The New Republic, Page 3

  “But this arrangement would be provisional,” Wallasek barreled on before Edgar had a chance to say yes or no. “Barrington’s been on board this paper from its inception. He’s an institution, if you like. If he shows up with an explanation I can even pretend to swallow, the posting’s his again. He knows this story, been on it from the ground up. So Saddler shows up next week, your string is for one week.”

  “The retainer, how much . . . ?”

  “You’re embarrassing me,” Wallasek cut him off. “Three-fifty a month, which is as appalling as it is nonnegotiable. Furthermore, you gotta be prepared for plenty of computer solitaire. It’s possible the SOB has called it quits, or maybe they’ve clawed each other’s eyes out; these hot-blooded paramilitary outfits often self-destruct. In that case, the story’s dead, and you’re on your own. I can’t guarantee another posting, either. This is a one-time offer. On the other hand, the story heats up, Saddler’s still among the disappeared? You could spin this into a big break. Think you could handle that?” In brandishing disclaimers, the editor clearly read Edgar as so hard-up that he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Wallasek was right.

  This was indeed a big break, so Edgar’s hesitation was absurd. The offer far exceeded his expectations, the very expectations that Wallasek had mocked for being set so high. Edgar had figured that at best he’d get the go-ahead to submit a feature on spec, or a promise to keep his CV “on file”—that is, incinerated only after he walked out and not before his eyes. This “super-string” paid peanuts, but had a spicy ring to it, and was a foot in the door. Maybe sometime soon 245 civilians would make him a lucky man: DEATH TOLL IN HUNDREDS AS SOB CLAIMS SABOTAGE OF UNITED FLIGHT 169, by Edgar Kellogg, Barba Correspondent.

  Still, something in the setup oppressed him. Whoever Saddler was, sight-unseen the guy clearly belonged to the elite Exception to Every Rule Club, whose members cast the sort of shadow in which Edgar had lived all his life: the eponymous Falconer, of course, but Edgar’s super-jock older brother as well; the suffocatingly august Richard Stokes Thole; Angela’s affected ex-lover on whom she was secretly still stuck; all those valedictorians, first-chairs, first-prize winners, and presidents.

  Furthermore, Edgar was leery of substituting for a minor-league celeb who could show up unannounced any time to reclaim his home, his car, his beat, his half-smoked Camel, and his cold coffee. The very name “Saddler” sounded burdensome. Edgar imagined himself trudging a bleak landscape mounded with his predecessor’s baggage, like a loose burro too dumb and biddable to buck the chattel off his back.

  “I guess I’m game,” said Edgar uncertainly. “How soon should I go?”

  “ASAP. And here . . .” Wallasek scribbled an address, which he apparently knew by heart. “Saddler’s digs.” He held out a sheet of paper, adding obscurely, “You won’t suffer.”

  Edgar accepted the paper. “So how do I . . . ?”

  “Book a flight, submit a receipt, we’ll reimburse,” Wallasek yadda-yadda-ed. “Oh, and one more thing.” The editor thumbed a furry leather contact book on his desk, then snatched the paper back to scrawl a number. “You might get a key to the house from Nicola.” Returning the page with a teasing shimmy, Wallasek leered. “One of Saddler’s friends. His very best friend, from all reports. I’ve never met her, but it’s funny how often Saddler’s numerous friends turn out to be good-looking women.”

  A red flag went up: after spending ten seconds on the logistics of Edgar’s whole new life and forty-five minutes on this feckless cad playing hooky, Wallasek still couldn’t stop talking about Saddler.

  Edgar folded the paper, stalling. He was sure there were dozens of questions he should be asking, equally sure that they wouldn’t occur to him until he was on the plane. “So, um. What’s my first assignment?”

  “The strange and terrible fate of Barrington Saddler, what else?”

