Somehow, Jacob Harsch didn’t seem like a person who would be interested in a dead body beside the road. His world was more rarefied than that. I’ll tell my editor when I meet him, she decided.
Meantime, Harsch continued what was probably a set speech: “Our financial strength also makes it possible for us to hire the people we want, particularly the hardworking far-seeing young women like yourself who will help us keep the Weekly Galaxy brisk and alert and relevant to that ever-changing audience out there.”
“Relevant,” Sara echoed, no expression in her voice.
“Yes, relevant,” Harsch said, smiling grimly down upon her. “We’re not afraid of that word, Sara. All we’re afraid of is getting stale, old, tired. That’s why we want young women like yourself, who will challenge us, make us toe the mark, keep us . . . relevant.”
“Gosh” was all Sara could think of to say.
Having passed back everybody’s papers—Jack gazed in quiet despair at the many red lines now crisscrossing his own contributions—Massa finished this morning’s editorial meeting with a little general diatribe, saying, “Nobody’s giving me any news about John Michael Mercer. Do you people realize that man is the hottest star on television? Do you know his series, Breakpoint, is the number one rated series? And it’s shot right here in Florida!”
Massa glared around, waiting for an answer, and finally an editor to Jack’s left said, “Mercer doesn’t seem to be doing anything right now, sir.”
“John Michael Mercer?” Massa stared, popeyed. “What kind of answer is that? He’s interesting! People want to know about him. I want to know about him! Last night— On the show last night, he drove that little sports car right through a burning bam! It was terrific! I was on the edge of my chair! You tell me he doesn’t do anything? He drives through a burning bam, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he tell us what he thinks about that?”
A different editor, reluctance in his face and in his voice, said, “Uh, sir, John Michael Mercer won’t talk to us.”
“What?” Massa was astonished. “But we’re America! The Galaxy is the American people!”
The editor nodded. “We have explained that to him, yes, sir.”
Pointing generally—but glaring, it seemed to Jack, particularly at Jack—Massa said, “I want John Michael Mercer stories.” Then, using the same fmger, he poked the button that caused his desk to recede back into the elevator and the elevator doors to close. The editorial meeting was over.
His cold hand once again on her elbow, Harsch led Sara back toward the conference table, saying, “Let’s get you settled now. I’m giving you to one of the best editors in the shop. You’ll learn a great deal from Jack.”
“I’m sure I will,” Sara murmured.
The editorial conference was apparently over; DeMassi and his elevator/office were gone, and many worried-looking people were getting up from the table, moving away. Harsch called, “Jack! Just a minute, Jack.”
It was the rude man, who’d run into Sara on arrival. Now she could see he was about thirty, tall and well built, with thinning brown hair, and that he would probably be handsome if he didn’t look so cranky and discontented. He made an obvious effort to smooth out the bad temper in his face when Harsch approached him, but failed. “Jack,” Harsch said, “this is Sara Joslyn, she’ll be on your team. Sara, this is Jack Ingersoll.”
Jack Ingersoll was so thoroughly dislikable that Sara put on an extra-large smile to acknowledge the introduction, saying, “How do you do?”
“I’ve been worse,” Ingersoll said, which was hard to believe.
“Jack will take care of you now,” Harsch said, with a distant smile, and he left.
“You might as well come along,” Ingersoll told her. He had some crumpled pieces of paper in his hand, which he waved vaguely toward the area of the black lines. “What was the name again?”
“Sara,” she said, as they started off.
“I’m Jack.” They walked between the lines.
“I remember,” Sara told him, with a faint edge in her voice.
“Don’t kick me, lady,” Jack Ingersoll said, “I just left my bowels back there.”
“What was all that?”
“Every morning at ten a.m.,” he said redun- dantiy, “the editors, of whom I am at least one, go to that shrine back there and lay thirty story ideas at the feet of—”
“Thirty! Every day?”
“Believe it or not,” Jack Ingersoll said, “I came here as a young and beautiful woman. Much like yourself.”
