There were four people in them. One of them was Cambridge. The other three were The People Upstairs. They were sitting there, waiting for me, when I came into the room. Cambridge was closest to the door. Farthest, that is, from the seat of power at the opposite head of the table. He was sitting, hunched forward over his yellow legal pad. He wore a pale green suit without a wrinkle on it. It looked like the skin of a seasick infant. He brushed at his hair with his fingers, looking serious and concerned.
The man seated next to him was Max Hodgekiss, our editor-in-chief. He was around fifty, short and slim, dressed in impeccable dark gray. He was bald except for a fringe of white, impeccably clipped. He had a round, small, impeccable face with impeccably tight lips. He didn’t know anything, and he had no power.
In the chair across from him was Roy Sandler, our executive editor. He was also about fifty, short and slim, but he was nowhere near impeccable. In fact, there was something almost feral about him. He had a bullet head, crisscrossed with black hairs. He had heavy eyebrows over deepset eyes. The eyes were sharp and hungry. They kept moving. They devoured what they touched and then passed on. Sandler had power all right. At times, he ran the place. He liked me, too, as much as he liked anybody. We understood each other.
Finally, at the head of the table, was the King himself. Our publisher, Milton Bush. He was a big old son of a gun was Milton. He was big and broad and he pushed against his gray pinstriped vest like an expanding balloon. He had a full head of hair. It was gray and it was cut short. He had a face that came at you like the front end of a locomotive. There was a slight, cruel smile stuck on his pale, thin lips. He looked like he was daring you to stand in his way.
Bush and I had only met a few times. He always tried to break a bone or two when he shook my hand, but it was nothing personal. I’d heard all the scuttlebutt on him—his mistreated wife, his well-kept mistresses, his vicious tactics in the boardroom and so on. I’d heard he once voted a rival’s job away while the guy was in the john. But that was just secondhand stuff. It had nothing to do with me.
My position with him was hard to figure. He knew I was a good reporter. He’d said so to my face. He knew I’d kept the Star on top during the recent scandals, and that our circulation had risen during those scandals, leaving the competition in the dust. So that counted in my favor. Against me, though, was Bush himself; the man, his personality. It was my guess that he was the kind of guy who didn’t much care what else I could do as long as I could touch the floor with my nose. If I could do that every now and again about two inches in front of his polished black oxfords, then I’d be all right. That was my strategy anyway: bow, scrape, eat shit and go back to work.
I inclined my head toward the four of them. “Gentlemen,” I said.
Cambridge pretended not to know me. He hardly looked up. Bush just sort of snorted in derision.
“Come on in, John,” Sandler said. “Sit down.”
I sat down at the head of the table, opposite Bush. There were ashtrays all around. I pulled one toward me. Cambridge gave me a look. I lit a cigarette. Bush cleared his throat, reached into his pocket and hauled out a cigar the size of my arm. Cambridge looked down again. I sat back, took a drag and waited.
Sandler glanced at Bush. Bush nodded. Sandler said, “John …” He had a hard, sharp voice. “John, we don’t want you to feel that you’re on trial here. We know how much you mean to this newspaper. We respect that. But … We don’t much like being made a laughingstock. You’ve seen the Post, I imagine.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
“Well, you can see how we feel. I mean, we know that mistakes can happen. We’d just like to hear from you exactly how it did happen, and hear any ideas you might have for getting back on top of this story.”
I opened my mouth to speak.
“I think what Roy is saying,” said Hodgekiss. He leaned forward to illustrate with an open hand. “Is: we want your version of the story, and any solutions you might have for what’s gone wrong.”
My mouth was still open. I put my cigarette in it, sucked in some smoke. “Two nights ago,” I said, “Mayforth Kendrick called me up. Said he had a story for me. It was slow, I figured I’d check it out. I went to his apartment and he showed me photographs of Paul Abingdon having sex with a woman I’d never seen before.…”
“Excuse me for interrupting.…” Hodgekiss leaned forward. “But was this … normal sex?”
“What?”
