Night Film(3)

I was at this party thanks to one of my ex-wife Cynthia’s friends, a woman named Birdie. I found it both amusing and flattering that, long after my wife had divorced me, swimming on to bluer seas, a dense school of her girlfriends swirled around me as if I were an interesting shipwreck, looking for a piece of rubble to salvage and take home. Birdie was blond, forties, and hadn’t left my side for the better part of two hours. Every now and then, her hand squeezed my arm—a signal that her husband, some hedge-fund guy (hedge fungi) was out of town and her three kids Guantánamoed with a nanny. Only a summons from the hostess to show Birdie her newly renovated kitchen had pried the woman from my side.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Birdie had said.

I’d done precisely that. This wreckage wanted to stay submerged.

I drained the rest of my scotch, was about to head back to the bar, when I felt my BlackBerry buzzing.

I slipped through the door behind me onto the second-floor landing. It was a text from my old attorney, Stu Laughton. I hadn’t heard from Stu in at least six months.


Cordova’s daughter found dead.

Call me.

I closed the message and Googled Cordova, scrolling the returns.

It was true. And there was my goddamn name in quite a few articles.

“Disgraced journalist Scott McGrath …”

I’d be a marked man, peppered with questions, the moment this latest news circulated the party.

Suddenly, I was sober. I slipped through the crowd, down the spiral marble stairs. No one said a word as I grabbed my coat, walked past the bronze bust of the hostess (which, in a shameless use of artistic license, made her resemble Elizabeth Taylor), out the front door, and down the townhouse steps onto East Ninety-fourth Street. I headed to Fifth, breathing in the damp October night. I hailed a taxi and climbed in.

“West Fourth and Perry.”

As we took off, I unrolled the window and felt my stomach tighten as the reality of it settled in: Cordova’s daughter found dead. What was the unfiltered sound-bite I’d blurted on national television?

Cordova’s a predator—in the same league as Manson, Jim Jones, Colonel Kurtz. I have an inside source who worked for the family for years. Someone needs to terminate this guy with extreme prejudice.

That inspired tidbit cost me my career, my reputation—not to mention a quarter of a million dollars—but that didn’t make it any less true. Though I probably should have stopped talking after Charles Manson.

I couldn’t help but laugh at myself for feeling like a fugitive—or maybe the more apt comparison was a Most Wanted radical. Yet I had to admit there was something electrifying about seeing that name again—Cordova—in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it was time to start running for my life again.





2


Twenty minutes later, I let myself into my apartment at 30 Perry Street.

“I said I had to be out of here by nine,” a voice announced behind me as I closed the door. “It’s after one. What the hell?”

Her name was Jeannie, but no sane man would ever dream of her.

Two weekends a month when I had legal visitation with my five-year-old daughter, Samantha, my ex-wife, in an eighteen-year two-for-one promotion, decreed it compulsory I also take custody of Jeannie, the nanny. She was a twenty-four-year-old Yale graduate studying education at Columbia and clearly relished her powerful position as the designated bodyguard, the private escort, the Blackwater detail for Sam whenever she ventured into my dangerous custody. In this equation, I was the unstable Third World nation with a corrupt government, substandard infrastructure, rebel unrest, and an economy in free-fall.

“I’m sorry,” I said, throwing my jacket over the chair. “I lost track of time. Where’s Sam?”

“Asleep.”

“Did you find her cloud pajamas?”

“No. I was supposed to be at a study group four hours ago.”

“I’ll pay you double, so you can hire a tutor.” I took out my wallet, handed Jeannie about five hundred bucks, which she happily zipped into her backpack, and then I moved deliberately around her, heading down the hall.

“Oh, and Mr. McGrath? Cynthia wanted to know if she could switch weekends with you next weekend.”

I stopped outside the closed door at the end, turning back.

“Why?”

“She and Bruce are going to Santa Barbara.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I made plans. We’ll stick to the schedule.”

“But they already made the arrangements.”

“They can unmake them.”

Jeannie opened her mouth to protest, but clamped it shut—sensing, quite rightly, that the territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan’s tribal region.

“She’s gonna call you about it,” she noted quietly.

“Good night, Jeannie.”

With a dubious sigh, she let herself out. I entered my office, switched on the desk lamp, and nudged the door closed behind me.

Santa Barbara, my ass.





3


My office was a small, neglected, green-walled room of filing cabinets, photographs, magazines, and piles of books.

There was a framed picture on my desk of Samantha, taken on the day she was born, her face ancient and elflike. Hanging on the wall was a movie poster of a debonair but exhausted-looking Alain Delon in Le Samoura?. The print had been a gift from my old editor at Insider. He’d told me that I reminded him of the main character—a lonely French existentialist hit man—which wasn’t a compliment. Across the room, left over from my Phi Psi frat-house days at the University of Michigan, was a sagging brown leather couch (on which I’d both lost my virginity and pounded out every one of my best stories). Hanging above that were framed covers of my books—MasterCard Nation, Hunting Captain Hook: Pirating on the Open Seas, Crud: Dirty Secrets of the Oil Industry, Cocaine Carnivals. They looked faded, the dust jacket designs very late-nineties. There were also a few copies of my more famous Esquire, Time, and Insider articles: “In Search of El Dorado.” “Black Snow Inferno.” “Surviving a Siberian Prison.” Two giant windows opposite the door overlooked Perry Street and a banged-up poplar tree, though it was too dark to see it now.