“Nothing, thanks.” To encourage a cut to the chase, Edgar shot a pointed glance at his chunky gold-plated diving watch. In the context of Edgar’s current average income of $300/month, its gratuitous dials spun with a dizzying exorbitance that until this spring he’d taken for granted.
“Second in your class,” Wallasek muttered, running a finger down the CV. “Vice president . . . Honorable mention . . . Salutatorian . . . Second prize . . . Second-chair . . . Say, you’ve almost snagged a lot of things.”
“I’m one of life’s runners-up.” Having failed to keep the edge from his voice, Edgar moderated pleasantly, “We try harder.”
Wallasek pulled back the arm on a pair of nail clippers and stuck the end in his ear, digging for wax. “A book review for Newsday,” he ruminated, spreading the photocopies. “The Village Voice—that’s a freebie now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Edgar said stonily.
“Washington Times . . . The Moonie paper.”
Since the early eighties the Washington Times had been owned by a fat Korean evangelist. “The staff does maintain independent editorial control.”
“Yes—or so they claim. Still, it’s not the Post, is it?”
“No, sirree,” Edgar agreed, clicking his eyeteeth, “it ain’t the Washington Post.”
“Columbia Alumni Magazine, Amtrak Express.” Examining his nail clipper arm, the editor removed a sulfurous chunk from its tip before returning to Edgar’s fledgling journalism, none of which seemed to generate the intense fascination of the gunk from Wallasek’s ear.
“And the New Republic,” Edgar pointed out.
“The rest of these seem to be law review. How much do you know about the National Record?”
“I’m a regular reader,” Edgar lied; once he’d scanned for Falconer’s byline he generally tossed the rag, since its sports section sucked. “I appreciate that the Record filled a void. For this country’s only national newspaper to have remained USA Today would have been a scandal.”
Wallasek still looked expectant; Edgar hadn’t yet laid it on thick enough. “The Record also embraces America’s post–Cold War global leadership. Your international coverage is at least as thorough as the New York Times. In assuming that readers care about the rest of the world, you don’t condescend to your subscribers.” Edgar had to stop; his inflection had developed the lilt of implausible enthusiasm employed to retail panty shields.
“Of course we condescend to our subscribers,” Wallasek dismissed with a wave. “International coverage is a sop to their vanity. Only a handful read that stuff. With one exception: when our American everyman tucks the Record under one arm and trundles into a seven-forty-seven and one of those filthy little foreigners blows it up. Those articles get read, my friend. Every column inch.”
Edgar found railing against terrorists the height of tedium. The issue invited over-obvious moralizing, since who’s going to contend that wasting those two kids with a trashcan bomb in a D.C. shopping mall in April was a profound political statement? Presumably Edgar was now obliged to chime in with hearty indignation over the Soldatsies Oozhatsies, or whatever those sorry-ass crackpots called themselves, clenching his fist in we-shall-not-be-moved solidarity with his fellow Americans, who will never capitulate to terrorism. Or maybe he should small-talk about how amazing it was that the FBI hadn’t collared a single one of these dirtbags, to demonstrate that he was on top of the story. But this interview wasn’t going well, the application had been a long shot to begin with, and Edgar passed.
“You aware of how the Record managed to establish a reputation for quality journalism in so few years?” asked Wallasek.
“Astute editing, a clearly defined remit—”
“Balls,” Wallasek cut him off. “By paying better than any paper in the country.”
Edgar smiled despite himself. “I know.”
“What I’m getting at here is that, well, you’ve got a few nice clips—”
“Those are only samples, of course.”
They both knew that Edgar had furnished every semicolon he’d ever published.
“Still, Mr. Kellogg, aren’t you aiming a little high?”
“I explained in my cover letter—”
“Yes—you ‘quit the law to become a freelance journalist.’ That caught my eye.”
“I left a top Wall Street firm where I was about to make partner,” said Edgar. “Until a few months ago I was making two hundred grand a year and rising. The Record may pay well, but that well? Seems to me that, however you slice it, I’m not ‘aiming high,’ but asking for a whopping cut in salary.”
“So I should hire you because you’re nuts?”
Edgar laughed. “Or what’s the latest prissy buzz phrase? Learning-delayed.”
