I am now making no sense whatsoever, Ryall thought, staring into the small screen of his television set. The very chicest thing was to have no television at all, and Ryall hadn’t had one until three days ago, when he realized he wanted, passionately, to see himself on all these television programs he was doing. He wanted to see himself when the show aired, and he wanted to see himself on the videotape they gave him a day or two later, like a souvenir. He’d had to buy not only the television set, but a VCR as well, and that had left him not only dangerously out of pocket but upset as well. Apparently, nobody was buying videotapes anymore. They were buying DVDs. The clerk in the Radio Shack Ryall had gone to had been as disdainful as Charlotte Ross when confronted with a tourist from Topeka who “really loved art.” Ryall didn’t care. He only wished he’d bought a bigger set, so that he didn’t have to scrunch up his eyes to see himself on the screen. In a couple of days, he was supposed to be on Larry King Live. Practically everybody watched Larry King Live except those women who were too chic to own a television set, and their children watched it. He had no trouble imagining himself at the next big fund-raiser—when one of those women had the guts to give one—with all those college kids hanging off his elbows while he talked about what it was like to schmooze over coffee with Jesse Jackson and Barbara Ehrenreich.
The tape had come to its natural end. All he could see on the screen was fuzz. The cell phone he had plastered to his ear was humming. Nick Braden-ton was lecturing him, again. He stepped forward and hit rewind. He wanted to watch the tape again. He wished he had bought a bigger set. He wished even more than he hadn’t lost the remote for this one. The tape finished rewinding and he hit the play button again.
“Are you listening to me?” Nick said. “I talk and I talk, but I don’t think you ever listen to me.”
“I’m listening to you.”
“I’m your editor,” Nick said. “I’m responsible for you. And you’re behaving like an ass.”
“I seem to be doing all right,” Ryall said. On the screen, there was a sudden sharp picture of himself, only a few seconds long, being introduced to the viewers. He did look like Porky Pig. He half-expected the camera to pan around to his behind and catch a view of a curly little tail poking out from the seat of his trousers. God, it was embarrassing.
“You’re making yourself suspect number one in the biggest shooting of the year,” Nick said. “Or maybe of the decade. You’re plastered all over everything from the National Enquirer to Crossfire, and the only thing that ever comes out of your mouth is just how close you were when the bullets hit.”
“I was close when the bullets hit,” Ryall said. “I saw his face explode in front of my eyes.”
“Save it for cable. You know and I know that if you really had been that close, you wouldn’t have stood there watching Tony Ross’s face explode. You’d have dived under the nearest table and done your best to be invisible.”
Ryall sniffed. “Maybe you underestimate me, Nick. Maybe I’m not just some poof society gossip columnist.”
“Have I ever called you a poof?”
Ryall didn’t answer.
“Shit,” Nick said.
If Ryall had had the remote, he would have been able to freeze frames to study what he was doing wrong. He was too jumpy. He talked too fast. His face was too animated. You wanted to be larger than life when you went on television, but not too larger than life, because then you looked—cartoonish.
“Try to pay attention,” Nick said. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your sex life, your social life, or your sexual orientation. I do care about having my office invaded by a bunch of FBI agents who need a quick fix and think they’ve got one in my least retiring regular columnist. This is not a game, Ryall. Got that? Tony Ross wasn’t just Charlotte Ross’s husband. He was the head of one of the world’s most influential investment banks. He’s had dinner at the White House as a matter of course for the last four administrations. The first lady was on her way to his front door when he got offed, and the offing looks a lot like a professional hit. This might, just might, have some connection to international terrorism, if only because of Ross’s exposure on the globalization issue. So when you go around telling everybody and his cat that you looked right into Tony Ross’s eyes at the moment he was hit—”
“I did look into his eyes.”
“—a few people, like those FBI agents, and the Bryn Mawr cops, get to thinking that the reason you knew enough to be staring at Tony in the first place was because you were either in the process of shooting him or because you had prior knowledge that he was going to be shot. And when you put that together with the fact that this mess has been the biggest boost to your career since the day you first learned how to use a computer, some people—”