Pitoniak Our American Friend

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-85730-554-1
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

'Elegant and well-paced ... Like 'Emily in Paris' meets 'Scandal'-fantastic fun.'- The New York Times A mysterious First Lady. The intrepid journalist writing her biography. And the secret that could destroy them both. Tired of covering the grating dysfunction of Washington and the increasingly outrageous antics of President Henry Caine, White House correspondent Sofie Morse quits her job and plans to leave politics behind. But when she gets a call from the office of First Lady Lara Caine, inviting her to come in for a private meeting, Sofie's curiosity is piqued. Sofie, like the rest of the world, knows little about Lara - only that she was born in the USSR, raised in Paris, and worked as a model before moving to America and marrying the notoriously brash mogul. When Lara asks Sofie to write her official biography, and to finally fill in the gaps of her history, Sofie's curiosity gets the better of her. As Lara's story unfolds, Sofie can't help but wonder why Lara is rehashing such sensitive information. Why tell Sofie? And why now? Suddenly, Sofie is in the middle of a game of cat and mouse that could have explosive ramifications. 'Spectacular... The story succeeds on every level' - Lee Child 'A gripping legacy of the Cold War and its people' - People Magazine 'Wholly original' - Entertainment Weekly

Anna Pitoniak is the author of The Futures, Necessary People, and Our American Friend. She graduated from Yale, where she majored in English and was an editor at the Yale Daily News. She worked for many years in book publishing, most recently as a Senior Editor at Random House. Anna grew up in Whistler, British Columbia, and now lives in New York City.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pitoniak, Anna