Wallasek squinted. “What possessed you?”
Edgar paused. He’d rehearsed his explanation in the taxi on the way here, the cab itself an extravagance left over from the Lee & Thole days—a habit he’d have to break. Despite his designer slouch, Edgar must have been nervous; the glib rationale fled. Only overwrought snippets from college D. H. Lawrence classes flitted back to him, like “inchoate yearning.” He could not emote to some bovine newspaperman about “inchoate yearning” any more than he could assert to Toby’s own boss that he was driven to become “a Falconer.”
Lately he’d had to wonder, was he crazy? Papaya King again for lunch, when six months ago he might have dined on a client’s tab at The Cub Room. Had he been asked to go to Syracuse on short notice, he could have charged the firm for a new shirt and sent a messenger to pick it up. If he stayed past 7:30 p.m. (like, until 7:31), a Dial-car would drive him home. How could he ever explain to Guy Wallasek that privilege might have enticed an overworked paralegal, but that when Edgar was finally able to overbill clients himself the practice had seemed abruptly low-rent? Or that for no self-evident reason Edgar was meant for something finer than drafting turgid briefs? Or that he wanted to “say something,” when the very ache to say “something” and not something in particular must have put Edgar in the same boat as every other flailing schmuck in the country?
“I got bored,” Edgar telescoped lamely.
“Writing for Amtrak Express amuses you more?”
“Gotta start somewhere. And the law felt, I don’t know, passive. We’re parasites.”
“Journalists are parasites,” Wallasek countered, “on everyone else’s events. Plenty of scribblers spend their workdays merely recording what you just walked away from: mergers and acquisitions, transfers of money and power. The worst thing that can happen to a correspondent is to start thinking of himself as a player. The hack who fancies himself a mover-and-shaker gets slipshod—thinks he’s covering his own story. Reporting is a humble profession, Mr. Kellogg. Journalists—” Wallasek shrugged—“are History’s secretaries.”
“Better History’s secretary than Philip Morris’s lawyer,” Edgar ventured. “At least hacks get bylines. Law’s an anonymous profession, behind the scenes. Attorneys are paid so much because the work is drab and thankless. A predictable calling for runners-up. But I don’t want honorable mentions anymore, Mr. Wallasek. I’d like to distinguish myself.”
“You want to see your name in print,” said Wallasek skeptically.
“I want to see anything in print that isn’t solely composed to help some suit who already has more money than he knows what to do with make a little more.” Edgar pressed on with a willful geekiness refreshingly unlike him, “I want to get at the truth.”
“The ‘truth’ most reporters get at is pretty pedestrian: the secretary of state left the White House at five forty p.m. and not at six o’clock. As for the big-picture sort . . .” Wallasek seemed to take a moment to reflect, and ran a dirty nail along the stitching of his jacket. “I didn’t used to camp behind a desk, Mr. Kellogg. Funny, I don’t miss pounding the pavement much as I might have expected. I cut my teeth in Vietnam, hung up my hat after Grenada. I can’t say for sure if I’ve a better understanding, of anything, than the fo
lks who stayed in bed. Damnedest thing, but you can be right there in the middle, two armies tearing each other apart, and afterwards have not one thing to say about it. Not one thing. Way it should be. A reporter’s not supposed to chip in his two cents. But this—failure to achieve perspective. It can be personally discouraging. There’s no overarching ‘truth’ out there. Only a bunch of menial, dissociated little facts. And the facts don’t often add up to much. Lotta trees; not much forest. Oh, once in a rare while you trip over an All the President’s Men, and get to play the hero. But for the most part you just find out what happened, and what happened is depressing.”
“No more depressing than Lee & Thole.”
“I only wonder if your expectations aren’t a mite steep. Not only of getting a staff job at this newspaper, but of what the job would entail if I were rash enough to offer a post to an inexperienced, middle-aged cub.”
Edgar could skip the fatherly advice, as well as being classed at only thirty-seven as “middle-aged.” Before he could stop it, his hand was tracing his forehead, as if his hairline might have receded another half-inch since he checked it this morning. On the way back to his lap, Edgar’s fingertips traced the deep V-shaped runnels of a scowl so habitual that Angela claimed he frowned in his sleep.
