The Parnell Affair

by James, Seth

  “It cost whatever the market dictates,” Karl said with an indifferent shrug.

  “It's not the only thing that dictates,” Tobias said. “And for the same, dirty reason, too. But hey, who cares about the constitution or a few human lives when there are some dollars to be made? Just as long as you funnel oil to your masters' oil companies—and the easily manipulated market dictates their oil sells for a huge sum of dollars.”

  “You people never understand,” Karl said and then tried to unclench his jaw surreptitiously. “You always impose your own greed-ridden fantasies onto the wealthy, the powerful. Money for restaurants, for cars, for prostitutes, for family vacations?” he sneered. He threw his head back and steepled his fingers again. “Stupid. Money is ammunition.

  “The people you hate don't want money for its own sake,” Karl continued. “Money is a tool. Just like a carpenter needs his saw, or a soldier his guns, or a petty reporter needs his pens and filth.”

  “And with your money you make what?” Tobias asked. “You make wars. Wars for more money for—”

  “If necessary,” Karl said. “But even then, war is only a tool.”

  “And never mind the thousands of people you'll kill,” Tobias said. “And not face-to-face like a soldier, like a man! You'll squat here, hiding behind the President's coat tails, killing in absentia, killing without the sight of blood.”

  “Are you still that stupid?” Karl shouted over Tobias's rising voice and then controlled himself. “You still fail to understand. What do you lose if a thousand carpenters, soldiers, or farmers die? They are going to die anyway and when they do, others will take their places. And they are all the same! What does it matter who launders my coat or raises my food? One is the same as another. It is not unlike being particular about which cow you get your steaks from—it makes no difference.

  “It is the cruel hard fact that the egotistical peasant never faces,” Karl continued as he walked slowly around Tobias, “scrambling to protect his precious little life: your lives do not matter. If you were not here, someone else would do your job; the world goes on; the universe does not notice your absence and history never knew your name to begin with. But for the President? The Powerful? My success shapes the world! History is changed! The future forged! By my design, Tobias. And so, perhaps you can now raise your head from the trough and see, the powerful matter.”

  “You're disgusting,” Tobias said. “And by your smile, I can see you like being thought of as a monster. But why would you even bother, oh great and powerful Karl? If not for the good of the multitude, why bother?”

  “Why do you bother with the featureless masses?” Karl asked. “Do you distinguish one pea from another as you eat? No. Why do I shape the world? To leave a legacy. To have shaped the world however I so deem. And for my great work, I need tools. And I'll have them.

  “It always amuses me,” he continued, “and never ceases to amaze, how you people scorn capitalism.”

  “What you practice isn't capitalism,” Tobias said. “It's the filthiest form of monarchy.”

  “Temper, temper,” Karl said. “What I practice is capitalism. The purest, highest form, an art of capitalism lived in all aspects of life. Where only the bonds of existence set the goal posts. No petty squabbling about fanciful rules, no sacred cows. Greatness for those who can; for all others—” he said and shrugged.

  “The marketplace, red in tooth and claw,” Tobias said.

  “Ah, it learns!” Karl said.

  “Only, in the marketplace of ideas, you're bankrupt,” Tobias said.

  “You have revealed yourself,” Karl said. “As have your little stories in the paper. You tried to compete, tried to derail my plans, and you failed. The marketplace determined your ideas are of less value than mine. You have been beaten. You have lost. And now, as some losers do, you throw a tantrum. You should be glad. If you had proven competent, in anyway a challenge to me, I would have taken greater pains to remove you from play. As things stand, on the eve of war and glory, you are insignificant. And you should thank whatever god you pray to. You can go on, blissfully ignorant, safely impotent, scribbling your way through your inconsequential life. It is my gift to you, Tobias: you are beneath my notice.

  “Boys!” he cried as he walked back to the restaurant. “Let's go.”

  The door swung open and the bodyguards hustled up and piled through with Karl. Tobias stood shivering.

  “No, I'm not powerful,” he whispered. “I don't have an entire political party expending billions of dollars to keep half the population convinced they're better off voting against their self-interest. All I have are my little tools, a pen,” he said and put his hand into his jacket, feeling the torture memo, “and filth.

