Kitabı oku: «This Child Of Mine», sayfa 3
CHAPTER FOUR
THE OFFICES OF the Coalition for Responsible Media consisted of four cramped rooms at the top of three flights of stairs in an ancient, crumbling nineteenth-century building on the fringes of Old Town.
Enthusiastic volunteers teemed in and out of cubicles crammed with file cabinets, beat-up desks, computers and a perpetually zipping photocopier.
“Where do all these people come from?” was Mark Masters’s first question as he observed the beehive of activity, already at a fever pitch at eight in the morning.
Before Kitt could answer, a young man hailed her. “Ms. Stevens, Senator Goins on line one.”
She pushed her back-to-normal bangs aside, and said, “Take a seat,” to Masters without introducing him to anybody. She had no intention of making this guy too comfortable.
Then she got so busy bending congressional ears that she didn’t see him for the next hour. Which was just as well. Their beginning this morning had been rocky.
The first thing out of his mouth when he picked her up in the disgusting foreign Lexus was, “What a relief! I was afraid you’d still have your hair up in that snaky braidy thing.”
Little snot.
Kitt had blushed at her own folly. The expense. The discomfort. For nothing. “Oh, you didn’t like my wig?” she cracked as she settled herself into the leather seat.
He grinned as the precision engine purred to life. “You borrowed it from the Star Trek props room, right?”
Kitt pursed her mouth sourly. Normally, she loved this kind of repartee. With four brothers, she’d grown up on a steady diet of it. But from this man, it rankled. Because he’d known who she was the whole time, stupid hairdo or no stupid hairdo. Had he even known at the ice-cream social? Had he been mocking her instead of flirting with her? Pride prevented her from asking.
She looked over at him. Again, he was immaculately groomed in a navy-blue worsted-wool suit—the same tailored suit he’d worn before, she was certain—and a starched white shirt. Only his tie was a contradiction to his classic apparel. Today it was panda bears tumbling over themselves, munching bamboo. The black-and-white pandas and kelly-green bamboo looked absolutely ghastly with the navy suit. But rich boys, she supposed, could wear any ugly tie they pleased.
She stared out the windshield at the hazy morning scene of Alexandria-near-the-Potomac and wondered why she had agreed to let this spoiled brat pick her up this morning.
“So,” she said as she adjusted her seat belt, “you’re Marcus Masters the Third. Marcus Masters’s kid.”
“No. I am Mark Masters. The adult son of a man whose name is Marcus Masters, whose father also happens to be named Marcus Masters.”
He was still smiling, but not quite so brightly now, and Kitt thought, Touchy, touchy. She wanted to say, No, you are the spoiled son of a man who doesn’t care how he pollutes the culture as long as it makes a profit. But she steered clear of that honey pot. This was the congressman’s new intern, and she couldn’t do anything to jeopardize the CRM’s position with Congressman Wilkens.
“Well, Mr. Masters—” she couldn’t help the sarcasm “—exactly how did you happen to obtain this plum of an internship with Congressman Wilkens?”
“Don’t call me Mr. Masters.” The smile was gone and his face looked suddenly older, hardened. “That’s my father. I’m Mark.”
So this is some kind of sore point, his father. “Not Marcus?”
“That’s my father as well. And Mac is my grandfather. I’m Mark.”
“Does everybody call you that?”
“Only since I’ve been born.” Now he smiled.
“Okay. Mark. How?”
“My father didn’t pull strings for me if that’s what you’re asking. I applied for the internship like everybody else, and I got it.”
“Yes,” Kitt said, eyeing the supple leather upholstery, the walnut trim, his handsome profile as he steered the car smoothly through the tangle of rush-hour traffic, “I imagine it was just that simple.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her, a dark slash of disapproval. “Rich does not equal spoiled.”
She blushed at his perceptiveness, and he smiled, but not warmly. “I get this all the time, Ms. Stevens.”
Kitt turned her face to the window. All this Mr. and Ms. doo-doo was purely antagonistic posturing, but even so, she did not invite him to call her Kitt. A tense silence ensued as they waited at one of the interminable stoplights that control the infamous five-way intersections in northern Virginia.
