Chapter 46
Safely in the car, with the adrenaline of the moment fading, I started shaking. Jack put his arm around me but pulled over onto a side street as I inexplicably began to cry.
To his credit, Jack held me, stroking my hair, soothing me wordlessly until I quieted.
“You were incredible,” he said softly. “Where did you get dosvedanya?”
I hiccuped. “From Russia with Love.”
“The James Bond book?” I nodded. Jack laughed. “Where on earth did I find you?”
“In the typing pool.”
He kissed my forehead. “You never belonged there. But you know that.”
“We have to write the article. Now. Tonight. Before the president comes back to town.”
“We have a few days.”
I shook my head. “We don’t. She said Thursday. It’s Monday.”
He swallowed, looking past me at the dark city street. “We can’t turn it in until we can take out Pullman,” he said slowly. “Even if we write it tonight.”
“Ipecac,” I said suddenly.
“Gesundheit?”
“No, we put ipecac in his coffee. Well—I ask someone else to do it. Or I sneak up there and get someone else to serve it to him. It won’t hurt him. He’ll just throw up a lot and have to leave.”
Jack looked unconvinced. “How do you know it won’t hurt him?”
“Didn’t your mother ever make you take it when you swallowed something you shouldn’t have?”
“No?”
I smiled. “I guess I never liked following rules. There would be too many questions if we tried to write it at my house. We wouldn’t get anything done.
Can we go to your place?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, my mind flashed back to the hotel room.
I shook my head to clear the image. This was too important to get distracted.
Jack’s face was mildly horrified.
“Or we grab a typewriter from your apartment and go sit at the Tastee Diner?” I asked, naming a Silver Spring staple that was known for being open all night.
“Is that okay?”
“Sure.” I was never one to turn down a Belgian waffle.
But I watched him as he put the car back into drive. Something was off. Had I done something wrong?
I turned my face toward the window, watching the city pass by. Soon the city was behind us, and I realized we hadn’t reached an apartment.
“I—uh—you should probably know,” Jack started. “I don’t have an apartment, per se. It has its own entrance and all, but . . .” I looked at him, confused. He was still staring straight ahead. “I rent the basement from my mother.”
I tilted my head. “Okay.”
“I just—she was going to take in boarders, when my father died, and I didn’t want strangers in her house so this . . . worked.”
“That’s sweet of you.”
“You don’t think it’s weird?”
“Of all the things that make you weird, that’s the least of them.”
He finally smiled. “I just didn’t want—there would be just as many questions if we worked at my place, that’s all. And it’s really only a bedroom, a desk, and a bathroom.”
“I understand. Can you still go grab your typewriter and some paper?”
“Of course.”
“Then let’s get this thing written already.”
He looked over at me. “Yes, ma’am.”
Twenty minutes later, we slid into a secluded booth at the Tastee Diner, Jack placing the dictation device and the zippered case of his typewriter on the table. We both reached for the typewriter at the same time.
“I’m typing,” I said. “Ninety words a minute, and I always have to rewrite your leads.”
He shook his head but let me take it. I unzipped the cover, revealing a mid-fifties light-gray Royal Quiet Deluxe. It wasn’t my Underwood, but it would do the job. “College?”
Jack shrugged and smiled ruefully. “Still works. And honestly, I like it better than the newsroom ones.”
I knew what he meant. Typewriters had their own personalities. I positioned my fingers over the keys and typed three words. Yes. This machine and I would get on just fine. I rolled a sheet of paper into it.
The waitress came with menus, and Jack ordered two cups of coffee with extra cream and sugar.
I ordered a Belgian waffle, and Jack said he’d have the same.
She left, and we looked at each other, suddenly shy.
Writing was a deeply personal experience, and cowriting articles in high school and college had always led either to fights or to me just taking over.
I couldn’t see me and Jack actually fighting, but, despite my critiques, he had more real-world experience in this area than I did.
Our coffees appeared in front of us, and Jack reached for his and took a sip. He set the cup down, then looked at me. “After the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion failed to depose Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro—”
I held up a hand. “Absolutely not.”
“What?”
“You can’t start with the background. This is the problem with all your leads. Start with who or what.”
“I did start with what.”
“You started with a presumed reason why. Not what. The what of this story is the planned assassination.”
He leaned back, his face a mix of mild amusement and annoyance. “So how would you start it?”
I thought briefly. “A Cuban spy on a mission to assassinate the president of the United States—”
“We don’t know she’s a spy even if that’s what you and I have been calling her. I’d say she’s a national. Or a revolutionary—we have evidence of both.”
