The Submission - Amy Waldman [79]
She dialed Claire, nervous, and almost dropped the phone when she answered.
“Mrs. Burwell?”
“Yes.”
“This is Alyssa Spier, from the Post.” She hated, in that moment, her hissing name, her paper’s name, all that sibilance.
Silence.
“How did you get my number?”
“From a friend. I’m—”
“No friend of mine would give you my number.”
I didn’t say your friend. Alyssa pressed on. “So sorry to bother you.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about the memorial, the hearing. Uh, I just want to get a sense of what you’re thinking—”
“You wrote an appalling column about what I’m thinking, and now you want to talk?”
Alyssa held the phone slightly away from her ear and thought: Fuck you, you moral prig. You’ve had everything easy—okay, everything other than your husband dying—and you judge me?
“Maybe we could just meet and talk informally,” she said. “You know, not for the record.”
“Don’t call me on this number again.”
“Wait!” Alyssa hailed Mary. “Wait. I’m calling because I have information you’ll want. On Khan.”
There was a tantalizing hesitation on the other end of the line, then Claire said, coldly, “Why would your information be of interest to me?”
“Because,” Alyssa said, “because—it could be explosive, for the families, and if I were you I’d want to be prepared for that.”
“Fine,” Claire said, after another pause.
For all her relief, Alyssa was surprised that Claire agreed to meet, and suspicious, as if by accident she’d stepped on a soft, rotting plank in an impeccable hardwood floor. There was some uncertainty, some vulnerability there. The only problem was that Alyssa had no tool to pry up that plank: she’d lied when she said she had ominous information on Khan. Under-promise, then surprise, Oscar had always told her. She’d promised “explosive,” with only until tomorrow morning to find it.
She worked the phone and keyboard until the tendons in her forearms ached. There had to be something on Mohammad Khan she could use: there was something on everyone. She circled back to her contacts at the police department, the FBI. Was he on any terrorist watch list? Any no-fly list? Any general “suspicious Muslim” list? Nothing, at least nothing anyone would share. Plenty of dirt on the woman lawyer, but the blogs were already all over her maggoty client list—terrorist suspects, loudmouthed Palestinian-defending imams, unidentified undocumented relatives of attack victims for whom she had secured windfalls. Anyway, guilt by such attenuated association probably wouldn’t move Claire.
The newsroom began emptying out. When Alyssa looked outside, darkness had already dropped. She ate ramen noodles from the vending machine, their texture just a few molecular recombinations from the Styrofoam cup containing them. The janitor had begun pushing his supply cart and sadness across the cluttered room, and something deeper than panic pressed hard on her heart.
At ten, she left the building to walk across a city temperamentally indifferent to desperation. She rehearsed her words: “Oscar, I need help. Oscar, I need help.” He had deeper law enforcement sources than anyone. Why he should share them with her, an ex-sort-of-paramour, now a reporter for a rival paper, she couldn’t say. She could only hope.
By the time he answered his buzzer she was in tears, blubbering so that the words came out, “Monster, I weed kelp.” He let her up anyway. It never occurred to her that he might not be alone.
“Alyssa, this is Desiree,” he said, managing not to be awkward despite the fact that he was wearing a T-shirt and boxers,