As Will joined Charlie at a window table, he noticed that a Diet Coke and glass of ice already waited for him.
The AWM Executive Dining room staff took pride in knowing the preferences of their clients.
Charlie wasted no time on formalities. "We're gonna try Elliot out at 10:00."
"With the right EP, he'll do great."
"I think so, too, and I know how much he appreciates your lobbying for him. He really looks up to you."
"What's this got to do with where my staff went?"
"He's taking your staff. Well, strictly speaking, he's taking your EP and your EP's taking your staff."
"Wait, Don's going with Elliot?"
"Don asked to go."
"He asked to go?" Will's indignation rose to match his incredulity. "I get that there are moments, very infrequent moments, mind you, where I'm not the easiest guy to work with—"
Barely containing his mirth at Will's struggle with composure, Charlie administered the coup de grace. "I'm hiring a new EP for you."
Now Will positively sputtered. "You're hiring—you—without my meeting him—"
"Her."
"Without my meeting her?"
"No, you've met her."
Will's gasket finally reached terminal velocity. "Charlie, have you hired to run my show, without consulting me—"
Barely containing a grin, Charlie took a sip of his drink and finally showed his poker hand. "Tried to. She turned me down."
"Turned you—down?" Will took a moment to consider his narrow escape, then recalibrated.
The nerve of her—the unmitigated arrogance—to turn down his show—as if it wasn't good enough for her.
Charlie paused to drain his bourbon and signal to the waiter for another. "I did my damnedest to convince her. Fast car. War stories. All the usual bullshit, you know—"
"Yeah, yeah. The bailing water analogy." Will had heard most of Charlie's homey aphorisms before.
"But she turned you down?"
It was unclear if Will was surprised or if he simply wanted additional reassurance on that score.
"Said she had another offer." Charlie ran his finger around the rim of his glass, still waiting for the second drink. "But—frankly, she didn't look like she was getting offers. In fact, she didn't look—"
Will bit at the bait, guardedly. "Like what?"
"Well—sober."
"MacKenzie?" Will laughed in spite of himself. "This is MacKenzie McHale we're talking about. Paragon of professional virtue," adopting a properly mocking tone on the operative word.
Charlie shrugged. "What can I say? She was wearing sweatpants at a bowling alley at eleven on a Tuesday morning. Two empty beer bottles on the bar in front of her. What other conclusion should I draw?"
"MacKenzie," Will still insisted, as if the answer was contained in that name alone.
The older man leaned forward. "You keep saying that, Will, and I'll be damned if I can figure out whether you're surprised or—pleased in some sick way."
"It, uh, just seems out of character. The Mac I knew, anyway."
But you never really knew her, did you, a voice echoed in his head.
"Last I heard, she was with CNN," Will began, trying to muster a convincing amount of indifference.
"They let her go."
MacKenzie? CNN let MacKenzie go?
Will didn't give voice to it this time, but Charlie nonetheless read it on his face, so Will dug deeper for the nonchalance he wanted to project. "Wasn't she doing good work? I mean—"
"The best. Filing stories from fucking caves. Shot at in three different countries. Two Peabody awards, one RFK award."
"But they let her go?"
"Yeah. Fucking crazy, isn't it?" Charlie sighed and checked his watch. "Well, I've got two interviews this afternoon to find you a new exec. Kathy Sutton from Fox at 2—"
Will made a face.
"—And Jerry Peters at 4—he's at NPR now, but has bounced all over cable news. One of them ought to do the trick."
"For my show?"
"That's the general idea."
"I need to be in those meetings, Charlie. I have approval over my executive producer."
"You would think so, wouldn't you? But Business Affairs went through your whole contract and na-da."
"I don't have contractual approval?"
Shake of the head.
"I'm gonna renegotiate my contract right now," Will thundered, rising.
oooo
But Scott had been unavailable, so contract renegotiation became an empty threat, and it was nearly an hour later before Will's thoughts returned to the earlier portion of his conversation with Charlie. The part about—
MacKenzie.
The account Charlie gave didn't seem possible. So out of character.
Well. So what?
Was he supposed to care if she'd become a drunk?
Perhaps she'd had all the makings even when they had been a couple. In retrospect, it seemed like he had never known her at all.
