that?â
âIf they wanted to kill each other, theyâd hire hitmen. And not the kind who get caught.â
âNobody cares about those people anymore. Theyâre not relevant to real peopleâs lives. And donât give me that thing about running the world, because it doesnât matter if they do. They donât run
my
world.â
âYou wouldnât think that if they took it into their heads to shut down the newspaper and you were out on your ear looking for a job.â
âI donât think anybody would just take it into his head to shut down the newspaper. Thatâs not the way it works, Ryall. Come into the real world for a timeâpretty funny, considering your name. Do people make that joke on your name all the time?â
âNo,â Ryall said. âAnd weâve had this conversation before. Never mind. As long as you have the material. Iâll come in tomorrow and look it over. Although God only knows, I hate to come in to the office after one of these things. I always have a hangover.â
âItâs like that Enron thing,â Marilyn said. âIt was a big scandal, and a big deal in all the newspapers, and it was on CNN and TV for months, but nobody really paid attention. Why should they? Itâs just a business thing. Itâs not as if theyâreââ
ââSteven Spielbergââ
ââMadonna.â
âThatâs the car,â Ryall said. âAs long as you have them. Put them somewhere safe. I donât want them getting lost.â
âI never lose anything,â Marilyn said, which was true. She never forgot appointments, either. Ryall was sure that, if she had been alive at the time, she would have been the one person in her class who would have remembered all her homework on the day after the Kennedy assassination. He knew for a fact that the events of September 11 hadnât fazed her for a moment.
âTheyâll be in your private drawer,â she said. âIâve even taken the care to lock it, since youâve been so paranoid. But if you ask me, youâre behaving like a lunatic.â
âThe car,â Ryall said. Then he switched the cell phone off and put it down. The car wasnât really here, not yet, and wouldnât be for a while. He still had to find all his paraphernalia: his money clip; his wallet; his card case; his key ring; his Swiss army knife. The Swiss army knife was made of sterling silver and accented with gold. It was the kind of thing that impressed people like Marilyn.
âCrap, crap, crap,â Ryall said to the air. He didnât want to spend the night at this party. He didnât want to file a story about it with the paper and then with
Town and Country
. He didnât want to
feel
like Porky Pig anymore, so that right in the middle of any moment when he was able to think of himself as winning, the image would pop up on the back of his eyelids like a computer virus and there he would be, squat and round, with a little curly tail sticking out of the back of his best tuxedo pants.
âCrap, crap, crap,â he said again. Then he swept all his things off the top of his bureau and headed out his bedroom door and down the stairs.
6
Lucinda Watkins had been born and raised a Baptist in a world where the most exotic âotherâ religion belonged to the Catholics at St. Mary of the Fields, and there werenât many of them. âThe preachers say they worship the devil,â Lucindaâs grandmother had said, âbut I donât believe it.â And because Grandma Watkins hadnât believed it, Lucinda hadnât believed it, either. In the end, everything that had ever happened to Lucinda had come down to Grandma Watkins, who had taken their residence in Mount Hope, Mississippi, as a kind of purgatory come early, except that she hadnât believed in purgatory. God was getting them ready for something special. She
Major Dick Winters, Colonel Cole C. Kingseed