“So you study at the Carl Albert Center?” she said after a moment, trying to be civil.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She ignored the ma’am. “Is that your major? Political Science?”
“I study writing.”
“Writing?” Kitt’s own undergraduate major had been journalism, in its own way as tough a nut to crack as law school. “I’d think writing would be somewhat quaint and antiquated for the LinkServe genius.”
“Do you actually know anything about my LinkServe experiment?”
“I know it’s a comprehensive communications technology that you’ve been working on ever since you graduated from creating video games in high school. I know it’s the technology that threatens to make other technologies obsolete. I know you—and your father—don’t want LinkServe—and others like it—regulated by the new bill designed to control the glut of filth and violence in the media.”
“I see I’m not the only one who does my homework.”
“Is that what you call it? Homework?”
“Yeah. What do you call it?” He watched the stoplights above them.
“Espionage. Skulduggery.”
He had glanced over then, blue eyes sparkling with challenge, and had given her a crooked little smile, which she had wanted to slap off his pretty-boy face. “You don’t like me much,” he said. “I can tell.”
“I wouldn’t say that I don’t like you personally, Mark,” she answered.
“Oh, what don’t you like impersonally, then?”
Your father, the way he’s polluting the mindscape of this country’s kids for the bottom line, she thought. The way he’s planning to use LinkServe to keep on doing it, no matter what kinds of legislation my people get passed. But, again, she avoided all that by squinting at his chest and saying, “It’s your tie I think.”
He laughed—a surprised, delighted laugh—and flapped the tie. “Hey. Don’t knock it. This tie is a gift from a girl with impeccable taste.”
“Oh, yeah?” Kitt imagined he probably had girls with impeccable taste buying him gifts every day of the week. And then, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, she’d turned ten shades of red, and, trapped right there in his Lexus, all she could do was turn her face to the passenger window again.
Thank you, dear Congressman Wilkens, she’d seethed, for arranging this delightful week with this delightful young man.
WHEN KITT FINISHED her phone calls, she found him with his butt propped on a corner of one of the volunteer’s desks, his handsome head cocked to one side, listening intently while two women and one man blasted their faces off with flushing zeal about the future plans of the Coalition for Responsible Media.
And in his palm he held a microrecorder.
“What’s that for?” Kitt charged forward, pointing at the thing.
He stood. “I asked Mary and Shirley and Howard—” he smiled at the three “—if I could tape their comments. My memory is sort of feeble,” he explained, then smiled again at the trio, who beamed back.
“But you didn’t ask me,” Kitt said. “Turn it off.”
Mary’s and Shirley’s and Howard’s smiles shriveled and they looked stunned, offended. At Kitt.
She ignored them. “If you want information, we’ll get you some literature. Follow me.” She whirled away.
Behind her, she heard him making his apologies to the group, saying maybe they could visit more later.
When she got him alone in her tiny office, she closed the door. “Don’t do that again.”
“Do what?” His face was guileless.
“Record the staff’s comments. This is a coalition, and a very loose, diverse one at that. Made up of child advocacy groups, church groups, parents, cops, educators. Most of these folks are not political players. They’re volunteers. They believe in what they are doing, but they are very naive. Did you even tell them you are an intern from Wilkens’s office? That you’re gathering data to report to the congressman?”
“Nobody asked.”
Just as she’d thought. “Listen, Mr. Masters—”
“Mark,” he corrected.
But at that she only squinted and repeated: “Mr. Masters, those folks wouldn’t, of course, ask. They wouldn’t know to ask. And while I appreciate your efforts to be accurate—”
“That’s right. I’m only striving to be accurate.” He raised his palms in a helpless gesture. “I have a very poor memory. In fact—” he pumped his eyebrows Groucho style “—I have absolutely no memory of the first three years of my life.” He dropped his hands and grinned.
But his silly joke and his goofy grin did not amuse Kitt. “While I do want your report to the congressman to be as accurate as possible, you surely realize there are people who are anxious to undermine what we’re doing here, to make us look like zealots, like twenty-first century thought police.”