“Because we’ve heard rumors now that he was engaged in something offbeat. Out of the way. Uh—you know …” Now Hodgekiss used his hand to make circular you-know motions in the air.
I used my hand to scratch my nose. “He tied her hands with a belt or something and hit her with this scarf she had.”
“Ah. Ah,” said our editor-in-chief, nodding vigorously. “I see. Okay. Fine. Now I see.”
“So anyway …” I said.
“Fine,” said Hodgekiss. “Go ahead. Okay.”
“Anyway, Kendrick hinted he’d tried to blackmail Abingdon with the photos, but Abingdon wouldn’t bite, so he was trying to sell them to me.” I faltered. I took a deep breath.
“Uh—what did you do, John?” Sandler asked.
I looked him dead in the eye. “I said it was no story. I turned him down.”
Sandler smiled softly. He nodded. He lowered his head. On my right, Cambridge bent over his legal pad, trying not to dance and sing for joy. Next to him, Hodgekiss made vague exclamations under his breath. Bush just stared at me. He had a stare that hit you like a Giants linebacker.
“Why, John?” Sandler asked. “Why’d you turn him down?”
I gestured with the cigarette. “Like I said. It’s no story. Not unless his private life affects his public action.”
“It’s sure a story now,” said Cambridge. He laughed. He looked at everyone else to see if they laughed. They smiled. He stopped laughing and smiled instead.
“You’re right,” I said. “It is. But at the time, I didn’t know Kendrick was going to get murdered. It didn’t come up.”
One by one, starting with Bush, the smiles faded away. The room was silent. So far, Bush had held his cigar in his hand unlit. Now he stuck the monster in his face. He torched it with a sleek lighter of gold. He puffed great gobs of green smoke. The silence continued. So did the smoke. It billowed out over our heads and hung there in a thin layer. So did the silence.
Then, in a voice like a cannon shot, Bush said, “What I’d like to know is: Where the fuck do you get off making a decision like that without consulting your superior, without consulting Cambridge?”
“Well, sir, after twenty-six years as a reporter I …”
“I don’t give diddly shit about your twenty-six years as a reporter, Wells. The reporters who work for me don’t make decisions like that. We hire people to make those decisions. People with brains.”
My breath held itself. I felt the blood pounding in my brows. Beside me, Cambridge was nodding sagely, solemnly. Only the light in his eyes was dancing.
I ran a finger across the top of my Up. It came away damp. I looked at Bush with his big chest thrown out toward me. “Well, sir,” I said softly, “maybe you’re right.”
“Right?” Bush stared at Sandler for a second as if to assure himself he’d heard me. Next he stared at me. He sat forward with his hands folded together to do it. The cigar stuck up between the fingers of one of the hands. “You’re damned right I’m right,” he said. “I know I’m right. And this may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t need a fifty-year-old street reporter to tell me I’m right.”
I didn’t have to take that. “Forty-six,” I said, and I put some spin on it too.
Bush pushed his big face at me with its thin and nasty smile. “Forty-six.” He nodded. “And when you’re fifty, you’ll still be a street reporter. If you’re lucky.”
I finally took a breath. It wasn’t much as breaths go. The blood hammered in my head even louder. My chest felt like someone ha
d tied a knot in it. “Well, sir,” I said softly, “maybe you’re right.”
Cambridge kept looking at his legal pad. His expression hadn’t changed. But his cheeks had turned the color of the sunset in Jersey—a deep scarlet. It was, I guessed, the unmistakeable sign that he was having a meaningful sensual experience.
And it wasn’t over yet.
“Now,” said Bush. He sat back in his chair. He cocked his cigar at the ceiling. He smiled at me. Snakes smile, that way when they unhinge their jaws. “Since it didn’t occur to you to ask your superior what to do in the first place, maybe it would help you to have him explain to you now the exact extent of the damage you’ve caused us.”
He looked at Cambridge. Sandler looked at Cambridge. Hodgekiss cleared his throat and looked at Cambridge.
