Part 25 (1/2)

She'd been on her way toward me; now she stopped. ”You took it from my bag?”

”In a sense.”

”What do you mean, in a-? You either-”

”Yes.”

”Charlotte, why?”

”I wanted to read it.”

”What kind of f.u.c.ked-up thing was that to do?” she said, in the first volley of profanity I'd ever heard from Irene. It jarred me. ”All you had to do was ask. I would have shown it to you gladly. Why sneak around like that?”

”I don't know,” I said. ”I don't know why a person sneaks around, but I'm looking forward to finding out.” And then I told her: The phone number. Halliday. Jackpot Jackpot.

She looked away, exhaled and sat down heavily on the piece of furniture I had determined not to mention in her presence.

”He said you would explain,” I said.

Irene didn't answer. For a long while she seemed to be thinking. ”Okay,” she finally said. ”I'm going to start with the worst part, right up front. I'll just say it, okay?” Still, she hesitated. Since entering my apartment, she had actually gone pale. ”I'm not a reporter.”

She blurted this out, then seemed to wait for what devastation might follow.

”Huh,” I said, careful not to react. But I was shocked. More than shocked, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't imagine her as anything else.

”I'm an academic,” she went on, ”a professor of comparative literature. An adjunct,” she added quickly, as if saying the first without the second amounted to further duplicity. ”My area is cultural studies. Specifically, the way literary and cinematic genres affect certain kinds of experience.” I sensed her straining to put this in language I would understand. ”For example, the Mafia. How do cultural notions of the so-called wiseguy affect the way people like John Gotti dress and move and speak? How does that extra layer of self-consciousness impact experience? The same for cops; they watch cop shows, too. And how does their experience of those shows affect their experience as cops?”

”Detectives,” I said, addressing the cigarette in my hand.

”Exactly. Detective stories. The genre is almost as old as the profession, the two have been intertwined practically from the beginning.”

”Detectives write books,” I said ruefully.

”That's right,” she said. ”A surprising number try to write detective novels, as if writing books were a corollary of the experience of being a detective. So ... well, you know where this is going.”

She had interviewed Halliday for a paper she was writing on detectives, then asked if she could spend a couple of weeks observing his work. He'd called her a few days later, spur-of-the-moment, and offered her an opportunity to experience his work from the inside: to interview a reluctant witness in a missing-persons case. So she'd invented the phony story about being a reporter who was looking for a model with a brand-new face. She'd phoned around until she found my agency and pitched the story to Oscar, who, desperate on my behalf, had lunged unthinkingly into the trap. Then she'd fabricated a business card on one of those selfservice machines and shown up on my doorstep.

”At that point you weren't real to me, Charlotte,” she said. ”It was all just a goofy experiment, a slice-of-life kind of thing.”

During our ”interview,” she'd felt cus.h.i.+oned at first by the several layers of disingenuousness that separated us, but with time those had seemed to burn away, leaving her exposed and at my mercy. And then a queasy sense of impropriety had made itself known within her. ”I don't know if you remember this,” she said, ”but you said something like, Can you look me in the eye and swear on your husband's life that everything you're saying is absolutely true? I was like, Oh my G.o.d, get me out of here.”

Afterwards, she'd felt crummy about the whole thing-so crummy that although she did write the paper on detectives, she'd found a different one to observe rather than work with Halliday. ”He was very sweet about it,” she said. ”He felt badly that I felt bad.”

”So there was no article?” I asked, still not fully able to grasp it.

”Well, there was an article. But not about models. And not for the Post Post, that's for sure. I don't even read it!”

”And the business card wasn't real?”

”It was all fake, Charlotte. That's what I'm telling you.”

”But how did you think up those questions?”

Irene looked at me with concern. ”I just made them up. I was trying to get you to talk about Z. I mean, granted, I wasn't very good at it-I had no idea what I was doing.”

”I see,” I said. But I didn't. Irene Maitlock the reporter I trusted implicitly; this new woman I was having trouble believing.

And then, she said, I had called her out of nowhere, wanting to meet again. She'd tried to wriggle out of it, but when I announced that I was on my way to her ”office” armed with her phony business card (a card she was fairly certain she had made illegally, with her real phone number on it), she'd dashed to my apartment to stave me off. And once she was here, practically the first words out of my mouth were about the very person Halliday had been looking for.

”I listened,” she said, ”I was curious, obviously, I remembered that this was the guy who'd disappeared. But afterwards, when I got home, the whole thing seemed too neat. And I wondered if Anthony was somehow behind it-if the two of you were in cahoots, trying to mess with my head.”

I knew the feeling. Because now, at last, I saw it all, like the final, critical moves in a game of solitaire. Halliday wanted information on Z. He'd sent Irene to get it. And, in the course of two short months, I'd told her everything.

”So you called him,” I said pleasantly.

”I did.”

”You told him what I'd said.”

”About the wire. Yes.”

”And?”

”And I could tell by his reaction that he hadn't set it up.”

”He was excited. He finally had some information.”

”He was ... interested. But I told him he was on his own from there on in. That was the last time we spoke.”

”And there's a bridge in Brooklyn you'd like to sell me, if I'd be interested.”

Irene sighed. ”It's the truth,” she said. ”You can believe it or not believe it.”

”You little b.i.t.c.h!” I cried, jumping to my feet.

She looked frightened, just as the other Irene-the reporter-would have looked. But I wasn't fooled anymore.

”Charlotte, I wanted to tell you,” she said. ”I felt s.h.i.+tty about having lied. But the longer I waited, the harder it seemed, the weirder it got, and finally I thought, Look, what does it even matter? This thing we're doing is about you-what does it matter exactly what I do for a living?”

”Oh, it matters,” I said. Already she seemed different to me; bolder, less restrained. I wondered if what I'd mistaken for reticence, reserve-for honesty honesty-had merely been the fact that she'd been hiding something.

”I would even tell myself sometimes that you, of all people, would understand,” she said. ”If you knew.”

”I do understand,” I said. ”I understand that you're exactly like everybody else. You lie, you say whatever you need to say, you're one more calculating b.i.t.c.h in a world that's full of them.”

”Like you?”