Why did I even have to lie to cover this? Good question. Apart from the justification that I lie for a living, this was the only moment in this entire process that I could try to contain a possible future spill. It was a note of unexpected excitement, and I wanted to keep it to myself until I learned more. My excitements, up to this point, had all become predictable and dull. This was new, and I didn’t want to share.
“Katy” is a collapse of “Katerina,” and is pronounced KAH-tee, with the accent on the first syllable. Get that wrong and you don’t have a chance at conversation of any sort. People sometimes try to curry intimacy by calling me Connie; I can’t seem to stop them. Katy runs sales for Kroeger; we’re like chessmen of equal value inside the company. She likes Bombay Sapphire martinis and never gets tipsy with co-workers (that I’ve ever seen). As we walked to the car, she indicated that a recreational beverage or two was just the thing she needed to unscrew her spine from the flight, ex–New York after a full workday on the far end of the country. We could plot strategy and swap mild professional gossip. Then I could drop her off at her condo in the Marina.
The lounge we went to was one of those places redolent of “yuppie flu” run epidemic: too much brass, wood, and foliage, all fake, with high stools posted at little round tables, like pedestals. When she scooted up to her seat I noticed she was wearing stockings, not panty hose, and I felt a little tug inside my rib cage. I thought, Caution. You wouldn’t be so instantly randy if she were wearing a revolver strapped to her hip. In this business, wardrobe is often a weapon.
Without the Blahnik heels Katy was probably five-foot-eight, with a lot of wavy brown hair she usually wore down, reminding me of forties movie sirens in soft focus. She had slender hands with long fingers, like porcelain sculpture, and frank blue-gray eyes with a thin, natural brow arch. She didn’t use a lot of makeup; she didn’t have to, and knew exactly where the line was to be crossed. Subtle gloss was all she wore—lipstick would have been overdoing it. Small fine teeth and a body full of promise. You’d never know she was a hotshot in the field, and ruthless at her job, which is what I really liked about her, in addition to the obvious.
Come to think of it, she’d probably look more sexy wearing a gun; who was I kidding?
We had tacitly agreed to buy the persona each of us was selling to the other. That’s the first step in any relationship, right? You buy the vision, then deal with the reality later.
Katy’s big deal, today, was our impending acquisition of a PR package for a hotshot politico named G. Johnson Jenks. He had the California governorship in his sights after emerging from private industry and logging the usual community service time as a councilman and ecological paladin up north, where people still get uppity about topics like old trees, or ozone. Kroeger Concepts was in the running to sell Mr. Jenks to the voting public in a salubrious fashion. Katy was the point person on the deal, and brought all this up because she wanted my assurance that I would be onboard, armed with enthusiasm and ideas, if we actually did score the gig. We’d have to pull long hours, “in close and tight,” as she put it.
I dropped smoothly into work mode, admiring myself because I now had a secret and was comporting myself extra-slick. Jenks’s opponent in the gubernatorial slapdown was an equal-but-opposite talking head named Theodore Ripkin, and our task as good Kroeger soldiers was to demonstrate Mr. Jenks’s vote-worthiness and overall moral superiority. In other words, anticipate every single gob of mud that might be hurled against our gladiator, and emplace damage-control strategies while hunting for the one subterranean factoid that might knock Theodore Ripkin right off his high-ass horse. Put another way, employ the usual misdirection and surgical strikes. Votes matter in theory but not in practice; what matters is grabbing the gold in the big popularity contest. All’s fair!
The Jenks campaign was well-heeled enough to promise all of us a lot of pull and cash flow; the sort of thing that almost always spins me to attention and a full salute.