Randall #01 - The Best Revenge (14 page)

“An article on public transportation in San Diego?”

Maybe she should write something—just to show she tried.

“Now, Camellia, isn’t that one of the prettiest sights you ever saw?”

Ahead was the long curve of the Coronado Bridge, outlined in jewel-like lights.

“Yes, it is. Just beautiful.”

~

The Del was everything Violet said it would be. After a valet parked the Edsel with just as much decorum if they were driving a late model Mercedes, Violet led Camilla along the plush-carpeted hallway to the magnificent Crown Room.

Camilla was amazed by the composure of the tuxedoed
Mâitre d’
, who treated “Madame” as if she were royalty.

“Look at that,” Violet said, pointing up at the chandeliers, which were indeed, shaped like huge, jeweled crowns. “Make your eyes pop out, don’t they?”

Camilla surveyed the grand room with an appreciation she wouldn’t have felt a few short months ago. Her mother would find the place over-decorated, of course. But she wasn’t with her mother now, and could admit to being rather fond of high Victoriana.

She was also ravenous, and the Crab Louis that Violet ordered for them was beyond delicious. So was the raspberry chocolate truffle torte she chose from the dessert cart. Camilla had no idea how Violet could possibly pay for it all, but she resolved to pay her back as soon as she could—if she could find a way to keep her job.

After the dessert, Violet called the
Mâitre d’
over again.

“No—no more,” Camilla said. “I’ve got to get home. I’ve got to write that article.”

“Exactly,” said Violet, as the
Mâitre d’
presented her with a pad of paper and a pencil, carefully arranged on a tray. “That’s why I asked him to bring these.”

Camilla took the pencil and opened the notebook helplessly. “But I have no idea what to write—”

“Well, from what I remember it’s ‘Who? What? When? Where?’” said Violet.

Camilla couldn’t help laughing.

“All right, Mrs. Rushforth,” she said, as the rules she learned in her Rosewood Journalism classes came back to her. “When was it exactly that Harry on route 24 drove you to your doctor’s office?”

Chapter 14—Encounters: With Penguins and Others

Jonathan Kahn had lied. He did not arrive at the office at 6:30 with the rest of them. He hadn’t even arrived by 6:45 with the lugubrious Sunshine, who now wore a kind of renaissance costume of fraying velvet.

Julie, who breezed by in a T-shirt displaying a portrait of Susan B. Anthony, informed Camilla that she was to report to Stuart.

“Who’s Stuart?” she asked Bob, who looked as if he hadn’t left his typewriter all night.

“E. Stuart Gordon, III, assistant news editor and resident Harvard man,” Bob said, gesturing with his head at the back of the room while he continued to type.

Camilla surveyed the group of relentlessly underdressed workers behind her and saw no one who fit that description. She took a deep breath and inserted a piece of paper into her typewriter.

“Early last March,” she wrote, “Mrs. Violet Rushforth, 84-year-old resident of Golden Hill, stood in the rain waiting for the number twenty-four bus…”

The words came out with surprising ease. Her journalism professor would have been proud. She liked the sound of her IBM Selectric, which made a nice counterpoint to the rhythm of Bob’s two-fingered typing.

~

A bit later, when Camilla was proofreading what really wasn’t a bad story—a little short on facts, of course—describing the pleasant, but inadequate San Diego public transportation system, she sensed someone standing by her desk. She looked up and saw a curly-haired young man wearing an L.L. Bean shirt with ducks on it. He examined her through thick, dark-rimmed glasses.

“Randy? I’m Stuart Gordon. You’re going to have to wrap that up right away. Some demented individual is holding a couple of penguins hostage over at Sea World.” He gave a conspiratorial smile and bent over her desk. “Sorry to send you out on such a Mickey Mouse assignment, but Genghis thinks there are political implications in this.”

“Genghis?”

Camilla reached for the keys to the Edsel, which Violet had insisted she take this morning.

“I mean Mr. Kahn,” Stuart said. “Sorry. Private joke. Hey, is that finished? He wants to see it right away.”

She watched Stuart pick up her neatly typed manuscript and fought the urge to grab it back. She glanced at the glass office, where Mr. Kahn paced while he held his phone to his ear. She was amazed to see she’d been so absorbed in her work she hadn’t noticed him come in. She wondered if he’d seen her. Although she had dressed in her most conservative suit and pulled her hair back in a tight knot in an attempt at disguise, she knew she had no hope of keeping her identity a secret very long.

