A Faint Cold Fear

A Faint Cold Fear

In New York Ray Douglas, chief of the narcotics division, is too successful, too outspoken.  When he criticizes the decisions of his superiors once too often he is summarily exiled to South America, his career broken, as liaison with the DEA there, a job that doesn’t exist.  Reporter Jane Fox, meanwhile begs her superiors to send her there.  Colombia is a place of bombings, kidnappings and murderous traffickers richer than the government.  Too dangerous for a woman, she is told. She sees it as the story that can make her career, she fights and gets the job.  In Bogota, despite their differing agendas, the two meet and are thrown together, while all around them the violence goes on.

A FAINT COLD FEAR

Excerpts from Reviews

Mr. Daley understands politics from the White House to the station house, and he understands even more acutely the sinister politics of every day life—of careerism and of love…even his villains are granted humanity, however evil and thwarted…intelligent, absorbing and full of the stuff of life.  --New York Times Book Review

No one writes the police thriller better than Robert Daley…He is in top form here.  –San Diego Union

The action is suspenseful, the violence a constant threat, and the atmosphere heady with drugs, power politics and sex.  –Chicago Tribune

Sneaky peeks inside a repellently fascinating world.  –Atlanta Constitution

Daley knows the territory, how to populate it with vivid leads, how to pace his material smartly.  It’ll keep you turning pages well into the night.  --Detroit News

Books by Robert Daley

NOVELS

The Whole Truth

Only a Game

A Priest and a Girl

Strong Wine Red as Blood

To Kill a Cop

The Fast One

Year of the Dragon

The Dangerous Edge

Hands of a Stranger

Man With a Gun

A Faint Cold Fear

Tainted Evidence

Wall of Brass

Nowhere to Run

The Innocents Within

The Enemy of God

Pictures

NON-FICTION

The World Beneath the City

Cars at Speed

The Bizarre World of European Sport

The Cruel Sport

The Swords of Spain

A Star in the Family

Target Blue

Treasure

Prince of the City

An American Saga

Portraits of France

A Book of the Month Club featured alternate

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally.  Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or to events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or my any electronic or mechanical means without the express written consent of the author.

Copyright @ 1990 by Riviera Productions Ltd.

Originally published by Little, Brown & Company, New York, N.Y, 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A Faint Cold Fear

By Robert Daley

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 978-1-4661-8241-7

1. Title

PS3554-A43F35   1990 

81.3’54—dc20             92-31904

813’.54 ---dc20

90-39021

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land

A Faint Cold Fear

A novel by ROBERT DALEY

Chapter 1

It was a low apartment house at the end of a short, tree-lined, deadend street in a residential neighborhood in Forest Hills, supposedly the richest section of Queens. Behind it ran a chain link fence and below the fence ran the Grand Central Parkway. There was no way to watch the building from the parkway side. Since the street deadened at the fence the front side was not much better. You could approach from one direction only and not at all without being noticed. Across the street was a row of one-family brick houses with slate roofs. The houses were rammed in side by side. They had driveways and garage doors in front and tiny front lawns, with maybe an alley between each pair of them. They were occupied by families with children—no chance of setting up anything in those houses. Some of them had a few bushes out front that maybe you could hide in at night, if you scrunched up real small. Since there was so little traffic a stakeout in parked cars was not possible. To work a surveillance truck into such a street without attracting attention was not possible. There were no overhead wires to service. You could repair the pavement or work the manholes but only for a few days at a time. You could send in delivery men, but not too often. You could put a man on the roof, but you couldn't protect him there. You could send a dog walker down the street twice a day every day, provided it was the same guy and the same dog; but how long could they linger?

In short, a difficult building to watch, and chosen no doubt for that reason. A problem. A series of problems that Ray Douglas had come upon during a period of immense unhappiness in his life, and had attacked with increasing fascination.  

In the end he had used all of the above techniques and some others, switching back and forth, doubling back on himself, and the surveillance had not been burned, as far as he could tell, though it had lasted now four months. He had lost himself in this case. After four months it would end within the hour. 