“How can I undermine you if I simply give the congressman the facts? You don’t have anything to hide here, do you?” He smiled that smile. That smile that, Kitt was convinced by now, he surely must know was completely disarming and endearing. Completely sexy.
“From now on just stick with me,” she said.
“Like ugly wallpaper.” He pumped those eyebrows again, smiled that smile.
Kitt looked pointedly at his tie. He should know from ugly.
And the remainder of the day went like that: Kitt feeling threatened, edgy, thinking mean little thoughts; Masters being sunny, straightforward, thinking only heaven-knew-what. Smiling, smiling, smiling that damn winning smile. All the while Kitt felt certain he was gathering data that would somehow be used against her cause, given who he really was. Intern, schmintern.
He had to be doing everything he could to protect his LinkServe—how had he phrased it to Wilkens?—his interests? Interests indeed.
She felt despair when she realized that by some grotesque twist of fate, Marcus Masters’s own son had become their unsympathetic pipeline to Congressman Wilkens. And The Pipeline seemed to be everywhere, getting into everything, persisting in being so nice that the staff was blinded to the dangers of opening up to him. Their underfunded little organization would be laid before the Masters Multimedia giant like a deer caught in the headlights of a semitruck.
By late afternoon Kitt was exhausted from the mental gymnastics, and the very sight of Mark Masters was giving her a torpid headache. She couldn’t wait to get him out of their offices, to get away from the man.
But Jeff Smith neatly destroyed all hope of that when he arrived shortly after five to offer Kitt a ride home.
She went to gather her paraphernalia: jacket, clutch, pager, cell phone. While she crammed it all into her tote, Jeff reviewed their plans to go to Murphy’s, her favorite Irish pub in Old Town. A little too loudly, Kitt realized, when she saw Mark Masters’s head pop up from a stack of deadly-dull media-content analysis statistics.
“Hey! I’ve heard of that place!” Masters said from across the room.
Jeff turned. “Oh?”
“Yeah. One of the other interns mentioned it. Authentic Irish music, live.” Masters smiled that choir-boy smile. “Sounds neat.”
Kitt wished to heaven the man would stop saying neat.
Mark’s reminder that he was the congressman’s intern was not lost on Jeff. “Would you care to join us?” said Jeff, the charming congressional aide, being hospitable to the lonesome little intern. “Whatdaya say, Kitt? Don’t you think Mark should get a taste of authentic Alexandria nightlife?”
“Well…” Kitt knew she looked caught, trapped again, and she tried to compose her expression into one of nonchalance as Mark stood and crossed the room.
She shrugged. “Well, Murphy’s isn’t really a good example of Old Town nightlife. It’s pretty dull, actually. The place would bore Mark, I’m afraid.”
Mark gave her a small frown, cocked his head, regarded her with glittering eyes that seemed to see right through her. “I’m not nearly so prone to boredom as you seem to imagine,” he said. “And how could anything be dull—” he paused, narrowing those already-narrow eyes at her “—as long as you’re there.”
Kitt’s face flamed, and she opened her mouth to speak, but Jeff wedged his lanky frame between Kitt and Mark. “Does that mean you’ll be joining us?” he asked.
Mark quirked a dark eyebrow at Jeff. “Absolutely. How do I get there?”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PLANK DOORWAY to Murphy’s Irish Tavern was so narrow that Mark actually had to tilt his shoulders sideways as he squeezed in. He stood inside a cramped little vestibule, allowing himself a moment to adjust to the dim lighting, the noise and the pressing crowd.
Mark hated crowds, and he was already thoroughly sick of the trendy Washington bar scene—self-important men in overpriced suits, narcissistic women in clever little day-to-evening getups. Tonight the regulars were doing their best to outshout each other over loud music in this dark forty-by-sixty room saturated with smoke, strong cooking odors and humidity that floated up from the Potomac like clingy polyester netting. Grateful that he’d left his jacket and tie in the Lexus, Mark rolled up his shirtsleeves and stepped into the melee.