  Chapter 3

  Long Time, No See

  IT MAY HAVE been almost twenty years since they’d nodded stiffly at each other across a throng of parents at Yardley’s graduation, but Edgar didn’t anticipate having any trouble recognizing Toby Falconer when they met for a post-interview drink. Toby was one of those golden boys. His hair was so blond it was almost white, confirming for Edgar, whose own mop was mouse-brown, that the chosen people weren’t self-made but genetically marked. Vertical as a mast, Toby’s Nordic frame and sea-green eyes called out for bearskins and a javelin. It was unlikely he’d kept that smooth, narrow chest into manhood, but Falconer was vain enough by sixteen that he’d probably become one of those Nautilus obsessives who poured rice milk on his muesli. Besides, Edgar’s paltry efforts to update his mental mock-up of Toby Falconer—to bulge the muscular wavelets of his stomach into a paunchy swell, to dull the sublime adolescent promise of that platinum blond down to pewter—felt juvenile, like drawing zits on a GQ model with a ballpoint.

  He was a little surprised that Falconer’s choice of venue didn’t show more panache. The Red Shoe had once been a chic Flatiron watering hole, but that was years back. Since, the crimson velvet cushions had faded to sickly pink, their plush nap flattened like a cat’s fur in the sink. The varnish on the dark banquettes had worn to expose stained pine. Its waiters were old enough to no longer describe their shifts as “day jobs.” Even Wall Street knew The Red Shoe was déclassé. Maybe it was sufficiently out of fashion to qualify for a tongue-in-cheek reprise, and Toby, as usual, was setting the pace.

  Edgar paused in The Red Shoe’s foyer, preparing himself for his old friend—or whatever it was that Toby had become by senior year. After mussing his hair, releasing his top shirt button, and yanking the Windsor knot to the side the way he once wrenched his school tie, Edgar ditched his suit jacket on the coat rack. Edgar’s image at Yardley had been hostile, unkempt, and seditious; an intact chalk-stripe might give Falconer a shock.

  Edgar turned and heard a plop. The hanger arm had flipped upside-down and dumped his jacket on the floor. Stripped screw. Flustered, Edgar scooped up the jacket, hastily brushing the lapels. Damn. Especially in these in-between moments—tossing a coat on a rack, swinging from a bucket seat—Toby Falconer had been infuriatingly graceful.

  Inhaling, Edgar launched through the double doors, his coat hooked over a shoulder. He was flattering himself to picture his old buddy, waiting expectantly in a corner by himself. Falconer was always mobbed. Forget homing in on the beacon of hair. Just locate the social goat-fuck in the very center of this dive, its biggest table, the one crammed with extra chairs—one more of which Edgar would be obliged to fetch and wedge in somewhere. Falconer would be braying, those mighty fluoride-fortified teeth arrayed to the smoky tin ceiling, arms spread and palms lifted like Jesus, the rest of the rabble wheezing, flopping, wiping tears.

  But the bar was quiet. Edgar scanned the large round middle tables: one subdued party, workmates, glancing at watches, looking for an excuse to scram. A couple of loners sagging in booths—one wrung-out dishrag, quietly sobbing (that made three weeping women that he’d happened across today; the daily New York average was five or six), and some balding nondescript.

  But then, why would Toby Falconer be prompt? Edgar would stew here for an hour, knocking back beers and refurbishing a resentment that two decades had failed to anodize into indifference. Finally, when Edgar was requesting his check, Toby would sashay in, double doors swinging with his dozen disciples, all drunk, loud, and dashingly dressed, infusing this old-man’s-bathrobe of a bar with its original camp, smoking-jacket flash. For now refusing to consider the higher likelihood that Falconer had blown off their appointment altogether, Edgar assumed a chair at the center-most table and signaled for a waiter.

  “Edgar?”

  Edgar twisted at the finger on his arm, and experienced one of those blank moments induced by headlines about Barba or Montenegro. It was the balding nondescript. His eyes were mild and dilute, their lids puffy; his face was broad and bland, his figure padded. The man’s skin was pallid, in contrast to the lustrous walnut glow
of a thrill-seeker who hot-dogged the winter slopes and sailed at the head of his regatta. But between the gray straggles across his scalp gleamed a few nostalgic streaks of platinum.

  “Falconer!” Edgar pumped the stranger’s hand.

  “I don’t know what football team you’re expecting. Let’s sit over here. Listen, I’m sorry about The Red Shoe. Last time I was here it was hopping, but I don’t get out much. Christ, you look the same! A little more pissed off, maybe . . . If that’s possible. But you sure kept that weight off.”

