Spearfield's Daughter (59 page)

Tom
had never met a policeman who didn't have hopes of an early arrest. He went back to the hotel, wrote his piece on what he had and phoned it through to Chuck Nevin, giving it extra depth with his own reactions to the escape of the girl who had kidnapped him and Cleo all that time ago. He hung up after talking to Nevin, then called Simone. She was upset, almost distraught.

“I called M. Nevin and he told me why you had gone to Hamburg. What are you doing? Trying to get yourself killed?”

“
Chérie,
they don't even know I'm in town. They're not interested in me.”

“That girl, what's her name? Fuchs? She'll be interested, if she finds out you're in Hamburg. You're a fool, you don't understand women.”

You can say that again.
“I'll take care,
chérie
, I promise. I'll tidy up the story tomorrow and I'll be home in the evening. How was Alain?”

“More sensible than you.” She was silent a moment, then she said, “I love you. Please be careful.”

He hung up, guilt hanging on him like an iron overcoat. Having tasted news again, he knew that this was not going to be the last time he would go off on his own; he would be pestering Chuck Nevin for further stories to cover, at freelance rates and minimum expenses; he would be spending his novelist's royalties to satisfy himself as a newspaperman. The old game dog was hoping for a permanent season out there in the swamps where news fell. The Rosa Fuchs escape was as big an event for him as it was for the German prison authorities.

The phone rang. He picked it up, expecting to hear Simone again; then remembered he had not told her where he was staying. It was not Simone, though it was a woman. “Herr Border?”

“Yes.”

“This is Rosa Fuchs.”

How the hell had she known where to find him? Was there some leak in the police department? “How did you know I was here? What do you want?”

“Never mind how I knew where to contact you—that doesn't concern you. I want to warn you, Herr Border. I have other things to do right now, but some day, if you come back to Germany, I shall kill you. You and Fräulein Spearfield.”

“She is not here with me.” His voice seemed to be shaking in his throat, but it sounded steady
enough
in his ears.

“Pass on the warning,” said Rosa Fuchs. Then her voice lightened, she laughed, as if freedom were taking hold of her like a drug. “
Auf wiedersehn,
Heir Border. Take care, as you Americans say.”

She hung up and Tom wondered if he should call the police. Then he decided against it: he would tell no one of Rosa Fuchs's threat, not Simone, not even Cleo.

Sensibly he left Hamburg next morning, going no further with the story. Simone welcomed him back as if he were from a war returning: “Oh, I was worried for you! Don't volunteer again for such dangers—”

He tried to sound convincing. “There was no danger. I went after a story, I got it and now it's all over. Relax.”

“You promise me there won't be other stories? Sit down and write another novel.”

Just like that.
“I'll write one after lunch. Let's make love.”

She was always willing to do that. Then, as they lay in bed afterwards, she said, “I think I am pregnant. Isn't that marvellous?”

“Great,” he said, and knew he must sound like a cheerleader whose team had just lost the ball game 52-nil. He hastened to sound better: “I mean really great! If it's a boy, I want him born in the United States, so he can grow up to be President.”

“What's wrong with being President of France?” She was building up to start speaking in French.

“Nothing, darling,” he said, keeping English in the bed with them. “Let's make love again. We may get a President for each side of the Atlantic.”

“It doesn't work like that,” she said, and he wasn't sure whether she was trying to give him a lesson in politics or biology.

A week later, when he dropped in once more at the
Courier
bureau, a note was waiting for him from the associate editor in New York:
An excellent story. It brought back memories. We ran it on Page One and dug up an old pic of you to head it—I hope you haven't changed. Love, Cleo.

Love, Cleo: that meant nothing these days, when everyone was everyone's
darling.
And what memories had it brought back to her? Memories of them together in bed or in danger? And no, he hadn't changed; at least not in his feelings for her. He wrote back, a note as short as hers, polite but distant. But he
knew
he could never be distant enough from her.

