by Jon Cleary
“Me neither,” said Carl.
“Bloody men!” said Cleo. “It’s no joking matter. Tom could go out there and get his head blown off as soon as that man Rossano found out he was in town.”
“If we held back the story till I was back here in New York, the Mob out in K.C. wouldn’t know I was working for the Courier, that I had any connection with Hal. My by-line hasn’t been a regular one in the paper. I could be just a hometown boy come home to visit my folks.”
“Your folks live down in Friendship.”
He was surprised that she remembered. “Sure, but I once worked in Kansas City. Anyone who works in K.C. for one pay-day, they claim him forever. Count Basie was born in New Jersey and spent, I don’t know, no more than two or three years of his entire life in K.C. But out there he’s a native son. That’s what I’ll be, a native son come home for a few weeks.”
“Don’t be too conspicuous,” said Joe, suddenly serious.
Cleo saw now that Tom wanted to go to Kansas City for more than just a story. He wanted to be out of New York when Jack came over from London. Perhaps it was cowardice, perhaps it was wisdom: in any event he was putting her out on the limb she herself had grafted on to the tree. She could not blame him for deserting her. But he didn’t have to go out into Indian, or gangster, territory.
Woman-like, which was what she knew they all expected of her, she looked at Joe Hamlyn. “What do you think, Joe?”
“I’d like to know who killed Hal and why,” said Joe. “I’ve never really worried myself about whether justice has been done or been seen to be done. But in this case . . .”
“The sons-of-bitches should be flushed out,” said Carl, and Tom nodded.
Then Cleo realized that, though Tom may have brought up the idea only as an excuse to escape the next week or two, the reminder of Hal Rainer’s murder had taken hold of the three men. It was the kinship of the newsroom, the police shack, the locker room: it did not occur amongst all men, but it had with these three men and Hal. It was something that women, even one in a man’s game, were locked out of.
She sighed, tossed her gold pen on her desk. “Righto, you win. You’re on the payroll as of now—I’ll tell Personnel. You may as well get started right away. Catch a plane out tonight.”
All three men looked surprised. Tom said, “I’d like to read the files first—”
“Take them with you. Ring Joe every day to let him know how you’re going. And don’t take any stupid bloody risks!”
Joe Hamlyn and Carl Fishburg, married men, recognized that something else besides the safety of one of her reporters was on Cleo’s mind. They suddenly found they had work to do back at their own desks, got up and left Cleo’s office.
Tom stood up slowly. “Honey, I thought I was doing the right thing. I don’t want to be around when you tell Cruze—”
“I guessed that. But why the hell can’t you choose somewhere safe to retreat to? Go—go and do a piece on the national parks!”
He grinned, then was sober. “I’ll take care, I promise. You do the same. I offered to stay here and be with you when you talk to him—”
“No.” She had refused the suggestion when he had made it as they lay in bed on Sunday morning. “That wouldn’t be fair to him. Ring me tonight and let me know where you’re staying.”
“Do I kiss you or just shake hands?”
“Neither. In this office I’m your editor.” But she wanted to grab him, feel the bone and muscle and flesh of him in her hands. Her hands actually seemed to itch. “You’d better go.”
He stopped at the door. “Cleo old girl—”
She shook her head, reading his mind. “No, it’s better that you’re out of the way when I see him. There are some things a woman does better on her own.”
V
Jack flew in on Thursday afternoon. She left Joe and Carl to conduct the editorial conference and took a limousine out to meet him at Kennedy Airport. As he came towards her, walking behind the red cap carrying his one bag, she knew that telling him the news of herself and Tom was going to be so much harder than she had thought. He had aged, put on five years or more in the two weeks since she had seen him last. He had aged, but what was worse, she could see the sad defiance in his grey face, he had refused to accept it.
She kissed him on the cheek, took his hand, felt him holding hers as if he were blind and she was leading him through a hostile crowd. But his eyes were not blind and she read the delight in them at seeing her. She felt sicker by the minute at what lay ahead. Bad news is always the easiest news for reporters to write and editors to feature; but none of her training and none of Jack’s experience was going to make the personal bad news easy to bear. She held his hand and chattered.
“What’s the matter?” he said, good-humoured, already looking a year younger. “You haven’t stopped talking.”
They were in the limousine heading into Manhattan to the Pierre. Though he occasionally stayed the night at her apartment, he had not made it a habit; for business reasons he always booked into the Pierre. Cleo knew there was gossip about the two of them, but no one ever mentioned it to her face.
“It’s been a busy week. I guess I’m still keyed up. It gets like this sometimes.”
“The world’s falling apart.” But he didn’t look too disturbed. “I’ve been thinking about retiring. How’d you like to go and live in the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands?”
“I couldn’t edit the Courier from there.” She smiled, trying to keep the mood between them light. “Let’s talk after you’ve rested.”
