She held her drink. Her face was flushed with the sun or the warmth of the day, her red hair reddened further by the reflected rays of the last of the sun. Her large green eyes were deep and yet not clear, like flawed emeralds.
“I don’t know you,” she said.
“I’m sorry. You look like Rita Macklin.” Devereaux paused and then resumed the line he had prepared. “I thought it was you, I wasn’t sure—”
“Who are you?”
“Devereaux. You were — wait, I understand now.” He sat down, still smiling, adjusting the smile mechanically by watching the reaction on her face. “You came here because of Father Tunney.”
For a moment, she looked afraid and then annoyed.
Hanley would not have approved of this contact; Hanley was the most careful of controls. Hanley saw risks where none existed; he had never foreseen the real difficulties of details.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
“Just a fan.” But she did not react to his smile now and he let it die, like a bulb going out. He took his glass and finished the dregs of vodka and placed it sharply on the bar. The woman behind the bar turned at the sound, glanced at him, and reached for the glass.
“I’m sorry,” Devereaux said. Rita had turned away from him.
“I’m a reporter,” he said. “With Central Press Association.”
“Never heard of them.”
He tried his smile again. “Well, I never heard of World Information Syndicate until I saw you on the Today show.” He took the fresh glass. “Nice piece of work you did at Watergate. Where would Washington reporters be without a Watergate? I was curious about you, I asked around. Our paths never had crossed in D.C. and it’s not that big a town. Not for reporters.”
“You work in Washington?”
“Home office. I work all over. Central Press is on the thirteenth floor of the National Press Building.”
“Is that a fact?” Her voice was level, a little bored, a little challenging.
It would be difficult now. Most of the time, lies were quite simple and were simply accepted; Devereaux had always used lies like burglar tools, prying at secrets. Now he would begin to lie to Rita Macklin, to use her and find her secrets. But she was a reporter, she was used to lies and saw through them; the difficulty would be in making the lie so easy to accept that she would not want to see through it.
“How did you know about me? And Tunney? Are you down here on the same story?”
“I knew about you from television. I knew about Tunney from the St. Petersburg Times, they had a long piece about Tunney returning to the motherhouse or whatever they call it of his Order. In Clearwater. So I saw you just now and I thought of your story in Washington and Tunney being here. Simple connection.”
“You’re with Central Press?”
“I’ll show you my press card if you’ll show me yours.”
She smiled at that. “And you’re not on a story?”
“No. Not at the moment.” He flicked back his smile. “Reporters are so suspicious. I work for Lou Gotti, you might know him. He’s the general editor back in D.C.”
In case you want to check on me, he thought. He knew she would want to; and he knew her suspicions would be lessened when he offered her such an easy way to check on him. For a little while; for long enough.
“Are you going to tell me you’re on vacation?” Rita said.
“Vacation,” Devereaux nodded. “First one in two years. I was in Tehran at the start of the hostage crisis and then we all had to get out after a while. You remember. I went down to Tel Aviv and then roamed around a bit, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.… I got into Afghanistan with the rebels and when I came out, I was just getting sick of it. I wanted to come in from the cold, get a little shot of America, white bread and all.”
He smiled again, a smile tinged with melancholy. He thought not of the lie he was constructing but of the truth left in it, of the loneliness that was out there in the field. “They owe me reams of time so I thought I’d just come down here.” No, that part had to be fine-tuned, he thought; it was too pat. “When I was a kid, my folks came down here a couple of times in the winter. A little sun. A little white bread.”
“And a little nostalgia,” she said, finishing the thought.
He was surprised by her words and by the empathy they seemed to express.
“Sure. Nostalgia. You can’t go home again but maybe you can go to the places you saw when you were a kid. To see if they’re as big as they were then, if they still have magic.”
“Do they?”
Winter on the snow-packed streets of Chicago had always been cold, always gray, always mean, always violent. There had been no parents, no idylls in the Florida sun. And yet, in this moment, Devereaux could believe his own lie.
“No. The beach is built up. But I like this bar; that’s an improvement.”
“I didn’t know the Today show would make me famous.”
“For a little while at least.” He tasted his drink and put it down. She stirred the ice cubes against the sides of her glass, staring at the wedge of lime floating around and around at the top of the glass. The steel band had begun to play again. The sun was nearly touching the horizon and all the windows in the hotel reflected the redness. The light was indistinct, caught between afternoon and the sudden darkness that descends on the Florida coast.
“You’re the first person who recognized me from the TV show.” She glanced up sharply when she said it, as though the words had sprung from an unconscious feeling and had bypassed her mind. It was a little odd, wasn’t it?
Devereaux gave her a quick, shy smile that briefly lightened the icy burden of his cold face. “No, probably not. Just the first to say anything to you. I think most people would just stare, just think to themselves that you reminded them of someone.”
“A star is born.”
They smiled at each other, disarming any hostile thoughts. The conversation was working, though they perceived it from different perspectives. Was she buying his little lies?
And later, if she called or when she called, she would discover that there really was a Central Press Association in the building on Fourteenth Street in Washington. And she would discover that for the most part, it was a legitimate news-gathering syndicate, one of the hundreds in the capital, feeding a diet of political news to a string of daily papers in the Southwest and in southern California. Central Press was funded out of a double-blind trust set up at a bank in San Diego by the National Security Agency’s “Provisions” section. “Provisions” was the hardware store for the various intelligence agencies that came under the umbrella of the NSA, including the CIA, R Section, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the ultra-secret Mole Group. In 1964, NSA had set up Central Press out of the bones of a faltering news organization called Southwest Central News; it was the cover for various agents in both R Section and the CIA.
Rita Macklin called for a second gin and tonic and smiled again at the man next to her. After a moment of silence, they resumed talking; it was a soft, friendly conversation that had nothing to do with anything.
The echoes of the steel drums ebbed in a last song full of melancholy and farewell. The sun dipped into the sea and darkness spread around them.
“You’re right about Tunney. I’ve been here six days trying to get to him. It’s as hard as anything I’ve ever done.”
“Unless you compare it to interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini.” He grinned. “That was after the embassy seizure and my editor thought it was the easiest thing in the world, to talk to that madman.”