Douglas was 44 years old, a tall man with black hair and nearly black eyes. He had been a cop from the age of twenty two. From college, needing a job because he wanted to get married, he had gone simultaneously into the Police Academy and into the N.Y.U. graduate school of business administration. His ambition in life had nothing to do with being a cop. It was to become a businessman like his father. The department for him was in no sense a calling though it became one soon enough. The young husband, the earnest student, was a patrolman on patrol and as such no different from the others. He spent his days and sometimes nights arresting villains, coping with trauma and tragedy, helping where he could help. He found he loved the helping. But he loved the violence too. He loved the camaraderie of the station houses.

He loved everything about being cop.

A daughter was born. There was no longer enough money for graduate school. Rather than ask his father for help he had dropped out and taken a second job painting houses. He never went back. Within four years he was a sergeant, moving up fast within the department.

By now his rank was deputy chief. He commanded the narcotics division, a thousand men. He had an office in headquarters and was supposed to be in it, his eye on his entire division. Like everyone else in headquarters, he was supposed to be protecting his career and his back, and politicking in the halls. But he did not care about any of that anymore. He was not supposed to be concentrating on any particular investigation but he had organized this one personally and then, to the astonishment of his detectives, had joined them. He had ridden with his men in tail cars, had sat with them on wiretaps, had sometimes brought them coffee in the night.

And he was with them now, lying under a bush across the street from the apartment building. The case had become more real to him than his life. Panel trucks had been driving up all day. Boxes had been going inside. Douglas supposed he knew what was in them, and on this supposition had based his decision. The case ended tonight. 

The lobby had glass doors. It was empty and he watched it. The people they were watching, as he had told his men, were disciplined, organized, and as heavily armed and dangerous as any of the world's terrorist gangs. They were richer than the government of the country they came from, which his detectives thought beside the point. Douglas did not. Rich meant they could buy gear his side was not permitted or could not afford. They had recoilless submachine guns that made no noise, and perhaps hand grenades. They had night vision goggles, and electronic detection devices that perhaps picked up police transmissions. They might have night scopes too. The crosshairs could be fixed on his forehead at this moment. Most felons were afraid to fire at cops. Not these people, who had orders from base to shoot it out. Usually they obeyed, why not?  If arrested they faced astronomical bail, meaning no bail, and after that astronomical sentences. They were all illegal aliens anyway. To them a shootout made sense. They either died or, if they escaped, went home and were safe forever. 

Douglas's career was as much at risk as his life. Perhaps more so.

If tonight's results did not measure up to the prodigious number of police man-hours he had expended and the hopes he had raised; if too few arrests were made or if they did not stand up in court; if the evidence to be seized was less than he had imagined; worse, if a cop or cops got killed—then most likely he would lose his command, and his career would be over. In the New York Police Department his personal involvement would be taken certainly as incompetence and probably as stupidity—not because he had mangled the case, but because he had risked his personal prestige on it—in the world of police commanders, proof of the worst sort of bad judgment.

It was August, and the night was hot. Douglas wore jeans and a polo shirt, and lay with stones pressing into him, beside a detective named Sullivan. The young man was dumbstruck by such intimate proximity to rank; in any case, he had been silent for an hour. The police radio was in Douglas's hand, and his briefcase, which contained the warrants, leaned against his leg. He was waiting for five men to come out. He could not go up and get them; the apartments in that building had steel fire doors. In the case of the suspects' apartment, this made it a fortress. Assault the fortress and cops would get killed. The five might come out together. He hoped they would come out separately. He did not want a pitched battle in the street either.

There were two detectives parked down on the verge of the highway below the fence, watching the back of the building, an unlikely escape route; they would be useless in any shootout up here. Others were crouched between the houses—once darkness had fallen it had become possible to move them up that close but no closer. The rest were out on the avenue, waiting.

Five perpetrators. Although an educated man, Douglas thought in police jargon, same as street cops. Perpetrators.

Suddenly the first of them appeared. The elevator doors opened and there he was crossing the lobby. He was alone, and this was what Douglas had hoped for. Douglas slapped the radio to his mouth and whispered: Salvador's coming out.

It was two o'clock in the morning. He had felt Detective Sullivan stiffen beside him. He could almost hear the department cars start up out on the avenue.

Salvador in the doorway eyeballed the street and sidewalk. Nothing alarmed him. He came out, climbed up into his double-parked van, and started it up. As it moved away, Douglas again whispered into the radio: Don't anyone follow him.