  “You, too, you look—terrific!”

  Falconer guffawed, a more muffled version of the old clarion bray, recognizable but rounder, less piercing. “Never thought I’d see the day Edgar Kellogg was polite. I look like dog shit! Dog shit with three hyperactive kids and a depressive wife. What’ll you have?”

  Edgar liked to think of himself as a Wild Turkey man. “Amstel Light.”

  “Never lose the fear, do you?” Falconer smiled, his teeth no longer blinding, though that was unfair; everybody’s teeth yellowed a bit with age. But the smile also seemed physically smaller, and that was impossible.

  “Not quite,” Edgar admitted, telling himself not to stare. “Inside this runt there’s always a fat slob struggling to get out.”

  “A lot of Yardley’s a blur now, but one thing I remember clear as a Dialing for Dollars rerun is our very own Incredible Shrinking Man: Edgar Kellogg, dropping a size a week. I could track the calendar by the notches cinched on your belt. Night after night in the dining hall, chomping through a barricade of celery sticks. Amazing.”

  “I’d read somewhere that you burn more energy eating celery than you ingest. Still, I don’t remember inspiring much amazement. More like hilarity.”

  “Only for the first fifty pounds.”

  “Fifty pounds’ worth of ridicule could last a lifetime.”

  “Seems so. Look at you. You’re still mad!”

  Edgar emitted a derisive puh and looked away, signaling once more, fruitlessly, for the waiter. He cracked a half-smile, and tore at a cuticle. “Maybe.”

  Toby biffed him softly on the arm. “You knocked my socks off. Never seen such determination, before or since.”

  “Yeah, I did get the feeling at the time that’s what earned me—”

  “Earned you what?”

  “Admission. To your—” it was hard to put this tactfully—“demanding circle.”

  “I don’t remember admitting you to anything,” Toby dismissed. “You just stopped keeping to yourself for a while. A short while, come to think of it. Hey, service stinks here. Better get us drinks from the bar.”

  Edgar welcomed the interruption, since Falconer’s rewrite of history was outlandish.

  Accepting the Amstel, he tried to restore an easy humor. “I order this cow piss compulsively. But I’ve no idea how I’ll ever get to be a larger-than-life character drinking candy-ass beer.”

  “You’re a character.” Falconer reared back in the booth with some of his Yardley authority and took a slug of his microbrew draft. “That’s enough. No such thing as larger-than-life, Kellogg. There’s only life-size, and any magnification is just other people’s bullshit. So how’d the interview go?”

  Dazed by his good fortune, Edgar was only beginning to apprehend that the interview had gone staggeringly well. Much as he might have liked to conclude that he’d cut an impressive figure, chances were that Falconer had given him a recommendation far more enthusiastic than Edgar’s virtual-stranger status merited, and that Falconer had stroke.

  “Swell, I guess. Wallasek gave me a super-string. In Barba.”

  Toby made a face. “I should have warned you that’s what he had in mind. Better than nothing, I hope. But I’ve done a couple of features out of there. It ain’t Club Med.”

  “You think it’s dangerous?” asked Edgar hopefully.

  “Well, as you know the Sobs have never set off anything in their own territory. I guess the logic runs, don’t shit in your own bed. But that could change. And what makes for a dangerous place is dangerous people. Or that’s the line Saddler used to squeeze a hardship allowance out of Wallasek. I don’t know why his lordship bothered to be so creative. Wallasek would have handed Saddler his firstborn son swaddled in C-notes, no questions asked.”

  Already any reference to Barrington Saddler threw Edgar lurching nauseously between opposing inclinations, as if he were careering up switchbacks in a bus. He both longed to discuss this preposterous fellow and to avoid all mention of the man with the same degree of urgency. When he gave in and pursued the subject, he instantly regretted it, the way you curse yourself for having picked a scab. “What is so wonderful about the little prick?”

  “Saddler’s not little. I’ve only met him a handful of times. Bit scary, frankly.”

  Even in this bewilderingly modest an incarnation, Edgar couldn’t fathom Tobias Falconer being frightened by anybody. “That name for starters. What kind of a blowhard goes by ‘Barrington’?”

  “You obviously haven’t met the guy. Weird, but it suits him. He’s English, you know. And large. He almost requires three syllables.”

