“Why not?” I said. “I’m not a cop, I’m not wired for sound, I’m just curious.”
He managed a crooked smile. “I’ll bet you’re curious.”
“I’d like to think,” I said, “that it was incredibly great, historically great, so great you lost your head. Then, at least, you’d have that much of an excuse.”
Bernard looked at the river and mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said she was fantastic!” he said. He turned toward me and leaned in to me. His face was a bizarre combination of anguish and triumph.
“Matt, she was unbelievable, she was like a tornado. She was like a drug. I couldn’t stop. I knew about all the other men, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t love her—I didn’t even much like her. But I did what she asked. Yes, I did what she asked. Not that she asked that much.”
“But she asked you to arrange the deal with Weiskopf.”
“She said she had ... ah ... no head for business.”
“Did you have a cut of the visa mill?”
“She wanted to cut me in, but I refused.”
“Mr. Nobility, all of a sudden.”
“I won’t even try that one, Matt. Nobility had nothing to do with it. From my point of view, the return was too small for the risk. I’m—I was in a fair way to take over as managing director when her ladyship retires.”
“Uh huh. Of course, Phoebe did sort of mention you, last night. She said there was someone competent to run the business for Stephen if he took over. He’d have the title, but you’d no doubt have a hefty pay raise to go along with the actual power—you could settle for that, I guess.”
“What can I say?” he asked.
“You’re doing fine. I suppose Phoebe also asked you to keep her informed of anything her stepmother-in-law was up to. So you more or less fingered Aliou for her.”
“I had no idea he was going to be shot. Besides, at the time it actually happened, Phoebe was with—with me.”
“You don’t deserve Sandy, you know that, don’t you, you bastard?”
“My hand on my heart, I’m going to from now on. Whatever happens as far as the job goes, I’ll make it up to her.”
“I believe you will,” I said.
“I swear it on my life. Does she have to know about it?”
“That’ll be up to you,” I said.
“Matt, you won’t regret it.”
“I’m trying to believe that, Bernard, I really am. There’s just one thing that gets in the way.”
“What’s that?” he said. His voice promised sloppily to remove all my doubts.
“The fact that you tipped off Weiskopf I was coming. What was the idea? For me to kill him, or for him to kill me? Or did you give a damn? I think you didn’t care, but I’ll never forget that he was the one you gave the advantage to.”
Bernard had this look on his face. It was a mute question: How can you make me go through this agony? I looked away, not because he engendered in me any guilt or sympathy, but because looking at it made me want to drag him the thirty yards to the river and drown him.
“What could I do?” he whined. “I was trapped.”
“Son, you don’t know ‘trapped.’ You are about to learn.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean a catastrophe is about to befall you. Your wishes are about to come true.”
“I still don’t get it, Matt.”
“Wait for it,” I told him. “Bernard, what can I do with you? Can’t have you prosecuted, because you haven’t actually committed any crime.”
I think for the first time I really shocked him. If his conscience had enough life in it that it convinced him he had committed crimes, there was hope for him yet.
“You’re a treacherous son of a bitch, but if there were laws against that, all the governments and half the businesses in the world would have to shut down. I could get you fired, but what good would that do? You’d just go to work for somebody else. Not only are you a very talented TV executive, you’d know things about TVStrato that could be used against it. And I have a financial stake in TVStrato, through my Network stock. The one thing I can do is destroy your marriage.”
“Oh Christ, Matt, don’t.”
“I said that’s up to you.”
“How?”
“You are going to run TVStrato, as planned. I think Lady Arking even has it in mind to put you on the board of BIC. You’ll take the jobs. And you will do them very, very well.”
“I won’t let you down, Matt.”
“Shut up, Bernard. Leave me out of this. You and I are through. After this little talk, I hope never to see or speak to you again. Got that?”
“I—I understand how you feel.”
“Not unless the sight of your own face makes you want to throw up. That’s why I made you take me to The Lighter Side. After this, I’m going to need a laugh.” I took a deep breath. “You’ll do the jobs and TVStrato will prosper. I’ll have my eye on you—from a distance. If you screw up, the letters I stayed up all last night writing go out. There are a lot of them. To Lady Arking, to Bristow, the papers, and to Sandy. All the mess I’ve been trying to avoid will land on you then.
“It’ll land on you lots of ways. If anything happens to me, for instance. Or Roxanne. Or anyone close to me. If a competitor is suddenly too smart in anticipating the company’s moves. If Sandy lives a life anything short of total happiness. You starting to get the idea?”
He swallowed. “You’re making it very clear.”
“Good,” I said. “Incidentally, Lady Arking is starting the Joseph Aliou Scholarship Fund, for aspiring Third World journalists. You are going to be a major contributor and a tireless worker in the good cause.
“You know, Bernard, you are so much luckier than you deserve, you should be on the cover of the Guinness Book. If you keep your nose clean and do a good job, you’ll wind up Sir Bernard in the end. You and I will be the only ones to know what a cowardly scumbag you actually are, and I’ll be the only one who ever cared.”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, saw my eyes, and closed it again.
I got up from the bench and walked home to Roxanne.
23
“So it’s good night from me.”
“And it’s good night from him.”
Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker
The Two Ronnies, BBC
“THE MORAL OF THE STORY is—” I began.
“Stay the hell away from television,” Roxanne told me.
“No, the moral of the story is, you can run away from your problems, but wherever you wind up, there’ll be a new set waiting for you.”
“Is this a pitch to go back to New York?”
“Of course not. That would just be running back to the problems we ran away from in the first place. Besides, Spot is going to be out of quarantine before too long.”
Roxanne was in her historian suit; another conference on England’s involvement in the American Civil War.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“I thought you didn’t ask me questions like that.”
“This is business.”
I figured out what she had in mind. “Just great enough to wow them without stepping over into frivolity.”
She grinned. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
“What are you going to do today?”
“I thought I’d head on down to Brixton.”
“Brixton?”
“Yeah. I thought I’d find out who owns that basketball court. Maybe we can put it in shape, and start a program for the kids down there. That Thomas could be a player.”
“Sounds like a brilliant idea,” she said.
“Yeah, better to light a candle and so on. Maybe we can limit the supply of Winstons.”
“I wasn’t talking about them, I was talking about you. I should have known better than to think you could adapt to a life of leisure.”
“I’ll get there.”
“I hope I live
to see it. Got to go.” She kissed me, gathered up her briefcase and left.
A little while later, I left, too. As I headed for the bus stop, I was realizing I had it wrong. I’d spotted Christieland, but I’d missed the subtler delusion of Cobbland. London wasn’t a backdrop for my personal life, it was the arena for ten million personal lives. There was bound to be some friction. All you could do was try to slide through it as smoothly and helpfully as you could.
The bus came. I went off to spread the gospel of hoops to a new land.
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copyright © 1996 by William L. DeAndrea
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Killed in the Fog Page 20
