The place was nearly empty. Almost no one moved in the vast maze of white walls that separated one cubicle from another. There wasn’t even much activity at the city desk in the center of the room. Only the wires editor, Shelly Smith, was there, tapping at her computer. I glanced at my watch. It was quarter past nine. It seemed the city summer had brought the place to a halt.
I wandered over to the coffee machine against the wall. The coffeepot was empty.
I screamed: “Alex!”
My voice faded away into the hum of the electric clock on the wall above my head.
Seriously disgruntled, I carried the pot to the city desk. I lowered over Shelly, a pleasant-faced matron with frosted blond hair.
“Where the hell’s the copy boy?” I said.
She did not look up. She tapped at her computer.
“Gone.”
“What does that mean?”
“He got a job on the Philly Inquirer. Editor-in-chief, I think.” She kept tapping.
“Didn’t he make coffee before he left?”
“Maybe, but he left last Friday. It’s probably cold.”
“So who’s the new copy boy?” I said.
“Fran.”
“Fran!” I screamed.
A sylph with long black hair appeared. She wore a pleated purple skirt and a lavender blouse. She had a cute, round monkey-face with big square glasses perched on the little nose. I tossed the coffeepot into her arms. Startled, she caught it.
“Make some coffee fast,” I said.
She did not move fast. She did not move at all. She hesitated. She looked at the coffeepot. She looked at me.
I pointed a finger at her. “Fran,” I said, “I look into your young eyes and I see a girl debating whether to tell me that making coffee isn’t part of her job.”
“Well, I …”
“Make coffee, Fran.”
“But when I was hired …”
“Fran. You don’t understand. If you don’t make coffee, I will rip your fucking head off and throw your bleeding carcass onto the street where the jackals can eat it.”
Fran’s mouth opened. Her cheeks flushed. She appealed to Shelly.
“He can do it,” Shelly said. “It’s in his contract.”
Fran went away to make coffee.
“Black,” I called after her. I sat on the edge of the city desk. “Imagine that Alex,” I said. “He didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I know.” Shelly pouted at her computer screen. She kept tapping the keys. “And after the way you treated him, too.”
I lit a cigarette. “So that explains Alex. What about everyone else?”
“Everyone else is here.”
“You’re it? Is the whole staff on vacation?”
“The whole staff is at the whole staff meeting.”
I paused in the midst of a breath of smoke. “Shit,” I said.
“The nine A.M. staff meeting.”
“Shit,” I said again.
“And it’s no good saying ‘shit.’”
“Goddamn,” I said.
“That’s no good either. If I were you, I’d get going. Cambridge seemed put out by your absence.”
“I forgot.”
Shelly glanced up at me.
“Well, they slip my mind. It’s Freudian.”
She turned back to the monitor. “See a psychiatrist.” She tapped away.
“I can’t afford a psychiatrist. I’m about to get fired.” I got off the desk. “The guy doesn’t even let us smoke,” I muttered. “I’m forty-six. I should be able to smoke anywhere I damn well please.”
I wandered over toward the hall. I paused at the edge of it, smoking, trying to get as many drags in as I could.
Fran came to me with a Styrofoam cup full of black coffee. She handed it over.
“Thanks,” I said. “Is my tie straight?”
“Your tie isn’t even tied.”
“Oh.” I yanked it off, stuffed it in my jacket pocket.
“You’re John Wells, right?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I tried on a smile. “How’s this? Does this look like I’m eating shit?”
Fran laughed. “No. It looks like you’re chewing flesh.”
“Darn.”
“Alex told me about you,” she said. She put her hands behind her back. She turned this way and that like a flirting schoolgirl.
“Yeah. Well, he was an idiot.”
“He said you were the best reporter alive.”
“A brilliant boy. He’ll go far.”
She lowered her eyes shyly. “He also said you were the biggest son of a bitch he’d ever met in his life.”
“That Alex. What a kidder.” I sipped my coffee. I tugged desperately at the last of my cigarette.
“And,” added Fran, “he said if I called you ‘Pops’ you’d get really angry.”