  “So he’s fat,” Edgar pounced upon victoriously.

  Falconer frowned. “Nnno-o. Just big. Big, big, big. In every sense.”

  “Why’s he scary? I get the impression you don’t like the guy much.”

  “That’s just it: I shouldn’t. He’s got my own editor wrapped around his pinky. He gets away with murder—like, for .01 percent of the shit he’s pulled any mere mortal would have been canned. He has this tut-tut, frightfully-frightfully accent that makes Americans feel crass and Coca-Cola by comparison. So whenever I’ve thought about it—and I’ve thought about it, which is one thing that’s scary—everything about the man grates. But Saddler only gets on my nerves when he’s not there. He never rubs me the wrong way in person. Face-to-face Barrington Saddler is inexpressibly charming, and I spend the entire time frantically trying to get him to like me.”

  “That is scary,” said Edgar, thinking: money down, no one had ever described Edgar Kellogg behind his back as “inexpressibly charming.”

  “How’d you find Wallasek?” Falconer asked.

  “Paternalistic for my taste.” Absent any encouragement in Toby’s expression, Edgar exercised his proclivity for putting his foot in it. “And awfully in the know. Wallasek thinks he has a window into the mind of the SOB because of Saddler—when what are the chances that both of them know dick?

  “Also,” Edgar plunged recklessly on, “Wallasek talks a humble line, about ‘history’s secretaries,’ but you can tell he thinks journalism is a lofty calling fraught with daunting tests of fire. As opposed to being mostly about the ability to write a sentence. Which I can, but I don’t think he was impressed by my clips. I’ve only been at this a few months, and Wallasek didn’t care what the articles said—typical name-brand mentality. I didn’t walk in with the New York Times and The Atlantic plastered to my forehead . . . What’s so funny?”

  “You really haven’t changed, have you?”

  “How’s that?” asked Edgar warily.

  “Guy Wallasek gave you an interview on the basis of a pretty slight clip file, and what’s more gave you a job. Which, though Barba’s not Hawaii, I assume you want. Doesn’t that make you grateful?”

  Edgar folded his arms and bunched into the corner, scowling to beat the band. It was a hatches-battened position he’d often assumed when he was fat. “Wallasek offered me a temporary post that could be ripped out from under me by your big, big, big friend any time he cares to show his face, an arrangement that would be intolerable to staffers. A string will pay squat. I was a sharp lawyer and I can write. I’ll do an ace job, and he’s getting a bargain. Why should I be grateful?”

  Falconer shook his head. “So hard on people, Kellogg. You that hard on yourself?”

  An honest answer was too complicated: that he hacked on other people as a substitute for hacking on himself, and it didn’t work. That he ru
shed to dislike others before they could dislike him; that Edgar’s hasty dislike veritably ensured they would indeed dislike him; that, alas, beating acquaintances to the antagonistic punch had never protected him from the ensuing sense of injury that he had apparently brought on himself. A simpler answer—that Edgar perceived himself as an island of underrated promise in a sea of undeserving incompetence—would sound iffy in the open air. “I call them as I see them. You said yourself that Wallasek’s relationship to this Barrington guy is fucked up.”

  “I didn’t say that. Wallasek’s a good editor, and a decent man. He claims he doesn’t, but he misses the fray—being so smack in the middle when some corner of the world goes up in flames that the hairs singe off your arm. So he has a weakness for the inside track; any journalist does. As for Saddler? Wallasek nine-to-fives it, he’s bored, feels left out. Saddler blasts into town and they go out until all hours and get slammed and meet kooky people and get kicked out of bars and Wallasek feels plugged in again. A minor failing, if it’s a failing at all. Why not give him a chance? It’s not a bad policy. You’re a smart guy, Kellogg, but you can be so—savage.”

  Edgar felt chastened. He didn’t like feeling chastened. “Good God, Falconer. You’ve gone and got sincere on me.”

  Toby was rolling the bottom of his empty beer mug in contemplative circles. “I was actually surprised to hear from you. Not sorry, mind you. But surprised.”

  Edgar wasn’t about to admit that he rang Falconer over his own dead body. “It had been a long time,” he submitted neutrally.