Dateline: Atlantis (4 page)

It's not chic, but she's been in her fourth apartment in the six years she's lived in Los Angeles, and nothing ever will fit. That's because L.A. doesn't feel like anything more than a way station on her career path. No wonder she spends all her time at the office. The newspaper is the only place that feels like home.

But even the office is thorny at the moment. She senses eyes boring into the back of her head, so Amaryllis turns and fidgets with her shoe, trying to avoid the gaze of Sonia, the editor's secretary. Sonia considers all visitors to the secret den of Noel Wright III to be assaults by undeserving interlopers, even a favored reporter like Amaryllis. Sonia is not fooled for one second by Amaryllis' shoe gazing. Her eyes are pinned on the reporter's face.

Amaryllis is determined not to crack. She has an appointment and some guard-dog receptionist isn't going to make her back down. The staring continues. As Sonia's gaze strengthens in force, Amaryllis rocks back and forth on her three-inch heels, eyes on the closed door. She considers the photos and sound recordings she left at the apartment and wonders if there's time to run back and retrieve them. They'd bolster her story. The phone console buzzes. Sonia whispers into the receiver, and the editor's oak-paneled door swings open.

“Amy,” Wright booms, whisking her into his chambers with one strong arm, while letting the door swing behind them. As the door closes with a creak, Amaryllis sees Sonia peering Wright's way, trying to send a wordless message, but Wright clicks the door shut. He steers Amaryllis to his desk, a fine slab of teak dotted with doo-dads from his many travels: Japanese happy cats, tiny African drums, Tibetan hand chimes. She's been at several newspapers before the
Star
and never met an editor with such a streak of vanity. Most of the bosses want to be perceived as one of the gang and pile their cheap plywood-topped workstations with towers of paperwork. They are “working editors,” deep into printing ink and endless phone calls.

Wright, an Englishman by birth who has adopted the United States lifestyle, has yet to get the concept of the American work ethic. He doesn't seem to labor at anything except to calm the Los Angeles political waters. A steady stream of community leaders visits his inner sanctum, but one of his own reporters is a rare visitor. He has his favorites, and Amaryllis knows she's one the special ones.

“So you found something big, I hear,” Wright says, arranging his collection of pricey fountain pens in their crystal holder. “Barney tells me it's really a prize,” he adds as he leans closer, as if to conspire with her. It isn't until then that she notices his eyes open wide and sincere—or else they fool her with manufactured frankness. Wright looks alight with a journalist's glow. He's onto an amazing scoop. All his own. Well, of course, Amaryllis', too.

She realizes it is her turn to answer but finds herself too wrapped up in the swank style of the office, Wright's gushing presence, even the smiling Japanese happy cat. The boss senses her anxiety and begins to coach her. “Barney says you found ruins…,” he starts.

“Yes, yes, we did,” she begins, her voice still jammed high in her throat. Funny how the name of Barney Lodge, her section editor, suddenly calms her, makes her feel secure. “You see Barney let me go down there—“

“Mexico.”

“Yes, on a junket. A dumb travel piece. You know.” She begins to fidget with her skirt. Why tell the editor the feature piece was bogus? Everyone on staff gets these freebies—just another public-relations junket. Of course, the
Times
would never allow them, but the
Star
has looser rules. But Wright doesn't focus on that. He keeps prompting.

“And you left Cancún to dive.”

“Yes, I did. I was impetuous, but I paid for the side trip myself.” She looks up at Wright, who appears delighted, as if he is watching an amusing cartoon show. His eyes are lustrous, and he laughs as he brushes away the extra expense with his broad hand. Anything for Amaryllis, his gestures say. She swallows and continues. “And I found that amazing caves had opened up after a hurricane. So I explored.”

“As would any good reporter,” Wright murmurs as he reaches behind his desk to pull out a newspaper. It is in Spanish and says something about new caves in the Caribbean. The word “¿Atlantis?” hovers over the picture in seventy-two point type. Amaryllis cringes.

