Charm City

running until she got back into her car. The paper had granted interviews to every one of the Star's 383 newsroom employees. They offered jobs to fewer than ten. A new suit, a borrowed pocketbook, and intact pantyhose were not enough to make Tess one of them.

Luckily, the suit had stayed in style, even if the store that had sold it had gone out of business. Nothing went out of style in Baltimore, especially the simple clothes suited to Tess's unfashionable figure. Almost three years later, her interview suit was still smart, as her mother would say: navy blue, with a fitted jacket that didn't require a blouse, and a straight skirt to the knee. With her hair up and navy high heels, she was the picture of demure femininity, stretched out over six feet.

'A real lady,' Tyner judged, inspecting her Thursday morning as she turned slowly in front of the full-length mirror inside his office's closet door.

'The neckline is kind of plunging,' said Whitney, who had ended up spending the night on Tess's sofa. She had awakened with a headache that she refused to admit was a hangover, and was now perched on Tyner's desk, lost inside a sweater and skirt borrowed from Tess. On Whitney, the too-big clothes looked chic and deliberate.

'Thanks, Whitney. You're a real pal.'

'I'm not being rude. But if they were making a training film about sexual harassment, you'd be cast as the doe-eyed secretary. Someone could fall into your cleavage and never be seen again. It's too sexy. You lack authority. You need a scarf.'

'Of course. I've noticed the President always wears one during the State of the Union address.'

Ignoring her, Whitney dug through her Dooney amp; Burke bag until she produced an Hermes with a Western motif-lassos, spurs, and horseshoes in shades of copper and gold, against a navy-and-ivory background.

'Cool,' Tess said. 'Now can you make a quarter come out of my ear?'

'I've got better tricks than that.' Whitney arranged the scarf so it filled in the expanse of flesh without making Tess look as if she were a cross-dressing Boy Scout. 'There, that creates interest around the face, as they say.'

'It does make the outfit,' Tess admitted grudgingly. 'But if they didn't want me as a reporter, why would they want to hire me as an investigator?

Whitney put her arm around her shoulders, joining her in the mirror. Cool Snow White and flushed Rose Red stared back. White bread and rye bread, baked potato and potato hash.

'Half the editors at the Beacon Light today weren't even there when the Star folded,' Whitney reminded her. 'The other half can barely remember what their wives look like, much less the hundreds of supplicants they've turned down over the years. You'll be a whole new person to them, someone with the power to turn them down. By the way, I hinted you might not be able to take the job, because you're so much in demand.'

'Wives?' That was Tyner, who seemed to be enjoying his temporary membership in this girls' club. Tess expected him to start wielding a lipstick or mascara brush in her direction any moment. 'I never thought I'd catch you being a sexist, Whitney. You mean spouses.'

'No, I mean wives. Little women. Helpmates. There's only one woman in the upper ranks at the Beacon-Light, the managing editor, and she's got the biggest balls of all of them. She had a husband once, maybe two, but I think they went into the federal witness protection program. Now she makes do with a little slave boy at home, running around in nothing but a ruffled apron, with a Scotch and water at the ready when she comes clomping home at ten or eleven.'

'It doesn't sound so bad to me,' Tess said.

'Well, that's what you have, isn't it?'

The Beacon-Light's founders, the Pfieffer family, had been savvy about many things. Real estate was not one of them. The family had calculated on the city's center moving west over time, beyond the great department stores along the Howard Street corridor. So after World War II, when the expanding paper needed a new building, Pfieffer III had built the plant on Saratoga Street, near the ten-story Hutzler's, the grandest of all the stores. The result was a marvel of blandness, a building of tan bricks with no discernible style. Its only charm had been its real beacon, a Bakelite lighthouse revolving on a small pedestal above the entrance. The lighthouse had been torn down in the '70s and was now the Holy Grail among local collectors. The City Life museum was dying to find it, but rumor had it that a former Star columnist had unearthed it at a flea market and kept it on the third floor of his Bolton Hill townhouse, where he performed quasi-voodoo rituals intended to make Baltimore the country's first no-newspaper town.