“You’re the one who asked me for an interview,” Edgar grunted. “You could’ve flipped my CV in the trash.” Edgar reached for his briefcase.
Wallasek raised his palm. “Hold your horses. Toby Falconer recommended you, and he’s the most solid, levelheaded staffer here. Toby said you were ‘persevering, thorough, and single-minded’ once you’d set your sights on something.”
Edgar was quietly embarrassed. Making last month’s tremulous phone call to Falconer (to whom the adjectives “solid” and “levelheaded” would never have been applied at Yardley) had been so difficult that it made him physically ill. Although Falconer had been dumbfoundingly decent, Edgar had a queasy feeling that on his end the call hadn’t gone well. He’d felt ashamed of himself—tapping Toby for connections, after all those years without so much as a how-do-you-do. Chagrin had made him resentful, maybe even truculent. This was hardly the circumstance in which he’d fantasized about contacting the guy, and he’d never have pushed his luck like that if his level of desperation hadn’t gone through the roof. But by then, the night sweats had begun. In his dreams, Edgar implored Richard Stokes Thole to take him back without health coverage while wearing nothing but lime-green socks; the imposing senior partner scolded that the firm had gone casual on Fridays but it was Thursday and his socks ought really to be brown or black.
As for that “single-minded” jazz? Edgar’s shedding a hundred pounds in his junior year at Yardley must have left a lasting impression.
“Toby figured your law skills would transfer to journalism: interviewing, library research, writing up cases. Besides,” Wallasek got to the point at last, “I have a problem.”
Edgar’s eyebrows shot up before they plowed into a more agreeable scowl. Once resumed, his slouch cut a jauntier slant.
“You up to speed on the Barban conflict?” asked Wallasek.
Though Edgar had scanned his share of headlines (who could miss them when they were two inches high?), the SOB’s cause had sounded so tiresome when the fringe group surfaced a few years ago that Edgar had happily added Barba to the growing list of too-complicated-and-who-gives-a-fuck shit holes about which Edgar refused to read—along with Bosnia, Angola, Algeria, and Azerbaijan. Before cramming current events to prepare for this interview, Edgar couldn’t have pinpointed the jerkwater within a thousand miles on a map.
“Never been there,” said Edgar. “But of course I’ve followed the story closely.”
“Wouldn’t speak any Portuguese, would you?”
“I went to prep school in Stonington, Connecticut, settled by Portuguese immigrants. I’m not fluent, but I get by.” In truth, his total Portuguese vocabulary came down to three words, filho da puta, and “son of a whore” had limited application. Still, something was opening up here, and Edgar had no desire to go home and draft a proposal for American’s in-flight magazine.
Wallasek rose and stretched; his thigh splayed as he perched chummily on the desk. “The SOB has been lying low, and the story may be played out. But some folks are convinced that this is an undeclared cessation not because they’re giving up, but because they’re gearing up for something big. Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times last week that canny terrorists vary the pace of their campaign. For a while there, the Sobs were blowing up a subway or an airplane like clockwork, every six weeks or so. People can get used to anything. Pretty soon, you’ve got these miscreants going to all that trouble blowing stuff up, only to maintain the impression that nothing’s new. Tom was ostensibly urging we not get complacent about security, but I wasn’t sure about that column myself. Almost like Friedman giving those maniacs good tactical advice.”
It was Pavlovian: Wallasek mentions Barba, and Edgar’s mind wanders. In fact, Edgar had been musing how when the “SOB” first emerged in the news everyone had thought the name of the group was a laugh. Nowadays even management types like Wallasek here cited the acronym with a straight face. You actually had to remind yourself that in olden times it meant son of a bitch.
“Point is,” Wallasek continued, “any day now we could have another horror show splattered across the front page, and the Record could be caught with its pants down.”
“How’s that?”
Wallasek sucked his cheeks between his molars and chewed. He stood up. He jammed his hands in his pockets and jingled his keys. He glowered piercingly at his toes, as if trying to burn extra holes in his wingtips.
“Barrington Saddler.”
He didn’t ask, “Have you heard of—?” or introduce, “There’s this fellow called—” The editor simply plunked the name in the room like a heavy object he’d been lugging around and was relieved to chuck on the floor. Wallasek himself gazed at a midpoint in the office as if some large physical presence would manifest itself.
