seemed dumbfounded, very much including the word’s literal meaning: speechless. My God, being publisher of the Miami Herald wasn’t supposed to involve such shit as felonious! It was supposed to involve going out to three-hour lunches with advertisers, politicians, CEOs, CFOs, college and foundation presidents, patrons of the arts, long-term celebrities, but also fifteen-minute stars hot off national TV dance shows, music shows, quiz shows, reality shows, and body shows, and TV dance-show, music-show, and game-show winners, all of whose presence demanded a suave, perpetually tanned, perpetually gregarious host, whose small talk never clicked and clacked because too many marbles got in the way, and whose very face brought out the most obsequious welcomes by name and aims to please by maître d’s and owners of all the best restaurants. There was nothing suave about him at this moment, however. His mouth hung slightly open. Ed knew precisely what desPortes was asking himself… Have we committed a terrible blunder? Have we done what scientists call hopey-dopey research, in which the hope for a particular outcome skews the actual findings? Have we relied on the word of a man who we ourselves know to be a pathetic drunk? Was Drukovich’s wall-full of forgeries missing for no other reason than that he had stored them somewhere else—if, in fact, they were forgeries at all? Have we hopey-doped Korolyov’s every move… when, in fact, he was innocent of any duplicitous intent? Did he, Ed, know precisely what was running through the mind of the grandly named Adlai desPortes because that was precisely what was running through Edward T. Topping IV’s mind, too?
Like a good pit bull, always spoiling for a fight, Cutler seemed to look through the hides of all the Eds and Adlais before him and see all the limp spines. So it fell to him, the task of stiffening them and making them stand up straight.
“Beautiful!” he said, grinning as if the most jolly game in the world had just begun. “You gotta love it! Have you ever heard a bigger bagful of hot air in your life?… masquerading as a missile? Try to find one fact in our story that they deny… You won’t find it, because they can’t, either! They can’t deny specifically what we have accused Korolyov of doing—because we haven’t accused him of anything! I hope you know,” he said, “that the moment they file a libel suit, they’re inviting a real strip search.”
Cutler not only smiled, he began rubbing his hands together as if he couldn’t imagine any prospect more delightful. “This is all bluster. Why are they sending this thing—by hand—so early in the morning?” He scanned all the faces again, as if someone might get it immediately… Silence… Stone… “It’s pure PR!” he said. “They wanna get on the record about how ‘scurrilous’ this all is, so that no more news stories will go out without their all-threatening denial included. That’s all we’ve got here.”
Ed felt the need to demonstrate his leadership by commenting in some trenchant way. But he couldn’t think of anything to say in any way, trenchantly or otherwise. Besides, the letter was addressed to desPortes, wasn’t it? It was up to him, right? Ed stared at Adlai desPortes. The man looked as if he had just been poleaxed at the base of the skull. He was a blank, out on his feet. Ed knew what he, the publisher, was thinking, because he, Ed, was thinking the same thing. Why had they let this ambitious juvenile, John Smith, have his way? He was a boy! He looked like he never had to shave! His whole case was based on a sudden burst of “truth” from the breast of a hopeless drunk—who was now dead. With this lawyer Julius Gudder brandishing the scalpel, Korolyov and Company would reduce Igor Drukovich’s reputation and veracity to a stain on a bath mat.
Publisher desPortes came to life and, so to speak, took the words right out of Ed’s mouth: “But Ira, aren’t we relying awfully heavily on the testimony of a man with a couple of serious handicaps? One, he’s dead and, two, he was dead drunk when he was alive?”
That drew some laughs, and thank God for that! Signs of life among the undead!
The pit bull, however, wasn’t having any of it. His voice hit only higher, harsher, more haranguing tones as he said, “Not at all! Not at all! The man’s sobriety or lack of it has nothing to do with it. This