He hadn't overtly wished her ill, but it certainly seemed fitting that she was reaping what she'd sown. Karmic, in fact.
He tried to recall the particulars of their last encounter, the one where she confessed to screwing around on him. He wanted to remember the exact words she used, so that he could take satisfaction in (possibly) them being used against her.
Strangely, though, he couldn't remember the precise words. They should have been burned in his memory—but they weren't.
Very strange.
No matter, he told himself. MacKenzie was finally getting her just dues. It might be cruel to take pleasure in her having been cast low, but he appreciated that the scales had at last been evened.
Do dirt, you get dirt—wasn't that the phrase?
He put it out of his mind again and went to the first rundown meeting, so he could harangue Don publicly about choosing to go to the other team.
Glancing at the clock after the rundown meeting, Will found he had time to crash the interview Charlie had with the NPR producer. Scott was still unavailable, and actual contractual bluster was off-the-table, but Will could still act the part. Aggrieved anchor, not getting his due.
oooo
Jerry Peters was round-faced and sandy-haired, with a hairline that didn't bode a long existence. He had small white fingers that limply returned Will's handshake—all the firmer for a subtextual display of who would really be in charge of any future professional relationship—and appeared a tad off his game now that the anchor had inserted himself into the interview process. Peters had believed he was on safer ground with only the news division president present.
Charlie permitted Will to interrupt the proceedings without revealing that he hadn't been invited.
"How's the fit at NPR?" Charlie asked, after the handshakes and introductions had been completed, and the three of them had taken chairs.
Peters made a stagey wince. "Comme ci, comme ça. It's been kind of crazy this spring." No doubt, he referred to the embarrassing incident where the head of the news division had publicly terminated a news personality for on-air insensitive remarks. It had set off an industry firestorm, ending with the news president's own resignation.
"We heard," Charlie acknowledged, trying to stay in the middle without being caught there. "Tough period."
"Jerry, I need an EP." To Charlie's consternation, Will cut immediately to the chase.
"Let's just talk a bit, first," Charlie interjected, in an attempt to get the interview back on track and restore his own advantage. He shot Will a warning look before turning back to the other man. "You've only been at NPR for a little over a year—and, unfortunately, a rather tumultuous year for them. Before that, you were—" Charlie flipped through papers on his desk, "freelancing for Stars and Stripes—"
Peters heh-hed. "Interesting assignments, but I couldn't pay the bills on that miserly stipend."
"—And before that, you were in the field with CNN." Charlie put the papers down and looked up. "Why'd you leave CNN?"
"Brutal rotations. Once they learned your competency level, CNN would just suck you into a maw of never-ending deployments with staggering deadlines. Nearly two years there and it prematurely aged me." Peters laughed nervously. "Anyway, CNN found its superstar in the field and pretty much let the rest of us know there was no advancement for the rest of us. Funny how that turned out, though."
"What do you mean?"
"The anointed one. She fell from grace somehow. Summarily shown the door, was what I heard."
"Who—?"
"McHale. MacKenzie McHale."
Will's head popped up from scrolling through his phone messages. He and Charlie exchanged a glance.
"She was great. Exceeded every expectation. Wrote copy on her hands, cut segments in her head. Spot-on every time. Why, she could reassemble a video-cam the same way a grunt could reassemble his rifle. In fact, I'm surprised you aren't talking to her about News Night." Peters shook his head and hitched up a corner of his mouth into a laconic smile. "Maybe I should shut my mouth, huh? I want this job so I shouldn't give you any ideas." More nervous laughter.
Although he desperately wanted to pursue the tantalizing comments of Jerry Peters, Charlie steered the conversation back to philosophies on production and content. Will seemed to follow along, posing a couple of what-if scenarios to expose probable editorial biases.
After a leisurely hour of conversation that rarely felt like an actual job interview, Charlie rose and the others followed suit. Time was up.
"Thanks for your time today, Jerry. We expect to make a decision soon, so you'll likely hear something from us in a couple of weeks."
"Great. It's been good talking with you." He shook hands all around and turned to leave.
"Jerry?" Charlie called him back. "Uh—just out of curiosity—just because I have some other openings in D.C. and L.A.—can you tell me any more about this MacKenzie McHale?"