Sure, Edgar had caught references to some bombastic-sounding buffoon while he was waiting for Wallasek to get off the phone. But that didn’t altogether explain Edgar’s nagging impression of having heard the name before.
In any event, the name put Edgar off from the start. The “Barrington” bit was overblown and beefy, and anyone who didn’t have the wit to shorten the pretentious appellation down to “Barry” was a pompous ass. The tag evoked adjectives like overbearing and unbearable, and New Englanders would experience an irksome impulse to place the word “Great” in front of it.
“Barrington Saddler was sent to earth to try my personal patience,” Wallasek had resumed. “Maybe it’s because I’m still trying valiantly to pass God’s test of my character that I haven’t fired the man. That and because Saddler is supposedly one of our star reporters. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty unless someday you appear in need of a cautionary tale, but Barrington was posted to Russia, where Barrington was bad. I could’ve axed him then, but his boosters would’ve put up a stink, and I do have this indefensible fondness for the lout.
“So I decided to exile him instead. I spread out a map of Europe and located the most far-flung, poorest, dullest corner of the Continent. This worthless jut of Portugal hadn’t rated passing mention in the American press for two hundred years. I figured, here was the perfect place for Saddler to contemplate the error of his ways. Here was the one place he’d never draw a crowd—another protective, gossipy clique that goads him into mischief. Because no one went there. No tourists, no expats, much less any of his journo buddies on assignment, because there was jack to cover, just a bunch of Iberian crackers babbling a language he’d be too lazy to learn and good Catholic girls who’d keep their bodices buttoned. I’d keep him on salary until he’d learned his lesson, and he’d come back from this sandbox having got nothing in the paper all year, suitably chastened and ready to play by the rules as one more humble steno in History’s secretarial pool
.
“And where is this Podunk across the pond?” Wallasek charged ferociously.
“Barba,” Edgar guessed.
“BARBA! Which within months of Saddler’s arrival sprouts the single most lethal terrorist organization of the twentieth century. Ever, I reckon. And there’s Saddler, happy as a pig in shit, in the very center of the story, firing off front-page leads on the ultimatums of the SOB. A predictable cadre descends on the dump—the Times, the Post, and the Guardian now have permanent staffers in the provincial capital, Cinziero. Even the London Independent, which is terminally broke, keeps a string. Presto, Saddler’s leading a hack pack again. I’d say the man is charmed, except that lately I’ve wondered if this cat is finally on life number ten.”
“Saddler’s in trouble?” Once again, Edgar felt a weird familiarity with this preposterous character, a shared exasperation.
“Maybe he cozied up to those murderous douchebags too close, I don’t know. He’s reckless; he thinks danger is funny. Anyway, three months ago he disappeared. Vanished, poof, gone. Practically left his coffee cooling and his Camel burning. Which is where you come in.”
“I was a lawyer, not a PI.”
“I don’t expect you to look for him. That’s the cops’ job, which they’ve already done, badly if you ask me. This Cinziero police chief Lieutenant Car-ho-ho, or whoever, claims to have left no stone unturned. He’s one of those parochial rubes crazed with petty power who’s very possessive about his patch. I’ve talked to him. Try to suggest maybe he hasn’t tried all the angles, and he gets snippy and defensive and patriotic on you. You’ll see—Barbans are all like that. Touchy. And all roads lead to their cloverleaf politics. Mention the flipping weather—which I gather stinks—and you’ve insulted their precious national pride. Anyway, the guy came up with diddly. No leads. Left me to believe Saddler must have been abducted by aliens or something.”
“So what’s the gig?” Edgar pressed, forcing his leg to stop jittering.
Wallasek clapped his hands. “I need a correspondent in Barba. I’ve given up waiting for Saddler to send flowers. So I’m offering you a string. There is a retainer, which technically makes you a ‘super-stringer,’ but don’t let the heroic title go to your head; our monthly gratuity will keep your tape recorder in fresh batteries, and that’s about it. Flat-rate four hundred bucks an article, plus expenses, but only for the pieces we print. We’ll pay your initial freight. No benefits. You can set yourself up in Barrington’s digs; I gather he even left his car.