The Fourth Hand (39 page)

“I see,” Wal ingford replied. “Then I suppose I might as wel keep the anchor job.”

“But are you sure you
want
the job, Pat?”

He believed that Mary wasn’t being cautious just because Wharton and Sabina were there in her office. (The moon-faced CEO and the bitter Sabina sat listening with seeming indifference, not saying a word.) What Wal ingford understood about Mary was that she didn’t real y know what he wanted, and this made her nervous.

“It depends,” Patrick replied. “It’s hard to imagine trading an anchor chair for field assignments, even if I get to pick my own assignments. You know what they say:

‘Been there, done that.’ It’s hard to look forward to going backward. I guess you’d have to make me an offer, so I have a better idea of what you have in mind.”

Mary looked at him, smiling brightly. “How was Wisconsin?”

she asked. Wharton, whose frozen blandness would begin to blend in with the furniture if he didn’t say something (or at least twitch) in the next thirty seconds, coughed minimal y into his cupped palm. The unbelievable blankness of his expression cal ed to mind the vacuity of a masked executioner; even Wharton’s cough was underexpressed.

Sabina, whom Wal ingford could barely remember sleeping with—now that he thought of it, she’d whimpered in her sleep like a dog having a dream—cleared her throat as if she’d swal owed a pubic hair.

“Wisconsin was fine.”

Wal ingford spoke as neutral y as possible, but Mary correctly deduced that nothing had been decided between him and Doris Clausen. He couldn’t have waited to tel her if he and Mrs. Clausen were real y a couple. Just as, the second Mary knew she was pregnant, she wouldn’t wait to tel him. And they both knew it had been necessary to enact this standoff in the presence of Wharton and Sabina, who both knew it, too. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been advisable for Patrick Wal ingford and Mary Shanahan to be alone together.

“Boy, is it ever
frosty
around here!” was what Angie told Wal ingford, when she got him alone in the makeup chair.

“Is it
ever
!” Patrick admitted. He was glad to see the good-hearted girl, who’d left his apartment the cleanest it had been since the day he moved in.

“So . . . are ya gonna tel me about Wisconsin or what?”

Angie asked.

“It’s too soon to say,” Wal ingford confessed. “I’ve got my fingers crossed,” he added—an unfortunate choice of words because he was reminded of Mrs. Clausen’s fertility charm.

“My fingers are crossed for ya, too,” Angie said. She had stopped flirting with him, but she was no less sincere and no less friendly.

Wal ingford would throw away his digital alarm clock and replace it with a new one, because whenever he looked at the old one he would remember Angie’s piece of gum stuck there—as wel as the near-death gyrations that had caused her gum to be expectorated with such force. He didn’t want to lie in bed thinking about Angie unless Doris Clausen said no.

For now, Doris was being vague. Wal ingford had to acknowledge that it was hard to know what to make of the photographs she sent him, although her accompanying comments, if not cryptic, struck him as more mischievous than romantic.

She hadn’t sent him a copy of every picture on the rol ; missing, Patrick saw, were two he’d taken himself. Her purple bathing suit on the clothesline, alongside his swimming trunks—he’d taken two shots in case she wanted to keep one of the photos for herself. She had kept them both.

The first two photos Mrs. Clausen sent were unsurprising, beginning with that one of Wal ingford wading in the shal ow water near the lakeshore with little Otto naked in his arms.

The second picture was the one that Patrick took of Doris and Otto junior on the sundeck of the main cabin. It was Wal ingford’s first night at the cottage on the lake, and nothing had happened yet between him and Mrs. Clausen.

As if she weren’t even thinking that anything
might
happen between them, her expression was total y relaxed, free of any expectation. The only surprise was the third photograph, which Wal ingford didn’t know Doris had taken; it was the one of him sleeping in the rocking chair with his son. Patrick did not know how to interpret Mrs. Clausen’s remarks in the note that accompanied the photographs—

especial y how matter-of-factly she reported that she’d taken two shots of little Otto asleep in his father’s arms and had kept one for herself. The tone of her note, which Wal ingford had at first found mischievous, was also ambiguous. Doris had written:
On the evidence of the
enclosed, you have
the potential to be a good father.

O n l y
the potential
? Patrick’s feelings were hurt.

Nevertheless, he read
The English
Patient
in the fervent hope he would find a passage to bring to her attention—

maybe one she had marked, one they both liked.

When Wal ingford cal ed Mrs. Clausen to thank her for the photographs, he thought he might have found such a passage. “I loved that part about the ‘list of wounds,’

especial y when she stabs him with the fork. Do you remember that?

‘The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.’ ”

Doris was silent on her end of the phone.

“You didn’t like that part?” Patrick asked.

“I’d just as soon not be reminded of
your
bite marks, and your other wounds,” she told him.

“Oh.”

Wal ingford would keep reading
The English Patient.
It was merely a matter of reading the novel more careful y; yet he threw caution to the wind when he came upon Almásy saying of Katharine, “She was hungrier to change than I expected.”

This was surely true of Patrick’s impression of Mrs.

Clausen as a lover—she’d been voracious in ways that had astonished him. He cal ed her immediately, forgetting that it was very late at night in New York; in Green Bay, it was only an hour earlier. Given little Otto’s schedule, Doris usual y went to bed early. She didn’t sound like herself when she answered the phone. Patrick was instantly apologetic.

“I’m sorry. You were asleep.”

“That’s okay. What is it?”

“It’s a passage in
The English Patient,
but I can tel you what it is another time. You can cal me in the morning, as early as you want. Please wake me up!” he begged her.

“Read me the passage.”

“It’s just something Almásy says about Katharine—”

“Go on. Read it.”

