Down Here

investments?”

“Lots of them. Why?”

“That’s what I’m looking for.”

“With your book?”

“Stop dancing around, Laura. You don’t need to do that. I’m not pressuring you. That’s why I said what I did, to take the pressure off.”

“I . . . checked you out,” she said, quietly, looking down.

“And?”

“And . . . are you married?”

“Divorced,” I said.

“Do you have children?”

How deep did she look? I knew Hauser kept his private life rigidly segregated from his work, but, still . . .

I gambled. “No,” I told her. “I had a vasectomy, in fact.”

“You don’t like kids?”

“I don’t dislike them. Just never wanted any.”

“Me neither,” she said. “I wouldn’t have invited you to my house if I didn’t know you were a legitimate person. Some of those books, the ones I read after we first talked, they were just . . . terrifying. Like . . . I don’t know, pornography.”

I shifted my body slightly, so my chest was against her shoulder.

“I don’t mean that I think there’s anything wrong with . . . sex,” she said, hastily. “That isn’t what I meant by pornography. Those books—are they all about sex murderers or rapists?”

“I guess they could seem like that, especially if you were looking at the paperback originals. The real pros, though, they’re journalists, and crime happens to be the topic of a particular book. Look at Jack Olsen. He was the dean of so-called true-crime writing, and he wrote about sex killers, sure. But he also wrote about Gypsy con games. And about an innocent man spending most of his life in prison.”

“Oh. Is that where you—?”

“I think so,” I said, as if I was considering the idea for the first time. “I met Jack Olsen once,” I told her. “He was a great truth-seeker. Any reporter would want to follow in his footsteps.”

She turned to face me. “So what happens now?”

“You make some decisions,” I said. “In order of importance: Do you want to give me a chance with you? Do you want to talk to me about the impact the wrongful imprisonment of a loved one has on a family? Do you want to ask your brother if he’d be interested in doing an interview?”

“But I—”

“You don’t have to decide any of it tonight, Laura,” I said, holding her eyes in the reflected glow of the diner’s windows.

It was almost one in the morning when we pulled into her garage. She killed the engine. Turned to look at me. “I want you to come back up with me,” she said.

“Because you decided . . . ?”

“On all of it, yes.”

She leaned over, kissed me under my bad eye.

“Okay?” she said.

^“You have a lot of scars,” she whispered, later.

“I’ve had a lot of surgery,” I said. “Different things.”

“Where did the doctor who did this one get his license, in a school for the blind?” she said, licking the chopped-off top of my right ear.

“Sometimes, it’s not neatness that counts.”

“What, then?”

“Speed.”

“Oh. Were you wounded?”

“Yeah.”

“In Vietnam?”

“No. Africa.”

“Africa? You were a . . . like a mercenary?”

“No,” I said. “I was there covering a story.”

“What story?” she asked.

So I told her a story. About the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, the rape of the Congo, the “blood diamonds” of Sierra Leone, and how they got that name.

Everything I told her was true, except for the part about me being there. I filled in the blanks—right down to how it feels to get malaria—from my Biafra days. But I didn’t say a word about those experiences. J. P. Hauser wouldn’t have been old enough to have them.

“You’ve really led a life,” she said.

“Not me, personally,” I told her. “Reporters aren’t supposed to lead lives, they’re supposed to lead people to lives . . . other people’s lives. I didn’t have to be in Africa. The story wasn’t me, it was those people who did have to be there, see?”

“Yes. But, still, it must be exciting. There’s a woman I watch on CNN all the time. It seems, every time something major happens, anywhere in the world, she’s there. You can’t tell me that’s not . . . I don’t know, glamorous.”

“I don’t have the face for TV,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” she agreed. “But at least you could be in the profession you wanted.”

“Are you saying you couldn’t?”

“You know why there’s such a shortage of nurses and teachers now?” she said.

“No,” I admitted. “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

“It’s because, years ago, those were about the only real opportunities for an educated woman. Maybe there were others, like being a social worker, but all in the ‘helping’ professions. When things started to change, started to open up, a lot of women took other roads.”

“And you’re one of the them, right?”

“Yes. I didn’t get an M.B.A. to teach home economics. It wasn’t just the money—although that was a factor—it’s the . . . freedom, I guess.”

“I thought money was tightly regulated. I mean, with the SEC and all. . . .”

“You’re talking about interest rates, and things like that,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if the government regulates money, so long as it doesn’t regulate making money. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m saying is, if you get good enough at putting together deals, you get to call the shots. Be your own boss. I don’t mean self-employed; I mean a real boss. With people under you.

“There’s women who manage major mutual funds now, head up corporations, all kinds of opportunities. But what I want isn’t anything like that.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to put things together,” she said. “Not working for anyone, working for me. I want to sit back and analyze situations. Then I’d approach all the different parties with a proposal to solve their problems—by using what they already have but don’t understand.”

“Like what? What could they have and not understand, for example?”

“Capabilities in concert,” she said, licking the words like they were rich cream. “Sometimes, assets and liabilities of one company fit those of another one—like a jigsaw puzzle. And if you look at them from an objective distance, you can see how, if they did things together, they could both benefit.”

“You mean, like a merger?”

“Like that, but not exactly that,” she said. “Mergers are usually about controlling markets. Or a company looking to expand. I want to specialize in rescue operations. Like leveraged buyouts and third-party ventures from unrealized asset pools and—”