Leseproben

1 The Mediterranean was a deep winter blue, cold and dimpled like hammered steel, on the morning that I began wondering if I had made the worst mistake of my life. The night before, I’d been walking home through our quiet corner of the city, no more or less nervous than usual. Light flickered from the dying bulb in the streetlight. Cars were parked tight up against the white stucco buildings. We lived on a narrow street where no one knew our name, in a home that was meant to remain anonymous. But in the doorway – our doorway – there was a strange figure, standing and waiting. A young woman, blonde hair peeking from beneath her knit hat, wearing a plush parka, bent over her phone, her face illuminated in an eerie glow. Hearing my footsteps, she suddenly looked up. ‘You’re Sofie, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Sofie Morse?’ She held out a business card and I glanced down. I recognized her name. My heart began thudding against my rib cage. With a patient smile, she explained how much effort it had taken for her to track me down, given that I hadn’t returned any of her emails or phone calls, and she didn’t mean to startle me but she really did have some important questions to ask. I took the card from her and looked away, mumbling, ‘Right, right, thanks. Uh, sorry, got to get these groceries inside.’ I could sense her continuing to stare at me. She stood in front of the door, blocking the way. ‘Sorry,’ I repeated. ‘Do you mind?’ As she stepped aside, she placed her hand on my arm and said: ‘So you’ll call me?’ Though I had no intention of seeing this woman again, I needed to get away from her. I nodded, and said I’d call her, because every second we stood here was another second in which she might see through me. Upstairs, I unlocked our apartment door with shaking hands. I dropped the grocery bags to the floor, forgetting the carton of eggs, which now seeped from their cracked shells. I took deep breaths, trying not to panic. Stop freaking out, I told myself. You’re okay. Except that a stranger had tracked me down, flown across the Atlantic, and waited on my doorstep for who-knew-how-long in the cold January night, because that’s how badly she wanted to know the truth; the truth, which, if revealed, could cause the entire operation to collapse. It wasn’t just my safety, or Ben’s safety. I’d been reminded, time and again, that the stakes were much bigger than that. No, I wasn’t okay. I was definitely not okay. ‘It’s unlikely that you’ll need it,’ the man had said, last year, back in New York. He had the seen-it-all sangfroid of a person familiar with the furthest edges of life. ‘But if you’re in real trouble, and you need to signal for a meeting, here’s what you do.’ I hurried into the bedroom and took the red towel from the shelf in the closet. I grabbed a few stray items from the laundry hamper – a T-shirt, a sweatshirt – and soaked everything in the kitchen sink. The towel was brand-new, never washed before. The red dye bled and stained the water. The wet bundle left a trail along the floor as I carried it to our small balcony, where we kept a collapsible laundry rack. On the outermost edge, clearly visible to anyone passing, the red towel dripped and dripped. When Ben got home an hour later, his eyes were wide. He had seen the towel. Silently, he nodded toward the balcony. Why the towel? What happened? I slid the business card across the counter. His eyebrows arched in recognition. The woman was a journalist from a TV network back in New York. She told me she would love the chance to talk about my relationship with Lara Caine, the First Lady of the United States. Would love, that’s how she phrased it. Would sell a kidney for is a better way to put it. That night I lay wide awake, unable to sleep. The fear had ebbed and flowed since we arrived in Croatia four months before, but this was the worst yet. Ben breathed steadily in the darkness. Okay, I thought, engaging in my usual practice. Ask yourself this. What was I scared of? Was I scared of her? I was familiar with the hunger she felt, the relentless drive to uncover the truth. Wasn’t she just a journalist, not so different from me? Anyway, it wasn’t like she was interested in me specifically. She was only doing her job. As the gray light of dawn softened the edges of the bedroom curtains, I convinced myself that I had overreacted. ‘What are you doing?’ Ben said drowsily, as I climbed out of bed. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’ No harm, I thought, bringing the laundry back inside. It had been an unusually cold night, and the towel had frozen stiff. Maybe no one had seen it and I would be spared from embarrassment. I ran a hot shower. I got dressed, brushed my teeth, and put away last night’s dishes. You’re fine, Sofie. I would live my life like it was any ordinary day, because that’s what I wanted it to be. And I began every day with a long walk through town and along the corniche, where the towering procession of palm trees shivered in the wind. Or, more accurately, shivered in the bora: the name of the winter wind that swept along the undulating Adriatic coastline. Ben had defined the word bora for me. He read constantly, to keep his mind busy. He’d recently read Ernest Shackleton’s memoir, which inspired his suggestion that we each establish our own daily routines to maintain our sanity during this strange exile. We’d arrived in Split the previous September. I thought we’d be in Croatia for a month, two months tops. We’d left behind our life in New York in a hurry, figuring we’d be back soon enough. Then two months turned into three, and then it was Christmas, and then it was a new year, and still there was no end in sight. Whenever I expressed guilt about the mess I’d gotten us into, Ben shook his head. ‘Stop,’ he’d say. ‘We did this together, Sofe.’ Except that my decisions – mine, not his – had brought us to this point. And no matter how many times Ben told me that it was okay, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe him. That morning, walking along the corniche, as the cold wind whipped my hair into a frenzy, I scanned the faces of everyone I passed. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for – a returned gaze? surreptitious sign language? – but whatever it was, it didn’t materialize. ‘We’ll have people on the ground,’ the man had said to us, before we left. ‘They’ll be watching, just in case.’ I remembered nodding. I remembered feeling relieved by his reassurances. I remembered thinking: This man is a stranger, and yet we’re trusting him with our lives. The bell on the café door jangled, and the waiters waved at me as I headed to my regular table. I liked this place. The café was too haphazard to be elegant, but it was cozy and generously heated in the wintertime. The room was tall and narrow, like a shoebox stood on its end. The tables were covered in red damask, with squares of white paper to shield the fabric, and the warm light of the sconces was reflected in the wall-hung mirrors. They made a decent cappuccino, and the pastries were passable, but mostly I liked this café because the waitstaff remembered me, and that kindness made a tiny dent in our anonymity. The waiters – teenagers for the most part – were as bored and affable as high school students sitting through last period. The café was cramped, so they were constantly colliding with one another, spilling coffee and yelping in indignation, but they also never had quite enough work to keep themselves busy, and they bickered to pass the time. My waiter that day, Mirko, was my favorite. He was gangly and gregarious, and saving money toward the goal of achieving his greatest desire, which was to travel to America – specifically to Chicago. (He was obsessed with Michael Jordan and could recite the entire roster of the 1996 Bulls.) That morning, as he placed my cappuccino and cornet pastry on the table – I hadn’t even needed to order it – Mirko said, ‘There is a big story about your president.’ ‘Oh?’ I said. Even though a lot of Americans had long since wearied of the conversation, the foreigners I’d met remained intensely curious about President Caine. ‘Yes,’ Mirko said, standing up straight, looking slightly indignant. ‘It is very bad news. He says he is planning to visit Serbia next month for an important meeting.’ ‘Why is that bad news?’ I asked. ‘Bad for Croatia!’ he exclaimed. ‘We are much more beautiful than Serbia. Why would he go there instead of here? He is choosing our greatest rival instead of choosing us, even though we are so much better. It is very bad.’ Mirko’s eyes were wide. ‘Why do you think he did this, Sofie?’ ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘No one understands him, Mirko.’ After Mirko left, I scrolled through the news on my phone, just like every morning. I glanced up whenever the bell on the door jangled – a pair of tourists chattering in German; a mother with a baby swaddled against her chest – but none of the new arrivals met my eye. There was a story that day about Caine’s recent phone call with Russian president Nikolai Gruzdev. The White House released little detail about the conversation, except to emphasize that Gruzdev was fully supportive of Caine’s recent decision to withdraw American...