“Sage counsel, kid.”
“So what I want to ask is: How will I know when you’re really angry?”
I handed her the smoldering filter of my cigarette. “You won’t,” I told her. “But your survivors will.”
I carried my coffee down the hall to the conference room.
The gang was all there. Editors, reporters, the lot. The elder statesmen, like Rafferty and Gershon and me, were a shaggy bunch with open vests and rolled-up sleeves and undone ties. The new breed, and they were in the majority now, were shiny and tidy and blow-dried. Old and young, they sat in chairs around the long conference table or stood behind the chairs with their backs against the wall. All of them looked up when I came in. The staff meeting has a thousand eyes.
Two of those eyes belonged to Robert Cambridge, our managing editor. He was one of the younger breed, thirty-three or so. He was sitting at the head of the table. He was slouching in his chair, his legs out before him. He looked sleek and trim in his tailored brown suit. He was playing with his pen. He was talking. Then he stopped talking. He looked up. He smiled at me. He smiled thinly.
“Johnny. Hey. Johnny,” he said softly. “Have a seat.”
He waved a hand at the chairs. All the chairs were taken.
“S’all right,” I said. “I’ll stand.”
He nodded. “Great,” he said, still softly. His voice was dangerously soft. “Great.”
I moved to the back of the room. I excused myself as I pushed past the others in their chairs. Many of the editors studied the yellow legal pads in front of them as I went by. Many of my fellow reporters cleared their throats and murmured and stared at their laps. McKay, who was seated near the middle of the table, pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. His mouth wiggled back and forth.
I reached the back wall, leaned against it as the shifting and murmuring and staring continued another moment. I glanced down and was surprised to see Lansing seated right in front of me. She was supposed to be on vacation. She smiled up at me warmly. Her blue eyes softened. She reached out and touched my hand for a second.
“Hi, John! How are you? I missed you,” she whispered.
I motioned her to face front. I figured I was in enough trouble. “Stop looking at me that way, Lansing,” I hissed.
Her eyes clouded over on the instant. She was hurt. She turned away.
I sighed. I sipped my coffee. The morning was not going well. I peeked across the rim of my cup at Cambridge.
He did not look at me again. He looked at his pen. He played with his pen, tapping it against the tabletop, letting it slide up and down through his well-manicured fingers. The expression on his round, tanned face seemed dreamy. His voice oozed out. He seemed to just pick up where he’d left off.
“Now, I’ve been here for almost—what has it been? Two years,” he said. “Two years … and certain things have really changed and that’s great. We’ve gotten much, much more relatable as a newspaper. Much more oriented toward what I always call Infotainment. Short pieces. People pieces. You-and-me pieces. The kind of things people want to read. We do much more of that now. And that’s great.”
The reporters nodded, staring down at the table. The editors pretended to take notes on their legal pads. I sipped my coffee, leaning against the wall.
Cambridge tapped his pen forcefully to punctuate his words. “But we still … still—after all this time—we still get bogged down in this—idea, this, this—conception of … I don’t know what you want to call it: The Holy Shrine of News.” The pen beat out the rhythm of his words. “I don’t … under … stand … why this … has … to be.”
Next to him on the table lay a stack of newspapers. He set the pencil down and grabbed one of them. He held the paper up with one hand. It flopped forward, unreadable. “The front page two weeks ago,” he said. He jerked it to get the page straight. It flopped forward. “Now why—” He jerked it. It flopped. He straightened in his chair. He held the paper in both hands, like Truman after he beat Dewey. The banner read: DELLACROCE FREE. The crime boss, who’d been sent up for racketeering barely a year before, had been released after a technical appeal. I’d written the story. “Now, I was out of town the week this happened,” said Cambridge, “and I come back and find this. And inside, page eight or ten or I don’t know what the hell it is, what do we find out but that fucking Miss America may be married. I mean, fucking married, for Christ’s sake!” He surveyed our faces. We hung our heads in shame. “Page ten?” he asked us. “I mean, okay, it turns out it wasn’t true, but I mean that’s a big story! A big, big story! The Post led with it and, okay, you can say what you want to about the Post but they’re not afraid to relate. To be relatable. Now that’s all I’m talking about.”
