Eye Contact (17 page)

“I’d heard rumors to that effect.”

Neil presses his mouth to Manning’s. Their tongues meet, and they taste each other’s coffee—Neil likes that amaretto-flavored cream, while Manning takes it black.

Manning’s passions quickly rise. So does the lump in his shorts. He tells Neil, “Take your clothes off.”

“Can’t. No time.” He drops to his knees, takes the coffee from Manning’s hand, sets the mug down, and hooks his thumbs in the waistband of Manning’s shorts. “There’s time for this, though.” And he shucks them to the floor.

Manning’s head lolls backward as Neil’s face nuzzles his crotch. There they are—one naked, the other fully dressed—onstage before an anonymous city. Thousands of waking eyes may be watching. More likely, none at all. Manning’s arms hang limp, his fingers tracing lazy circles on the temples of the man who loves him. Manning’s eyelids flutter, revealing strobe-flash glimpses of the ceiling of the room where he is worshipped by the man who kneels before him. As if dreaming, Manning feels himself slipping down Neil’s throat. He’s needed this.
They’ve
needed this.

The phone rings. Neil’s teeth clench; Manning’s eyes pop. “Sorry,” Neil tries to mumble, but it sounds more like “thawgy.” They attempt to ignore the intrusion and get back to business, but it’s impossible—the moment has passed.

“Thanks anyway,” says Manning, bending over to plant a kiss on Neil’s head. “It might be important.”

Manning trots to the kitchen and answers the phone. “Oh. Hello, Gordon.”

Neil, satisfied that the unwelcome call is not for him, rises from his knees, checking his watch. He whisks his hair and clothes with his hands, picks up Manning’s shorts and coffee, and heads for the kitchen.

Gordon Smith’s voice tells Manning, “Sorry to bother you so early, Marko.”

“No bother at all,” Manning lies. He and Neil roll their eyes at each other.

The editor continues. “Nathan Cain just phoned me.”

“Oh?”

Neil has rinsed their cups and put the clipboard in his briefcase. He’s ready to head out, but he still has Manning’s shorts shoved under one arm.

Smith says, “He wants to see us in the inner sanctum again. Thirty minutes.”

Neil approaches, flips the shorts onto Manning’s head like a big floppy beret, then gives Manning’s penis a jaunty good-bye tug—it’s still wet with Neil’s spit, but has shrunken fast in the air-conditioning. Seconds later, Neil is out the door.

There’s a touch of nervousness to Smith’s chuckle as he suggests, “Better get cracking, Marko.”

Resigned to a morning that just isn’t working out right, Manning tells him, “No problem, Gordon.”

Half an hour later, riding the private elevator to the top of the Journal Building, Manning asks Smith, “Did Cain say what he wanted?”

Smith shakes his head. “I assume he wants an update on Cliff Nolan or an account of your meeting with Zarnik.”

“Either that,” says Manning, “or he wants to know how his star reporter managed to screw up the Sunday lead.”

Bingo. “I doubt that,” Smith says.

The door slides open, the security guard nods—he’s been expecting them—and they are admitted without comment into Cain’s outer offices. The receptionist rises, also without comment, and escorts them down the hall past the secretarial pool, where the four desks are not yet occupied, since it’s barely eight o’clock. When they arrive in Lucille Haring’s office, the receptionist gives Manning and Smith a half-smile, then turns and retreats to her desk.

The office seems empty. Manning and Smith exchange a look that asks, Now what? Then, someone rises from a desk behind a file cabinet. Their first glimpse of short-cropped carrot-colored hair confirms that Lucille Haring also got an early start this morning.

“Gentlemen,” she says. It’s a greeting without inflection that merely acknowledges their presence. She’s busy shuffling paperwork. Her eyes do not meet theirs. “The Colonel is expecting you.” She crosses to the arched door that leads to Cain’s office, reaches for the knob, and turns back toward Manning and Smith. She at last looks Manning in the eye, but her face seems utterly featureless, even more so than before. The slightest cock of her head signals that they should enter.

The situation is entirely too weird for Gordon Smith’s down-home nature. As he passes Haring on his way into Cain’s office with Manning, he tells her, “Cheer up, Lucy. I don’t much care for Monday mornings, either.”

She looks at him as if he’s out of his mind.

Awkwardly, he adds, “It was sure nice to see you at Marko’s party Saturday. Too bad you had to skedaddle.”

She looks from Smith to Manning with a panicky expression that asks, How much do you know? What did you tell him?