Jerry Peters' face clouded, as if he realized she might be real competition to him still. "Look, I don't know how to contact her. I don't know where she is. She might be dead for all I know."
However speculative the conjecture, Will still swallowed hard.
"Like I said, I have a lot of positions," Charlie repeated, trying to cultivate a casual, off-handed tone. "Just following every lead, you know."
Peters caught the drift now and set about to lower expectations. "I may have laid it on a bit thick earlier. All that woman-of-steel stuff. When I first met her, three years ago, she looked awfully fragile. Had her arm in a cast—"
"Some injury on assignment?"
"Nah. She showed up that way on the first day with CNN. An accident, she said, but I remember there was some talk at the higher levels even then that perhaps she wasn't going to be able to handle the field. It isn't for sissies, you remember," Peters added, trying to play to what he divined was Charlie's sweet spot. "Lots of equipment for the field, and there aren't any grips out there."
Peters could have left it there, but after a pause, he added, "She did it, though. Made a habit of defying your preconceptions, you know. So, by the time the thing happened in Islamabad, we were just a little surprised that she had gotten that sloppy."
"Sloppy? What happened in Islamabad?"
Peters voice took on an edge at the continued inquiry about a potential professional rival. "You guys do news here, right? You didn't hear about a CNN journalist taking a knife in the belly?"
Will blanched and Charlie answered for the both of them. "No. So that was McHale?"
Peters nodded. "And that was the beginning of the end for her, I heard. Never got things back together after that." He shrugged and affected a thousand watt smile. "Thanks again. Looking forward to hearing from you, Charlie, and I hope we get to work together, Will."
As soon as he was out the door, Will turned on Charlie.
"Were you doing that on purpose?"
It being well past five o'clock now, the older man had gravitated to the decanter. "I was genuinely curious. I mean, I saw her the other day, and I wanted to know how to reconcile what I saw with what he had been saying."
"What you saw? Charlie, what you saw was MacKenzie's decaying orbit. Inevitable and of no interest to me." Will crossed his arms and sniffed. "I'd rather talk about Jerry Peters and whoever else you—"
"Damn it, Will." Charlie slammed the lid to the ice bucket in frustration. "The guy just told you that someone you used to know—used to care about—is having a tough time. Lost her job—took a stab wound on assignment—"
He noticed Will wince slightly at that phrase. Precisely as he had intended. "She'd evidently even taken the job on while at less than one hundred percent." Then, musing aloud, "Signing up for field work in Afghanistan with a broken arm—"
—Grabbing her wrist—
"—And you two did great work together years ago, I'd love to see that sort of fire at News Night."
Ice cubes hit Charlie's glass with a sharp, discordant chink.
"Yeah, well, you won't. Not MacKenzie."
"She told me as much. That you would never agree to it, and that it was personal, not professional."
"Did she give you the particulars?" Warily.
"No, but she didn't have to. You're doing a pretty good job right now."
"Charlie, she ripped my heart out while it was still beating. Dribbled it down the court before the slapshot at the goalpost."
"Mixing some metaphors there, aren't we?"
Will marshaled his annoyance. "Can we just move on and find the best new EP for my show?"
"You already know who the best is. And yet, you're willing to settle for someone else."
oooo
Back in his office, Will scrolled through his contacts list, unlit cigarette between his lips. There had to be someone other than Sutton and Peters, someone who would jump at the chance to work with—
"I found the video you wanted to see. It's in your file on the server."
Ellin, or Karen, or whatever her name was, stood in front of his desk, plainly uneasy at her proximity to her actual boss. "And, I think—that is, I'm pretty sure—that you can't smoke in here." She offered a self-deprecating little smile.
He picked up the Zippo and lit the end of his cigarette, watching her steadily. "Thanks for letting me know."
She practically curtsied in mortification on her way out the door.
Will's hand hovered over the computer mouse, but he found himself unable to call up the video to which his assistant had referred. He didn't want to see it; it was only important to establish a timeline.
Perhaps he should call that guy Jerry Peters. Ask some more questions. Like, when did he first meet Mac—the exact date? Had she had any explanation for the cast on her arm?
And which wrist?
Because Will was having unsettling flashes of remembrance.