Before the Fall(20)

A security man opened the back door for him. David stepped out into the bustle. Outside, the air was the temperature and consistency of a patty melt. He was wearing a steel-gray suit with a white shirt and a red tie. Sometimes in the mornings he liked to veer away from the front door at the last second and wander off to find a second breakfast. It kept the security guys on their toes. But today he had things to do if he was going to make it to the airport by three.

David’s office was on the fifty-eighth floor. He came off the elevator at a fast clip, eyes focused on his office door. People got out of the way when he walked. They ducked into cubicles. They turned and fled. It wasn’t the man so much as the office. Or maybe it was the suit. The faces around him seemed to get younger every day, David thought, segment producers and executive administrators, online nerds with soul patches and artisanal coffee, smug with the knowledge that they were the future. Everyone in this business was building a legacy. Some were ideologues, others were opportunists, but they were all there because ALC was the number one cable news network in the country, and David Bateman was the reason.

Lydia Cox, his secretary, was already at her desk. She had been with David since 1995, a fifty-nine-year-old woman who had never married, but had never owned a cat. Lydia was thin. Her hair was short, and she carried a certain old-school Brooklyn chutzpah that, like a once thriving Indian tribe, had long since been driven from the borough by hostile gentrifiers from across the sea.

“You’ve got the Sellers call in ten minutes,” she reminded him first thing.

David didn’t slow. He went in to his desk, took off his jacket, and hung it on the back of his chair. Lydia had put his schedule on the seat. He picked it up, frowned. Starting the day with Sellers—the increasingly unpopular LA bureau chief—was like starting the day with a colonoscopy.

“Hasn’t somebody stabbed this guy yet?” he said.

“No,” said Lydia, following him in. “But last year you did buy a burial plot in his name and send him a picture of it for Christmas.”

David smiled. As far as he was concerned there weren’t enough moments like that in life.

“Push it to Monday,” he told her.

“He’s called twice already. Don’t you dare let him blow this off, was the gist.”

“Too late.”

There was a hot cup of coffee on David’s desk. He pointed to it.

“For me?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s the pope’s.”

Bill Cunningham appeared in the doorway behind her. He was in jeans, a T-shirt, and his trademark red suspenders.

“Hey,” he said. “Got a sec?”

Lydia turned to go. As Bill stepped aside to let her pass, David noticed Krista Brewer hovering behind him. She looked worried.

“Sure,” said David. “What’s up?”

They came in. Bill closed the door behind them, which wasn’t something he normally did. Cunningham was a performance artist. His whole shtick was built on a rant against secret backroom meetings. In other words, nothing he did was ever private. Instead he preferred to go into David’s office twice a week and yell his head off. About what didn’t matter. It was a show of force, like a military exercise. So the closed door was a concern.

“Bill,” said David, “did you just close the door?”

He looked at Krista, Bill’s executive producer. She seemed a little green. Bill dropped onto the sofa. He had the wingspan of a pterodactyl. He sat, as he always did, with his knees spread wide so you could see how big his balls were.

“First of all,” he said, “it’s not as bad as you think.”

“No,” said Krista. “It’s worse.”

“Two days of bullshit,” said Bill. “Maybe the lawyers get involved. Maybe.”

David got up and looked out the window. He found the best thing you could do with a showman like Bill was not look at him.

“Whose lawyers?” he asked. “Yours or mine?”

“Goddammit, Bill,” said Krista turning on the anchor. “This isn’t a rule you broke, Don’t spit in church. It’s a law. Several laws probably.”

David watched the traffic go by on Fifth Avenue.

“I’m going to the airport at three,” he said. “Do you think we’ll have reached the point by then, or are we going to have to finish this by phone?”

He turned and looked at them. Krista’s arms were crossed defiantly. Bill’s gotta say it, was her body language. Messengers get killed for delivering bad news, and Krista wasn’t going to lose her job for another one of Cunningham’s dumb mistakes. Bill, meanwhile, had an angry smile on his face like a cop after a shooting he’ll swear on the stand was justified.

“Krista,” said David.

“He tapped people’s phones,” she said.

The words hung there, a crisis point, but not yet a full-blown crisis.

“People,” David echoed cautiously, the word bitter on his tongue.

Krista looked at Bill.

“Bill has this guy,” she said.

“Namor,” said Bill. “You remember Namor. Former Navy SEAL, former Pentagon intel.”

David shook his head. In the last few years Bill had taken to surrounding himself with a bunch of Gordon Liddy kooks.