elbow.
A second couple, both in their twenties, were working away at a tavern table in the corner. She was busy inputting notes in a laptop computer. He was busy negotiating with someone on his cell phone: “I understand you perfectly-Oliver wants a limo from JFK. But I can’t give him one. If Oliver gets a limo, then Quentin will want one.” Spence Sibley from Panorama Studios, evidently. “I swear, no one is getting a limo. This is not the damned Golden Globes!”
“Now what can I get you, Mitch?” Les asked as he bustled around behind the bar.
“Whatever you have on draft will be fine.”
Les drew a Double Diamond for him in an Astrid’s Castle pilsner glass and set it before him on an Astrid’s Castle bar coaster. Mitch began to wonder if he’d be seeing that damned logo in his sleep tonight.
“We’ve never had the pleasure, Mitch,” Aaron spoke up, sticking his hand out toward him. “I enjoy your work thoroughly.”
Mitch shook Aaron’s hand, which was limp and sodden. “Thanks, glad to meet you,” he said, even though he was far from it. As far as Mitch was concerned, Aaron Ackerman was one of the most despicable figures in modern American journalism.
If you could even call what Aaron Ackerman did journalism. Mitch didn’t. Aaron specialized in skewering public figures for fun and profit, a brutal form of personal destruction that had come to be known in media circles as Ack-Ack. Ada Geiger’s grandson got his start during the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a member of what Mitch called The Young and The Damp, that perspiring, attention-starved legion of bow-tied baby neo-conservatives who began popping up all over the cable news channels to pummel Bill Clinton and tout their own right-wing agenda. Aaron had two things going for him that quickly set him apart from the others. He had a very famous left-wing grandmother and he had a giddy, unabashed love for toxic tirades. The man became a full-fledged star with the publication of Incoming Ack-Ack, a collection of his most outrageous diatribes, which spent a dizzy twenty-eight weeks atop the New York Times Best Sellers list. Among his targets: tax-and-spend liberals, mealy-mouthed moderates, yuppies, gays, feminists, environmentalists, New Yorkers, Hollywood political activists, the French-anyone and everyone whose world vision didn’t march in lock-step with his own.
Aaron Ackerman spared no one-not even his own grandmother. He’d gone so far as to Ack-Ack her just this past weekend on Larry King Live, labeling her “a misguided paleo-leftist relic.” He’d even called Ada’s films “objectively, tragically awful.”
He was in his early thirties and had the blinky, nose-twitchy look of someone who used to wear thick glasses before the advent of laser eye surgery. He had a jiggly, shapeless body and an extremely big head. Not in the sense that it was swollen, though it was, but in the sense that it was just a really big, meaty head. Mitch couldn’t imagine what size hat the man wore. Aaron had a rather simian shelf of bone where his eyebrows were. One brow, the right, was often arched in a manner that reminded Mitch of pro wrestler turned movie star The Rock-minus the calculated irony. Aaron did have an affluent surface shine. His curly black hair was neatly trimmed, teeth bleached camera-ready white, fingernails buffed and polished. And he was impeccably dressed in a navy-blue blazer, pink shirt, polka-dot bow tie and charcoal flannel slacks. But the man still had the word shlub stamped all over him. He lacked physical ease, reeked of insecurity.
“I’m surprised you’re here for Ada’s tribute,” Mitch said to him, sipping his beer. “After what you said about her on television, I mean.”
“That happened to be a great deal of nothing,” Aaron said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He had an orotund style of speaking, a manner so pompous and self-satisfied that he practically cried out to be mocked-which he had been to devastating effect on a recent Saturday Night Live by guest host David Schwimmer. “And it was by no means personal, merely something that I needed to do so as to create space between us in terms of the public Aaron. Naturally, the private Aaron is an entirely different matter. I love my grandmother dearly.” He paused, peering in Mitch’s general direction without actually looking at him. It was more as if he were looking through him. “Surely you can understand that, can’t you?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I only have the one me.”
Aaron seemed shocked by this. “Really? How very disappointing.” Now he turned in his stool to face the slender blonde over by the fire. “Mitch, allow me to introduce my lovely wife, Professor Carly Cade. Carly, say hello to Mitch Berger.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mitch,” she said in a voice that was well-bred, lightly Southern-accented and quite mature. As Mitch moved toward her outstretched hand he realized that Carly was not as young as he’d first thought. Not that he could tell how old she was, but she sure wasn’t in her twenties. She parted her shiny blond hair in the middle and combed it straight down like a teenaged girl, framing her face like half-closed curtains. It was a face that seemed peculiarly expressionless, almost as if she were wearing a mask over it. She was petite, maybe five feet three, and looked terrific in the little sleeveless black dress she had on. Her arms were toned and taut, her legs shapely and smooth.
“Your hand is absolutely frozen,” Mitch said as he released it.
“If you think my hand is cold, you should feel my toes right now,” Carly said, shivering. “I feel like we’re in the real Dorset tonight, don’t you?”
“The real Dorset?”
“In England,” she said. “Where they have no central heat.”
“We have central heat,” Les said defensively, throwing another log on the fire. “But when it gets this windy, it just goes flying right out the windows.”
The wind was definitely howling. In fact, Mitch thought it might even be picking up.
“They do have such things as sweaters, you know,” Aaron said, looking his bare-skinned wife up and down in a most proprietary fashion.
“Aaron, I can tell you don’t know one thing about women,” Les said.
“You are so right, Les,” Carly agreed. “I have spent a fortune on this dress. I have huffed and puffed for two hours a day at the gym so I can wear it. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw some old sweater on over it.”
“I think you look great in it,” said Mitch.
“Why, thank you, kind sir.” She treated Mitch to a dainty curtsy. “I like this man, Aaron. I just may have to run off with him.”
“Sorry, I’m taken,” said Mitch, who was trying to figure out how Carly Cade had ended up married to a mean-spirited weasel like Aaron Ackerman. She was pretty. She was classy. She wasn’t dumb-Aaron had gone out of his way to identify her as a professor.
“Mitch, you’re probably wondering what a major babe like Carly is doing with a beltway wonk like me,” Aaron said, gazing through Mitch.
“Not a chance,” Mitch smiled, sipping his beer.
“Believe me, everyone in Washington does,” Aaron assured him, his tone suggesting that the subject of their marriage was Topic Number 1 wherever people of power and influence gathered. Senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices-they all talked about Aaron Ackerman and his comely blond wife. “They call us the beauty and the beast. You can guess which one I am. All I can say on my own behalf is that I’m the luckiest schnook in town.”
“And don’t you forget it, Acky,” Carly said tartly, tossing her blond head. “It’s like I always tell people, Mitch. I believe in equal opportunity. I’ve already been married to two handsome, athletic men with impeccable social skills. Now it’s Aaron’s turn.”
“He doesn’t need to hear about your other marriages,” Aaron grumbled at her peevishly.
She held her empty martini glass out to him. “Acky, will you get me a refill?”
He snatched it from her and took it to the bar, where Les did the honors.
“So how did you two meet, Professor?” Mitch asked her.
“God, don’t call me that. Every time I hear the P-word I think of some old hag with a mustache and a hump. Make it Carly, okay? I was up in D.C. for a symposium on U.S. global hegemony at the American Enterprise Institute. I live in Charlottesville, teach modern political history at Mary Baldwin College over in Staunton. Anyway, the two of us were seated next to each other. I knew Aaron’s work, of course. We started talking, and I ended up inviting him down as a guest lecturer. After that, he just swept me off my feet.”
“Translation: I got into her sweet little pants my first night there,” Aaron boasted, returning with her refill.