She settled him into his suite at the hotel, told him she would come by for a late supper. Then she went back to the paper and spent the next few hours agonizing over how she was going to give him the bad news. She looked at the make-up of Page One: disaster covered it. Tomorrow’s paper would be chock-full of history in the making, most of which readers would prefer not to read. She had begun to believe that the man in the street, the object of Mr. Kugel’s scorn, did not want to know about the diseases of his world: he had enough of his own. The curing of them was beyond his power and so he gave up; if he cared at all, he wrote cynical letters to the paper that were as depressing to read as the subjects that made him so discouraged and bitter. Some day she must look for Benjamin Franklin’s comments on the man in the streets of Philadelphia.
She finished at the office at ten and took a cab to the Pierre. Jack had slept, then bathed and also washed his hair; the grey was almost white, adding to his aged look. He was dressed in silk pyjamas, a paisley silk dressing-gown and a white silk cravat; but suavity was not his long or his best suit. He looked like Noel Coward’s gardener.
The talk was light, like their supper. But there was a heavy feeling in her chest, as if she had stuffed herself with one of his sensible dinners. At last she said, “Jack, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“I thought there might. Is it the paper?”
That would be a simple problem. “No. Jack—I’m in love with someone else.” The words were like a bubble in her mouth, they were straight out of soap opera. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you now—I mean while you’re not well—”
He sat very quietly looking at the shreds of smoked salmon on his plate. His cravat had slipped down, exposing his stringy throat, and even his dressing-gown seemed to have slipped off his shoulders. One might have thought he was suddenly falling apart, except that sartorially he had always been on the verge of doing just that. His voice was hoarse: “Is it someone I know?”
“Not very well. Tom Border.”
“Aah.” It was difficult to tell whether it was a sigh of understanding or of pain. “How long has it been going on?”
“Only since last weekend. Two days, that’s all. He’s now out in Kansas City.”
He looked at her quizzically, as if to say, Pull the other leg. “You’ve known him for years.”
“Only at a distance. He was married for years. Five or six, anyway. He’s just been divorced. Alain Roux is marrying his ex-wif
e.”
“What a bloody merry-go-round!” He pulled the cravat away from his throat, began rolling it up as if it were a bandage.
She waited impatiently, unable to tell whether he was shocked or angry or indifferent. In the old days he would have flown into a rage, accused her of treachery, told her she was ungrateful for everything he had done for her. If he still felt any of that he was either afraid to let it spill out of him or he hadn’t energy any more to express it.
He was now pulling the cravat tightly round one hand, like a tourniquet. She was surprised, almost let down, when he said quietly, “I suppose it had to come. I was always too old for you.”
“It wasn’t that.” It was, but only partly so. It was deeper: she had never loved him and, though it was specious honesty on her part, she had never told him she did. But she could not hurt him further now by telling him she had never been in love with him. Though, being shrewd, he had probably known the truth of that. “There were always too many other things between us.”
“Emma?”
She was glad to accept that excuse if he was. “Yes. But other things.”
“What?”
Men, she thought, are just like women: they liked to be tortured when in love. She was more composed now that he was not going to fly into a rage and precipitate a heart attack. “Jack, you’ve always wanted me to play second fiddle. Look at what you suggested tonight. I’m only thirty-four and you want me to retire, give up everything I’ve achieved, and go and live with you in the Virgin Islands.”
“Bloody ambition!”
“You had it. Why not me?”
He gestured in frustration, because he had no answer. Then after a while he conceded: “It really takes hold of you, doesn’t it?”
She knew what he meant, had recognized the symptoms in herself. She had not been ambitious as a girl growing up; that had only come when she had grown tired of being nobody but Sylvester Spearfield’s daughter. Now she had discovered that ambition had its own momentum; and suddenly, afraid, wondered if Tom, the least ambitious of men, would understand. They hadn’t talked of the future beyond her telling Jack that it was all over between them.
She reached across the small table, put her hand on his. She still had affection for him, even love: but not the sort of love he wanted from her. “I’m sorry, Jack. You haven’t made very good choices with your women, have you?”
“You don’t choose whom you fall in love with. Christ, you should know that!” For a moment he flared, like the old Jack.
She nodded: indeed she did know it. She sat back in her chair, all at once felt hungry and began to nibble at the smoked salmon. The heaviness in her chest had gone: talk, sometimes, is a good antacid.
He watched her with sour admiration. “You women have remarkable powers of recovery. If a man reacted like some of you do, you’d say he was unfeeling.”
She smiled, unoffended. They were back on safe ground, the war between the sexes. “I’d never say that about you. You were selfish and demanding and a hundred other things, but you were never unfeeling.”
“There you go again—” Then he grinned, though the humour had difficulty rising in him. He watched her eat and she watched him watching her, knowing that his mind hadn’t stopped working. Only when she had finished what was on her plate and sat back, did he say, “You won’t be wanting to see me again, I take it?”
“Do you think it would be wise? It would only make us both more unhappy.”
“There’s the paper . . .”
Abruptly another fear struck her: “Do you want to get rid of me as editor?”
“No-o.” He didn’t sound emphatic. “But once I sell out, Claudine might not want you.”
He was threatening her, getting his own back in no uncertain way. “Would you do that to me? Sell your interest in the Courier?”