  “However insignificant,” he said, walking to the door, “whatever crimes are about to be committed in the country's name, it won't be my fault. It won't be because I did nothing.”

  Tobias found his phone lying broken on the floor as he entered the restaurant. Returning to his place beside Sally, who looked a little peeved he'd taken so long, he began typing immediately. Within half and hour, the story was finished. He took a few minutes to proof it and then they left. He looked into the dining room, as he passed by, and saw Karl dining alone.

  Sally hailed them a cab, which they took to within a few blocks of The Observer, and then they walked the rest of the way, wary of ambush. Tobias said nothing of his encounter with the President's Chief of Staff.

  The night had grown frigid; cold, cloudless air had descended over Washington. The air—heavy and buoyant as ice—seemed to have frozen the city indoors so that only gusts of wind and the occasional shower of ice breaking off a power line to fall like a rain of needles could be heard. The streetlights lit the emptiness but showed nothing, merely dimmed the night sky above.

  At the end of the alley they traversed, which opened upon the plaza before The Observer's building, Sally stopped and pulled Tobias's arm so he wouldn't pass her.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “What is it?” he said, racing his eyes up and down the street. “And why do I now feel as if I'm headed to a firing squad?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “Maybe you are.” She smiled coyly at his exaggerated alarm and added, “Though, hopefully, you'll be the one shouting, 'fire!'”

  She kissed him and he felt an unusually urgency, a possessiveness in her hands. In her eyes, a moment later, he saw sadness.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have to see my girls. I feel like the worst mother in the world for what I've put them through—and then not rushing to comfort them. I have to go.”

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  “Come with me!” she said.

  “Well, you see,” he said, pushing the hair back from his forehead with a long sigh. Then he shrugged and said, “Yeah, okay.”

  She hit him in the kidney. “Thank you very much for taking it so lightly—I was worried,” she said.

  “Yes, I got that impression,” he said, grinning in his old way. “But why?”

  Sally looked away though she kept her arms around him. “Because this dirty world makes cynics,” she said. “My story's been told; my help ends when you publish this one; I can't be of much use to you anymore and—” she trailed off into a shrug.

  “And your usefulness at an end, I'll tie you to some train tracks?” he said. “You think that little of me?”

  “No!” she said. “I don't think so highly of myself, however, that I couldn't be fooled or mistaken or stupid. I've been in love exactly twice: and given how the other time turned out—I don't know what I'm saying. Live a life full of suspicion and this is what you get,” she said, gesturing to herself.

  “A beautiful woman?” Tobias said. “So that's the key ingredient.”

  “And you have a certain reputation,” she said. Her vanity was a little piqued at his casual handling of what felt like a minor crisis to her. “And you’ve never told me why you didn't marry.”

  “Beca
use I hadn't met you, yet,” he said.

  “I'm already in love with you,” she said. “You don't have to seduce me again.”

  “Good to know,” he said. “But there's no other answer than that.” He kissed her. “Our lives are pretty complicated right now but this isn't,” he said, holding her closer. “This doesn't need any explanation. So let's go put this story to bed and leave for Paris. Provided, of course, that we're not murdered in the street by the madmen running this country for the evidence of their crimes I've got in my pocket.”

  She kissed him. “Just keep your cell phone on,” she said. “I'll stay downstairs while you deliver the story. If the Gestapo shows up, I'll call. The minute you see my name on your phone, shut it off and run for the stairs.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  She said the same into his mouth as their lips came together again.

  Arm in arm, they left the alleyway and crossed the street, both glancing to either side as the cold February wind whipped at their clothing.

  Chapter 13

  The news room waited with the eerie silence it only ever knew at that time of night. After the journalists and administrative staff left for the day but prior to most of production arriving to see off the next day's paper in the wee hours of the morning, the newsroom had the forsaken and forgotten quiet of an abandoned town. Tobias could hear computers clicking or whirring like aggravated insects or dreaming dogs as he weaved through aisle after aisle of empty desks. Like a meeting outside of town, he thought.