A svelte woman said, “Excuse me,” while brushing up against him as she passed. She made an elaborate business of raising two full glasses to shoulder level, to emphasize, he supposed, her trim shape, sheathed in a brown dress that poured over her curves like melted chocolate. The dense perfume she left in her wake clogged his sinuses.
Three girls, ponytails pulled through baseball caps and cleavage spilling out of athletic spandex, smiled from a nearby table and one raised a glass of ale at him. A woman at the bar turned her head, arched her back and lowered her eyelashes as he passed.
Mark spotted Kitt near the back of the narrow room. Squeezed into one of the old high-backed booths, with Jeff and that blond girl Mark had seen at the ice-cream social.
As he made his way to the booth, a trio onstage struck up a rowdy rendition of “Gary Owen,” making normal conversation strenuous and even shouted greetings difficult to hear.
“Mark!” Jeff jumped up. “You found us!”
Mark tried to discreetly wipe the sweat from his temple. “This place is certainly tucked in here, like you said,” he shouted at Jeff. “Had to circle the block twice before I found it, and a couple more times looking for a parking space.” He glanced at Kitt. Although she smiled up at him, she looked as if she couldn’t make out his words.
“Yeah, well,” Jeff hollered in Mark’s ear, “I guess Alexandria’s a far cry from Oklahoma, where everything is surrounded by miles and miles of absolutely totally nothing.” Jeff backed up a fraction, gave him a bland smile.
Even though Mark was not a native Oklahoman, he was irked by this condescending attitude. “Not absolutely totally nothing.” He smiled back, parroting Jeff’s redundancy. “There is the occasional Injun teepee.”
Jeff’s smile frosted a bit.
Kitt still seemed unable to hear the men above the music, but her eyes narrowed as if she had become aware that something was subtly amiss. “Mark—” she leaned forward “—this is Lauren Holmes, one of my roommates. Perhaps you two met at Congressman Wilkens’s ice-cream social.”
Mark extended his hand to the blonde, and she offered hers with that fingertips-only handshake some women employ.
“Sit down!” Jeff yelled and slapped Mark’s back, pointing to the seat next to Lauren. Then he squeezed into the booth beside Kitt.
Were Kitt Stevens and Jeff Smith a couple? Mark studied Kitt. The moment he’d seen her at that ice-cream social, he’d thought, Now there’s an interesting woman. Okay. More than interesting. Attractive. He’d found her even more intriguing at Gadsby’s, and downright fascinating as he observed her in her offices today.
She glanced at him, brushed her bangs out of her eyes self-consciously, and he realized he was staring. He turned his face toward the singers. Steady, boy, he told himself. Think of Tanni. Always of Tanni. Don’t let yourself get all hot about a woman you don’t even know.
“How about a beer?” Jeff, the grand host, offered.
“Have a Harp,” Kitt shouted, “the best of Ireland.” She raised her glass. The orange glow from the green-shaded lamp hanging over the table enriched the color of her hair to a honey gold.
Jeff jerked his thumb at Kitt’s glass of Harp. “The only alcoholic thing she’ll drink, but she claims Harp is some kind of patriotic ritual. Murphy’s and church are about the extent of her social life, you know.” Jeff winked at Mark and then grinned at Kitt indulgently.
Kitt smiled at Mark. An impudent little smile. “Irish music and a glass of Harp are good for the soul,” she said, then closed her eyes and broke into a mellow, perfect-pitch harmony with the singers onstage. Some song about a minstrel boy.
Above her singing, Jeff teased, “Maybe good for the soul, but not the ears.”
Without opening her eyes, Kitt jabbed Jeff in the ribs, and sang louder. Jeff clutched his side, feigning injury, then covered his ears.
Ignoring this silliness, Mark fixed his gaze on Kitt, but spoke to Jeff. “Actually, she has a beautiful voice.”
Abruptly, she opened her eyes and stopped singing. She blushed, he noted with satisfaction, most attractively.
“Please. Don’t stop.” He smiled.
