Exclusive Page 20

I pushed the bottle away and looked straight into his deep blue eyes.

  “Do you think we can get it annulled?” I asked him.

  “Probably,” he said, making me the happiest woman in the world.

  Forget about Mulvaney sharing this ending with anyone, including my mother. He now says the ending was all his idea and demonstrates how well he can meld history and partisan politics, even when it's not his partisan politics.

  “It's not over yet,” I say. “It may never be.”

  “This whole idea was my idea,” he reminds me, as the call comes from Hollywood.

  CHAPTER 40

  Engagement (Short)

  We were alone in our own room at the Europa, and no alarms had gone off, at least not downstairs.

  By the bed he took off his jeans. They had been through a lot. But underneath them, Mulvaney was the same. “Why don't we do this together?” he asked, glancing at the running bathwater.

  “Mulvaney, we do very little together,” I reminded him.

  He pulled my skirt down. “We better do it now before we get married.”

  This did not speak well for the institution.

  But in the tub, it was as if the Europa Hotel had been bombed by an adamant gardener. It was as if we were falling into a great big hole full of building rubble with petals and roses with thorns and it felt fine anyway.

  “Don't write about this,” Mulvaney said as we dried off. “I don't think you can write sex.”

  “And you can?” I paused. “So what do you think really did it, Mulvaney?”

  “Got me out?” he asked, drying himself with a thick white towel made from Belfast cotton. “Paisley was terrified that you might be a murderess.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Do you think they cared that people would write about it, as dumb as that sounds?”

  “I think Paisley just wants American politicians on his side so he can keep the province the way it is,” he said.

  As with most stories involving love and politics, none of us was really sure why it had worked.

  Mulvaney threw down his towel. “We really do have to get married.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the PR man is coming with us to America to make sure that we do just that.”

  “I don't believe you.”

  “Look outside the room.”

  I wrapped myself in a towel and peeked out the door. Indeed, the PR man was sitting on his suitcase.

  He blushed when he saw me. “Ever been to America?” I asked him.

  “No, but I have cousins there.”

  I stepped back inside and closed the door. “You have a Minder,” I said to Mulvaney. “I wonder if it will do any good?”

  “I think I can get rid of him after the wedding.”

  “Are you proposing marriage?” I wanted to get this on the record.

  “I am proposing that we work together to get rid of the Minder.”

  “I like the concept of you with a permanent Minder,” I said. “It will be good for the world. You are proposing to me but you are never going to admit it.”

  “It will be a good story to tell in our old age,” he said.

  Downstairs at the Europa bar, my mother kissed Mulvaney.

  “You're going to make me one of the most brutally honest women on earth,” she said. “A mother-in-law!”

  Queen Asta yelped.

  Peter King and Gary Ackerman said they wouldn't miss our wedding for anything in the world, unless, of course, there would be no press there.

  The Real Mulvaney cleared his throat, stood. “I have been authorized on behalf of my recently acquired client, a man who prefers to go by the name Leisure Suit, to offer Mulvaney-Fischkin, and Fischkin-Mulvaney, after their marriage of course, the Latin America Bureau of Newsday.”

  What did marriage have to do with it?

  “Ah,” said the Real Mulvaney. “A small point, but the employment is contingent on the marriage.”

  “That's illegal!” I protested.

  “A small point,” the Real Mulvaney reiterated. “Too much paperwork to send two unrelated reporters to a foreign location. Which reminds me, my client would have been here himself, but he is unable to leave Ronkonkoma.”

  Well, I had the job I wanted.

  If Mulvaney still wanted to cover Belfast, he could do it from Managua. Magic-realism journalism. It worked with Irish stories. It had worked with Colm—and with Ian Paisley. It even worked with Irish Americans.

  Claire hadn't really been in Dublin, had she?

  No reason to think it wouldn't work with Mulvaney-true.

  My father handed out Phillies Panatelas to everyone, including my mother, Queen Asta, and me.

  Gary Ackerman unpinned his white carnation and handed it to me.

  “And, Barbara,” my mother said, “annulments are only for Catholics.”

  “Mulvaney is Catholic,” I said.

  “People can change,” my mother replied.

  I have apologized to Mulvaney's mother for that mother-in-law crack.

  “It's okay,” she said. “To have only one mother-in-law joke in a book filled with so many other cheap shots is a great accomplishment.”

  True-true: While I wrote she cheered from backstage.

  She and I have a strong alliance, even if it isn't a natural one.

  Natural alliances, as we know, are not what I do best.

  “Endings are a problem for you, too,” she pointed out, helpfully enumerating another of my shortcomings. “But if you're writing a sequel, which of course is required if you sell a movie, you can end with the beginning.”

  Where is that?

  “Maybe Ronkonkoma,” said the Real Mulvaney.

  “Maybe the wedding,” corrected my mother-in-law.

  This made me wonder why they themselves are not still married.

  “It would be more timely to worry about us,” Mulvaney scolds. “Can't get married without a ring. This book needs rings.”

  “I have a ring,” I say.

  “I don't,” he replies. “And they should match.”

  Talk about history-making moments!

