Charm City

Later, after a hot bath, she was still plucking bits of paper from odd places when the phone rang.

'Tesser! You told me to call you, so here I am, calling you.' Whitney, a little too hale and hearty. The rah-rah team captain persona was usually reserved for strangers, strangers Whitney wished to keep strangers.

'Here you are,' Tess echoed, without much enthusiasm.

'Can you come out and play?'

'Now?'

'Why not? It's only eight-thirty, spring is coming, and I haven't been taking enough people out on my expense account. They'll lose respect for me if it's under three figures for the month. Come be my recalcitrant source. I'll make it worth your while.'

Tess studied the wad of soggy paper towels in her hand. 'I'm in my bathrobe and feeling kind of cranky. Can't you buy some bourbon, bring it over here, and put that on your expense account?'

She was counting on being refused. Tess couldn't give Whitney a receipt or a credit card slip. She couldn't even validate parking.

'Okay, but be ready to throw a coat over your bathrobe. I want to sit out on your terrace, at least as long as we can take it. See you in twenty minutes.'

Tess's apartment took up only half of the space of the two floors below. The rest belonged to a flat, unremarkable roof, reached through French doors off her bedroom. A more ambitious tenant might have filled this pseudo-patio with pots of geraniums, or splurged on wrought-iron cafe chairs and a matching table. Tess left two vinyl lawn chairs out year-round, sponging them off as necessary. The harbor view was so spectacular it seemed unnecessary to do more. Who needed fripperies like tiny white lights in ficus trees with the neon Domino Sugar sign across the water in Locust Point blazing red throughout the night?

Yet when Whitney arrived, she was in no hurry to go outside.

'Do you have any…?' she asked, sniffing delicately. Esskay wandered over to see if Whitney was good for a few pats, or a morsel of food. She stroked the dog's head, never bothering to ask how or why Tess had acquired such an ugly beast. Incurious Whitney. Reporting had never come naturally to her.

'Have any what, Whitney?' Tess knew exactly what she meant, but loved to torture the answer out of her friend, force her to say what she wanted.

'You know.' Her voice was now a stage whisper. 'The little box under your bed.'

'My sweaters? Dust balls?'

'Your pot. Your dope. Weed. Mary Jane. Ganja. The 1970s smokable herb now making a comeback, as they say in the New York Times every time they do one of those ‘Whatever-happened-to- marijuana?' stories. Satisfied?'

'Oh, that. I stopped making purchases when I went to work for Tyner, given it's a crime. A condition of my employment.' A half-truth. Tyner disapproved of marijuana only because it hampered the lungs' ability to maximize oxygen intake.

Whitney looked so blue that Tess took pity on her. 'I still have a little left, though. I've been hoarding it.'

'Well, dig it out. And let's order pizza from BOP or Al Pacino's. Do they deliver?'

'They do to Kitty's address.'

Within an hour, Esskay was nosing through two grease-stained boxes in a corner of the terrace, searching out stray bits of pepperoni and Whitney's uneaten crusts. The night was not at all springlike, but Tess and Whitney, warmed by doses of bourbon and pizza, were inured to the temperature as they shared a second post-dinner joint. Time had collapsed. They could have been in Washington College again, smoking on the banks of the Chester River.

The joint almost gone, Whitney improvised a roach clip with a garnet stickpin from the lapel of her blazer. 'I like your boy-toy Crow, but I'm not sorry he's away tonight,' she said, coughing a little. 'I wanted to have you to myself. It makes me feel like I'm nineteen again. That, and this.' Another furtive puff.

'I was thinking the same thing. Except the nights were so black on the Eastern Shore and they're so bright here. Have you ever noticed the city looks faintly radioactive from here? It has this smudgy glow, from the anticrime streetlights and all the neon.'

'What did we talk about back in college, all those nights we smoked and drank and talked?'

'Our classes, our love lives, our futures. I was going to be a street-smart columnist and you were going to be the New York Times Tokyo correspondent. You're still on track, at least. We also played Botticelli. Remember?'

'You called it Botticelli. My family called it ‘Are You a Wily Austrian Diplomat?' And you picked the most incredibly obscure people.

'Jackie Mason is not obscure, Whitney.'

Tess's turn to inhale. It wasn't very good pot. The mild buzz was giving her a mild headache right between the eyebrows. Ever the good hostess, she let her guest have the last toke. Whitney pulled hard on the stub of the joint, then tossed the remains off the roof, to the graveyard of vices in the alley below-broken bottles, limp condoms, Twinkie wrappers.

'So you had drinks with Feeney last night,' she said suddenly. 'Did he say anything of note?'

'You know Feeney. Sometimes you can't get a word out of him all night.'

Whitney snorted. 'The only thing you can't get out of Feeney's mouth is his foot.' She started to bring her fingers to her lips, then realized the joint was gone and refastened the stickpin to her lapel instead. 'He told you about his story, didn't he? That's why you asked me about it today.'

'He told me it was on life support and not expected to make it through the week.' Spike's face flashed in her mind, and she suddenly felt guilty for her glib metaphor.

'It was.'

'What happened?'

'Biggest resurrection this town has seen since Jesus or our last crooked governor, depending on your frame of reference. Spiked in the afternoon, it rose again that night for one edition only, the final. But one edition was enough. The Associated Press overnight guy moved it on the wire, which went to all the broadcast outlets, and there was no turning back. Everyone in town went with it, and everyone attributed it to the Beacon- Light.'

'Why only one edition?'

'Good question. One of many being asked around the office today.' Whitney's eyes locked on hers, steady and serious. 'It wasn't suppose to be there, Tess. Not today. Maybe not ever. Someone decided otherwise.'

'So what happened? You should know, you're a lock for a Pulitzer for in-house gossip.'

'I'd rather have that Far East fellowship, the one in Hawaii, or one of those Alicia Patterson grants for young journalists,' Whitney said, as if 'Pulitzer' was the only word she had heard. For a moment she seemed lost in some private reverie, perhaps an image of herself striding through the Orient, literally head and shoulders above the populace. She blinked, returning to Baltimore, Tess, and the roof.

'As it turns out, I do know quite a bit about this. I got it all from the big boss, right after I saw you today. Editor in chief Lionel C. Mabry himself.'

'Do I know him?'

'He came to the paper nine months ago, lured out of semiretirement at Northwestern University. Ran the Chicago Democrat in its glory days. Reporters call him the Lion King, because he has this mane of blond hair sweeping back from a high widow's peak. They also call him the Lyin' King, because he has a tendency to tell you nice things to your face, then go to the editors' meeting and stick knives in your back. Long, elegant, quite sharp knives.'

'Not your bony back, Whitney. Bosses always love you.'

'The old bosses did. But Mabry doesn't know my work as a reporter, and he's going to have a big say in who gets the Tokyo bureau when it opens up this summer. I'm on the short list, but I'm not a lock. Not even close.'

Whitney frowned. She looked baffled, much in the same way she had the first time she'd attended a Passover dinner with Tess's mother's family. 'That's not horseradish,' she had insisted politely, poking the tuberous root with her spoon. 'Horseradish comes in a jar.' No one had dared contradict her.

Tess poured more bourbon into Whitney's glass. 'You'll win him over.'