The Crasher Page 4

  In the house, as she quickly made a salad and pasta, Virginia decided she wasn’t going to say a word about her plan—yet. She didn’t know what Ginny would think, but she could hear, as if he’d already said it, Graham’s reaction: “Mindless! My daughter’s going to use her brains, not her body. She’s going to get a business degree, so she can run her own courses for the Walker School.”

  “Don’t count on it,” she muttered. “You may be in for a big surprise, Professor Higgins.”

  Ginny hardly touched her dinner, but Virginia wasn’t taking her to task—yet. Poor Ginny, she’d had a miserable day. When Toby called around eight, despite Graham’s frowns (he loathed phone calls in the evening, unless they were responding to his ads), Virginia was happy to hear Ginny talking and finally laughing upstairs. The young were so resilient; they soon forgot their disappointments.

  By nine Graham had already gone upstairs to bed. He’d left all the lights on in the den, off the dining alcove, the space he used as an office.

  What a mess it was, with papers all over the floor. She knew better than to attempt to tidy them up. He would accuse her of losing the one paper that was essential for his work, his life, their livelihood.

  On his desk was a piece he’d been researching since learning, to his fury, that the U.S. postal rate might go up to twenty-nine cents in the new year. Disastrous for his kind of business. He’d sent President Bush an impassioned telegram explaining how counterproductive to the economy the increase would be. When that produced no response, to Virginia’s increasing frustration, he’d wasted two weeks studying the U.S. Postal Service since its inception.

  She picked up the heavily corrected manuscript he’d told her he intended to send to his God, Quentin Peet, expecting him to use the information in one of his columns. Why he thought Peet would be interested she had no idea, but that was Graham all over, full of confidence—or was it bluster? As far as she knew, Peet rarely responded personally to her husband’s frequent missives, although she’d seen the occasional acknowledgment from Peet’s office.

  “Are you going to stay up all night?” he called from upstairs.

  “I’m just reading your masterpiece, dear, on the Postal Service.” She didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm in her voice. He probably wouldn’t notice it anyway.

  She was right. “Good, good. Take your time. This is something Peet will really thank me for. It’s of vital national importance.”

  Virginia grimaced. Oh, sure, Professor Higgins. I bet he can hardly wait.

  “Good evening, Mr. Peet.”

  “Glad to see you back, Mr. Peet. Where’ve you come from this time? We’ve missed you here at Twenty-One.”

  “Good evening, Walter. Good evening, Bruce. None of your God damn business where I’ve been. Don’t you guys ever read a paper? My son here yet?”

  “Yes, Mr. Peet.” The young manager looked around the comfortable sofa-and-armchair-filled lounge. “At least he was here a minute ago…”

  Peet gave a cursory glance down the long room. A military-looking man was smoothing his mustache as he studied the stock market machine; a vivacious, curvaceous redhead in a low-cut dress sipped champagne and appeared to be watching an ice hockey match on TV, while two business-suited companions watched her.

  “Perhaps he’s on the phone.”

  “I don’t doubt it” Peet curled his lip disdainfully.

  With his head of thick dark brown hair, slim, well-exercised body and lightly tanned, brooding face, Quentin Peet never seemed to age. At fifty-nine, going on sixty, he still turned heads when he entered a room, not because he was one of the most famous journalists of his era, or certainly the most handsome, but because he exuded energy, power, and a word overused to describe him—magnetism.

  At the 21 Club in New York, one of the most famous restaurants in the world since its days as a speakeasy back in the 1920’s, Quentin Peet eschewed the much sought after first-floor restaurant just off the foyer, with its racy red-checkered tablecloths, sporting memorabilia covering much of the ceiling, and brass plaques announcing where the rich, famous and infamous had sat over the years. Most people clamored to sit there, and be seen, squeezed together in some discomfort and no privacy, but not Quentin Peet. He had never believed in being one of the crowd. He was one of a kind, a leader of men, and as many foreign potentates—not to mention journalistic competitors—had lived to regret, woe betide anyone who underestimated him.

