrison and the attached military academy, had become a fixture of LA high society. Soon these rich boys would be the officer corps of the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army. PLAyers, the gossip sites called them.

  The redhead was losing a battle to stay upright, tugged down by her wrist to sit on the lap of a man whose broad grin just got broader. He ran his hand down the woman’s back, resting it just above her buttocks. She was showing her teeth in a smile, but her eyes suggested she didn’t find it funny.

  Maddy contemplated the tableau they made, the Princelings and their would-be princesses, their Aston Martins and Ferraris cooling outside. She was surprised this place was expensive enough for them. Now that they were here, it soon would be.

  Charlie broke into his own monologue to wave hello at one of the PLAyers.

  ‘Is he an investor?’ Maddy asked, surprised.

  ‘I wish,’ Charlie sighed. ‘He’s a patient. The thing is …’

  Suddenly she caught sight of Katharine standing at full stretch in a corner, her mouth making an O of delight, waving her to come over. Maddy gave Charlie a parting peck on the cheek, mumbled a ‘Good luck’ and all but fled to Katharine and Enrica, standing in a cluster with a few others around a small, high table congested with cocktails.

  She slowed down when she saw him. What on earth was he doing here? She thought it was going to be a night with the girls, or at least men she hadn’t met, ideally gay. A night off. She gave Katharine a glare. But it was too late. He was already there, glass in hand, with his trademark embryonic smile. The beard was a new addition. When they lived together, she had always vetoed facial hair. But that was nearly nine months ago and now she saw it, she had to admit, it suited him.

  ‘Leo.’

  ‘Maddy. You look as stunning as ever.’

  ‘Don’t be slimy. Slimy never suited you.’

  ‘I was being charming.’

  ‘Yeah, well, charming never suited you either.’

  ‘How would you like me to be?’

  ‘Somewhere else?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Seriously, Leo. I thought we were going to give each other some space.’

  ‘Come on, Maddy. Let’s not ruin your big night.’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  He nodded towards Katharine, then took a sip of his drink. The budding smile had blossomed in his eyes, which never left her. They were a warm brown. In the right mood, when his interest, or better still his passion, was engaged, they seemed to contain sparks of light that would careen around the iris, bouncing off each other. They were brightening now.

  ‘What did she tell you? K, what did you—’

  He reached for her wrist. ‘Don’t worry, she didn’t tell me anything. Just that you’ve reeled in a big one. Big enough to win a Huawei.’

  ‘Katharine doesn’t know what’s she’s talking about,’ Maddy retorted. But her shoulders dropped for the first time since she walked in here. She couldn’t hide it: she’d been thinking this story had the potential to win a Huawei prize from the beginning, before she’d even written a word. It had just what the judges liked: investigation, risk, its target corruption – at just that mid-level where its exposure did not threaten those at the very top. In more than one sleepless hour, she had worded the imaginary citation.

  ‘But you do, Maddy. And your face is telling me I’m right. You’ve landed a biggie.’

  ‘Don’t think you’re going to get me to tell you by flattering me, because it won’t work.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I know you, Leo Harris. I know all your tricks. Leaking my exclusive to everyone else, so it makes no impact—’

  ‘Not that again.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to let you ruin this evening. I’m in a happy mood and I’m going to—’

  ‘OK, just tell me one thing.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does it affect the mayor in any way at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do I need to worry about it in any way at all?’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really? And I’m supposed to be reassured by that?’

  ‘I mean, only in the sense that it’s happening in this city. And,’ she tilted her chin towards her chest and dropped her voice two octaves, ‘“Everything that happens in this city concerns—”’

  ‘“—concerns the mayor.” You see, Maddy, you do remember me.’

  She said nothing but kept her eyes trained on his, brown and warm as a logfire. Seeing his pleasure, his tickled vanity, the thought came out of her mouth before she was even fully aware of it. ‘You’re such an asshole, Leo.’

  ‘Let me get you a drink.’

  He turned and headed towards the bar, leaving Maddy to the gaze of Katharine, simultaneously quizzical and reproachful. Her friend and colleague, shorter, older and always wiser in such matters, was wordlessly asking her what the hell she was doing. By means of her eyes alone, she said, I thought we’d talked about this.

  Leo was back, handing Maddy a glass. Whisky, not wine. I know you. She downed it in one gulp.

  ‘So,’ he began again, as if drawing a line under the previous topic. ‘I tell you what would win an instant Huawei.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Inside the campaign of the next Governor of the great state of California. Unprecedented access, fly on the wall. In the room.’

  ‘Are you offering me access to Berger’s campaign?’

  ‘No. I’m telling you what you could’ve had if you hadn’t broken up with me.’

  ‘Leo.’

  ‘All right. If you hadn’t decided we should have a “break”.’

  ‘We decided.’