She gave him a quick wide-eyed stare, then dragged her gaze to the singers onstage, and picked up the melody. But her singing was softer, more subdued now.
As the last strains of the music died away, Kitt looked into Mark’s eyes. While they studied each other, a crease formed between her eyebrows, and her lips parted. Mark’s gut tightened and a quickening shot to his groin as he watched her mouth.
The crowd was applauding and cheering, Jeff and Lauren with them. But Kitt and Mark continued to analyze each other in motionless silence.
The waitress came. Mark smiled up at her, then fixed his gaze back on Kitt and said, “I’ll have a Harp, please.” He glanced back up at the waitress and added, “And could you run me a tab?”
“Sure,” the waitress said as she scribbled on her pad. But then she gave Mark a closer look and hesitated. “Uh, may I see your ID, sir?”
Mark leaned forward, extracted his billfold and flashed his driver’s license.
“Thanks.” The waitress gave him a second glance, smiled in apology and left.
“Bet you get sick of that,” Jeff piped up. “How old are you, anyway? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Twenty-seven,” Mark said flatly. “And you?” He asked this with his eyebrows raised as if this were a real conversation and not a put-down contest. From the first, he’d suspected Jeff had some kind of territorial thing about Kitt.
The little blonde smiled into her beer glass.
“Old enough not to get carded,” Jeff answered, and draped his arm on the booth behind Kitt.
“Congratulations,” Mark said dryly.
This time it was the blonde who stepped in to calm the waters. “So, Mark, you’re in Washington on an internship,” she said.
He turned to Lauren. She was pretty, but not like Kitt. Not fascinating. “Yes,” he answered. “And I’m also doing some stringing for the Dallas Morning News.”
Kitt nearly lunged across the table, grabbing his wrist. “You’re a reporter?” she said.
He looked at his wrist. She released it. “Not yet,” he answered. “I’m only a cub. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Yet.”
“That’s why you took this internship,” Kitt said, realization dawning on her face. She made it sound like a crime or something. “And you’re already stringing for the Dallas Morning News,” she challenged. “That’s what you were doing with that microrecorder.”
“I was putting out feelers for a feature, that’s all. Just an idea. They don’t have to buy it.”
Now Kitt’s green eyes flashed like heat lightning. “Don’t you have some ethical obligation to tell us that?” She was practically shouting. Mark noticed that people at surrounding tables were glancing their way.
“If I decide to actually write it, sure. But right now I’m just researching, seeing if there’s a story there. You know, something along the lines of the tiny idealistic coalition taking on the media giants.”
“Just researching? You were recording people’s remarks.” Now Kitt was shouting, and her face was getting redder by the second.
The duo onstage struck up a livelier song, a Scottish ditty about two young ladies peeking under the kilt of a passed-out drunken Scot.
Kitt pointed an accusing finger at Mark. “You were extracting material from sources who didn’t know they were sources.”
“Kitt, this is not a courtroom,” Jeff tried to calm her.
“Oh shut up.” She whirled her head at Jeff, and her hair made a glittering saffron fan over her cheek.
Mark pointed at the pint glass of Harp in front of her. “How many of those have you had?”
She spun her face back toward Mark. “I’m perfectly clear-headed.” Kitt pounded the table with her fist. “What I want to know is what you were planning to do. Paint our organization as zealots—fools? Anything to undermine the CRM’s efforts to limit the violence and filth glutting the media? Anything to help your daddy profit off his dirty rock-and-gangsta rap? Anything to clear the way for your precious LinkServe to operate free of constraints? Is that it?”
Mark eyed her. Even if she was a little stewed, it was obvious she meant every word. He matched her ardent fire with the cold sobriety of a stone. “No, ma’am. That is not it. I do not work for my father. And I wasn’t being sneaky. I told your people I was recording them. And I haven’t done a feature article yet that wasn’t totally unbiased—”
“Unbiased? How can you even pretend to be unbiased about the CRM when you yourself are the developer of that…that LinkServe monstrosity?”
“Monstrosity? Monstrosity? This happens to be the twenty-first century. Technologies like LinkServe are here to stay.”
