Free Azrael by William L. Deandrea Page B

dark eyes that said she wasn’t the mouse she seemed to act like. He managed to talk to her long enough to find out she was a sociology major (as Jimmy was) and that her father was the manager of the butcher department of a Food Emporium Supermarket in Queens before Jimmy got wound up on the topic of American intransigence. She looked tenderly at her fiancée, but, Trotter could tell, without illusion. It was the attitude most intelligent women had about men, if they didn’t scorn them entirely—“He’s really quite wonderful, he just needs a little management.”
    She was quite good at managing Jimmy already. Every time Trotter made a particularly telling point (the myth of the “Soviet People” for instance), and Jimmy looked likely to lose his temper, Hannah asked him to pass the salt or the butter or something. The tactic drew approving looks from Petra Hudson. Even Regina peered through her week-long haze of irritation at Trotter long enough to nod with thoughtful approval at her prospective sister-in-law.
    They were eating in a private room at The Hayloft, Kirkester’s finest restaurant, and the only money-losing proposition in the entire Hudson Group. James Hudson, Sr., had opened the place because when the Hudson Group began to take off, there hadn’t been a suitable place to take the heavy hitters they were now dealing with to lunch. It was a converted farmhouse with a lot of wood and genuine antiques around. The food was excellent. Trotter had Beef Wellington, and hadn’t had to use his knife yet. He’d noted prices when he looked at the menu, and they were quite reasonable.
    “Qaddafi isn’t really important,” Jimmy said.
    “He was to the people who got blown up at the Rome airport,” Regina put in. Trotter hadn’t even been sure she’d been listening. She was still mad at him and promised to be that way for a long time yet. She’d been upset ever since he’d used the covering noise of the presses to tell her he’d have to be her boyfriend, at least as far as the world was concerned.
    She hadn’t liked the idea. Trotter had told her if he was going to do any good at all, he had to get close enough to Petra Hudson to find out what was bothering her, and being a feature writer for the Chronicle just wasn’t going to do it.
    She still didn’t like it.
    “Why not?” Trotter had demanded.
    By this time, they had been out of the building completely, walking down a tree-lined path around the carefully landscaped grounds of the Hudson Group Headquarters. Regina kicked angrily at dry leaves as they walked. She had her hands in her pockets and her head down.
    “Why not?” Trotter said again.
    “I have a hard time getting myself taken seriously,” she said. “As a boss. As a journalist.”
    Trotter resisted the impulse to ask if the fact that at this moment she looked and acted as if she were seven years old had anything to do with it. Instead, he said, “So you think people will—”
    “I know people will,” she told him. “They always do. You’ll be hearing the whispers about my mother and Charles, if you haven’t already.
    “So I bring you in to a good job without consulting anybody—even Sally Long, who is now convinced her days as feature editor are numbered, by the way. And you turn out to be my boyfriend. It’s going to look sleazy, Mr. Trotter.”
    “Allan. I’m your boyfriend, you have to call me Allan.”
    “You are not my boyfriend!” It didn’t come out as a shout only because she strangled it through clenched teeth.
    “Believe me, Allan Trotter will turn in features the like of which this paper has never seen. Pulitzer Prize-quality stuff.” That was no lie. One of the Congressman’s many captive experts was a former Pulitzer prizewinner who had drunk and gambled himself and his family into serious, not to say terminal, trouble before the old man interceded. Cleaned up and respectable again, he wrote for the Congressman on demand whenever fine nonfiction or pseudo