Cambridge adjusted his tie. He lifted the top page on his legal pad to consult the notes beneath. I didn’t think he would be able to look me in the eye. But I was wrong. He’d waited two years for this. He wasn’t going to miss it.
He looked me in the eye. “John,” he said gently, smoothly. “I just want to reiterate what Roy here has said. We want you to know—I personally want you to know—that you’re not on trial here or, you know, under the gun in any way. We’re just trying to give you the kind of useful constructive criticism that will improve your performance in the future. Now, do you understand that?”
I couldn’t speak. I forced myself to nod.
Cambridge raised his index finger. He placed it thoughtfully against his lower lip. “You see,” he said, “when someone comes to you with a story like this one, and you turn it down on your own initiative, you take an important decision out of management’s hands. I mean, out of the hands of the very people who are paid to make decisions like that and who might be able to make them with a cooler head than the reporter on the scene. Now, in this case, for instance, you saw some pictures, they were distasteful, you thought forget it, and now you’ve got every paper in town ahead of us on our own story. Okay? That’s number one.”
Cambridge lowered his index finger to consult his notes again. When he looked up, he looked me in the eye again. I gained a moment by crushing out my cigarette, but he waited until I met his gaze. I did. I looked right into his eyes. I could feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I cursed myself for it.
“Second,” Cambridge said, “you turned your back on a political story with major ramifications, leaving us open to attacks of partisanship. Third, you made a value judgment instead of a news judgment that I just don’t think was justified.”
“What Bob is saying,” broke in Hodgekiss, out of pure stupidity I imagine, “is: despite its decidedly controversial or you might say explicit or sexual nature, this is definitely in my judgment, and I’m sure in the judgment of Mr. Bush here a legitimate, a decidedly legitimate news story.”
I swiped at the sweat on my brow as inconspicuously as I could. “Well, sir,” I said gently, “maybe you’re right.”
Cambridge was about to start in again, but Hodgekiss was encouraged and went on. “You know, we’ve discussed this very thoroughly upstairs here, and it seems to us that pictures like these say something very definite about a candidate’s character.”
“Definitely,” said Cambridge, slicing the air with the edge of his hand. “Definitely, definitely. There is no question about it. This is a character issue. This is not the first time Abingdon has done this. It’s a real, a real habit with him. And it’s something the public definitely, definitely, definitely has a right to know. I mean, this is a man who wants to be a senator, a man who one day may try to become president. I mean, you essentially, when you turned those pictures down, you just threw morality out the window. You took the first amendment into your own hands.”
“And I’ll tell you something else,” said Bush. He leaned forward again, this time to jab his cigar at me. “I’ll tell you something else. By turning down those pictures, you put us in a situation where the next time someone has something like this to offer, they may not come to us first. They may say to themselves, ‘Oh—huh!—The Star! That’s that paper with … integrity!’” He spoke the last word with a single explosion of laughter. It was echoed by the other three. He pointed the cigar again. “I don’t need integrity, Wells. I need news. Do you understand me?”
I stalled. I reached for a cigarette. I brought it to my lips. My hands were trembling. I wondered if they could see that. I lit a match and held it to the cigarette’s tip. I watched Bush through the flame. He was leaning toward me, waiting.
“Do you understand?” he said again.
I waved out the match. The sweat that had gathered on my forehead finally fell. A drop of it rolled down the side of my jaw.
I tried to speak. I was too hoarse. I had to clear my throat. Finally, I got it out.
“Well, sir,” I said gently, “you are full of shit.”
I took a breath of smoke. I blew the smoke out. No one said anything. The four men looked at me, as if they were still waiting for me to speak, as if they had decided to discount what they had just heard and start the moment over again at the beginning.
I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the heel of my trembling hand.
“John,” said Sandler. “Let’s try and deal with this in a measured …”
“Wait a minute,” said Bush. “Wait a minute. Did you just tell me I’m full of shit?”
“Yeah,” I said. I shook my head sadly. “Yeah, damn it, I did.” I could feel my heartbeat beginning to slow. I could feel the sweat drying on my brow. I had surely lost my job. The sudden freedom rolled over me like a wave. “And you are, too,” I added carelessly, “completely full of shit.”