Salvador had a wife and children, just like other people. His address was known, his habits. You never arrested everyone in a conspiracy like this. You left a loose end to lead to a new case. You stayed away for two weeks, then put the tail back on and watched where the loose end took you. At the end of two weeks of looking over his shoulder, Salvador would imagine the heat was off, he had been overlooked. He would make contact with someone, or someone would make contact with him, and the case would resume. Of course, sometimes this tactic got the loose end killed. He was assumed by his colleagues to have been overlooked because he was an informant, and he got hit. If this should happen to Salvador, it would cause Douglas's detectives, though not Douglas, to laugh. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, they would joke. But it would end the case.

With Salvador gone, Douglas ordered more men up close, but left several detectives at the head of the street to stop any residents who might be coming home late. He was trying to think of everything—and to protect his career as much as he could under the circumstances. If there was to be a shootout, he could not afford to get some bystander caught in the crossfire.

Presently he had a van double parked in front of the door with detectives inside it. Douglas was standing now. A three quarter moon hung low over the trees, and he could feel a faint cool breeze against his face. He was like an orchestra leader about to make music. It could not be long now. A crescendo was about to be heard. He was the man who controlled what was to happen next, and he felt the power of it—power such as few men ever feel. He was about to change people's lives.

For fifteen minutes, perhaps more, he watched the open elevator doors. When finally they slid shut, he ran across into the lobby and watched the floor numbers light up.

The elevator had stopped on the third floor. They're coming, he breathed into his radio, and he ran back out and hid behind the van, radio in one hand, gun in the other.

What was now supposed to occur he had written down on paper, diagrammed, explained, but the behavior of criminals, like the behavior of bullets, could not be predicted, and Douglas knew this, and had so warned his men who knew it also but sometimes forgot. Since the remaining perpetrators had arrived in two cars, then logically they should split up at the sidewalk, for the cars were parked at either end of the street. Douglas had assigned separate teams to rush them. The idea was to take them simultaneously with overwhelming force.

This was the way the book said to do it, and he believed in the book as far as it went. The New York Police Department made l00,000 felony arrests a year, a few of them as dangerous as these, and when the book was followed there was almost never any shooting. Particularly there was almost never any shot or dead cop. Almost never.

Peering over the hood of the van, Douglas watched the elevator doors open.

Only three suspects stepped forth. Where was the last of them?  Was he asleep up there?  Was he watching from the roof?  Would he erupt shooting from the stairwell as soon as the arrests were in progress?

The three were each carrying attaché cases. They were relaxed and jabbering to each other in their own language, for he could hear them.

Out on the sidewalk they shook hands all around the way foreigners did, then separated. Two went one way, one the other. And one still upstairs.

What to do?

When they were about twenty paces apart, Douglas shouted Now! into his radio, and tossed it in the window of the van. As he rushed forward he was aware that in a moment he might be dead, an exhilaration he had experienced before and that was like no other. Jamming his gun into someone's belly he shouted: Police, freeze.

He wasn't dead and the danger was almost past.

Move, motherfucker, and you're gone, said Sullivan, who was beside him.

Douglas's heartbeat began to slow.

Their astonishment was pleasant to see, though it was followed almost instantly by something colder, more calculating. But as detectives from the van, from the alleys, from the bushes kept pouring forward, the three sets of hands rose into the air.

Douglas ordered them stripped of their attaché cases, pushed up against the van, patted down, handcuffed. While this was done he watched the lobby, the open elevator doors.

He was nervous again. Hurry up, he urged his men.

One of the prisoners squealed. Too tight, man. 

Another said: Abogado.

Fucker wants his lawyer, Sullivan said.

Shove them into the van, ordered Douglas.

The elevator doors were still open, the lobby still empty. One was still upstairs. Douglas tried to decide what to do next.

The apartment's steel door was as much a fortress with one man behind it as with five. Kick it down and there would be widows to notify. To wait or not to wait?  The perpetrator might come out five minutes from now, or not at all. He might be waiting for them to hit the door. He might be in bed asleep, and in the morning come down surrounded by people on their way to work. 

The prisoners' pockets had been emptied out, and their belongings spread out on the hood of the van. Douglas stirred through coins, wallets, cigaret lighters, keys. He studied the keys and thought: we won't have to kick the door down at all.