  Now he bounded upstairs to 21’s gracious second floor, where, he knew without asking, his usual corner table would be awaiting him. Here, tables were spaced farther apart and the decor was much more to his liking.

  With its gleaming dark wood, rich velvet curtains, soft lighting on crisp white damask, silver and crystal, the second-floor restaurant was, for him, reminiscent of London, which, after New York, was his favorite city by far. There, his only child, Johnny, had been born during sunny years when, his fame just beginning, he had been appointed his paper’s youngest bureau chief, a reward after winning his first Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam.

  He hadn’t been seated long before Johnny, aka John Q. Peet, rushed across the room to join him. “Sorry, Dad, I was—”

  “On the phone, making a date to meet some babe after dinner with more boobs than brains.” His father spoke in a matter-of-fact, clipped voice, as if the matter was already closed.

  At twenty-five, Johnny showed a slight resemblance to his father, although it could easily be missed if you didn’t know they were related. His father was dark. Johnny was fair. They had the same handsomely shaped head, the same straight nose, but the “take-no-prisoners” fierceness present in Quentin Peet’s face was totally absent in Johnny’s. His mouth was gentler, or weaker, depending on how you looked at it, and there was a hesitancy, a slight droop to the shoulders, more noticeable when he was with his father, that conveyed uncertainty, vulnerability, something he deprecated about himself, although he knew women were attracted by it. Not for the first time Johnny felt a flash of irritation noting there wasn’t a trace of gray in his old man’s hair. Goddammit, it was as thick as ever, although his own appeared to be actually receding.

  In less than five minutes Quentin Peet’s favorite cocktail, a Rob Roy on the rocks (“Chivas, light on the vermouth”) was before him.

  “What are you drinking these days, son?” Before Johnny could answer, his father laughed, a dry, humorless laugh. “I suppose you know you give away the kind of women you’re dating in your choice of drinks. Please God, don’t let it be Perrier on the rocks tonight. I can’t face the thought of running into you again with Ms. Health Club 1990, with her sweaty, hairy underarms and what d’you call ’em? Fab abs?”

  Johnny laughed in the same way, similarly unamused and unappreciative of the crack. “I’ll have a margarita on the rocks, not frozen and no salt,” he said defiantly to the hovering waiter.

  He hesitated, gauging his father’s mood, then decided to plunge right in. “I’m seeing Dolores again.”

  “The Bolivian bombshell? God save us. Does your mother know?”

  “No, why should she? I said I’m seeing her, not marrying her.”

  “Well, just make sure that’s not on her agenda. She’s a disaster waiting to happen. For once your mother and I agree about something. She’ll milk you for all you’re worth and then some.”

  Johnny ignored the barb. Dolores was a spendthrift, but apart from the fact she was also sensational in bed, she had her own inheritance and was, if anything, more generous with him than he was ever able to be with her.

  Following the usual pattern of dinner, an infrequent occasion because of his father’s heavy travel schedule, Johnny knew the real reason for the meeting would not come up until they had ordered and the first course was well under way.

  Perhaps his father knew, perhaps he didn’t. In any case Johnny reckoned he wouldn’t care a damn that the reason he always made a date to meet somebody after these command performances was because, no matter how good
the food, he was too jittery to eat, then found he was ravenous as soon as they parted company.

  Now he sat on the edge of the banquette, toying with his fork, watching his father throw down twelve malpaque oysters. He loved oysters, too, particularly in the late fall, as now; but as usual his appetite had disappeared.

  “Great pieces from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.” He said what he knew his father expected him to say, but all the same he meant every word. His father had a magical way with words, whether at home or abroad clarifying the most complicated situations in a way that from a lifetime of listening to and reading endless letters of admiration, Johnny knew, made readers feel they had unraveled the problems of the world for themselves. It had always been hard being Quentin Peet’s son and it wasn’t getting any easier.