  ‘Whatever. The point is, the mayor’s going to win, Maddy. He’s the most popular mayor in the history of Los Angeles.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just have to live with that, won’t I?’

  He shrugged. Your loss.

  They were joined just then by an improbably tall, slender woman perched on four-inch heels, wearing a dress which appeared to be slashed to the waist. Her skin was tanned and flawless. She was, Maddy decided, either a professional model or twenty-three years old. Or possibly both. When she spoke, it was with an accent that suggested an expensive education.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me, Leo?’ The woman’s smile was wide and white. She gave Maddy a look of unambiguous warmth, as if they were destined to be friends for life.

  ‘This is Jade,’ Leo mumbled.

  A lo
ng moment passed before Madison extended her hand and, realizing Leo was not going to do it for her, offered her own name. The three smiled at each other mutely before Madison finally turned and said under her breath, ‘Goodnight, Leo.’

  He whispered back, ‘Don’t break my balls, Maddy.’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere near your balls, Leo. Have a good night.’

  It was after midnight when Enrica announced that it was past her bedtime and that, unless Katharine wanted to deal with a woman no longer responsible for her actions, she needed to take her home. As Maddy followed them down the two flights of stairs, Katharine steadying her wife as she negotiated each step, she imagined what Leo would make of this sight: the lesbian couple, one Chinese-American, the other Latina, both committed Angelenos. It was a wonder he hadn’t cast them in a Berger campaign ad ages ago.

  Now, in the dead of night, Maddy was experiencing what was, to her, the rare sensation of having done what she had been told. She had gone out and gone back home and not phoned the desk once. She had not bothered Howard or complained. She had not tried to tweak the odd sentence here and there. Nor had she exploited the fact that she knew all the relevant codes to go online and make the changes herself – an action that would squarely fall into the category defined by Goldstein as ‘her usual tricks’. Sure, she had looked at the website a dozen times, she had checked Weibo, which was now humming with the story. But, by her standards, she had exercised remarkable restraint.

  She stood in the shower, unmoving, not washing, letting the water envelop her. Prompted, perhaps, by the sensation of warmth on her skin, she found herself tingling, her hands’ movements turning to caresses. Unbidden, came Leo – not the look of him so much as the sense of him, his presence. And the memory of his touch when he had been close to her, right here, in this shower, his body next to hers.

  And yet she lacked the energy for what would ordinarily come next. What she wanted most of all was to fall into a deep, restoring sleep. But what else was new?

  The water was turning cold. She stepped out, grabbed a towel and wandered into the living room. Or ‘living room’ as she would put it, in heavy quotes, were she writing a profile of somebody whose apartment looked like this. She assessed it now, with the detached eye of an observer. Outside lay the neighbourhood of Echo City, one part funky to two parts rundown. Inside, a large table, big enough to seat six or eight, entirely covered with paper, two laptops and a stack of filled notebooks, none arranged in any order except the one known exclusively to her. A couch, both ends taken up by piles of magazines and more papers, narrowing it into a seat for one.

  Off to one side, through an open archway, the kitchen area, deceptively clean – not through fastidiousness so much as underuse. Even from here she could see there was a veneer of dust on the stove. The explanation lay in the trash can, filled almost exclusively by take-out cartons, deposited in a daily stream since she’d been on this story – and, she conceded to herself, long before.

  For a moment Madison pictured how this place looked when she and Leo lived together. No tidier, but busier. Fuller. She enjoyed the memory, interrupted by that cut-glass accent. This is Jade.

  She glanced down at her phone. So busy writing all afternoon and into the evening, she’d repeatedly ignored it when it rang. She’d not even checked her missed calls. But here they were: two from Howard, one from Katharine, both now obsolete, six from her older sister, Quincy, and one from her younger sister, Abigail.

  She instantly thumbed Abigail’s name and hovered over the ‘Call’ button. It was late and Abigail was no night owl. On the other hand, she was a teacher at elementary school: blessed with a job that allowed her to turn off her cell when she went to bed. No risk of waking her up, no matter how late. Maddy perched on the end of the couch, still in her towel, and pressed the button. It rang six times and then voicemail, her sister’s voice so much younger, so much lighter, than her own.

  No one leaves messages on these any more. But go on, you’ve come this far. Let me hear how you sound.

  Maddy clicked off as soon as she heard the beep. She looked at the others, at Quincy’s six attempts. That suggested low-level incandescence rather than full-blown rage. Maddy wondered what she had done wrong to offend her older sister this time, what rule or convention or supposedly widely understood sisterly duty she had violated or failed to comprehend. She would not listen to the voicemail, she didn’t need to.