  CHAPTER 41

  Breaking the Glass

  Mulvaney said that if he was going to buy a wedding ring, his father's bartender should be there. “He likes to be part of big events in my life.”

  The four of us—we had Mulvaney's Minder, too—hailed a taxi, a New York yellow taxi. It had no specified religion. But to say it was a nonsectarian vehicle would be an oversimplification, since each and every New York taxi has a different inherent prejudice.

  “Tiffany!” ordered Mulvaney, amazing me yet again.

  The Minder began to shake as soon we were in the Midtown Tunnel. By the time we exited he asked if he might handcuff himself to Mulvaney. In case he himself got lost.

  Dan Tubridy eyed him suspiciously.

  I didn't know if the clerks at Tiffany had ever sold a wedding ring to a man who was locked to a Minder. But they did not act as if this was unusual.

  So the three of us examined gold bands.

  Since I'm not big on ceremony, this did not bother me.

  But when the clerk brought out the Tiffany Designer Version Claddagh and the Minder said it looked “shanty Irish”—American for “tinker”—Dan Tubridy punched him in the face.

  Northern Ireland's only former spokesman in the ceremonial jewelry section of the Fifth Avenue Tiffany then fell headfirst onto the marble floor.

  Mulvaney fell with him. But he kept his head up.

  “Illegal British detention of Irish American!” Dan Tubridy announced.

  Not again, I thought.

  A slight, graying man with a jeweler's monocle around his neck appeared with a toolbox and pried Mulvaney loose.

  “Damn Brits,” the jeweler said. “Me da fought them in 1916.”

  “Great store!” I said to Mulvaney, who was now free once again.

  “Don't get used to it,” he replied, sounding frighteningly like a husband.

 
; We didn't have time to send out wedding invitations, so Leisure Suit put up a notice on the bulletin board in the Ronkonkoma office. My mother offered to call all the places Mulvaney and I had been in our entire life, including the shul.

  Claire helped me to buy a wedding dress on deadline.

  “You're glowing, too.” I said. “In love?”

  “Nah, it's just that work isn't as bad as it used to be.”

  This worried me. If I could marry Mulvaney, even with fantasies of annulment, anything was possible.

  “Oh God,” I said. “You're not getting sweet on Leisure Suit!”

  She shook her head. “Unlike you and Mulvaney, we'd be the imperfect screwball couple. We can't stand to be together. And we can't stand not to be apart.”

  Most marriages, I thought, are probably like that. Since it was the day before my wedding, I took a brief moment to consider my good fortune.

  More than two hundred people, many of them cop friends of Mulvaney's whom I had never met, filled the bar and the deck at Pier 92, curiously eyeing the chuppah, made from driftwood decorated with green, orange, and white ribbons. Leonard's of Great Neck it wasn't.

  Those who were invited but could not attend for political reasons—Danny Morrison, Gerry Adams, Suzie McBreeze and daughters, the Alleged Cousin, Ian Paisley, Mario Cuomo, the Xanti Zarates and their dog, Danielito Ortega Saavedra—sent regrets from their respective revolutions. Their cards, festooned with the colors of renegade flags—and one FTP sash—as well as inflammatory slogans from ancient languages—hung on the chuppah as a reminder, I guess, that we all are one.

  Professor Colm McEligot sent congratulations and an invitation to meet him in Mexico City on my way to Managua. “Carlos Fuentes's bed is available,” he noted.

  Martin McBreeze, Suzie's husband-in-exile, came disguised in a fake beard and told everyone that he was the Real Gerry Adams.

  The Men Who Did Write Naked Came the Stranger came with the Men Who Didn't, along with their agent who hadn't been invited for political—or perhaps literary—reasons.

  “Message Pending,” the agent predicted, “will soon be worldwide.” Books, he added, would all be replaced by the electronic version.

  The agent was drunk, fantasizing, too tan, and from Los Angeles, so no one believed him, except Cousin George, who came with his current clients, Gary Ackerman and Peter King.

  “If I could explain Ed Koch,” Cousin George reasoned, “I can probably explain Northern Ireland.”

  The former Only Female Assistant Editor in Ronkonkoma—who still looked like she had slept with a lot of important men, only more so—came with Daniel Schorr.

  I asked him if he had ever been best friends with Mike Royko and he refused to comment.

  The grandest cocktail hour moment, though, occurred when Leisure Suit arrived in a suit but not a Leisure Suit.

  Claire said it might be Armani. But to this day we do not know.

  Then my father and the Real Mulvaney hurried us to the chuppah, as if we might change our minds if we had too long to think.

  So we got married on Pier 92's deck, overlooking Jamaica Bay. Mulvaney wore a morning suit, which I hoped was not rented.

  “I love you,” Mulvaney said. “And if you ever leave me, I will have to go to Long Kesh.”

  “I love you, too,” I replied. “You were never a bore and always a headache.”

  When it comes to original vows, I've heard worse.

  As is customary at Jewish weddings, Mulvaney was given a glass to break with his foot.

  This is supposed to symbolize the first marital you-know-what, but ours was a shot glass and wouldn't break.