  As he neared the glassed-in office of Chuck Ailes, The Washington Observer's Editor-in-Chief, Howard Lieter appeared at the pantry doorway, off to Tobias's left. Howard leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb, sipping a paper cup of coffee, and waved for Tobias to go right in to the Chief's office. He was too far away for Tobias to ask Howard to join him with anything but a gesture, but Howard declined.

  Through the glass wall of Ailes' office, Tobias could see the Chief sitting at his desk, chatting quietly with another man, whom Tobias didn't know. After a knock, Tobias walked in and once assured he wasn't interrupting—the other man was The Observer’s lawyer—he stood opposite the Chief.

  “No, no, just let me see it,” Ailes said, holding up his arms and twitching his fingers at Tobias's laptop. “I want the effect our readers will get seeing it on the front page.”

  “Sure,” Tobias said. He set down the laptop, brought it to life, and opened the file. He thought maybe Ailes had his doubts that Tobias could bring in another bombshell story so soon after the last one. Ailes looked tired, resigned. Wait until he sees this, Tobias thought. He turned the computer toward Ailes.

  Mr. Ailes took the computer and set it on his side of his double-wide desk; a desk without drawers that had been modern thirty years ago and now looked like a cafeteria table onto which a box of office supplies had been dumped. He read Tobias's story's first paragraph and, without looking up, said, “Show me.”

  Tobias knew Ailes wanted the torture memo, holding his hand out as he read. Tobias handed it over. Ailes looked briefly at the raised Presidential seal and then laid the memo on the laptop's keys.

  He made a humming noise and then said, “Let me see your notes from the Fanoui interview. You got them with you?”

  “Yeah, right here,” Tobias said, withdrawing them but hesitating. He'd never shown the Chief his notes before; it felt akin to naming sources.

  “Don't be shy, I want to see something,” Ailes said, snapping his fingers impatiently.

  Tobias passed them across. As the Chief flipped through the notepad, Tobias looked at the lawyer: the man was biting his cheek.

  Ailes nodded slowly to himself and then put the notes in his jacket. He closed the laptop with the torture memo still over the keys and handed it to his lawyer, who quickly locked it in a briefcase on a side table.

  “No story,” Ailes said.

  Tobias stood silently, waiting for his misapprehension to clear with the next word but it didn't come. It didn't come.

  “What—what's going on?” Tobias managed in a suddenly dry throat.

  “I'm sorry, Tobias,” Ailes said. He took off his glasses and ran a hand down his pale and waxy-looking face. He sighed and forced himself to meet Tobias's eyes. “I was given a direct order by the paper's owner—after your last big piece—that nothing like this was to be published again.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Tobias breathed. He looked between the two men and then shouted, “Give me my fucking laptop!”

  He took two steps around the desk toward the white-haired and terminally thin lawyer. The lawyer put his back and both hands against the locked briefcase.

  “This isn't yours,” he piped in a high voice. “It is now and always has been property of the paper.”

  “Hand it over—and the torture memo—or I'll break your goddamn neck!” Tobias shouted.

  “You'll do no such thing,” the lawyer said. He pointed through the glass wall at two burly armed guards who'd taken up position after the door had shut. “I anticipated this reaction.”

  “Tobias, I'm sorry,” Ailes said in a voice devoid of emotion. He looked at his hands in his lap. He hadn't so much as stirred when Tobias began shouting. “Anything you wrote, any notes, any stories, even any conversations you had during the course of your duties here are property of the paper. And I've been told not to let that sort of story out, so it's dead. I'm sorry.”

  Tobias dragged his feet to Ailes chair and leaned a hand on the armrest, another on the back.

  “What are you doing, Chuck?” Tobias asked. “You read what this is about. You saw the memo. The President of the United States of America ordered prisoners tortured to force them to make false confessions—all to start an unprovoked war!” he practically whispered in Ailes' ear. “How can you live with yourself afterward? When the bombs start falling and blood flowing all for a lie you helped perpetrate by obfuscating the truth, how are you going to live with yourself?”