  Her skin dry now, she followed the promise of sleep into the bedroom. Letting the towel fall off her, she slipped into the sheets, enjoying their cool. She had a dim awareness that she was following at least two elements of the recommended advice to insomniacs – a good shower and clean bedclothes. Such advice was in plentiful supply. She had been deluged with it over the years. Go to bed early, go to bed late. A bath, rather than a shower. Steaming hot or, better still, not hot. Eat a hearty meal, pasta is especially effective, at nine pm, or six pm, or noon, or even, in one version, seven am. A cup of warm milk. Not milk, whisky. Give up alcohol, give up wheat, give up meat. Stop smoking, start drinking. Start smoking, stop drinking. Exercise more, exercise less. Have you tried melatonin? Best to clear the head last thing at night by writing a to-do list. Never, ever write a to-do list: it will only set your mind racing. People are not clocks: they need to be wound down before sleep, not wound up. Thinking before bed was good, thinking before bed was very bad. One thing she knew for certain: contemplating all the myriad, contradictory methods of falling asleep could keep a person up at night.

  Indeed, here she was, shattered, her arms, her hands, her eyes, her very fingertips aching for sleep – and still wide awake. None of it worked. None of it had ever worked. Pills could knock her out, but the price was too high: groggy and listless the next day. And she feared getting hooked: she knew herself too well to take the risk.

  She had been up for twenty hours; all she was asking for was a few hours’ rest. Even a few minutes. She closed her eyes.

  Something like sleep came, the jumble of semi-conscious images that, for a normal person, usually presages sleep, a partial dream, like an overture to the main performance. She remembered that much from her childhood, back when she could rest effortlessly, surrendering to slumber the instant her head touched the pillow. But the voice in her head refused to fall silent. Here it was now, telling her she was still awake, stubbornly, maddeningly present.

  She reached for her phone, letting out a glum sigh: all right, you win. She checked the LA Times site again, her story still the ‘most read’. Then she clicked on the scanner app again, listening long enough to hear the police reporting several bodies found around town. One was not far from here, in Eagle Creek, another in North Hollywood.

  Next, a long article on foreign policy: ‘Yang’s Grand Tour’, detailing how the man tipped to be China’s next president had just returned from an extended visit to the Middle East and analysing what this meant for the next phase of the country’s ambition. The piece was suitably dense. Sure enough, it came close to sending her off, her mental field of vision behind her lidded eyes darkening at the edges, like the blurred border on an old silent movie. The dark surround spread, so that the image glimpsed by her mind’s eye became smaller and smaller, until it was very nearly all black …

  But she was watching it too closely, wanting it too much. She was conscious of her own slide into unconsciousness and so it didn’t happen. She was, goddammit, still awake. She opened her eyes in surrender.

  And then, for perhaps the thousandth time, she opened the drawer by her bed and pulled out the photograph.

  She gazed at it now, looking first at her mother. She would have been what, thirty-eight or thirty-nine, when this picture was taken. Christ, less than ten years older than Maddy was now. Her mother’s hair was brown, unstyled. She wore glasses too, of the unfashionable variety, as if trying to make herself look unattractive. Which would make a kind of sense.

  Quincy was there, seventeen, tall, the seriousness already etched into
her face. Beautiful in a stern way. Abigail was adorable of course, gap-toothed and smiling, aged six and sitting on Maddy’s lap. As for Maddy herself, aged fourteen in this photograph, she was smiling too, but her expression was not happy, exactly: it contained too much knowledge of the world and of what life can do.

  She reached out to touch her earlier self, but came up against the right-hand edge of the picture, sharp where she had methodically cut it all those years ago, excising the part she didn’t want to see.

  Later she would not be able to say when she had fallen asleep or even if she had. But the phone buzzed shortly after two am, making the bedside table shake. A name she recognized but which baffled her at this late hour: Detective Howe. A long-time source of hers from the crime beat, one who had been especially keen to remain on her contacts list. He called her once or twice a month: usually pretending to have a story, occasionally coming right out with it and asking her on a date. They had had lunch a couple of times, but she had never let it go further. And he had certainly never called in the middle of the night. One explanation surfaced. The sweatshop must have reported her for assault and Jeff was giving her a heads-up. Funny, she’d have thought they’d have wanted to avoid anything that would add to the publicity, especially after—

  ‘Madison, is that you?’

  ‘Yes. Jeff? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m OK. I’m downstairs. You need to let me in. Your buzzer’s broken.’

  ‘Jeff. It’s two in the morning. I’m—’

  ‘I know, Madison. Just let me in.’ He was not drunk, she could tell that much. Something in his voice told her this was not what she had briefly feared; he was not about to make a scene, declaring his love for her, pleading to share her bed. She buzzed him in and waited.

  When he appeared at her front door, she knew. His face alone told her: usually handsome, lean, his greying hair close-cropped, he now looked gaunt. She offered a greeting but her words sounded strange to her, clogged. Her mouth had dried. She noticed that she was cold. Her body temperature seemed to have dropped several degrees instantly.