“These are different caves than the ones you found,” Wright says, pointing at the paper's logo. It is from Havana. How Wright supplies himself with Cuban news is anyone's guess. There are so many rumors about him: private showers adjacent to his office, an allowance for celebrity dinners, mob figures hustled in at night. Who knows what to believe?

“Mine led to the most amazing pyramids you'd ever see. All covered with sea creatures and barnacles, but underneath, definitely Mayan construction. After Garret photographed it all, there was that ugly separatist incident.”

“The bombing.”

“Yes. The levee and breakwaters broke and the ocean rushed back in. It's all gone again. Below about a hundred feet of water. We were lucky to get away with our lives.”

“But you have pictures?”

“Garret must have taken fifty rolls or more—and I had digital images on my little camera. Not good ones, but they are there. Lucas managed to pitch our tents on high ground and our backpacks and camera bags were safe.”

“And you have an eyewitness?”

“Of course,” Amaryllis says, narrowing her eyes.
What game is he playing?
Doesn't she count as a reliable observer
?
“I had a guide. A Mayan man. He's quoted in my notes, and I have some recordings on my tapes.”

Wright explodes out of his leather chair and throws his arms wide as if to gather her in a fatherly embrace. She flinches and presses back further in her chair.

“Then we have it,” he says, voice singing in triumph. “The story we can rub in the
Times
' face. Prizes. Respect. Everything.”

“Well,” she answers, trying to keep his histrionics in check. And what's all this Atlantis nonsense? She never considered that for a moment even after her encounter with the crystal. The crystal! Her stomach contracts for a second before she realizes that the gem is safe—wrapped in silk and sitting at the bottom of her purse. That's one part of her adventure that's not going into the story—or into Wright's ear.

But Atlantis? She doesn't know a thing about unknown worlds, or archaeology, or ancient civilizations. How is she supposed to trump the
Times
with this?

“Yes, yes. It's a big story. Huge,” he begins to urge her out of her chair, patting her elbows and then piloting her to the door. “Start writing then. And where is Lucas?”

She reaches into her blazer pocket and hands him Garret's business card. Those cards are all over the features department, but somehow, the editor-in-chief is clueless about the newspaper's most prolific freelance photographer.

“He usually uses e-mail,” she says. As if he didn't know.

“I'll get him right away.”

He waves and she almost lets the door shut but then struggles with the heavy wood panel to work herself back into the room. She meets Wright's alarmed eyes. Sonia jerks alert at her sentry post. Apparently, when your audience with Wright is over, you don't try to wedge back in.

“Don't use the word Atlantis in the headline—or anywhere,” Amaryllis says, trying not to plead. “It would be embarrassing. I want this taken seriously.”

Wright closes his eyes as if taking a solemn oath. “You have my word. I want this to work as much as you do.”

#

Lights blink and twitch in the hills beyond Pasadena and still Amaryllis works the keyboard like Van Cliburn at his grand piano. Her fingers touch the plastic keys with such deftness it looks as if she is gliding over them rather than pressing buttons. Some reporters hunch over their computers, hunting and pecking, picking out each letter with deliberate care. Amaryllis has no need for such clumsiness. She is a keyboard savant, and she knows it.

The story takes shape the way a crystal builds. She uses the library for a little research and discovers that anything as deeply submerged as the caves must have existed before the Ice Age. That is the germ, the matrix of the story. Around this builds the physical form, the grid, the lines of lateral movement. From there, the story fans out with personal visions, quotations, references to history. Then the grid fills in with solid matter, the facts and numbers. She never needs an outline or a draft. The story is an organic whole; all the writer needs is to catch the seed and the story blossoms forth, like a sapling leafing out its full form. By the time her fingers pause, there is hardly a soul left in the vast
Star
office.

