Cheeta Ching, oblate as a satiated python in her dark red Carolyn Roehm maternity coat, teetered on her stiletto heels in the anteroom of Jed Burner's office.
"I heard that!" she hissed. "He asked who I was!"
The KNNN secretary clapped a brown hand decorated with gold fingernails over the telephone receiver.
"I'm sure Mr. Burner misunderstood you, Miss Ching."
"He did not! And he got my last name wrong. It's Ching, not Chang. Chang is Chinese. Chinese anchors are three-for-a-buck. I happen to be one hundred percent Korean. Who the hell does he think he is?"
Fear was in the secretary's liquid eyes now. "Please don't be upset, Miss Ching. I am sure we can work this out."
"Prove it. Answer this: Whose number is 404 555-1234?"
"Why, that's Mr. Burner's private number. How did you get it?"
"Not important. Tell that mouthy ignoramous I got his fax." Cheeta lifted her voice into a sandblasting screech. "You hear me, Captain Audion?"
"It's Audacious," said the secretary, clapping a firm hand over the phone mouthpiece.
"It's Audacious," echoed the muffled voice of Jed Burner. "And tell that sweet-talkin' woman Ah'm on my way."
"Yes, Mr. Burner." The secretary hung up.
Cheeta blinked. It seemed too easy. "He's coming?" she asked in a taken-aback voice.
"That's what he said."
Cheeta's puzzled frown was a pancake question mark.
"I think," the secretary said, "your voice reminded him of his wife."
Cheeta calmed down. "I've always admired Layne for telling the truth about Vietnam. Is she still getting death threats?"
The secretary indicated a vent near the ceiling. "See that? Behind the grille there's a marksman with a .454 Casull all set to pop you if you make a wrong move."
Cheeta's neck and ears paled. But her face didn't change color visibly. It couldn't. It was too heavily made up.
"And there's other security all about the building," the secretary further explained, "including antiaircraft guns up on the roof. Folks have long memories. Especially down here."
"Personally, I supported her work in Haiphong," Cheeta said in a too-loud voice.
From the vent, the cocking of a rifle came distinctly.
"Better get up on the roof," the secretary said, urging Cheeta to the elevator.
"Why the roof?"
"Cause Mr. Burner has his helipad up there. He's flying in."
Cheeta Ching walked backward on red heels, one eye on the dark ceiling vent. Her center of balance wasn't what it should have been, and when she stumbled back into the elevator, a heel caught and the door closed on the sound of her yelp of pain as she landed on her hormonally inflated backside.
"Going up?" an unfamiliar voice asked.
Cheeta looked up. A man was standing in the elevator. He wore a rumpled raincoat of some sort. It was open and the man's hairy legs showed.
Oh God, a flasher, thought Cheeta-until her gaze, traveling up the man's muscular calves, came to his sinewy thighs. He was not wearing pants. He wasn't even wearing underpants. But he wasn't naked either. He wore some kind of green plaid miniskirt. Her almond eyes shot upward. The man's face, made insect-unrecognizable by wide sunglasses and shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, was looking down at her with a cold remoteness.
"Nice timing," he said.
Then a gloved hand came out of a raincoat pocket and pointed a silenced gun barrel at the largest target in the tiny elevator.
Cheeta Ching's bulging stomach.
Jed Burner was listening to the familiar screechy voice over the rotor whine.
Normally, it was hard to carry on a conversation in the Superpuma. It was as soundproofed as a helicopter could be-which meant that holding a conversation under the whirling rotor mast was akin to hearing confession in a giant Mixmaster.
"She'll be perfect!" Layne Fondue-despised by a generation of US servicemen as "Haiphong Hannah" Fondue-was saying.
"Ah never heard of her," Burner snapped.
"She's the most popular TV anchor in journalism."
"So? Ah don't traffic in star anchors. They cost too damn much."
"I'm not talking about hiring her for KNNN. I want her in my next exercise video, Layne Fondue's New Mother Workout."
"We wouldn't need her if you'd just get pregnant like Ah keep tryin' to get you," Burner shouted back.
"I think I must have inhaled some Agent Orange during the war," Layne muttered, primping her pile of streaked hair that made her resemble a hungry Pekinese. "It blocked my tubes or something."
"You ask me, you ain't tryin'. Ah settled down so Ah could have a son and heir, and all Ah get is yappin'. Ah want yappin, Ah'll buy a cockah spaniel. Which come to think of it, you're gettin' a trifle doggy around the edges."
"You sexist pig!"
Burner beamed broadly. "Say it again. Ah don't think the Almighty got the word yet."
Layne Fondue took nothing from nobody. Unless one counted her career, which she had wheedled out of her famous actor-father. She had enjoyed a brief career as an ingenue, rode the celebrity activist circuit in the sixties and seventies while her physical assets succumbed to gravitational erosion, and as her politics went out of fashion, found a comfy niche as the premier exercise guress.
The fact that she had gone to Haiphong, Vietnam and done political commentary for the North Vietnamese, denouncing US soldiers as "baby-eating cannibals," had earned her the unshakable nickname of "Haiphong Hannah."
She was tough, she was hard, and she turned around in her seat and slapped her husband in the mouth.
Jed Burner picked his cigar off the floor, examined the stogie for damage, and blew on the gray ash. It burned red. He put it into his mouth, inhaled long and deep, eyes closed as if thinking.
While his wife watched, slowly relaxing, he suckerpunched her to the floor and kept her there with one foot.