He tossed the paper down, disgusted. He went on: What foolish prejudice had caused us to lead with a freed mob king when Miss America might be a Mrs.? he asked. Which of those two stories were people more interested in? Which were they more likely to talk about? Which would make them stop and take notice, make them say to each other over lunch, “Hey, did you see the Star today?”
“When you’re doing a story, or assigning a story, or budgeting space for a story, ask yourselves those questions.” Cambridge said. “Ask yourselves: Is this just news, or is it Infotainment?”
We listened. We shuffled our heels guiltily. We asked ourselves the questions, just for practice. I asked myself: Would our readers stop and take notice of Congressman Paul Abingdon in the nude, lashing a naked woman with her sash? Would they say to each other over lunch: “Hey, did you see what was in the Star today? A senate candidate with a hard-on!”
“I’m not pointing any fingers,” Cambridge said in a mischievous singsong voice, “but some people are just going to have to get with the program here, okay? Because the Star is going to be relatable. And that’s the way it is, folks. Okay?”
He must have felt this last part was a little rough on us. He looked around at our dejection. He grinned his boyish, lopsided, regular-guy grin. His forelock fell rakishly on his forehead like a regular guy’s. “So, hey,” he said, raising his eyebrows regular-guy-like. “Let’s do it. What do you say? Because this is good, good stuff we’re doing here. It’s important. Okay? Okay. Now …” He clapped his hands loudly. “I ordered some Danish. Fran has put them out in the city room. Go out there. Enjoy it. It’s on me. Okay?”
“Am I mistaken,” murmured McKay, as we walked together back to the city room, “or is that man the biggest asshole who ever lived?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What about Caligula?”
“No, no, no. He was a scumbag. That’s different. I’m talking assholes.”
I shrugged. McKay was our feature writer and resident wordsmith. He was always right when it came to questions of semantics.
In the newsroom, a crowd had now gathered around the coffee maker. There were two large boxes of doughnuts and Danish open there.
“Hey,” said McKay. “It’s on me. Okay?”
“Boy, you are just one regular guy.”
“I know, I know.”
“I’m talking regular.”
We got ourselves some doughnuts and coffee. We carried them over to my cubicle. I plopped down in the chair. I shoved back a pile of newspapers. My Olympia was underneath, the last typewriter in the joint. I shoved that back too. I set down my breakfast. McKay, meanwhile, hoisted a pile of newspapers off the desk. He tossed them onto the floor. He sat down where the papers used to be.
“Didn’t you get the memo on cleanliness?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I filed it next to godliness. It’s in there somewhere.” I chomped my doughnut. It was glazed. It was good. “So how’s the kid?” I asked him.
McKay grinned, his face full of doughnut. He had a face like a kid himself. Round and all cheeks without a wrinkle on it. When he smiled, he looked like a diaper ad. “Oh great,” he said. “She’s starting to talk, it’s really something. Yesterday, I come home …”
Lansing walked by, carrying a doughnut and coffee of her own.
“Yo,” I called. “What brings you back so soon?”
She had been on some island or other, as I recalled. She was darkly tanned and her long blond hair had turned nearly platinum. She was wearing a white wraparound skirt and a yellow T-shirt. The skirt showed off her long bronzed legs. The shirt showed off the long, slim curves of her.
She didn’t stop. I rolled my chair to the edge of the cubicle. I leaned my head out.
“Uh, Wells …” said McKay.
I didn’t listen. “Yo, Lansing. Don’t I get a hello?”
She stopped. She turned. Her skirt flared out as she turned. She walked slowly back to me. She smiled at me again. Weakly again.
Then she glanced down at the newspapers McKay had put on the floor.
“So how were the islands?”
“You know,” she said tightly, “you don’t have to do this.” She pointed at the papers with her doughnut. “I mean, really, it only makes things worse.”
I glanced at McKay. He was hiding his entire face in his coffee cup.
I tried again. “Yeah. So, uh, how were the islands?”