A cleaning crew roars in and out with their industrial-strength vacuum and hushed apologies while she writes. Amaryllis merely lifts her feet to let the man with the vacuum hose get under her desk. She is so hyper-focused, she barely knows he had been there. Used to the eccentricities of writers, the crew never attempts to break her concentration. On other nights, she might have greeted them with a smile or an offer of free popcorn. Tonight, she is in her zone, far from social niceties and her own physical needs.

When her fingers stop, the lights across the hills are switching off and pre-dawn gloom rolls along the eastern sky. Too late to party, too soon to start another day, the Angelenos pause for uneasy sleep. Amaryllis realizes she is finished for the night. Only the critics had stopped in while she was working—plunking out their reviews on impossibly short deadlines, then rushing to the copy desk to check their word counts, watching the headlines fill the screens, answering questions about ticket prices and parking provisions. Then, the critics were gone, some having spent only forty-five minutes on a major Shakespearean production or a Mozart opera. No matter how short the time, the reviews are always brilliant, because these critics are the few humans on earth who can work such magic. They are the kind, like her, who think on their feet, write sentences in their heads during intermissions, work out whole analyses during solo drives back to the office.

Now, only the sports crew is left. She can hear them down the hall tossing a foam football across the room.
Thwack.
It probably hit the head of the copy editor waiting for his nightly stats feed.
Fump.
The ball next will sail into the hands of the NFL writer, who is long finished with his story but not ready to go home either. A howl of laughter tumbles down the hallway as the assistant sports editor yells something at a TV screen. There wasn't much to do on a Tuesday night after the winter holidays. All the features are prewritten, the special sections gone to bed, the interviewees asleep.

Ignoring regulations, Amaryllis pops a rewritable CD into her computer and burns a copy of her story. Then she makes another copy onscreen and e-mails it to her home account. Too many crashes, too many software meltdowns have given her the jitters, and she doesn't care if the I.T. department likes her stopgap measures or not. She isn't losing this story.

She stands, feeling her legs come back to agonizing life, while her shoulders twitch in pain. It's time to return to that soul-less apartment she sleeps in.
I'll fill in Gabriel's quotes tomorrow.
She slips the CD into her pocket, writes a note to Barney, telling him she burned the midnight oil and probably will stumble in sometime after noon. Then she heads out the door, down the elevator, picks her way around the drunks passed out on the outdoor streets.
L.A. part glamour, part sleaze.
A fog creeps in from the ocean, but she finds her car easily in the mist. Soon she is sailing along the Santa Monica Freeway, heading home to West Hollywood and filled with an unfamiliar sense of accomplishment.

#

“I told you I was up to nearly dawn,” she growls into the phone, irritated at being woken up. It's Barney.

“I wouldn't wake you if this wasn't big,” he says, his voice dipping like a conspirator's. “Wright loves your piece…”

“Hell, I'm not done. What's he snooping for?”

“Let me finish,” Barney breaks in. “We can't find your photog.” She lets that sink in for a few foggy minutes. No pictures, no story. Without Garret she is nowhere.

“I'll get him. Let me call.”

“No, you don't get it. He's not answering. No one has seen him since yesterday. I even called Howell's, the place he usually uses when he needs prints developed quickly. They haven't seen him.”

“I doubt he'd let anyone else touch that film or the digital chips,” she says. Alarms go off in her brain.
My own camera, my tapes, where are they?
“I'll call you back.” She slips out of bed and into a sweatshirt and jeans. A thorough search of her apartment, which doesn't take long, turns up her complete set of still-packed baggage minus the mini-tape recorder. And the tapes. The digital camera remains, with a few grainy, unconvincing photos in the memory chip. The other chip, the good one, is missing. She goes over to her front door and inspects the locks. The metal is scraped and the door jamb is splintered in a couple spots. While Amaryllis was writing, someone had been busy burglarizing. When she came home last night, dead tired, she never noticed any of these details. She just fell into bed. A white-hot blast of anger hits her brain as she realizes her carelessness.