ELIA AND SIMON tore over to the studio in his plumber’s truck. As though they were on a heist, he kept the motor running and she went in, heading upstairs for the office Mandrake had occupied but with no idea what she was looking for.
While the door to Mike’s office was closed, she tried the knob and it unlocked. Betty was still working in the open-plan, so Elia mumbled she’d lost her pen somewhere, a Montblanc she’d been given for her birthday.
Thankfully, the cleaners hadn’t made it to this floor yet. Three paper planes were lying in Mike’s waste paper basket and, without unfolding them, Elia stuffed them into her bag. There was nothing on his desk or in any of the drawers. No, she was wrong: the third drawer down contained an unopened four-pack of Trojan condoms. Mandrake really was a sleazebag, she decided, but when she saw the box was still sealed she allowed herself a quick smirk.
Something else? There had to be something.
She punched ‘redial’ on his desk phone and wrote down the long grey number that scrolled across the small screen. She kept punching until she’d retrieved the numbers of his last five calls; the phones here stopped remembering at five.
She pasted a smile on her face as she left Mike’s ex-office and almost skipped over to Betty. “Yay!” she shouted, holding up her pen and a finger to mock the V-for-victory sign. “Now I can sleep.” She bounced over to her own desk, logged onto her computer, located the master contact list for the political campaign teams, and emailed it to herself at home.
ELIA approached Simon’s truck with a bit of a shrug. It was running but he wasn’t inside. She cast around and saw him loitering at the corner and signalled him back.
“Well?” he asked as he slammed the door shut beside him.
“A few scraps of paper and some phone numbers,” she told him. “Can we get the hell out of here? I’m shaking like a leaf.”
As he drove, she pulled the folded pages out of her bag and flattened them out on her knee. The first was a print-out of an email from Mike’s assistant in Washington, confirming dinner for him with his wife when he got back. “Sleazebag,” she repeated to herself as she recalled the condoms. The second sheet had The Un-Making of a President typed on it with by Mike Mandrake underneath, but no other text. She didn’t need to remind herself about his ego. And the last sheet was the first page of the LA office’s internal phone list which, no doubt, he tossed away knowing he wouldn’t have to put up with the likes of Elia any more.
“And?” Simon twisted his head around to glance at the pages.
“Nothing here, but wait till we get home so I can check some phone numbers.”
FOUR of the five numbers had East Coast area codes: Washington DC, New York City, Boston and Greenwich. The fifth was a number she already knew because she’d had to ring it herself a half-dozen times. It was the speed-dial for Mike’s assistant.
10 PM in LA wasn’t the best time to be making calls back east. “Here goes nothing,” and Elia dialled the first number.
“This is the Mandrakes,” said the answering machine. Elia hung up. “Next,” she said, punching in the second number. After one “Oops, wrong number” to a sleepy voice familiar to her as one of Close-up’s co-producers, followed by a ring-out, Elia felt this might be it:
“This is the Harvard Law School office of Professor Robert Dupont. Please leave a message…”
Elia didn’t, but did an internet search on him instead, striking what she hoped was paydirt. “Simon,” she yelled to him in the bedroom. “This could be something.” He came over. “Mandrake phoned a professor of constitutional law at Harvard,” she said. “This guy’s credentials go way up to here,” she added, her hand hovering above her head.
After speculating what this might mean, from absolutely nothing to damn near everything, Simon pressed Elia to contact Isabel’s campaign office.
“At this time of night?”
“For this, absolutely.” He could see Elia’s anxiety growing. At best, she’d already breached her duty of fidelity to her employer; at worst, she was guilty of theft. “It’s not as if we broke into the Watergate or anything,” he said sincerely, but that only made Elia’s mouth even dryer.
“Then I’ll do it,” he said, grabbing the phone.
Elia watched him, relieved. In truth, she wanted it done but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I got to speak to the guy in charge,” Simon said. “My name’s, er, Joshua and it’s confidential.”
“At 1 AM?” It was Julia Lee, a night owl who covered the phones in Isabel’s campaign headquarters three nights a week, from midnight to dawn. She was a veteran Republican volunteer four campaigns in a row.
“Confidential and urgent, okay?” But Simon was getting nowhere. “Did you see the Close-up promo?” he asked.
She hadn’t. She’d been staying at her sister’s the last two days, and her TV had been busted.