“The CRM is only trying to protect children from undue violence and sexually explicit material. Seems to me that used to be a given in this country, before kids with guns and dirty music became commonplace. No thanks to Masters Multimedia.”
“Masters Multimedia has nothing to do with guns, and as for dirty music, et cetera, we didn’t exactly invent it.” He cocked his head toward the stage, where the duo was still singing the bawdy Scottish song. “Just listen.
“This nonsense has been around for ages. Think of all the old Scottish, Irish, Appalachian ballads that are full of murder and mayhem, not to mention—pardon my French—sex.”
Kitt glared at him, picked up her Harp, took a swig, then carefully lowered the glass to the table. “Oh, this nonsense—” she made quote marks in the air with her fingers “—has been around all right, in the form of subtle innuendo. Like that last one. But not a dirty word in it. Even in the most tasteless old drinking songs, it’s all innuendo. Nothing explicit. I have nothing against sex…or fun. But there is a vast difference between bawdy old tunes for adults and the stuff your father’s company—” she shook her finger at him—twice “—your company, is producing, packaging and distributing to children—”
His mouth opened as he tried to say something about it not being his company, or about First Amendment rights, or about parental responsibility, but Kitt charged on, shouting over the music.
“Stuff so violent—” she actually jabbed his chest this time “—that it’s threatening to change the very fabric of this country. Kids are listening to those lyrics, they memorize them, they adopt their worldview. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, Mr. Masters, but today the village is destroying the child, all for the sake of money,” the word money came out muh-nee and Mark recognized a trace of Okie accent. “The CRM’s goal—and mine—is to halt that trend, Mr. Masters—” she jabbed again “—and neither you nor your rich daddy can stop us!”
The rich-daddy crack left Mark so blistered he was momentarily speechless.
Their eyes locked and it was as if Jeff and Lauren had shrunk to vanishing points at the edges of the room. And in that moment, Mark thought he felt something pass between himself and Kitt Stevens, something mystical but real. Her eyes, green as emeralds, were flashing, reflecting the fire in his own, he guessed.
He saw that she was looking at him, too, in a way no other woman ever had. Really looking at him. Into his eyes. And suddenly it hit him. This woman was the one. The One. Which was totally crazy. Surely he was imagining this, whatever it was. He tried to regain control. But it didn’t work. He felt shaken. And again he thought, as plainly as if it were a neon sign flashing behind the bar: She’s The One.
But The One broke off their eye contact, rummaged around wildly in her oversize tote and tossed a twenty on the table. “Let me out.” She nudged Jeff out of the way. “I refuse to drink Harp with the devil.”
“The devil?” Mark repeated sarcastically.
Kitt scooted to the edge of the seat, then twisted toward Mark before she stood up. ‘“Knocked yo’ mama outta her bed,’” she rapped. ‘“Jumped her bones and split her head.’”
“Dead Tuna,” Mark informed her. “Nobody takes them seriously.”
“The hell they don’t,” Kitt retorted, and stood. “You should check your own company’s sales records. Five hundred thousand copies sold and those precious lyrics inside every CD jacket.” She hoisted her tote over her shoulder and whirled away before Mark could respond.
“Sweetie! How will you get home?” Jeff whined at her departing back.
“I’ll be fine,” Kitt retorted as she pushed through the crowd.
Jeff stared after her for some seconds, then resettled himself in the booth. “The lass has a bit of a temper on her, a bit of a temper,” he said with a dreadful Irish brogue, which irked Mark at him afresh. What business did Jeff Smith have, apologizing for her? Jeff Smith wasn’t responsible for Kitt Stevens.
But yes, Mark warned himself, his face still scalding from her verbal excoriation, the woman has apparently got a temper. And a fantastic mind. And a kind of righteousness that he found both intimidating and thrilling. A righteousness he envied.
He glanced at Lauren next to him. She smiled uncertainly, her face betraying acute embarrassment. Much as he wanted to leave, he’d stay long enough to smooth this over with her. After all, she wasn’t to blame for the tremors rumbling beneath the surface between him and Kitt Stevens.
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