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the hunting and all the interviews himself so far. It was the print media way, not the TV way, he said. “I know all of you are cheesed off
with me. You think I don’t trust you which, to be honest, is true. But frankly, I should have let you do the pre-interviews.” If Elia could have read his mind, she would have
known it wasn’t because he’d just had a revelation about the value of the team, but because none of those interviews had gone anywhere.
    Mandrake was mentally shaking his head that if he had to sit through one more jerk-off repeating the same sickeningly sweet accolades about Isabel, he would gag: decent, intuitive, insightful,
loyal, empathetic, committed to the common good, having the drive and organisational skills to achieve goals, compassionate but decisive, a practical visionary, blah, blah, blah.
    Bor-fucking-ring.
    No way was his first TV piece going to be about some namby-pamby Little Goody Two-Shoes. The network hadn’t lured him from the peak of the print world for that. Close-up only did
controversy.
    Typing was Mandrake’s preferred way to think. “Who is the real Isabel Diaz?” his fingers had tapped out on his laptop days earlier. “Mary fucking Poppins?” He
hadn’t been able to find one bastard out there with a bad word to say about her. Even how she was dealing with the Karim Ahmed scandal showed her in a depressingly positive light, despite the
Democrats trying to whip it up as her Trojan or rather, Arabian horse. Mandrake had been weighing up tossing in the whole story when he had stumbled over the whereabouts of the trailer park
manager.
    Elia pleaded to have first shot.
    “Not this time,” he said. Mandrake had a gut instinct about this one. He was going to change the course of history. It was why he won his Pulitzer. And he badly wanted another one to
prove he hadn’t lost his magic just because he had sold out to television.

 
8
    “A NOTHER MARGARITA,” MANDRAKE winked to the bartender for the third time, “and another Wild Turkey for my friend. How ’bout
a double this time, eh?” The wink was a coded conspiracy against Mike’s drinking pal, a signal he’d agreed earlier with the barman to hold back the tequila from Mike’s own
drinks so he’d stay clear-headed while the former trailer park manager spilled his increasingly well-lubricated guts.
    Mike now knew he’d been right to do this prep himself, and alone. Willy Nesbit would be top TV talent. His baggy, crumpled surf shirt was styled—though that wasn’t quite the
right word—for someone thirty years younger and twenty pounds heavier. Nesbit had filched it from an unattended pile at the laundromat. Mike sniffed Nesbit out as his program teaser. Willy
was one of those tall, scrawny sleazebags whose rust-bucket of a truck would sport a peeling bumper sticker like, You think this pick-up is filthy? Just try a night with the driver .
Willy’s head was a total razor job, the shave exposing a macabre tattoo: two rats with their thick pink tails slithering down his neck. Perfect for TV.
    Good journalism was in the details, Mike knew that, and at last they were coming to him. Like the “Gappy Hooker”. Mike couldn’t believe his luck when Willy blurted out the pet
name he’d given thirty years ago to a woman he knew as Maria Rosa, Isabel’s apparently toothless mother.
    “It had its benefits,” Willy smirked, digging an elbow into Mike’s ribs.
    When Mike was slow to follow, Willy worked his lips into a big O, bulged his eyes cartoon-style and, placing one hand at the back of his neck right on top of the tattooed rats, and a finger of
his other hand near his mouth, he bobbed his head up and down so his mouth slid over his finger. But it was Mandrake who gagged: a performance like that, while the tape was running… could he
slide it past the network censors? Willy Nesbit was a repulsive toenail-clipping of a man, but Mike Mandrake was pumped.
    Luckily, Willy couldn’t recollect Maria