  “I've been in this business damn near forty years,” Ailes said, still intent upon his hands. “You young guys think you've got it all figured out. You don't know a thing. You call them Gestapo and Nazis and the President Hitler—and, hell, maybe those words fit—and think that's enough. They didn't just show up three years ago, Tobias. These boys took it slow, amassing power. Sure, they stole an election for Nixon but that was only the beginning. Who do you think owns this paper? What party do you think he contributes to? Those boys shout and shout against the liberal media and have everybody fooled. Who owns it? Those boys own it. And they own the companies that stand to make a hell of a lot of money out of this war. But they've already got so much money on their side, amassed during the Regan years—doing away with taxes, why do you think that's important to them?—that they can pour it into the nonstop media now. Lies? Sure they're lies; they're liars. But you think you're going to stop a system created over the past forty years with a couple of newspaper stories? You’re a squeaking mouse, Tobias, and they're a great big elephant: who's going to hear you?”

  “You're a moral defeatist,” Tobias said. “You can't even look me in the eye.”

  “Nope, I can't,” Ailes said. “But I'm not losing everything I have just to go down in flames with you.”

  “And that's exactly what they're counting on,” Tobias said. “That you'll let the lies pass. That you'll hear them shouting 2 + 2 = 5 and will shake your head and say nothing. But for Christ sake, what do you have that's so wonderful that you won't risk it and fight?”

  “My job,” Ailes said, shaking his head at his hands. “The social safety net isn't what it used to be. And the same handful of people own every media outlet: I make any noise here and I won't find a job anywhere else. And I'm too old to learn anything new. And what's the use in fighting? Christ, Tobias, give me a break. You think I like this? You think I haven't paced the floor of my bedroom for whole nights on end during the last ten years as Chief, thinking these same thoughts? What good would it do; you've seen this? One
noise out of me and I'm gone; no other paper and certainly not the TV networks would even acknowledge something's wrong; the furious 'news cycle' would crash on to some other nonsense like a tsunami wiping out a village; and there I'd be, still a few years from my retirement, draped over my sword, and the world wouldn't notice one bit.”

  “This is unbelievable,” Tobias said. He walked to the door, hands in his hair, and then turned on Ailes. “You selfish bastard,” he said. “You don't lock yourself up in this glass cage alone when you crawl under the heel of the owners. You drag every human being on this planet under their boot with you.

  “No one may believe this story,” he said, pointing at the briefcase on which the lawyer still perched, “if I tell it without proof. But I'll tell it anyway and as loud as I can.”

  “If you reveal anything you've gathered under the auspices of a journalist for this paper without our permission,” the lawyer yelped, “you'll be sued for breach of contract!”

  “And what'll you take?” Tobias asked. “Money? I don't have any. If that's your only lever, you're out of luck.”

  “You don't have to go, Tobias,” Ailes muttered. “Stay, keep working, be subtle. No one's firing you.”

  “No one has to,” Tobias said. “I quit.”

  Tobias shouldered past the armed guards and wound his way through the field of desks, his mind numb but in motion, like the Marathon runner in his last mile. He had gone to war for Truth but had not fought hard enough; and now he stumbled from the battle, her captors holding still the field and her. The days stretched out before him toward an indistinct margin, the path lined as with arches under which he must pass; at his feet, the rubble of the arch Cruel and Unusual Punishment lie, its destruction completed by Interrogators in Torturer's masks; ahead, Eavesdroppers and Checkpoint-Security swung their implements at the arch of Secure in Person, Papers, and Effects; beyond, the arch of Religious Freedom was defaced by Fear; that storied path of American values that had guided its people through two hundred turbulent years was under attack from all directions but Tobias—Tobias had lost his sword. The arch of the Freedom of the Press had been bought by Unfettered Greed, and its armory was now reserved for their servants only. Masterless and yet not free, Tobias left The Washington Observer for the last time, knowing that outside winter waited for him. He was off the record. No story formed itself in his mind as he walked, no song of his youth played from within his memory, only the relentless drumming of the unanswered thought: how do I get back in the war?