“I’m serious, Wells. I’m really serious.”
I studied her face. A nice face to study. She had high cheekbones. She had white skin. She had rich lips, very red. But looking her over I realized she was right: she was serious.
“In that case,” I told her, “it’s McKay’s fault.”
McKay snorted some hot coffee through his nose. That, in turn, made me choke on my doughnut.
“It’s not funny,” said Lansing. I glanced at her again. Almost unbelievably, her eyes were damp. This is the woman who went into Washington House disguised as a drug addict last May. Came out with a series on halfway house abuse that shut the place down. “You know,” she went on. Her lips thickened and trembled. “You come into the meeting half an hour late. You’re not wearing a tie. You throw your papers out in the hall, and who do you think catches shit for it? Why do you think we have meetings like that?”
“Um—because Cambridge is an idiot?”
She made a swift, angry gesture with her doughnut. She dropped her voice. “All right. We know that. He’s an idiot. But the people upstairs like him. And they have liked him for two years.”
“They like everybody for two years,” I said. “They liked Perelman when he came in to make us zingy, and Davis when he was going to give us pizzazz. Now, we’re relatable. I’ve been here eleven years, Lancer. I’ve seen all the Cambridges come and go.…”
“Oh …” She spluttered a moment. Coffee slopped over the rim of her cup. It pattered onto the floor. “Big deal!” she hissed finally. “You and Rafferty, you sit together and plot and you got your big deal crime-boss story on the front page and you … you buried Miss America when he was out of town, giggling about it like a couple of children. And the younger people, you know, they respect you, you’re a legend to them. You’ve backed him right to the wall, John. You’ve completely undermined his authority. You think he doesn’t know who’s responsible?”
“Uh—do I care?”
“You should care.” She’d
raised her voice. She looked around and lowered it. “You should care,” she hissed. “Because he hates your guts. He hates your guts and he’s gunning for you and the people upstairs love him and you should have a column by now and you could be secure and well-off instead of living in that dive and …”
“Lansing!” The cry came from the city desk. She looked around for it, her whole body trembling. “Lansing—your mother—on line four!”
Blood rushed into Lansing’s high cheeks. She bared her teeth. “God damn it!” she said.
Her coffee sloshing, her doughnut dropping crumbs, she stormed off to her cubicle.
Open-mouthed, I swiveled to McKay. “Come out of that coffee cup, you coward,” I said. He surfaced, gasping. “What the hell was that?’
He thought it over. “Rage, I’d say. Maybe just anger … no. No, I’d have to say rage.”
“Jesus Christ. She must have had a great vacation. I thought she wasn’t due back until Monday, anyway.”
McKay shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t have a good time. She went with her mother.”
“Is that my fault?”
McKay laughed. “I wouldn’t answer that if it were the last question on earth. But I’ll tell you this much: she’s been snapping like a windup alligator all morning. She’s had four cups of coffee. Her mother’s called twice.… In fact, the only pleasant things she’s said to anyone are ‘How’s Wells?” ‘When’s Wells coming in?’ and ‘Did Wells notice I was gone?’ Hell, I thought she was gonna be nice to you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She was.” I lit a cigarette. “Christ, look at this. She’s got me so upset, I lit a cigarette when I haven’t even finished my doughnut yet.”
McKay slid off my desk. “Hey,” he said, as he left. “Enjoy it. It’s on me. Okay?”
“Oh, shut up.” He was gone. I shouted, “Fran!”
The sylph came running. Breathless: “What?”
“Clean up those goddamned newspapers,” I said.
And that, it turned out, was the high point of my day. The rest was pure August. I read the paper. I finished my cigarette. I finished my doughnut, then another cigarette, then my coffee. Then I got on the phone. I dialed the cops on the killing of a trial witness in Brooklyn. They’d gotten nowhere. I smoked some cigarettes. I followed up a lead on a cable TV payoff. A dead end. I smoked. I called up the U.S. Attorney’s office to flirt something out of one of his assistants. She was on vacation. I went down the hall to the room with the vending machine. I bought a new pack of butts. I returned. I sat. I smoked.