He took the keys and started toward the lobby.

A crowd of detectives tried to enter the building with him. Kicking doors down was the most dangerous work cops did, but there was never any shortage of volunteers. They all wanted to do it. But four men was enough for a thing like this. You didn't want your men lined up in a narrow hallway. He kept three detectives, and sent the others back.

Having tiptoed along the third floor hallway, Douglas put his ear to the apartment door. But he could hear nothing. His heart was beating very fast again. Danger had the effect of stopping time in its tracks. This moment he was alive. The next moment he might not be. The dichotomy was absolute. Once through that door he could not go back. Risk was intellectual and physical both. To Douglas this was police work at its best, he loved it, could never give it up. He glanced behind him at the other three men who shared this risk, this moment with him, and they gave each other nervous grins, and he loved them too. 

There were two locks. One was a Lori, the other a Blocker. Lori was a fairly uncommon lock, and Blocker was rare. They could both have been Yales. He went searching through the three rings of keys. Luckier still: there was only one key of each make. Having detached them, he slid them as silently as possible into the two locks.

He nodded at the detectives he had with him, got three nods back, turned both keys at once, shoved the door inward, and burst into the room.

He was in a short hallway furnished only by a cardboard box. On the box lay a gun, and it was cocked. Beyond the box was the bathroom door, open, steam coming out. A man stood stark naked at the sink, half-turned from the mirror, staring toward them, lather on half his face. He held an old-fashioned razor in the air and stared as if stupefied.

Two of the detectives rushed forward and wrestled him naked into handcuffs, while Douglas reached for the gun and uncocked it. He found he was panting, though he had not exerted himself at all. As he tried to catch his breath, he glanced around, and as he did so a new exhilaration came on.

It was a one room studio apartment and it was crammed nearly to the ceiling, nearly wall to wall, with cartons. It was unbelievable!  There was a kitchen table and some chairs and no room for any other furniture at all. The cartons where he stood were stacked chest high and he ripped one open, and lifted out and hefted two plastic packages. They weighed about a kilo each and he dropped them back into that box and ripped open another, and then another. He glanced all around him. Not an apartment, a drug locker.

His detectives were ripping open cartons too. When the ripping stopped they gawped at the cartons. They gawped at each other. Their awe was almost religious. They had seen cartons going in today but had not be able to get close enough to count them. Douglas had expected to find a good many, everybody had, but nothing of this magnitude.

A detective came out of the bathroom with a small suitcase. It was behind the john, he said.

An expensive attaché case, rather large. Glove-soft leather. Hand stitched. Brass hinges and clasps. Locked. Heavy.

Douglas knew what was in it without being told. What's the combination, he asked the naked man.

Abogado, the man said.

A detective handed Douglas a clasp knife. It's a nice case, Douglas said to the prisoner, don't make me do this.

The naked man stared at him with black eyes.

He worked the blade under the heavy brass clasps. His own attaché case back in the van was scuffed by years of carrying around the tools of his trade on jobs like this one. Tonight, in addition to the warrants, it contained two boxes of bullets, an extra set of handcuffs, a flashlight, a sap, a hunting knife in a leather sheath, a second gun, and a cheese sandwich in a plastic bag.

He forced the blade in deeper, ripping the leather, prying the clasps loose. He lifted the lid.

Inside was money. Stacks of bills of all denominations. It was crammed with them.

He picked up a radio and spoke to his men outside. We've got one additional prisoner plus a roomful of stuff, plus an attaché case full of cash.  He paused to let this news sink in, then said: Congratulations to you all.

He ordered the prisoners brought up and manacled, along with the nude, to the kitchen chairs, knees under the table to save space. The outer door was closed and the apartment was now filled almost to bursting with boxes and people.

Now comes the hard part, Douglas told his detectives. Each package in each carton had to be counted, and initialed. The money had to be counted bill by bill, and there were tens of thousands of them. The sooner it's done, Douglas said, the sooner we can leave. 