Manning opens his mouth, searching for something to say, but before he can muster any words, she slips back into her office, closing the door behind her.

Standing just inside the inner sanctum, Smith lowers his voice to ask Manning, “What got into her?”

Beats me, Manning shrugs silently.

A pervasive quiet fills the vast room, and Cain does not seem to be present. Last Thursday, however, Cain was lurking, listening, somewhere in the library stacks. This time, Smith won’t give his publisher the opportunity to eavesdrop, so he stifles his loquacious tendencies and prudently decides to zip it. He and Manning aren’t sure what they should do, where they should go, but they feel silly standing there by the door. Side by side, they walk with measured steps toward the high altar of Cain’s desk, like timid Munchkins approaching Oz. They look about. Smith clears his throat and calls out, “Nathan?”

No response.

From the side of his mouth, Smith tells Manning, “Must be in the crapper.”

With a clank of heavy brass hardware, the door to the publisher’s private quarters opens, and Nathan Cain appears. He apparently spent the night here in the tower, for he still wears pajamas—silk, of course, the color of deepest burgundy. Over them he wears a copious robe—also silk, of royal blue that’s almost black. If he wore a stovepipe hat, he’d look like a smoked Uncle Sam.

“Good morning, Gordon,” he says dryly, then adds, “Mr. Manning,” nodding to each of them. He guides a pair of ostrich-leather slippers across the parquet floor, moving toward the bar. “Can I get you something?”

Manning’s had his coffee, but wouldn’t mind some orange juice. Then he sees Cain pour himself a generous snifter of cognac. “No, thank you, sir.”

Smith asks, “Do you have any coffee, Nathan?”

“I’ll send for some,” he offers, then crosses to his desk. He presses a button there, telling the gadget, “Coffee.”

He walks toward the seating area where they had their last discussion and flumps himself with difficulty onto one of the sofas, sloshing some cognac over the edge of his snifter. He wipes the side of the glass with his index finger, which he then licks. With his finger still in his mouth, he motions with his eyes that Smith and Manning should sit on the sofa across from him.

Smith says, “I was surprised to get your call so early, Nathan. What’s up?”

“‘Up’?” Nathan Cain doesn’t need a reason to call underlings to his office, day or night. Maybe he felt like talking. Maybe he wanted company. “I thought Mr. Manning might appreciate my take on Sunday’s Zarnik piece.”

Uh-oh. “Mr. Cain,” Manning begins.

But Cain cuts him off with a flick of his hand. “The story seemed a little … thin. Not quite as much meat as I expected.”

Manning glances sideways toward Smith, who looks toward him with a nervous smile. Manning isn’t sure how he can justify the story to Cain—he’s buying time, and for Cain’s own good, but he’s not yet prepared to reveal his suspicions. Cain would expect proof, and Manning doesn’t have it.

“However,” Cain continues, “on balance, I felt you did a commendable job of making a complex topic accessible to the general reader. Just enough technical mumbo-jumbo to be authoritative, but not overly long. Pithy, in fact.” He raises his glass in a salute. “Well done, Manning.” He drinks.

Smith gives Manning an elbow nudge, all smiles. “See there, Marko?
I said
you nailed it—and you had doubts!”

Manning tells him, “One of these days, Gordon, I’ll learn to take you at your word.” Then he says to Cain, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your vote of confidence, but in truth, that story was not my best work. There were some loose ends—factually—that I wasn’t able to bring together before deadline.”

Cain asks, “The funding angle?”

“Right. And the computer power—I wanted to be quantitative, but Zarnik was either unable or unwilling to supply me with facts. What’s more, he seemed totally thrown by my questions regarding his scientific method.”

“So you ran with what you had,” says Cain, indifferent. “That’s the nature of this business, Manning—I needn’t explain that to
you
.” He snorts his terse little laugh. “The main thing is, Zarnik’s on the level.” There’s a pause. “About his discovery.” Pause. “Right?”

Manning chooses his words with care. “His video demonstration was … compelling. He’s presented us, in effect, with a redrawn map of the solar system. If it’s inaccurate, intentionally or otherwise, the truth will eventually win out. It’s
possible,
of course, that the video demonstration itself is some sort of fabrication, but I can’t imagine any reasonable motive for deception. Why would Zarnik lie?”

