Running Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

wearing orange makeup from an earlier TV appearance, answered only certain questions, and those curtly, talking out of the side of his mouth. He was sixty, a large man, beginning to go fleshy, with something of a burdened look about him, small tired eyes blinking above those folds of loose skin.
    He wheeled right, strode past an enormous mahogany clock topped by a bellicose eagle, made another right toward a flight of stairs, and as though by hidden signal the reporters stopped pursuing and dispersed, leaving Moll to follow alone, right into an elevator reserved for senators and staff, out into another corridor, around a corner, keeping about seven feet behind him, just so he’d know she was there.
    “Out with it.”
    “Moll Robbins.”
    “Print or broadcast.”
    “
Running Dog
magazine.”
    “
Running Dog
,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “You people still in business?”
    “Barely.”
    “Capitalist lackeys and running dogs.”
    “Someone remembers,” she said.
    He pushed open a large door, looked inside, looked back at Moll, cocked his head, paused and shrugged, saying: “What the hell, come on in.”
    It was an enormous ornate men’s room. No one else in sight. Spotless tile, gleaming fixtures. Faint aroma of balsam fir and lime. Percival stooped over a wash basin.
    “I have to get this makeup off.”
    “I saw it,” she said.
    “What, the show?”
    She waited for him to raise up a bit so he could hear above the gushing water.
    “That man seemed confused.”
    “Who, the moderator?”
    She waited for his head to emerge again.
    “Yes.”
    “He’s always confused. The fella’s all image. He can’t talk about something like PAC/ORD. He’s a bunch of little electronic dots, that’s all he is. The fella’s so folksy he ought to do his news show in a living room set, wearing slippers and smoking a pipe, in front of a crackling fire.”
    Moll took a towel from a shelf and put it in his outstretched hand.
    “They ought to hire a kindly old lady to bring him disaster bulletins on a tray with his raisin cookies and hot chocolate.”
    “See, we thought at
Running Dog
we’d do something different.”
    “How different, I’d like to know.”
    As they spoke Moll had a distant sense of Memorable Event Taking Place, and could hear herself describing it to friends—
“So we’re in this U.S. Senate men’s room and he’s got his head down inside a Florentine marble wash basin and I’m checking out the urinals to see if they have state emblems on them, like Delaware pisses here, and this one’s Kansas”—
    A toilet flushed down at the end of a long row of stalls. The stall door opened and an elderly black man came out, fastening his trousers. Moll watched him approach.
    “How are you today, Senator?”
    “About as well as can be expected, Tyrell, under the circumstances.”
    “I know the feeling,” Tyrell said.
    He took a brush out of his white jacket and moved it through the air behind Percival’s shoulders and midback, eyeing Moll for the first time, at least openly. It was a look, combined with a haughty shrug, that said,
I don’t know what you’re doing here but this is the wrong place to be doing it
.
    In the corridor the Senator walked at a more reasonable pace.
    “We’d like to take a relaxed approach,” she said.
    “My so-called human side.”
    “It’s fairly common knowledge you spend much of your free time at your Georgetown house. That might be the place to talk.”
    “I have aides who screen people like you. Why weren’t you screened?”
    “Will you do it, Senator?”
    “
Running Dog
—Jesus, I don’t know.”
    “Our problems are strictly financial. We don’t get many complaints about content or format.”
    “You run nudes?”
    “Occasionally.”
    “Male and female?”
    “Female.”
    “Pubic hair?”
    “Airbrush.”
    They seemed to be coming to a door that led to the street.
    “Nice to know the old values aren’t dead,” he said.
    They stood blinking in the