The brilliant work was over and the slave work began. The detectives counted and the prisoners watched them: twelve men on a hot night in August in a room whose airspace was occupied mostly by cartons. The only window was a sliding glass door that seemed to have been bolted shut. They could not get it open. The outer door had to be kept not only shut but locked. The temperature went up and up. The apartment came to seem hermetically sealed. There were scores of cartons, and they were heavy, and Douglas, the deputy chief, moved as many as anyone, helping count over two thousand packages, taking his turn counting bills as well. The detectives begged for the outer door to be propped open, but Douglas would not permit it, for the money count was too high, the package count as well, and slinging the packages around made noise. He did not want some freelance stickup man peering in. He did not want the neighbors peering in or, worse, calling the police. He imagined trying to fend off a few carloads of blue uniforms. Or suppose while the door was open one of the prisoners' cohorts turned up to see what was keeping them?

He was trying to control this case to the smallest detail to the very end.

When he knew approximately what the totals would be he went out to the call box on the avenue to report to headquarters. The police commissioner had been informed in advance, as had other high ranking commanders. Any of them might have called in to ask about results. He supposed they all had.

He got the PC's duty sergeant on the line. Douglas knew him. The only occupant of the police commissioner's office each night. An older man, officious. At night he considered himself to outrank everyone.

The PC cannot to be disturbed, he said stiffly.

A sergeant was no fit recipient for Douglas's news, particularly this sergeant, but his ebullience was so great he could not help himself. It's the biggest seizure in the history of the city, he blurted out, two tons.

It changed the sergeant's tune, for he had once been a street cop himself. Jesus, he breathed.

Yeah.

Used to be, if you took five kilos it was enormous.

Yeah, said Douglas.

And it had to be heroin. If it was only cocaine you apologized as you turned it in.

And over two million bucks in cash as well. Did anybody call?

No one had. The sergeant was effusive with his praise, though. Should I wake everybody up?

Let 'em sleep, Douglas said, and hung up. For no reason he began to laugh. He laughed most of the way back to the apartment. Once he stopped to peer up at the stars. He breathed in the hot night air. The streets were empty, the city as quiet as he had ever heard it. This was what any man became a cop for, he thought. This was a night such as cops dreamed about their whole careers, and most never got it, and he was the luckiest man alive.

The apartment, when he stepped back in, seemed hotter than ever. Guns lay atop cartons. Bullet proof vests lay in a pile. The men worked stripped to the waist, dripping, and he joined them. A round of jokes began. Can you top this?  Some were old and stale. The men brought them forth one after another. All sounded uproarious now. They laughed until they could hardly stand.

The prisoners glowered and said nothing.

The pace of the counting, of the heaving around of cartons, had slowed. Their exhaustion approached hysteria, and even the blandest jokes made them reel and heave with laughter.

Here's one you haven't heard, said Sullivan. Why did the chicken eat the cocaine?

I don't know.

I don't know either, said Sullivan, and he broke into gales of laughter. As did everybody. They staggered around, they socked each other in the arms.

Through the still sealed glass slider Douglas watched the sky lighten. His cheeks ached from laughing. The sun came in on the cartons and painted them red.

He called in the police trucks by radio. Uniformed men lined the street with shotguns while he and his detectives heaved cartons up onto the tailgates. A small group of neighbors, some in bathrobes, had come out of the houses to watch. The perfect case perfectly controlled from beginning to end.

Later he sat between Sullivan and another detective at the counter in a Forest Hills coffee shop. He drank coffee and ate a piece of yesterday's danish, for the place had just opened for the day. As the air conditioning came up, the sweat dried on his body and his clothes dried and he was cool finally. There were detectives at two of the tables, and he kept half turning on his stool, glancing around at them fondly. He wanted the night never to end.

Chapter 2

The sleeping beauty was awakened not by a kiss but by the window shade, which sprang open to the top, and then slapped round and round itself. Her eyes blinked open with it, and then, in time with the slapping, continued blinking.

Prince Charming, namely her husband in his pajamas, was standing over the bed with a cup of coffee for her and she glared at him and he glanced from her to the window shade and back again.

He laughed. I didn't do it on purpose.

The sunlight washing into the room made her blink several times more but she sat up and took the saucer in both hands. He had a second cup for himself and he perched on the edge of the bed as always.

After a moment she said: Did the paper come?

Carrying his coffee he went out of the room and down the corridor. Her name was Jane Hoyt Fox, and she waited. She heard the apartment door open, then close.