Tess glanced up at the empty pedestal as she climbed the low, broad steps, picking her way among windblown McDonald's wrappers and crumpled newspaper pages. The local department stores, the few that had survived the '80s, were long gone from downtown. A drunk was sleeping among the daffodil shoots in an ill-kept flower bed. Squeegee kids-really, squeegee adults, a few squeegee senior citizens-had staked out the intersection. As the Pfieffers had predicted, the city had moved. Only it was in the other direction, south and east, toward the water. The Beacon-Light was a lonely and inconvenient outpost on the edge of an urban wilderness. Reporters consoled themselves with its proximity to two of Baltimore 's best dining experiences, the open stalls of Lexington Market, and the white tablecloths of Marconi's. The Beacon-Light also was convenient to St. Jude's shrine. According to newsroom lore, reporters made pilgrimages there after deadline, always uttering the same heartfelt prayer to the patron saint of lost causes: 'Please, St. Jude, don't let the editors fuck up my story.'

Feeney had told Tess about this ritual. And now she was facing the prospect that Feeney was the one who had fucked up. It seemed unlikely-certainly he had been too drunk to sneak into the building, perform a little computer hackery, and leave without a trace. But if the trail did lead back to him, Tess was determined to be there to protect him, even if she hadn't figured out how.

On the sixth floor, the publisher's secretary, one of those strangely proprietary women always found hovering at the elbows of powerful men, ushered Tess into an empty conference room adjacent to the publisher's office. It was a subtly opulent room, a place to wine and dine-well, coffee and croissant in these leaner, more abstemious times-the city's powerful. Mahogany table, Oriental rug, a silver tea set on a mahogany sideboard, the inevitable watercolors of nineteenth-century Baltimore. What must it be like for the top editors, the ones who traveled back and forth between this glossy dining room and the chaotic newsroom below, all the while trying to reconcile this realm of commerce with all those romantic ideas about journalism? How did they bridge these two worlds, the corporate and the cause?

Amnesia, Tess decided. Editors quickly forgot whatever they knew about reporting. If a man named Smith drove his truck into a local diner, killing five people, editors couldn't understand why you didn't call him up and ask for all the details. 'Just look it up in the phone book,' they would say, as if there were only one Smith, as if he weren't in jail, out of the reach of any phone. And if by some miracle you did find Smith and get the full story, the editors would say, 'Well, that's what we pay you for.' Or, 'We're tight tomorrow, it might have to hold.'

And now Tess had to face three of these amnesiacs at once, plus the publisher. The executive editor, the managing editor, and the deputy managing editor.

'Three editors,' she said out loud, staring out the window to the north. 'Well, Hercules slew the Hydra.'

'And it had nine heads.'

A man had slipped into the room behind her, a man with high color in his face and shiny brown hair falling in his eyes. In blue jeans and a T-shirt, he might have passed for 25. In his gray wool trousers, red tie, and blue- and-white striped Oxford cloth shirt, he looked closer to the 45 he probably was. But a cute 45, Tess decided, checking out his muscular forearms, the wide grin, the boyish way he kept pushing his hair out of his eyes.

'Jack Sterling,' he said, holding out his hand. 'Deputy managing editor.'

'Tess Monaghan.' Out of habit, she grasped his hand hard, the way she had pinched Rosita's when they'd met. But Jack Sterling just squeezed back even harder. Flustered, she broke the grip, feeling something she did not want to put a name to.

He sat on the edge of the gleaming table, openly appraising her, rotating the wrist of his right hand as he massaged it with his left.

' Baltimore mick,' he pronounced, talking to himself as if she were on the other side of a one-way glass. 'Something else blended in, though. Something solid, good peasant stock. About twenty-seven or twenty-eight.