  Peet grunted. “Mr. Hussein thinks he’s going to get away with it, but he isn’t…”

  “I thought that we told him…” Johnny stumbled, trying to remember the American diplomat’s name. As he often did to cover up his forgetfulness, he rephrased his sentence, “I thought our woman in Baghdad assured Hussein in the summer that we weren’t going to interfere, that Washington has no treaty obligation to defend Kuwait?”

  “Damn fool woman. I told State, Gillespie should never have been appointed there; wrote it, too.” Peet leaned back and looked long and hard at his son. “Mark my words, the Security Council is sooner or later going to pass a resolution to authorize all members of the U.N.—and I do mean all members—to use force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, if they haven’t withdrawn by such and such a date. This is something they haven’t done since Korea in the fifties.”

  There was a sense of pent-up excitement, mixed with impatience, about Quentin Peet. Johnny wasn’t surprised. The old man liked nothing better than a fight, a confrontation, a war, another opportunity to be at the forefront of something most people would give their all to escape from, including Johnny himself. He swallowed a sigh. “You mean there could be a war?”

  Peet didn’t answer.

  “What’s going to happen, Dad?”

  “That’s what I should be asking you, son.”

  Here it came. Johnny pushed his oysters away.

  “When the hell are you going to get off your ass? At your age, d’you know what I was doing? What I’d already done?”

  “I know… I know…”

  “Don’t you ‘I know’ me!” Peet’s brows met thunderously together as he puckered his forehead in rage. Once Johnny would have ducked for cover. Now he didn’t need to, but he still slumped back against the banquette, head down, waiting for the onslaught to continue.

  “Suez, Saigon, the Soviet Union—I’d already covered all of them at your age, not for my health and not for the travel section of The New York Times either.”

  Johnny winced. Since his father had arranged an internship for him at the Times, it was a constant cause of friction that one of the few bylines he’d achieved had appeared in the travel section. He’d written a piece about Puerto Rico after going there with Dolores to visit some of her cousins, and he’d been thrilled, even if his father hadn’t been, that the travel editor had liked it.

  It was just his luck that shortly after the piece appeared, Hurricane Hugo had ferociously hit the island on the way to devastating the Carolinas; and it was his father, not he, who’d flown down there to write a tearjerker about the four-billion-dollar path of destruction, a piece which had been reprinted all over the world.

  Well, so he hadn’t thought of doing it; his mind didn’t work that way, and in any case he was far too low on the totem pole at the Times to be able to go wherever he wanted.

  That, of course, was the reason for tonight’s dinner. After almost two years at the paper, although he’d become a staff reporter, he hadn’t climbed far up the greasy pole. He knew there wasn’t anything he could say that would satisfy his father, but he had to say something.

  “Dad, I’m trying, but you must know, I’ve told you before, I’m… I’m not you and I’m never going to be you. You’re unique. Everyone knows that Nobody expects another Peet like you.” He wasn’t about to tell his father that he still dreamed of smelling out a story that would turn him overnight into a Woodward or Bernstein, that he could be tenacious, too, if and when he was interested in something, but nothing and no one at the Times had come close to lighting his creative fuse. He was sure it was his fault, but it had been nothing but grind; and now there was the nightmarish suggestion of Albany.

  Albany! How was he supposed to get excited about going to Albany, where, okay, he’d probably get the occasional front-page story, reporting on some dreary piece of legislation, even “above the fold” as the other reporters dreamed of achieving, but where he’d die of boredom in a cultural desert, not to mention the lack of any sophisticated girls about town.

  His father’s expression didn’t change; he still looked stony, his mouth set in a grim, disappointed line as their main courses arrived, lamb chops for him, with a half-bottle of claret, swordfish and another margarita for Johnny.

  In his customary way Quentin Peet attacked the meat hungrily, drinking down a glass of claret as if he were dying of thirst Then, as if he could read Johnny’s mind, he said much too calmly, “Max tells me you’re not too keen on going to Albany?”