George Fox came back into the room, his coffee in one hand, the paper in the other, and stood above her scanning the front page. Dress lightly, he said cheerfully. Paper says we're in for another scorcher.

The paper came in four sections. Today as always he took the financial section, the only one that interested him, apparently. As she reached for the other three Jane said: I was having a nightmare. Something had me by the throat.

His smile got broader. That was life had you by the throat, I imagine. 

Not a new thought, but it sobered her.

Fox took the financial section with him into the bathroom. Also as he did every morning.

Turning to Metro news first, she scanned the headlines and bylines, all the while sipping her coffee, then read enough of each story to know what it was about and how well it was done.

Presently, shaved and reeking of after shave lotion, Fox came out, and she put the paper down and went into the bathroom in her turn.

Later, both dressed, husband and wife sat at the dining room table. Jane was working her way through the national and international sections of the paper and sipping more coffee.

What do you have on today? Fox asked.

He was a tall, well built man with a ruddy complexion and hair that was beginning to thin out, and she looked at him. You can read it in the paper tomorrow.

The piece about the working mothers, he said, Do you think they'll run it.

They'll run it, but I'll have to ruin it first.  She had lain awake last night plotting her strategy. Perhaps that was where the nightmare had come from. How much of the piece could she preserve?

Fox rose to leave. Ask me what I have on today?

I know what you have on, she said. How's it going?

A corporate lawyer, he was writing a contract whereby one of the divisions of Texaco acquired one of the divisions of Mobil. It's nearly finished, he told her.

The last time he had spoken of it, the contract had reached 360 pages in length. Three younger lawyers were helping him write it. Two or three more weeks, he said.

No one who signed such contracts ever read them. The principal lawyers on each side read them and told the signers where to sign. Her husband would have read it on one side and his counterpart on the other. The two chairmen would sign at a ceremony. Then the contract would go into a vault never to be read again. Her husband was writing a book for an audience of two or three people, whereas her stories appeared in the paper the next day, or within a week anyway, and were read by hundreds of thousands. She felt a bit sorry for him.

What do the stockholders get out of this? she asked him.

I don't know.

On which side do they get screwed?

He laughed. I don't know.

Why don't you?

He smirked at her. You're a good reporter. You ask indiscreet questions.

He went back into the bedroom, then came forth carrying his briefcase. We need milk, sugar and paper towels, he said, standing over the table with his hand on her shoulder. And can you please drop off my two suits to be cleaned.

Normally Jane went to work an hour later than he did. Therefore this job kept falling to her. I can't today.

Come on, Jane.

I have to get to the office right away and the cleaners won't be open this early. 

What am I supposed to do? 

His needs, she felt, did not always take precedence over hers, but she forbore telling him so. Still, she was so worried about the working mothers piece, and about what today would bring, that she snapped at him. If it's that important to you, put them in a bag and hang them on the cleaner's door knob.

In this city?  Those suits cost almost a thousand dollars each.

You could always wear the suit you have on two days in a row.  But it made Jane defensive. I'll take them for you tomorrow.

He moved toward the door. Jane said hurriedly: Can I share your taxi?  

It'll take me ten minutes out of my way.

She got up from the table.

Oh, all right, said Fox.

Never mind, I'll take the subway.

The city was Jane's beat and therefore, she sometimes felt, she should live in it twenty four hours a day, and she tried to. The subway was where she felt she belonged.

She carried the cups into the kitchen. They rode the elevator down in silence, wished the doorman good morning, and went out onto the sidewalk under the awning where Jane kissed Fox on the cheek and strode off toward the entrance on the corner. She could feel the sun already hot on her bare arms. The subway this morning was going to be unbearable.

I wish you'd let me give you a lift, Fox called after her. She gave him a wave without turning around and kept going. She could easily have got her own taxi, but was not going to. Let him feel like a shit.

After a moment Fox stepped between parked cars and a taxi stopped and he got into it.

The subway station was jammed and smelly and hot and there were homeless people down there on the platform—two men in ragged clothes still asleep on benches, their ragged bundles serving as pillows; and then a bit further on a woman clutching a similar bundle who reclined against the wall snoring. Most of the homeless were harmless enough; they just weren't very pleasant to look at. Not many years before such people would have been referred to as derelicts or bums. There were too many to call them that now. They could not be dismissed so easily. They were a municipal failure, or perhaps a national failure. They were people with no place else to go.