Two months later Simone had a miscarriage. He felt sicker and more distressed than she, but his condition was caused by guilt. Relief does not always make a person feel better.

16

I

JAKE LINTAS
had agreed to retire as editor; he could read the writing on the wall at any distance you cared to name. He put on his homburg, got his golden handshake, gave no wishes at all to Cleo and went out of the newsroom and the
Courier
without a backward glance. Cleo watched him go and felt badly. She was ambitious but she had squeamish feet; she found it hard to keep her balance walking over others as she climbed the ladder. Suddenly she wished Jake Lintas had waited till he had reached the proper retiring age. But by then, of course, the
Courier
might have sunk and a ladder is of no use in a sea.

Two other senior editors, both on the verge of retirement, both of them not wanting to blight their newspaper careers by finishing up working under a woman, also resigned. One of them was the Washington bureau chief.

Cleo sent for Joe Hamlyn and Carl Fishburg. She had waited a couple of days before she had moved into Jake Lintas's office; she wanted his chair bottom cold before she sat on it. It was only a small tactic, but she hoped all those in the newsroom had taken note of it. She might have to resort to such small tactics for quite some time.

Joe Hamlyn sat down, looking relaxed and easy with her. But Carl Fishburg was wary, as if he expected her to ask for
his
resignation. She had no intention of doing that: she knew how good a newspaperman he was and she wanted him on her side. He just had to be shaken out of the rut he had fallen into.

“I want one of you to take over the Washington bureau.”

“Isn't that something the paper's publisher should decide?” said Fishburg.

“Carl, you know that Mrs. Roux has been no more than the nominal publisher for years. Jake was the one who decided who got what jobs were going. If you want to take the matter to Mrs. Roux, I shan't
disagree
—”

“Let's hear what you have to say first,” said Joe Hamlyn.

Cleo gave them a quick summary of what she had in mind. “I want more
punch.
In every department and particularly from Washington. From now on the
Courier
is going to be non-party—”

“The Empress won't like that.”

“I think she'll accept it, if we don't go over to being a propaganda sheet for the Democrats. I want someone down in Washington who can shake them up—the bureau as well as the politicians—”

Carl Fishburg suddenly relaxed. “It's not for me, Cleo. I'm a New Yorker born and bred. I'll stay on the city desk, if you don't mind. I'd be lost down in Washington. I still think there's Indians out there west of the Hudson River. Have they got inside toilets yet out in Los Angeles? May Jesus Christ and Sam Houston forgive me, I've never seen Texas and don't want to. I could care less about the rest of America. I could care less for the guys who represent it.”

Cleo smiled at him in surprise. “You're human, Carl.”

He smiled at her, the first time he had ever done so. “I'm beginning to think you may be, too.”

“I'm intruding on this love affair,” said Joe Hamlyn. “I think I better go to Washington.”

“Do you mean that? Your wife won't mind moving?”

“She'll probably raise hell. But if I tell her she might get to have tea and grits with Rosalynn Carter . . .” Then he turned serious: “I think you're so damned right, Cleo. The paper's got to be re-vamped, otherwise we'll be out on our asses, no jobs at all, Washington or New York or anywhere. Maybe it's time I got off my bony ass and went out and did something about it. Anyhow, I've always wanted to shoot down a few of those smug sons-of-bitches in Washington.”

So Joe Hamlyn went to Washington and within a month the news and comment coming out of the bureau showed there was a new gun in town. Cleo retired Bill Brenner and brought in the girl from Denver whom she had recommended to Jake Lintas. Ruby Milford was in her mid-twenties, a brown mouse with a soft voice and a dagger-like pen. There were protests from readers, including women readers, but Cleo ignored the letters and over the next six months Ruby Milford was accepted in the company of Herblock and Paul Conrad and other top political cartoonists; being a woman she was, of course, never considered to be quite as good as any of them. The editorials were sharpened, the wind cut out of them.
More
pictures were featured, giving Bill Puskas new enthusiasm. The
Courier
slowly began to change, a fact that brought no new readers and lost some of the older, more devoted ones.