  “Good thing you don't get metaphors,” I told Mulvaney.

  “Honeymoon in Niagara Falls,” he replied.

  The Minder, still unshackled to the groom, said he would like that. Dan Tubridy stared him down.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “if we head for Niagara Falls, you'll find a story in Buffalo.”

  “I am a modern man,” Mulvaney protested. “The updated version. I don't write stories on my honeymoon. I just make it impossible for you to write any.”

  At that my mother popped a champagne cork, another skill I didn't know she had, and we drank to life's impossibilities: an enlightened criminal justice system in Northern Ireland and a long, happy marriage that was not distracting, not to me anyway.

  I will end by happily reporting that Mulvaney and I have not shared our many years of marriage with a Minder who was once a Northern Irish PR man. But how Peter King got rid of him, how he got Mulvaney's doctor's bag back, how he became not only a congressman himself but a novelist, too, and how he did indeed bring peace, or what passes for it these days, to Northern Ireland is a tale for another day. The only hint I will give you is that nobody gets anything done around here without Mulvaney's father's bartender.

  Or without Mulvaney getting in the way.

  Or without him telling me I am in his way.

  But enough comments have been made, enough stories have been told. Particularly when it comes to our so-called protagonist.

  Although my handsome, dashing husband would disagree, there is a finite amount of Mulvaney that can be tolerated in one shot.

  Acknowledgments

  The first fictional alter egos I met were in childhood tales told to me by my older brother, Ted Fischkin: a.k.a. Two Gun Theodore, the handsome, fearless Deputy Sheriff of Gruesome Gulch, an apocryphal town in the old American West that reminded me, suspiciously, of our very own shul. If I hadn't heard those stories, I wouldn't have had the nerve to tell this one.

  Professor Patrick Kelly, always teacher of the year, graciously read the earliest draft. David Groff, a fine editor, saw me through the initial tough layer of revision so that this novel could be presented to publishers. Also he got it. As did Micahlyn Whitt at Bantam Dell Publishing, who lifted the manuscript out of that proverbial pile. Later, editorial assistant Kerri Buckley was smart, kind, and efficient. Deborah Dwyer did a careful, enthusiastic job copyediting.

  I am grateful to Deputy Publisher Nita Taublib for her encouragement, support, and great ideas.

  My editor at Bantam Dell is Senior Editor Tracy Devine, and I can't imagine that it gets any better. If she had a fictional alter ego—I wouldn't dare—it would be an enchanted if slightly irreverent presence that knows what you know before you do, then gently, generously, and clearly leads you to the exact spot where you had always wanted to go.

  Mickey Freiberg is a terrific agent. So is Frank Weimann. They were both there from the beginning, even when I put one of them in the book.

  Also at the beginning: At Gold'N Hen Productions, President Judy Henry and Dale Eldrige Kaye, who were the first to offer encouragement. Many friends listened and discussed earlier drafts with me, including Colm Allen, Carole Butler, Laura Durkin, Wendy Kaplan, Tricia Joyce, and Gale Justin.

  Pete Eisner, an author and Deputy Foreign Editor of the Washington Post, was kind enough to advise on Basque culture, geography, history, and sensibility. Ray O'Hanlon, an author and Senior Editor of the Irish Echo, did likewise with the Irish. Any mistakes, though, are mine.

  Robert E. Mackoul, President of Mackoul & Associates, and Deborah K. Mackoul, President of New Empire Group, gave me a quiet place to write in their insurance and financial offices, and I will always be grateful for that. They are true patrons and better friends than anyone could hope to have.

  My real mother-in-law—Eileen Goodwin O'Keefe Mulvaney—passed away as this book was going to press. She taught me more than I can say about many things, including reading, writing, and teaching, and I will miss her deeply.

  Patrick Mulvaney, my brother-in-law, is not in this book, and may not be in the sequel, because one should treat a great chef delicately.

  Mulvaney himself—my husband—cannot be thanked enough. But never in public.

  About the Author

  As a journalist, BARBARA FISCHKIN covered stories in New York, Latin America, Hong Kong, Dublin, and Be
lfast and is the author of Muddy Cup: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America. She lives in Long Beach, Long Island, with her husband, who continues to be Jim Mulvaney, and their two sons. She is currently at work on a sequel to EXCLUSIVE.

  EXCLUSIVE

  REPORTERS IN LOVE . . . AND WAR: A NOVEL

  A Delta Trade Paperback / June 2005

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  The first five stanzas of “The Ballad of the Tinker's Wife” from Ballads of a Bogman by Sigerson Clifford. Copyright © 1986 by the Estate of Sigerson Clifford. Reprinted by kind permission of Mercier Press Ltd., Cork, Ireland.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Fischkin

  Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Fischkin, Barbara.

  Exclusive: reporters in love . . . and war: a novel / Barbara Fischkin.

  p. cm.

  1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Jewish women—Fiction. 3. Irish Americans—Fiction.

  4. Americans—Foreign countries—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  6. Adventure fiction. 7. Love stories.

  PS3606.I768 E97 2005

  813/.6 22

  2005041447

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33539-9

  v3.0