Most of the other waiting passengers simply pretended they were not there. For Jane this was impossible. Having been assigned to do a piece about the problem, she had interviewed more than thirty of them in all parts of the city, and then had written not a single piece but a three part series about the proliferation of the homeless in the richest city in the richest country in the world. When published, the series had caused some consternation at City Hall. The mayor had promised to do something, and maybe he would. Jane was not a cynical person but she knew better than to trust the public utterances of politicians under pressure from newspapers.

Jane was 36. In  college she had majored in English Literature, had written poems and mooned over various young men, all of whom had tried to get her into bed, and a number of whom had succeeded. This had begun the process of hardening her for life. She had acted in college plays, and had found it enthralling. After graduation she had tried to become an actress. She had had photos made up, and had begun the round of auditions. She had thick, dark brown hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion—whenever she got angry or blushed, it showed. Otherwise there was a softness to her face. She had auditioned for producers, agents, casting directors. She had tried to attract anyone who might help her. She had attracted them, and then had had to fight them off.

For three years she had auditioned, waitressing on the side, taking money from her father. She had got only a few small parts. Sometimes she was one of two hundred girls, many of them truly beautiful, auditioning for the same part. She could be rejected one day, cry herself to sleep that night, and go back into a theater the next day and try again. She was determined to succeed. People were always surprised to find she was a competitor, for she looked so vulnerable. But at last she turned away from the stage.

She decided to become a newspaper reporter. This goal seemed to her almost equally romantic, and it proved to be almost equally elusive.

She got a job on the paper as a copygirl running errands; her father still had to send her money to live. After a year she had been promoted to clerk, and she had begun writing articles on her own time for certain of the paper's Sunday sections. Journalism, she now saw, was unromantic in the extreme. Which is not to say it did not excite her. It excited her more every day. If she could not become a great actress, then she would become a great reporter and do good with her life. Change the world, or at least small corners of the world. She dreamed of investigating scoundrels, of exposing something really disgusting, and stopping it. About this time she also met Fox, who had been full of energy and enthusiasm then, and who dreamed, so he said, of becoming a famous trial lawyer. The two dreamers moved in together and, soon after, married. All her friends were married. It seemed to her the right time. She was not exactly head over heels in love, but blamed this on too much previous experience.

Jane did get promoted to reporter, but Fox never became a trial lawyer. He took no steps in that direction. He became instead a specialist in corporate mergers. Corporate mergers was the way America was going, he told her. The legal technicalities that he seemed to find so fascinating, the hundreds of pages of small print, did not fascinate her, though she tried to show interest. He was her husband and marriage had to be worked at, she realized. But before long she realized also that this particular husband was not the man she thought she had married. Fox's mergers absorbed him totally. He brought work home, was preoccupied, was rarely funny anymore, and he did not seem very interested in her.

By now Jane had been on the paper twelve years, had been a reporter for nine. She had driven one scoundrel from office, the Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The man had accepted money so that a midtown theater could be condemned. The thrill of nailing someone who was doing something shitty was as terrific as she had imagined. She was the one who had broken the story, and during the first few days, before the other papers got up the nerve to help, she was the only one writing it. She wrote it nervously each day: who am I to be attacking this man, am I so sure I'm right?  She was filled with fear and at night did not sleep. But she was right, and the chairman went to jail for six months.

She had grown into a tough and determined person. She would fight other reporters for stories, she would fight men for stories, she would come back with details others did not get.

She was five feet seven and weighed l25 pounds, meaning she could wear clothes well. She liked clothes and spent a lot of her money on them. She had a firm chin and nice eyes and fleshy lips that made her look, to many men, sexy. She certainly did not look like an aggressive reporter. She had never had any trouble attracting boys and then men which, once she was married, was a nuisance. Especially in her professional life it was a nuisance. Most men thought every woman available, and when she was working she sometimes did not have the leisure to say no nicely. But she had no intention of catting around. To Jane, marriage was marriage, and perhaps they were all like hers, rather tame once the initial gloss had worn off. Sometimes she considered divorce, but the very idea frightened her. If she divorced Fox, what did she do next?  Perhaps there was nothing better out there, and besides, Fox had done nothing to deserve such a step. He did not cheat on her that she knew of, was often thoughtless but never deliberately cruel, did not harass her, was scrupulously fair about money, and he certainly never hit her. It was just that he did not seem to need her for anything. They rarely had fun together. He seemed to think that what she did for a living was sordid. He never praised her and perhaps did not read her stories at all. In any case he never talked about them.