She looked sharply at him, but somehow the remark hadn’t had the quality of a pass, or a compliment. That left it unanswerable, so Sara continued beside him in silence.
The result of the editorial conference was a great increase in the noise and activity within the land of the black lines. Many reporters had abandoned their tables on the other side of the room to run over here for quick meetings with their editors. Other editors were on the phone, or running back and forth between their own and their neighbors’ offices; always going around to the door space, of course.
But why was that man over there putting on a Bela Lugosi mask and a black cape? Why were four women with English accents fugally singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” into a cassette recorder? Since today was the twelfth of July, why was one man assembling an artificial Christmas tree on his desk?
One thing about working here; it wasn’t going to be dull.
Jack led the new one into his squaricle, where Mary Kate said, “What’s the score, boss?”
“Five.”
“Ouch.” Mary Kate shook her bewigged head. Bonuses and awards and raises and squaricles beside the windows were all dependent on how many stories a team actually got into the paper. Jack’s team usually did pretty well, but for the last week or so he’d been in a slump, and the team had reason to be worried.
“That isn’t the worst of it,” he told her. “One of the five is undeliverable.”
“Which?”
“Gallstones. I asked the question, Massa answered it. Yes.”
“Oh, boy.” Mary Kate looked past Jack at the new one. “And what is this?”
“The latest keeper of the flame. Sara Something—”
“Joslyn.”
“Sure.” To Sara Joslyn, Jack said, “Mary Kate Scudder here is my secretary, not yours. Keep that in mind, she may be nice to you.”
“How do you do,” Sara Joslyn said to Mary Kate.
Mary Kate said, “I’m not sure,” and gave Jack a look. “Gallstones, huh?”
“Rub it in,” Jack said. “Give her the nutritionists.”
As Mary Kate opened a file drawer, one of Jack’s reporters, a tough broad named Ida Gavin, came into the squaricle and said, “It is definitely sex.”
“Good,” Jack said. To Mary Kate he said, “Also give her the goods requisition. Sign my name.” To Ida he said, “Expand.”
“The Keely Jones story,” Ida said, referring to a currendy popular television star. “She is definitely not only two-timing her husband with her manager, she is three-timing the manager with Mr. X.”
“And you have Mr. X,” Jack suggested.
“A swimming pool salesman.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Not as good as a cardinal.”
“An ex-con,” Ida added.
“Oh, nice.”
“Vehicular homicide. Pickup truck, pregnant woman, splat.”
“Massa will want Miss Jones’s reaction to this news,” Jack said. “On tape.”
“The little lady talks to nobody these days,” Ida said. “Not even to God.”
“Solve it, Ida, that’s why we’re here.” Turning away as Ida left, Jack saw the new one standing with several papers in her hand. Taking them from her, he returned them one at a time with explanations: “This is your requisition. Take the elevator down to one, turn to the right, give them this sheet, they’ll give you your typewriter, tape recorder, everything you need.”
“Okay.”
Pointing toward
the reporters’ tables on the other side of the room, Jack said, “Then you find yourself an empty oar over there, and row.”
“Any one at all?”
“You’re quick, I like that.” Handing her two more sheets, he said, “These are tame nutritionists, they will talk to the Galaxy. You phone them and— Why aren’t you writing this down?”
“Oh. Sorry.” Putting the papers on Mary Kate’s desk, she fumbled in her shoulder bag and produced steno pad and pencil. “Ready.”
“Fine. This is your money quote. Potato—” The girl looked blank.
“My what?”
“You must be a journalism school graduate,” Jack said.
She looked miffed. “Yes?”
“We talk faster here. The money quote is what you must get your subject to say.”
“All right,” she said. She was still miffed.
“This time, the money quote is, potato chips are a nutritious food, they contain all the values of potatoes plus fat plus salt—try to find a better word than fat—including protein. Eaten in moderation, potato chips can give you almost every known and unknown requirement of the human diet. Get me percentages; nitrate this, sodium that.”
The girl looked up from her scribbling, bewildered. “But—what’s it for?”
