“I can speak to him.”
“I’d appreciate that, sir. It would certainly keep me busy. Keep my mind off personal matters for some time.” I brushed at my skirt. “I might need a little help from the Metropolitan archives.”
“They are at your disposal, of course. I’ll tell my secretary to give you a key.”
I nearly swallowed my cigarette. “That would be very helpful, Mr. Lightfoot. I’d be most appreciative.”
“Hmm.” He dropped his smoke in the ashtray and rose from his desk. I took the hint and unwound my legs.
“I’m glad we had this talk, Miss Schuyler.” Lightfoot came around the desk and motioned me ahead of him. “I think we’ve come to an excellent understanding, don’t you?”
“It’s so lovely to be understood.”
His hand appeared on the doorknob in front of me. His voice dropped an octave. “All in one weekend, hmm? Dr. Salisbury must have been favorably impressed.”
“It’s a mistake I don’t mean to repeat, sir,” I said. “Ever.”
“I see.” He opened the door for me and extended his other hand. “Good day, Miss Schuyler.”
I shook his hand. “Good day, Mr. Lightfoot.”
? ? ?
I STRODE down the corridor, away from the Lightfoot wing. My eyeballs began to sting just as I reached my desk. I placed my briefcase on the floor and my pocketbook in the bottom drawer. Tibby’s head poked out from his office. His bark followed with considerable bite. “Where the hell is my coffee, Miss Schuyler?”
“In a moment, Mr. Tibbs.”
I found the bathroom just in time. I locked myself in the far stall, the one nobody used because the latch always stuck and made your nail varish chip. I sat on the seat and folded six squares of toilet tissue and cried silently into them, careful not to smudge my mascara, blotting as I went so no one would ever, ever suspect.
? ? ?
BY THE TIME I’d delivered Tibby’s coffee black, no sugar, everything was arranged except his willing cooperation. His unwilling cooperation, I had in spades.
He gulped his coffee straight before he began. At the second bob of his throat, I realized I’d forgotten the sugar. He didn’t seem to notice. “Your work has been reassigned to one of the junior writers,” he said, investing the sentence with as much irony as it could legally bear. “I will expect a full draft of this article on my desk within a week.”
“That won’t be possible. I have a tremendous amount of research to do. This is a big story, Tibby. Big big big.”
He flinched. “Two weeks.”
“I believe Mr. Lightfoot wants me to do the job as thoroughly as possible.”
“Three. Or I hand in my resignation.”
I held out my hand and gave him a blinding smile. “Done.”
When I returned to my desk, the key to the hallowed Metropolitan archives lay in a plain white envelope on my desk. I kissed it and danced to the elevator, taking care to wave Agatha a cheery farewell as I passed her desk.
Now, let’s be clear: the Metropolitan archives did not exist, officially speaking. I don’t even remember how I first heard about them. They were like a myth handed down, somewhere between the third Scotch and the fifth martini, in a hushed and reverent whisper obscured by a miasma of tobacco smoke. Gogo once told me they were located on the nineteenth floor of the building, behind a door marked FURNITURE REPOSITORY, but I doubt she would have recalled this small indiscretion the next morning. All I knew was that I needed those archives, because wherever the story of Walter and Violet and Lionel existed, it was not in the official library, the biographies, the encyclopedias, the New York Times.
It existed in the drawing rooms and bedrooms of 1914 Germany, where it would have caused a delicious scandal that summer; and if the affair had made its way to 1964 Manhattan at all, it would be contained in the gossipy correspondence of those who dined on it.
Like, for example, that sent by the Metropolitan correspondent in Berlin to his editor back in New York.
I know. I like the way my brain works, too.