He read: “ ‘She was hungrier to change than I expected.’ ”

Out of context, the passage suddenly struck Wal ingford as pornographic, but he trusted Mrs. Clausen to remember the context.

“Yes, I know that part,” she said, without emotion. Maybe she was stil half asleep.

“Wel . . .” Wal ingford started to say.

“I suppose
I
was hungrier than
you
expected. Is that it?”

Doris asked. (The way she said it, she might as wel have asked, “Is that
all
?”)

“Yes,” Patrick answered. He could hear her sigh.

“Wel . . .” Mrs. Clausen began. Then she seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “It real y is too late to cal ,” was her only comment. Which left Wal ingford with nothing to say but “I’m sorry.” He would have to keep reading and hoping.

Meanwhile, Mary Shanahan summoned him to her office—

not
for the purpose, Patrick soon realized, of tel ing him that she was or wasn’t pregnant. Mary had something else on her mind. While Wal ingford’s idea of a renegotiated contract of at least three years’ duration was not to the al -

news network’s liking—not even if Wal ingford was wil ing to give up the anchor chair and return to reporting from the field—the twenty-four-hour international channel was interested to know if Wal ingford would accept “occasional”

field assignments.

“Do you mean that they want me to begin the process of phasing myself out of the anchor job?” Patrick asked.

“Were you to accept, we would renegotiate your contract,”

Mary went on, without answering his question. “Natural y you’d get to keep your present salary.” She made the issue of not offering him a raise sound like a positive thing. “I believe we’re talking about a two-year contract.” She wasn’t exactly committing herself to it, and a two-year contract was superior to his present agreement by a scant six months.

What a piece of work she is! Wal ingford was thinking, but what he said was, “If the intention is to replace me as the anchor, why not bring me into the discussion? Why not ask me how I’d like to be replaced? Maybe gradual y would be best, but maybe not. I’d at least like to know the long-range plan.”

Mary Shanahan just smiled. Patrick had to marvel at how quickly she’d adjusted to her new and undefined power.

Surely she was not authorized to make decisions of this kind on her own, and she probably hadn’t yet learned just how many other people were part of the decision-making process, but of course she conveyed none of this to Wal ingford. At the same time, she was smart enough not to lie directly; she would never claim that there was
no
long-range plan, nor would she ever admit that there
was
one and that not even she knew what it was.

“I know you’ve always wanted to do something about Germany, Pat,” was what she told him, seemingly out of the blue—but nothing with Mary was out of the blue.

Wal ingford had asked to do a piece about German reunification—nine years after the fact. Among other things, he’d suggested exploring how the language for reunification—now “unification” in most of the official press

—had

changed.

Even
The New York Times
had

subscribed to “unification.” Yet Germany, which had been one country, had been divided; then it was made one again. Why wasn’t that
re
unification? Most Americans thought of Germany as
re
unified, surely. What were the politics of that not-so-little change in the language? And what differences of opinion
among Germans
remained about reunification or unification?

But the al -news network hadn’t been interested. “Who cares about Germans?”

Dick had asked. Fred had felt the same way. (In the New York newsroom, they were always saying they were “sick of” something—sick of religion, sick of the arts, sick of children, sick of Germans.)

Now here was Mary, the new news editor, holding out Germany as the dubious carrot before the reluctant donkey.

“What about Germany?” Wal ingford asked suspiciously.

Natural y Mary wouldn’t have raised the issue of him accepting “occasional” field assignments if the network hadn’t had one such assignment already in mind. What was it?

“Actual y there are two items,” Mary answered, making it sound as if two were a plus.

But she’d cal ed the stories “items,” which forewarned Patrick. German reunification was no
item
—that subject was too big to be cal ed an item. “Items”

in the newsroom were trivial stories, freakish amusements of the kind Wal ingford knew al too wel . Otto senior blowing his brains out in a beer truck after the Super Bowl

—that was an item. The lion guy himself was an item. If the network had two

“items” for Patrick Wal ingford to cover, Wal ingford knew they would be sensational y stupid stories, or trivial in the extreme—or both.

“What are they, Mary?” Patrick asked. He was trying not to lose his temper, because he sensed that these field assignments were not of Mary’s choosing; something about her hesitancy told him that she already knew how he would respond to the proposals.

“You’l probably think they’re just sil y,” she said. “But they
are
in Germany.”

“What are they, Mary?”

The channel had already aired a minute and a half of the first item—everyone had seen it. A forty-two-year-old German had managed to kil himself while watching the solar eclipse that August. He’d been driving his car near Kaiserslautern when a witness observed him weaving from one side of the road to the other; then his car had accelerated and struck a bridge abutment, or some kind of pier. It was discovered that he’d been wearing his solar viewers—he didn’t want to miss the eclipse. The lenses had been sufficiently dark to obscure everything but the partial y occluded sun.

“We already ran that item,” was Wal ingford’s only response.

“Wel , we were thinking of a fol ow-up. Something more in-depth,” Mary told him.

What “fol ow-up” could there be to such lunacy? How “in-depth” could such an absurd incident be? Had the man had a family? If so, they would no doubt be upset. But how long an interview could Wal ingford possibly sustain with the witness? And for what purpose? To what end?

“What’s the other item?”

He’d heard about the other story, too—it had been on one of the wire services. A fifty-one-year-old German, a hunter from Bad-somewhere, had been found shot dead beside his parked car in the Black Forest. The hunter’s gun was pointed out the window of his car; inside the car was the dead hunter’s frantic dog. The police concluded that the dog had shot him. (Unintentional y, of course—the dog had not been charged.)

Would they want Wal ingford to interview the dog?