Jack came over from London on his usual fortnightly trip. He took her to dinner at the Tower of London, certain now that it was a safe rendezvous and that the food, too, was safe.

“How's it going?”

“Not too well, I'm afraid. Circulation's down.” Cleo had felt dispirited when the circulation manager had given her the figures yesterday.

“Don't worry.” He patted her hand, being fatherly but not recognizing it. “It's bound to happen. You'll lose the dead-wood readers before you attract the new ones. It was the same way when I took over the
Examiner.
Readers aren't out there on street corners panting for a new-look
Courier.
They'll discover you in their own good time.”

“How long will that be? Jack, I'm spending money while circulation is dropping. If circulation goes down again next month, so will the advertising lineage. I'm supposed to be saving the paper, not hurrying it into bankruptcy.” For the first time she had other people's jobs resting on her and the responsibility weighed her down.

“I've never seen you like this. If there was anyone I knew with confidence, it was you.” Other than himself, of course, but he assumed she would take that for granted.

“Up till now I've always had a buffer between me and the public—an editor like myself. All I really had to do was write to please him and trust to his judgement. I was lucky I had such a good man in London as Quentin.”

“He couldn't help you here. This is a different country, different tastes. You'll do all right. Start swaggering again.”

She didn't know she had stopped. She must look as dispirited as she felt.

“I'll take you home. I'm glad you moved from that dump over that shop. That would be no place to be going back to, not when you feel like this.”

She had been going back to it for four years, sometimes feeling every bit as low as she did tonight. The night after Tom had told her he was married, the night her father and the Labour government had been kicked out of office, the night of Hal Rainer's death . . . Did Jack think she had been nothing but
happy
for the past four years?

She had moved out of the apartment above Kugel's Deli the week after she had moved into the editor's chair. She had been afraid that Mr. Kugel would be offended, but he had presented her with a goodbye bouquet of mixed sausage, salami, knackwurst, grutzwurst, the fruit of his Second Avenue garden.

“Your age, Miss Spearfield, you oughta be moving up in the world, it's only right. The editor of a big newspaper sleeping over a salami store, people will think it can't be a very classy newspaper.”

“Maybe I'll come back occasionally, Mr. Kugel. You can tell me what the man in the street is thinking.”

“Who cares what the man in the street is thinking? He's an ignoramus. All those public opinion polls, you ever heard a constructive thought from the man in the street? He's a complainer, nothing more. Take no notice of him,” said the man in the street from Second Avenue.

“You sound like an autocrat, Mr. Kugel.”

“What better to be? In the store I'm a hypocrite, you gotta be, you want the customers coming back. Between friends, I'm an autocrat. Good luck up on 89th Street. It's nice neighbourhood. I win the lottery, I'll move up there and be an autocrat all the time.”

The apartment on East 89th Street was not as large as the one Jack had provided for her in London; but it suggested more luxury than the one on Second Avenue and it did not smell of fresh bread, sausages and other odours that she had never identified. A Puerto Rican woman came in every day and kept the place immaculate and Cleo was pleased to come home to it every evening. But it wasn't
home:
that was still the old house in the street above the beach in Coogee. When she thought about it, which wasn't often, she was surprised that her roots were still tangled in the soil she thought she had deserted forever.

Since she had moved into the new apartment Jack had taken to coming up with her for a goodnight drink. His behaviour was still that of a good friend. He would kiss her goodnight, but always on the cheek: he was being avuncular, as if trying to avoid being fatherly. She did not encourage him to be anything else: they were partners, not lovers.

This evening he sat down, made himself comfortable; she knew at once he was planning to stay the night. She sat down beside him, instead of opposite him as she usually did, and put her hand on his.