“I bought it for you. You know that, though we never said anything. You’ve done a good job and the paper’s making money for me. But not enough to really interest me, not even enough to pay for these trips I’ve been making across here to see you. But that’s not the point. It’s been a fight all along with Claudine—you and Jerry Kibler know that. She’s fought every innovation every inch of the way. I’m not interested in that sort of fight any more. Dr. Hynd told me to take it easy. So did you,” he added after a proper pause for effect. “The more I can relieve myself of headaches, the longer I’ll live.”
She was angry and hurt; but she couldn’t blame him for his attitude. She tried the first argument that came to her tongue: “If I left, so would a lot of the other editors. The paper would fall apart and a lot of people would be thrown out of work.”
“If I hadn’t bought into the paper they’d have all been out of jobs a couple of years ago. Don’t start playing hearts and flowers on your second fiddle.”
She couldn’t help smiling, though sourly. “Where did you get that one?”
“I pinched it from Jane Kempton.” She was the columnist who had replaced Cleo when she had gone home to Australia. Whether that was his source or not, it was a nice touch. He had become subtler in the baiting game.
She put it to him directly: “Will you sell out?”
“I’ll think about it.”
The evening had ended as badly as she had feared, but in a different way. She just wondered why she hadn’t considered the possibility of what he was suggesting: he owed her nothing. She stood up, looking at her watch. “I have to go back to the office. With stories breaking the way they have been this past week, I keep an eye on it right down to the last edition.”
That was a lie, he knew. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been a bad week all round.”
When she had gone he sat in his chair staring at the remains of the meal on the table: the last supper, he guessed. He put a hand to the top of his head where she had kissed him goodnight: it had been like a niece’s kiss. He felt anything but avuncular; he felt murderously jealous. Bugger younger men! They did not run the world, that was still the province of older, wiser men; but they were the women’s choice in love and sex and that, if it did not run the world, made it go round. Or so the poets, all young ones, he’d bet, had said.
He felt the twinge in his chest; there was a sudden pain in his left arm. He took a pill-box from the pocket of his dressing-gown and swallowed a tablet. He continued to sit, willing himself to relax, opening himself, as it were, to let the emotion drain out of him. Then he began to weep.
He remembered some lines from a Roman poet, one whose name he couldn’t recall. The lines had been on the fly-leaf of a political biography:
I shall go quietly
merely shutting my eyes.
But he could not close his eyes, they were too full of tears.
18
I
TONY ROSSANO lived in a sprawling house in Mission Hills in Kansas City. The large grounds were surrounded by an eight-foot high spiked railing fence; every fifty feet there were signs on the fence, like armorial bearings, warning that the grounds were patrolled by security men. The security men were not uniformed, unless dead-pan faces and bulges under their armpits were a uniform. Tony Rossano had been blackballed by the three nearby country clubs and so he had laid out a putting green at the rear of his house. It was rumoured that he could not drive a golf ball straight for more than twenty yards, but he was possibly the best putter in the State of Missouri. His neighbours thought he was the worst resident in the area.
He had lost some hair and gained some weight since he had gone up in the world. The underworld, that is; he was still a long way under the surface in Kansas City’s social world. The Independent, the city’s social magazine, would not have run his name even if he had murdered ten of the top socialites. He had the sleek look of a successful businessman, which indeed he was; he was regional director of laundry for the Mob in Chicago. That he laundered money rather than clothes or linen was neither here nor there in his view. He had a nice tolerance of his own attitudes.
He was on his putting g
reen as the housemaid brought two men out of the house. He finished his putt, put the ball in the hole and looked up with the grimace of his lips that he mistakenly thought was his smile. “So what’d you learn?”
The bigger of the two men took off his hat, the brim of which he had pulled down over his face like an old-time movie gangster. He was a police detective from over the border in Kansas and he always tried to hide his face when he called on gangsters. He amused Tony Rossano, but he was the best informer on Rossano’s pay-roll.
“This guy you told me about, his name’s Border. Tom Border. He made a lotta dough as a writer. A book writer,” he explained, as if Rossano might confine his reading to race-books. “But he’s a newspaper guy, too. He used to work for the New York Courier. Maybe he still does, I couldn’t check on that. But I will,” he added when he saw Rossano’s look.
“Where’s he staying?”
“The Raphael. He seems to know K.C. pretty good.”
Rossano looked at the other man. He was shorter than the detective but probably weighed more. He was bald and wore no hat and his big red face had the friendly politician’s look of a cardinal from one of the richer dioceses. He was the only Irishman who worked for Rossano and, as such, invaluable. An Irish ear to the ground in Kansas City politics was as necessary as having an inside line to the White House in Kennedy’s day. He was a practising Catholic and, with the new liberalism in the Church, didn’t have to go to confession each Saturday to confess his sins, which were many.
“He knows where to go to ask the questions.” He had a deep rumbling voice, in contrast to the detective’s, which was only slightly lower than a high squeak. “He’s been getting answers, too. I think he’s working for that New York paper, Tony.”
Rossano had a mind like a filing cabinet; he kept a mental dossier on everyone who had crossed him since he was twelve years old and fighting the other kids on East Missouri in Little Italy. “I know the dame who’s editor of that paper. She was a pain in the ass.”
“They all are,” said the Irishman, but didn’t say whether he meant editors or dames.