“Genghis Kahn,” she said. “Oh, dear.”

“He’s not that bad.” Stuart followed as she hurried toward the stairs. “It’s just that he cares a lot more about humanity in general than any human being in particular. But he’s doing important things with this paper. He’s trying to build it up the point where it can compete with the Copley papers, which have a near monopoly in this town. That’s why I came to work for him after Harvard. After all, his book on Vietnam is the definitive work, don’t you think? It’s criminal that it’s out of print…uh, Randy?”

Camilla was trying to remember how to get to Sea World. She had no idea how she could write a story with “political implications” on the subject of penguins, whether they were being held hostage or not.

“Yes, Mr. Gordon?”

“Stuart,” he said, with his face closer to hers than was proper for a person of such recent acquaintance. “And if you’re free for dinner tonight, I’ve found a little place in Hillcrest that serves some almost passable veal—”

“How sweet of you,” she said, pulling away with an exaggerated smile. “But I’ve already made plans.”

~

As she dashed down the stairs, she felt some pleasure in knowing that she had dismissed Stuart without having to resort to an actual lie. She had indeed made plans for dinner this evening—with Violet. Or rather, Violet had made plans for both of them. She had promised to cook a “comfort feast” if Camilla lost her job today, but insisted that if she still had a job, she must fix dinner for Violet “on account of the bus thing was her idea.” Camilla was not exactly looking forward to another evening of Violet’s rambling monologues, but she knew it would be preferable to an evening with Stuart, who reminded her of every bad date she ever had while a student at Rosewood.

~

The penguins’ names were Fred and Ginger, and they had been held hostage for nearly three hours in a wing of the not-yet-open “Penguin Encounter”, the newest exhibit at Sea World. Their captor, a machete-wielding Mexican national named Luis Martinez, released them after that interval because, he said, he was “freezing his ass off”.

Mr. Martinez was a sad-looking man of about fifty. Camilla felt sorry for him, despite his threats to use his dangerous-looking knife to make Fred and Ginger into “penguin sushi”. The poor man was facing deportation after eighteen years in the U.S. because of irregularities in his immigration papers. He said he was protesting the fact that the citizens of San Diego were spending millions on the housing of feathered immigrants from Antarctica, but would do nothing about the squalid housing for hard-working human immigrants. He asked several times to see Fred and Ginger’s Green Cards.

~

As Camilla climbed back up the stairs to the
Sentinel
office, she was actually looking forward to writing the article. She hoped she’d have a chance to finish it before having to deal with Stuart or Jonathan Kahn again.

However, when she reached the newsroom she saw Stuart hovering near her desk.

“Genghis is out for blood. He wants to see you right away.” He gave her a pat. “The offer is still open for dinner, if you need a shoulder to cry on.”

Camilla’s knees felt rubbery as she knocked on the glass door. Mr. Kahn was not talking on the phone. He was reading copy. Hers. She took a deep breath.

“Come in, Randy.” He didn’t even look up from the typed pages. His dark curls shadowed his eyes and the stark light from the overhead fluorescent fixture made his cheekbones look especially prominent.

“Are you aware,” he said, suddenly glancing up from her story, “—that your assignment was to cover a computer fair in Rancho Bernardo?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you decided you’d rather write a piece on public transportation?”

She kept her hands clasped to stop them from shaking. “Not exactly—you see, I had trouble with the bus, so I didn’t get to the fair until it was over, but I thought I should write something, and Violet said everything has a lesson if you look for it, so—well, I wrote that.”

Mr. Kahn studied her story again. “I see.” He flipped over a page. “Well, even though your research is worse than skimpy, I think I see what you’re trying to do. But listen—if you want to be a political satirist, you’re going to have to be a lot more hard-hitting than this. Don’t be afraid to mention the mayor’s name. Call him out and tell him he’s a big, shiny, empty fraud, just like his buses. You can’t be this subtle. Hit us over the head with it.”

“So—you’d like a rewrite?” She tried to remember the mayor’s name.

“No.” Mr. Kahn leaned back in his chair. “I’ve already run two articles on Mayor Wilson this week, and most of our space is going to Bob’s Nicaragua article.” He dropped her story into the wastebasket next to his desk. “I suggest that in the future you write the stories assigned to you.”

“Yes, Mr. Kahn” she took one last look at her rejected work—already soaking up grease from the gooey burger box in the wastebasket.

“You look familiar to me, Randy,” he said. “Where have we met before?”