As a reporter Jane was more or less satisfied with what she had accomplished. As a woman she was less so. She accused herself of indecisiveness, lack of direction. She felt unfulfilled, and was not entirely sure why. She wished in a vague way that she might fall in love again.

She waited on the subway platform.

When the train came she wedged her way inside into the crush and rode that way for seventeen minutes, not very long compared to the rides some people endured every day. But by the time she had come up the stairs into the sunlight again her armpits were moist, and sweat had run down her backbone, and she was extremely annoyed at Fox.

She rode the elevator up to the newsroom on the seventh floor. She was alone in the elevator car, and alone in the newsroom too when she came into it, except for two janitors who moved along the rows of desks emptying waste baskets. An hour from now the editors and reporters would come in. The energy level would go up and up, something she still found exciting, people moving, talking, joking, telephones ringing, the floor—the whole building—humming with computers. But at this hour the newsroom was another thing: a vast, windowless space, low-ceilinged, empty, almost oppressive, row after row of unoccupied desks stretching from one wall to the other, the distance of a full city block.

She moved to her own desk which was almost in the exact center of the floor, put her handbag down and switched on her terminal almost with the same motion. When the screen lit up she leaned over the keyboard and tapped out the commands that called up her story on the working mothers. When it appeared tears of frustration popped into her eyes, and she pulled her chair out and sat down. Last night after she had gone home her story had again been tampered with—for the second night in a row—and by the same editor, judging from his handiwork. A man named Gottlieb. An assistant metro editor. New. He had changed her lead and had moved certain paragraphs around in the body of the text so that to her they no longer scanned. She considered that the story no longer had any emotional impact barely made sense.

She remembered how long and hard she had worked on it and with what pleasure she had turned it in. Not exposing scoundrels this time, exposing instead the suffering of women much like herself. A story, she imagined, that could be read two hundred years from now as a true picture of the world that women had faced in the next to last decade of this century, how they had thought and felt, a true and special picture of their lives.

As it had made its way through the editorial process no one had touched it. And then this man Gottlieb had come upon it, had told her he thought she should rearrange the top, and had begun to do it himself. From that moment there was little chance the piece would ever run the way she wanted it to, maybe no chance. It had felt as if her throat had been slit. It would be an uphill battle even to get something she didn't like into the paper.

The piece was long. She had put two weeks into it. It would run about two columns, assuming it ever ran at all. She began to study it. She read it through three times from beginning to end, then put back her own lead and the original paragraph order. This was dangerous.

As she worked she kept watching the front of the floor where the editors sat. The metro editor, Vaughan, had a reputation for coming in early. This was crucial. She had to see him alone, without Gottlieb or one of the others coming over to see what they were doing.

At ten minutes to ten Vaughan appeared. He sat down at his desk and began opening mail, and Jane went forward and told him she needed his help. She rolled a chair over next to his and asked him to call up her story on his terminal. He hesitated a moment, then did as asked, and she began to plead for her vision of what the story was about.

Every night in homes across the country, she told him, hundreds of thousands of women change places. The mother comes home from work, and the nanny or mother's helper or whatever you want to call her, leaves. The child often clings to the nanny, not the mother.

Her story detailed the problems of such working mothers, women who were absolutely dependant on these other women who were their surrogates most of each day, working mothers who worried about much more than whether or not the nannys treated their children properly. They worried about what they would do if the nanny ever quit, they worried about keeping her happy, they didn't even know what to call her, or what to ask to be called themselves.

They were women filled with doubt and with guilt. They were mothers without guidelines. There was no one to ask. Their own mothers hadn't worked. Their role was new. They stood in a new place in the world.

Yeah, said Vaughan, but Bill Gottlieb said the whole premise seems to lack, you know, drama.

Jane knew that she had to be careful. Gottlieb was so new in his post that he had nothing to do nights except call up people's stories on his terminal. Two days ago he had come upon Jane's. It