  Before Johnny could answer, his father continued, his voice low, icy, “If you don’t go, you know you’ll have cooked your goose, don’t you? You don’t turn down jobs at the Times; you take them in Patagonia, Peoria, Patchogue, Peru…”

  “Paris?” Johnny tried to laugh, to defuse the miserable atmosphere, but his father refused to be deflected.

  Eyes blazing, he said, “I repeat: Patchogue, Peru… you go there and you turn the fucking place into a story, a hundred stories, you deluge the desk with stories until the place comes alive and somebody begins to think that perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea having old Peet’s son there after all. You use this”—he jabbed Johnny’s forehead painfully—“this… this… this… your brain or whatever’s left of it after fucking yourself into a stupor every night.”

  He stopped eating to stare at his son. “I shouldn’t tell you this. You should have worked it out for yourself, but nobody is sent to Albany as a penance. It’s a prize—for showing some talent, a place where some of the best people on the paper proved themselves, Johnny Apple, Frankie Clines, Steve Weisman…” Quentin Peet reeled off a list of impressive names. Johnny knew better than to show he wasn’t buying it. He listened attentively as his father continued, “Albany’s about power, sonny. It’s where the money trail begins… money and power… If you ever have the luck to be appointed Albany Bureau Chief, I’ll know you’ve inherited my genes.”

  Johnny couldn’t think of how to respond to that. There was silence, his father waiting expectantly. Before he could make some kind of intelligent answer, Quentin Peet lost patience. “Okay, then, you go to Albany and write a fucking funny story for the travel department,” he exploded. “About the Rome of the North.” He paused to chew the last piece of meat off the chop. “You do know there is a Rome near Albany, don’t you?”

  By the time coffee came, Johnny felt as if he’d been tossed around in a cement mixer. He could hardly think straight as his father spelled out for him his dismal future life on the Times if he didn’t accept the Albany post. “They can’t fire you because of that union deal made back in the sixties, but you’ll be shunted into one dead-end job after another.”

  “Perhaps I should leave now?”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, television, a magazine.”

  “Vogue?” sneered his father.

  As so often happened at the end of a terrible evening, his father abruptly changed the subject. “Pity Dolores isn’t Colombian.”

  “Why?” This was a surprising switch.

  “I’ve got a hunch there’ll be a lot of interesting stories coming out of Colombia now. If Dolores was Colombian, she’d be able to introduce you to the pl
ace, might inspire you into a little action, to get on the case.”

  He drained the last drop in his second glass of wine. “There’s a war going on down there, a particularly nasty, violent war that few people realize is happening. D’you know the drug kingpins carried out nearly three hundred bombings last year, killing nearly two hundred people, not including those on the Avianca jet they probably blew up? And what kind of news was it here? Not even an m head story. I tell you these drug lords live in the kind of luxury the United States has forgotten ever existed. I think I’m going to pay a little visit to Bogotá myself to see what I can cook up.”

  It was nearly ten o’clock. “Time to go, son. I’ve hardly seen your mother since I got back from the Middle East. It’s a wonder she remembers who she’s married to.”

  It was a well-worn joke that always made Johnny shudder inside, because it was so near the truth.

  As they went downstairs, his father threw an arm casually around his shoulders. “Good to talk to you, Johnny. It’s always good to get together and—”

  He stopped as, at the bottom of the staircase, an attractive, stocky, Italian-looking man opened his arms wide and said, “I can’t believe it! QP himself. I called you earlier this evening. You’re just the man I want to see.”

  “Mario!” Quentin Peet allowed himself to be embraced in a bear hug, then said, “You’re just the man I want to see, too. Meet my son, Johnny. Johnny, meet the governor of our magnificent state, Mario Cuomo…”

  As Johnny shook the governor’s hand, his father winked at him. “Governor, I want you to remember Johnny. In a couple of months you may run into him up in your neck of the woods. He’s with the Times, you know, and they’re dangling the Albany Bureau under his talented nose…”

  1993