Bush laughed. It was not an I-like-your-spirit-son laugh. It was an oh-good-meat-for-supper laugh. He waved his cigar at me gracefully. “All right,” he said in great good humor. “All right, suppose you explain to me how I’m full of shit.”
I considered it for a drag or two. “Well. Just on the face of it, for instance,” I said. “You say these photographs say a lot about Abingdon’s character. And they do, all right. That’s certain. But so do his fantasies, his private thoughts, the notes of his clergyman or his psychiatrist. All that stuff says a lot about his character. But it says it in a way that is not within our purview. Anymore than your fantasies or thoughts or psychiatrist’s notes are within our purview.” I smoked. I thought. “What else?” I said. “You say the public has a right to know because the man is asking to be a senator. Okay. That’s a job. The public hires him to do it. That’s what a campaign is: it’s a job interview with the public. They have the right to hire him or not, but they have no right to pry into his private life anymore than their bosses should pry into theirs. If they do hire him and they don’t like the way he does his job, they can fire him. If he breaks the law while he does it, he should be put in jail like anyone else. We report to the public on his public conduct so they can make those decisions. When his public conduct goes astray, we have a right to know why, whether it’s incompetence or greed or a love affair or whatever. But as for his private morality, you’re right: I throw it out the window. I couldn’t care less. If I knew one damn thing about morality, I’d be in a different business anyway.” I leveled my cigarette at Bush where he sat back smiling and puffing smoke. “But that’s not why you’re full of shit,” I said.
Sandler shook his head, rubbed his eyes with the fingers of one hand. Hodgekiss sat frozen, his head tilted to one side, his mouth open, his eyes gazing into space blankly. Cambridge stared at me. His lip curled. It occurred to me suddenly that he was truly disgusted by my conduct on this story. He was an idiot.
As for Bush, he simply nodded at me without removing the cigar from his mug. “Go on,” he said.
“The reason you’re full of shit,” I said, “is because you don’t care. Not really. You don’t really give a damn about any of it. You care about getting the circulation, and you care about having the sex in your pages, and you care about having the power to ma
ke powerful people twist and grovel and sweat and fall down. But a job exists for a reason, and the reason my job exists is to tell people some of what’s going on in the world so they can decide if they want to do something about it. And you don’t care a rat’s ass about that and never have. Before I picked up a phone to call one of you people for editorial guidance in the field, I’d do something really radical and phone Rafferty, who happens to be the city editor and the guy I’m answerable to in these situations. I’d call him and he’d tell me to make my own decision like the veteran I am and leave him the fuck alone.” I laughed. I waved off the lot of them. “Just tell me when I’ve lost my job, okay, because I don’t want to talk to you guys any longer than I have to.”
That made Cambridge look eagerly at Bush. Bush still chomped, still puffed, still stared at me. The long wait was supposed to make me sweat and tremble with anxiety. It didn’t. I’d reached my limit. Bush was tough, all right. Tough and powerful. He could take my job without blinking and he could eat my future, such as it was, and spit it out. But I didn’t give a damn about that just then. I’d had it.
While the others watched, he plucked the cigar from his mouth. Daintily. Like picking a rose. He examined the smoldering tip of it. “Let me ask you something, Mr. Wells,” he said to it. “I’m not exactly clear on this. Am I supposed to admire your courage?”
I shoved my chair back and stood up. “I don’t care what you do. I rode into this state in a boxcar, pal, and if I have to, I’ll ride out again the same goddamn way.”
He nodded slowly. “Well, I’m giving you the rest of the week to break this story open,” he said. “Get the pictures first, find the girl. I don’t care what. Just put us back on top of it.” He rotated his hand, examined his watch. “This is Thursday. You have until Monday’s editions to put us out in front. If you don’t, you’re fired. If we get scooped again on it, you’re not only fired …” He raised his eyes from his watch to me. “… I’ll pick out the boxcar.”