“Fine. A Cuban revolutionary on a mission to assassinate the president of the United States began an affair with the vice president in the wake of the failed US-led attempt to depose Cuban leader Fidel Castro.”
He looked at me, going over it in his head. “Try not to say Cuban twice.”
“Okay.” I began to type, removing the first use of Cuban. Then I counted the words.
“What are you doing?”
“That’s your other problem. Your leads are too long.
Keep them shorter. Under thirty-five words is the sweet spot.
” Then I continued counting. “Okay, we’ve hit who, what, how, and why.
Do you think we need to include DC, or is it implied with the president and vice president in The Washington Digest? ”
“Implied,” Jack said. “Do you always do everything by the book?”
My fingers itched to start the next sentence, but I waited. “I think that’s why I like journalism so much. It’s like a puzzle. You have to fit all the pieces into the right places or it doesn’t work.”
“That explains why you liked this story so much, then. We had to crack it first.”
I smiled. He wasn’t wrong. “It was a lot more exciting than finding a way to get stains out of a mattress, which is what I’d be investigating in the women’s section.”
Jack grabbed a sheet of paper and pulled a pen from his pocket as the waitress brought our waffles. I watched as he began scrawling notes. “What are you doing now?”
“My leads may not be the strongest, but I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve yet. I like to make a list of everything I know about a story and then put it in order to—”
“Follow the inverted pyramid,” I said. He nodded. “I like that.” I reached for the syrup at the end of the table and covered my waffle with it. “What do you have so far?”
Jack went through his list, then we traded off adding elements. “What do we want to do about Carmen?”
I bit the inside of my lip. I knew why he was asking. Now that it was an assassination plot, not just an affair, we were absolutely going to be questioned by multiple agencies.
“Using her name lends credence,” Jack said. “A lot of it.”
“And then whoever Alejandra is working with goes after her next.”
“She’s not exactly an innocent.”
I leaned forward. “She helped us. Whatever she did . . . then . . . is in the past. And certainly isn’t tied to this.”
He took a bite of his waffle, chewing slowly. “If we don’t use her name, they’re going to suspect that the unnamed source who identified Alejandra was her regardless.”
“Let them suspect. We don’t have to tell them.”
“Okay.”
I had expected more of a fight. “Do you agree or are you just giving in because it’s what I want?”
“Both. But giving her name up to the FBI if we get questioned might not be the worst thing we could do.”
I looked at him askance. “How do you figure?”
“If she’s willing to provide our government with information, they’ll protect her—we can’t offer that ourselves.”
I nodded. Under normal circumstances, no, I would never give up a source. But Jack was right—this could keep her safe. And it wasn’t like she was going back to Cuba anytime soon.
“Pullman is the more interesting question though,” Jack mused. “It’s always possible he’s not actually involved in this and just got a tip.”
“From a Russian? No way. He’s either working with Russia, with Cuba, or with both. Otherwise why would he demote me for taking the call?”
“Maybe he’s got someone else following this one on the sly and had you pegged all along as someone who wasn’t going to follow rules and would go rogue to try to write the story?”
I ignored the second part of that. “Did you see anyone else going after Alejandra? Did we see anyone else we knew at Off the Record or the Hay-Adams or anywhere important?”
“There’s always a chance it wasn’t newspaper related.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jack shrugged. “It’s Washington. You never know who’s got FBI ties. Or CIA. Or any other government agency for that matter. Maybe he’s on the right side of this.”
Another valid point. Half of my childhood friends had parents whose jobs were shrouded in mystery.
And one of Betty’s friends’ fathers retired, only to reveal he had never been an accountant, but was a CIA analyst instead.
“So if he’s working at the newspaper as cover but is actually working for our government to stop this, he won’t want it getting published either. ”
“Exactly. If we out him and we’re wrong . . .”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Not only would we be interfering with a government agency, we’d both be out of jobs. And likely blacklisted at every newspaper in town. Even in the typing pool.
Especially in the typing pool. If we didn’t get this perfect, I was done. Jack would land on his feet at some small-town newspaper with his anglicized name and by virtue of his sex. Me? There would be no second chances.
I took a deep breath. “If we worry about potentially sabotaging intelligence agencies while working in DC, there’s nothing we can cover. They haven’t stopped her yet. We can.”
Jack nodded slowly and then reached his hand across the table. I took it.
For a few seconds, we just looked at each other, saying nothing. Then I gulped down the rest of my coffee and signaled to the waitress that I could use a refill. It was going to be a long night, and I needed to be my sharpest. Everything depended on that.