Uh-oh. Here it was. Her eyes focused on an ink stain on the green linoleum floor. She felt her cheeks burning as she tried to think of a plausible lie. Any lie.

“Good God!” he said. “You’re that air-brained little debutante, aren’t you? H. P. Randall’s daughter. What’s your name—Pamela?” He grabbed her greasy story from the basket and read her byline, which she had typed as “C. S. Randall.”

“C. S? Camilla. That’s it. Camilla Randall. Are you aware, Ms. Randall, that your family had me blacklisted with every major news agency in this country?”

“I’m afraid I am, Mr. Kahn.”

“Then would you mind explaining what you are doing here?”

She said “um” twice as she continued to stare at the ink spot. No words came. She didn’t even have the will to run.

“Wait a minute,” Mr. Kahn said. “I did that interview less than a year ago. You were going to some finishing school in Virginia. How long did you work for the
Union
?”

He tossed her story back in the trash and picked up the telephone.

“Julie, get me the
San Diego Union
personnel department.”

“Please! Don’t bother,” Camilla said. “I worked there for two months—in classifieds. I wasn’t very good at it, and they were getting ready to fire me anyway, and then I missed a day by mistake, so I just—never went back.” She clutched her shaking hands together and summoned the bravery to look Mr. Kahn in the face.

“Cancel that, Julie.” He put down the phone and leaned back in his chair with a mocking half-smile. “So, you got a fun summer job you didn’t bother to show up for?”

She looked back at the floor.

“You still haven’t answered my question, Ms. Randall. I’m not going to ask you how you conned Angela into recommending you for this job. I’ve conned her myself plenty of times. But I want to know why a spoiled little socialite with the political consciousness of a toy poodle wants to work for me?”

She could say nothing.

Mr. Kahn leaned forward. “You’re working for a left-wing newspaper in a southern California slum, Ms. Randall—a newspaper that happens to be run by a man who once wrote an awfully unflattering article about you for a major New York daily. I’m having trouble understanding why.”

The ink spot on the floor started looking like a severed head, with blood dripping from the neck.

Mr. Kahn’s voice got louder. “It’s obviously not the money. Eight hundred dollars a month is hardly an attraction to a woman whose mother just married the Grand Dragon of the fast-food industry. And God know it’s not the politics, so what is it?” His eyes flashed icy blue. “Is it revenge, Ms. Randall? Wasn’t blacklisting me enough for you? Is that angelic face hiding the soul of a vindictive bitch?”

This last speech had an odd effect on Camilla. She stopped wishing for the floor to swallow her up. She didn’t feel like crying, or even getting sick. Well, maybe the news that her mother had indeed gone through with her plans to marry Lester Stokes did make her queasy for a moment, but Mr. Kahn’s nastiness, and his use of the vulgar word, made him nothing but a twin of Lester Stokes, and she knew she had to fight him—the way she wished her mother had fought Stokes.

Taking a deep breath, she drew on her mother’s most powerful weapons: a steady smile, and a slow, calm voice.

“Mr. Kahn,” she said. “I do not intend to get into a contest of bad manners with you. Bad manners are your field of expertise, not mine. In answer to your question, I came to work here because I needed a job and I studied to be a journalist. If I had known that you were editor here, I probably wouldn’t have taken the position—not because I had anything to do with your blacklisting, but to save us both embarrassment. I assume you were embarrassed about that dreadful
Guardian
article, and the awful way you told me about how my father died. I will accept your apology for it. If you will accept mine for trying to pass myself off as an experienced journalist.”

Mr. Kahn said nothing.

She reached into her purse for her notebook and put it on his desk. “My notes on the penguin story,” she said. “I hope you find them legible.” She started toward the door.

“Ms. Randall, I want that story today. Where do you think you’re going?”

“I assumed I’d been fired, Mr. Kahn,” Camilla said.

“You assumed wrong. You’re educated. You know how to put together a sentence, and you have a good, clear style. If you’re serious about this job, and you write the stories assigned to you, there’s a place for you on this paper. I’ll give you a month. If you can’t cut it by then, you’re out. Got it?”

“Yes, Mr. Kahn.” She kept her hand on the doorknob to hide the shaking.

“Don’t forget your notes,” he said, gesturing at the notebook. “I want to see the story as soon as it’s finished.” He looked at his watch and reached for the telephone.

Camilla hoped Violet would enjoy a dinner of chocolate pudding. She’d never had a chance to tell her it was the only thing she could cook.