“Why, indeed,” echoes Cain. He warps his brows in thought. Then he leans forward, elbows on knees, coddling the snifter with both hands. “Let me be frank about this. My contacts in Washington now seem satisfied that Zarnik isn’t playing games, and that’s really all that they’ve asked us to help them to determine—so we’ve done our job, and a favor has been repaid. But I have to tell you, Manning, that some of the issues you’ve raised have roused my own reporter’s instincts. Would you like to keep digging on this a while longer?”

Manning tries not to appear too eager. “That might be a good idea, Mr. Cain. A fine suggestion. Thank you, sir.”

“See if you can get him to come up with those missing numbers.”

“That’s a start,” says Manning. “I’d also like to learn more about Zarnik’s personal background—since he’s a foreigner, I haven’t found much file material on him. Maybe some secondary interviews with other sources.”

“Sounds good.” Cain leans back in his seat, visibly more relaxed. “And this time, Manning, there’s no pressure, no deadline. Spend the next week on this. If you come up with something, great—we’ll run with it. If not, we’ll chalk it off as an investment in responsible journalism. After the Fourth, when things have calmed down, let’s meet again and assess where we’re at. Needless to say, if anything big develops, let me know at once. Gordon can give you my beeper number. Sound reasonable?”

“Very,” says Manning, thinking, Too good to be true. He arrived at this meeting prepared to squirm, anticipating Cain’s displeasure with his recent work. Instead, he’s been ordered to proceed exactly as he intended.

Smith jots a phone number on the back of a business card and hands it to Manning while asking Cain, “Can I assume Mark has carte blanche on this project?”

“Absolutely. Entertainment, research fees, travel—whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this.”

Smith reminds Manning, “And you’ve still got David Bosch in your hip pocket.”

Manning responds dryly, “That’s one way of putting it.”

Their conversation is interrupted by a rap on the door to the outer office. Heads turn as Lucille Haring trundles in backwards, towing a serving cart stocked with a huge silver coffee urn, carafes of various juices, cups, glassware, and ice. “Pardon the intrusion, Colonel,” she says, “but the kitchen said you’d placed an order.”

Before Cain has said, “Thank you, Miss Haring,” she has positioned the cart near the bar, returned to the door, snapped to attention, bowed, and retreated.

Cain says, “As I’ve mentioned before, she’s a model of efficiency.” As he rises and moves toward the cart, the others do also. “Coffee, Gordon?”

“Sure, Nathan. Thanks.”

Cain pours a cup for himself as well as for Smith. “Mr. Manning?”

“Some orange juice would be great.”

“How about something
in
it, Manning? An accelerator. Champagne, perhaps?”

“No, thank you, sir.”

“
Hngh.
” He hands the juice to Manning, coffee to Smith. They all sip. Cain’s lips gnarl. He dumps the remainder of his cognac from the snifter into his coffee cup, tastes again, and exhales a grunt of satisfaction. Smiling, he tells them, “Ambrosia, gentlemen. Sheer, silken ambrosia.” He gulps half the cup. Then he shifts gears, saying to Manning, “Now tell me about Clifford Nolan. What have you learned?”

“Well, sir”—Manning instinctively grabs for the notebook in his jacket, but withdraws his hand from it, deciding that his report to Cain will remain vague on crucial details—“I’ve identified several possible suspects at this point, none of them very firm. One is an eccentric neighbor whose motive may have been no stronger than her displeasure with Cliff’s loud music. But others may have had stronger, darker reasons to kill Cliff.”

Both Cain and Smith lookup from the coffee they are drinking.

Manning continues, “Two possibilities have come to light. First, there may be some connection between Cliff’s murder and Pavo Zarnik’s discovery.”

“Such as?” asks Cain. His tone is skeptical.

Manning is not yet prepared to reveal to his publisher that Zarnik is a fraud, so he simply tells him, “Cliff may have been writing about Zarnik at the time he was killed, and there’s apparently some political interest in Zarnik’s discovery, but at this point, I’m merely exploring a hunch.”

Cain swirls the mix of coffee and cognac. “And the other possibility?”

Manning moves a step closer, between Cain and Smith, tightening their circle. “Yesterday, while cleaning out Cliff’s desk, I came across something very disturbing.” Responding to Smith’s questioning look of surprise, he explains, “I intended to meet with you, Gordon, first thing this morning, to tell you what I found, but, well … here we are. I regret to inform both of you that Clifford Nolan was involved in an activity that should be a profound embarrassment to the
Journal.
He had compiled dossiers, handwritten files of ‘dirt’ on numerous friends, colleagues, and public figures. He was running a profitable little sideline of extortion.”