“I did, but so what? Get wasted. A story like this deserves it.”
Whether it was this callous remark or something embedded deeply in Katie’s soul, there was a definite pop in her brain.
“Wait a minute, Kevin!”
“What?”
“You can’t print the story, not yet.”
“Are you kidding?”
“You wait until I call back and give you the go-ahead. I have to check out something first.”
“Katie! My instincts are telling me-”
“Shut up and listen,” she screamed into the phone. “You don’t have instincts. It was my ass running all over the world getting shot at while people like you sat behind your nice safe desk, okay? You don’t give a shit about anything other than selling newspapers. You will hold that story until I tell you otherwise. And if you screw me, I will personally come to your house and rip your face off. And now I’m going to hang up and go have that drink you so graciously suggested, you bastard!”
She threw down the phone in disgust, took a deep breath, and tried to stop shaking. A few minutes later she was in the hotel bar steeling herself with a whiskey soda for what she was about to do. And then she had a second one. A third would have followed, but she somehow wrenched herself off the barstool after watching a guy next to her pass out in his own drool.
She walked outside, passing the Charles Dickens House. It was one of the many residences that the author had occupied in London but the only one now used as a museum. She wondered if even Dickens’s prodigious imagination could have contemplated the absolute nightmare she found herself in. Probably she would have had to look to Kafka to do it justice.
She reached a small park, sat down on a bench, took out her cell phone, and called him.
He answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“Can we talk?”
“I thought you made your position perfectly clear already.”
“I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“Please, Shaw. It’s important.”
The café was near King’s Cross Station. She sat outside and waited for him, watching the “bendy-buses,” as Londoners had dubbed them. They had taken the place of the double-deckers and were basically two buses joined together by a flex joint. They were not liked very much by Londoners because they often clogged the city’s narrow intersections when making a turn.
That’s my life, thought Katie. I’ve got a dozen bendy-buses blocking every possible direction I could take.
She saw him before he saw her. Even with the wounded arm, he moved effortlessly, seeming to glide above the pavement like a heron over water, just waiting to strike. She rose and motioned to him.
She ordered some food; he only had coffee and a biscuit.
“Did you talk to the police?” he asked.
“Briefly. I only told them what I saw. I didn’t mention that I was there interviewing him. Not a can of worms I wanted to open. As far as they knew I was just a passerby.”
“They’ll know you lied to them when the story comes out. Which is when, by the way? I’m sure you’ve already written it.”
“I have. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
He sat back and looked expectant. “So talk.”
“I don’t want to start a World War III.”
Shaw took a sip of his coffee while Katie picked at her salad. Neither said anything for about a minute.
“What do you want to hear from me?” he said. “That you shouldn’t publish the story? I already told you that.”