“The beer and potato chip diet,” Jack told her, then grabbed up the papers he’d given her and drew a black pen line through one name, saying, “Don’t call this one, he gave us the beer quote.” He handed her the papers again.
She stood there, looking stunned. “The, the beer and ...”
“Don’t worry about it,” he advised her. “Just get me the quote.” He turned away as Don Grove slouched into the squaricle, looking as pessimistic as ever. “Yeah?”
“You couldn’t use a Martian wedding, could you?”
“No,” Jack told him. “What happened to your two-headed calf?” Don shrugged. “They wanted the money before the pix.” He sloped away, and the new girl said, “Umm ...”
Turning back to her, Jack said, “Finished already?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” she said, “I do have a story. A different one.”
Jack reared back, the better to view this wonder. “A story? Your first minute on the job? Do you hear this, Mary Kate?”
“Yes,” Mary Kate said, reserving judgment.
“Tell me this story,” Jack demanded, “in one brief, fact-filled, explosive sentence.”
“There’s a murdered man out on the road,” she said, and looked smug, waiting to be patted on the head.
Jack held his breath for the kicker, though he already knew it wouldn’t come. He didn’t doubt her statement, not for a second—if she said there was a murdered man out on the road, there was a murdered man out on the road—but where was the fact’s usefulness? At last Jack asked the core question: “So what?”
She gaped. “I beg your pardon?”
Okay, okay; no point taking it out on her, she’s brand-new, nothing prior to this in the history of the world has been her fault. And here, in any case, is a golden opportunity for an entry-level lesson in the lower journalism. “Who is this murdered man?” Jack asked.
Wide-eyed, she spread her hands, saying, “I don’t know, I just—”
“Who murdered him?”
“How am I supposed to—”
“On what series is he a regular?”
Her jaw dropped, then clenched. “Are you,” she asked, “trying to make fun of me?”
“Not at all,” Jack assured her, while Mary Kate shook her head in scorn. “I am merely trying to point out,” he said, “that the Galaxy is a national newspaper, not some local hometown rag. We happen to be in the state of Florida, in which almost every road contains its murdered man, sometimes several. They’re mostly grubby little crimes about grubby little people, usually connected with cocaine or the Marielistas or both. Our readers don’t care about cocaine and never heard of the Marie- listas, and they’re happier that way. Our readers care about the beer and potato chip diet. They will love us and bless us and praise us as saviors of mankind when they read the beer and potato chip diet, and you are delaying that happy consummation. Now, you just got out of journalism school, so naturally you—”
“I did not,” she said. “I worked a year for—”
“Well, now you’re working here. Of course, if you’d rather not pursue the beer and—”
“I never said that!” Angry, jaw thrust forward, hands on hips, loudly she said, “I happen to be a reporter, and a good reporter, and I can follow my editor’s instruc—”
“Good,” he told her, meeting glare with glare, letting all the frustration and rage spill out, not caring anymore. “Because,” he told her, bearing down, “my survival on this rag depends on my people giving me what Massa wants. If you can do it, do it. If you can’t, save us all a lot of trouble and quit now.” Then, realizing he was just about to go too far, that he was on the verge of firing this poor girl before she ever got a chance to go to work, he turned away to Mary Kate and said, “I’ll be in the men’s room, contemplating suicide.”
Sara stared, openmouthed, as that insufferable man went stomping away, turning left, then right, among the black lines. The skinny little rat-faced secretary said, “Honey.”
Expecting sympathy, an explanation, something,
Sara turned her irritated expression toward Mary Kate Scudder, saying, “What?”
Mary Kate pointed across the room. “The phones are over there,” she said.
Four
Coming back up to the third floor, lugging the small portable manual typewriter and the package of pens and pencils and notepads and typing paper and paper clips and Liquid Paper and scissors and Scotch tape, Sara was still furious. Leaving the elevator, she looked over across the land of black lines and there he was, Jack Ingersoll, once again in his own square, ranting at a man and a woman, pushing his fingers through his hair, pacing, ranting and ranting while the man and woman sometimes nodded, sometimes interjected a word, and the secretary, Mary Kate Scudder, unconcernedly typed.
Why would anybody ever work for such a beast? I’ll work for him, Sara thought, but only to shove his nastiness and cynicism right back down his throat. I’ll prove myself here, and they’ll transfer me to a decent editor once they find out I can both take it and dish it out, and then we’ll see.
In the meantime, Ingersoll was too far away to be glared at effectively, and all this stuff she carried was heavy, so Sara turned and went over to the rows of long tables, where the reporters still typed or jotted notes or talked, talked, talked on the telephone. There were very few empty spaces at the tables, and Sara hesitated, unsure what to do, until a young woman in the middle of it all waved and beckoned for her to come over.
There was an empty space to the young woman’s left. Gratefully, Sara dumped all the stationery store stuff there and said, “Thanks. I’m new.” “You surely are,” the young woman said, with a finishing school accent. She had a sharpboned face, attractive in a patrician way. “I’m an old hand,” she said, “I’ve been here for months and months. I’m Phyllis Perkinson.”
“Sara Joslyn.”
They shook hands, Phyllis Perkinson grinning like someone playing grown-up. “Who’s your editor?” she asked.
“A truly terrible person,” Sara said, “called Jack Ingersoll.”
Phyllis Perkinson looked surprised. “Truly terrible? Jack Ingersoll’s a pussycat.”
“Not with me, he wasn’t. I came in with—” Instinctively dramatic, Sara lowered her voice, leaning toward Phyllis Perkinson as she said, “The most incredible thing happened, on my way here.”
Phyllis smiled, looking ready to laugh. “A funny thing happened on the way to work?”
“Not that funny. I found a murdered man!” Phyllis looked puzzled through her smile, as though still looking for the punchline.
“You found a what?”
“A murdered man.” Sara quickly sketched in the scene out beside the road, with non
e of the flourishes it would have received if she’d been permitted to write the story, and finished, “When I told that, that, Ingersoll, he said, ‘Oh? What series is he a regular on?’ Very snotty, just like that.”
“Oh,” Phyllis said, frowning now as she thought it all over. “Well, maybe Jack got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she decided. “I mean, that was a little rough.”
“I sure thought so.”
“Of course, that isn't our kind of story, you know,” Phyllis went on. “I mean, not really.”
“I understand that. Now I do.”
Phyllis dismissed the subject with an airy shrug. “Jack’s my editor, too,” she said, “and when you get to know him, believe me, you’ll think he’s great.”
“I can hardly wait,” Sara said, unconvinced.
“What are you working on?”
“Something called the beer and potato chip diet,” Sara said, having trouble believing it herself. “Nutritive values in potato chips.”
“Oh, he gave you an easy one!” Phyllis actually clapped her hands in delight. “There, see? I told you he was nice. He starts you off with something simple and easy, you don’t even have to he about who you are, and the first thing you know, you’re an old pro like me.” Laughing lightly, Phyllis said, “And now I'd better get back to work.” And, with a little wave of her fingertips, she turned away and reached for her phone. Setting up her desk space, Sara couldn’t help but hear Phyllis’s telephone conversation. After dialing what was obviously a long distance number, Phyllis said, with an official briskness completely unlike her previous conversational style, “Rosso Brothers? Yes, good morning, this is Miss Ballantine of Garfield Fiskin, accountants for John Michael Mercer. I understand you’ve taken over the gardening tasks at the Mercer est— No? Sorry.” And she hung up.
Having arranged everything more or less neatiy on her small desk space, Sara looked at the list of tame nutritionists, then rested her hand on the phone, but didn’t immediately make a call. Instead, she listened to Phyllis talk to another gardening service and present herself again as Miss Ballantine of John Michael Mercer’s accountants. Sara knew that John Michael Mercer was a television star with his own series, and so he would certainly be covered from time to time in the newspapers, but his gardener? What was that all about? Unable to swallow her curiosity, she waited till Phyllis’s second call was finished, then said, “Phyllis? Could I ask a question?”
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