Randolph paused, swallowed hard, and continued, his voice so low now that Fitzgerald had to lean forward to hear. “The kid pulls out a gun. He took it right out of the inside of his coat, a stout little semiautomatic. My father stopped in his tracks. I don’t know what was going on in his mind. I’m behind him, and I scream, ‘Drop it! Drop it.’ I look over at Gowan, who’s reaching for his sidearm, but it’s too late. The kid fires at him and he crumples to the ground.”
He stopped and stared at his shoes, at the maroon and navy patterns along the border of the rich Oriental rug. His body began quivering slightly and he brought his hands up to his face.
Forman said, sternly, “Lance, finish the story.”
Randolph let his palms drift from his cheeks to the back of his neck. He looked up slightly toward Forman and said, “Go fuck yourself, Jeb.” His voice came out like that of a small child.
Forman’s face reddened. He slammed his closed fist against the chair’s arm. “Lance, we have a state in turmoil. We need you to be clear and cogent and to tell your story.”
Bank leaned back in his chair, sipped absently on his port, and gazed out the open doors. Randolph stared again at Fitzgerald who, when he began talking, stared at nothing at all.
“Then he aims at my father. He had the gun down here”—he made a motion with his arms like he was cradling a weapon down around his chest—“and he fires. He kept pulling the trigger. I was about five, maybe eight yards away. I lost my mind. I didn’t know what I was doing. I could barely hear the shots. I just raced toward my father.
“The bullets must have still been flying. I didn’t hear them. But I saw this kid still holding the gun. When I got to my dad, he was covering his face with his hands, staggering to the side and ready to fall down. I pushed him to the ground and dove on top of him. I could feel his blood oozing out of his chest and onto my clothes. I could hear his last breath leave him. I could see his eyes go vacant.
“I looked up and this kid is still standing over us. He’s staring at me, so serene. He presses his finger against the trigger and nothing comes out. So he reaches into his pocket and pulls out another clip. And he says to me, his voice calm as mine is right now, ‘This is your lucky day.’ And he takes the barrel of the gun and puts it up against the roof of his mouth and blows his head off.”
Randolph began quaking more than quivering, staring again at the floor. He looked up at Fitzgerald one more time and said, “I tried to save my dad. I swear to God, I tried to save him.” Then he bowed his head and the tears flowed down his young cheeks.
Jeb Forman took a final draw on his cigar, stubbed it out in an ornate jade ashtray, and exhaled hard. He looked at Fitzgerald and said triumphantly, dramatically, “He tried to save his father. I’ll repeat that for everyone out there who’s trying to figure out how he was the only one who survived.” He paused, then presented each word as if they were individually wrapped: “He tried to save his father.”
Fitzgerald wrote a couple more sentences in his notebook. Bank drained his second port. Randolph sat convulsing in tears. And Forman slapped his knees against his thighs and said, “Well, I think that’s called a wrap.”
“Hold on,” Fitzgerald replied, his voice low and firm. “Lance, I’ve got a couple of questions I need you to answer.”
Randolph peered up through his hands. Fitzgerald asked, “You were standing right behind your father when the shooting began, right? Wouldn’t any errant shots have struck you? Did you feel bullets graze your clothes?”
Randolph shook his head and replied, “No. I guess this kid was accurate.”
Fitzgerald nodded and bit his bottom lip. He paged back through his notebook as the room fell dead quiet.
“Here’s what bothers me,” he finally said, looking across at Randolph. “The cops told me earlier today that this assassin didn’t even empty one full clip. He still had a couple of bullets left in the clip in his gun, and there weren’t any empties on the ground. Now you’re telling me something completely different, but the physical evidence would say that you’re wrong.”
Randolph, suddenly wide-eyed, stared searchingly at Forman, who rested his chin on his palm and looked straight ahead, deep in thought.
“Maybe I saw it wrong,” Randolph said, visibly frazzled, shaking his head while he spoke. “I thought I saw what I saw, but you have to remember, I’m on the ground. I’ve got my father gasping beneath me. I’m looking up at an odd angle. Maybe he was doing something else.”
“You said you heard your father draw his last breath before the kid changed his clip.”
Randolph looked again at Forman, who was now staring at the floor.
Forman broke the silence. “Look, Robert. A state trooper was dead. The guy’s father lies dying from thirteen fucking bullets that tore through every conceivable part of his body. He looks up and the kid is still holding a semiautomatic rifle pointed at his fucking face.
“So maybe he didn’t perfectly catalogue everything in his brain to relay toThe Boston Record in hopes that the entire nation has the clearest, most accurate image of what happened on that fucking dirt patch in Roxbury today. Maybe he’s just human. Maybe you ought to cut him a little slack.”
Fitzgerald glared back at Forman and replied, “I understand, but I’ll decide the questions I ask here.”
There was a long pause. Forman asked in a condescending tone, “Well then, Robert, do you have any more questions, or are we all done here?”
Fitzgerald sat in his chair, hunched forward, looking down at the words scratched onto the pages of his notebook but really seeing nothing at all. He thought of his best friend in life, his closest confidante, the governor, gunned down in a hail of bullets by some punk kid who confused television drama with daily reality. He thought of the widow downstairs, a beautiful, generous woman whose regal life of privilege was suddenly stripped of its entire purpose. He thought of the young man across from him, thrown into a situation that no normal person could ever comprehend.
What really happened out there today, he wondered.
He slowly folded up his notebook, slipped it into his breast pocket, and shot Forman a cold look. Then he gazed across at Randolph and said, “I’m all set, Lance.” With that, he pulled himself up and walked silently out the door.
Twenty-Six
IPACED BACK ANDforth in the hushed, carpeted hallway, wondering what words were being spoken, what direction was being followed on the other side of the oak-paneled double doors that led to the executive boardroom ofThe Boston Record.
Quiet as I was, try as I might, I couldn’t hear a damned thing except the sounds of my uneven breathing and the gentle drip of my burgeoning ulcer. I’ll confess that I was perspiring under my navy pin-stripe suit jacket, meaning I wouldn’t and couldn’t take it off. The only rule of business of which I’m even remotely aware goes as follows: Never let them see you sweat.
I knew from Cal Zinkle that Brent Cutter was making his presentation to a sympathetic committee just before mine. I pictured him sitting at the head of the table, his hair slicked perfectly back, his demeanor one of entitled confidence, talking the Harvard Business School talk of skill sets and repurposing and optimum performances and misintermediation. The damned board would probably be splattering drool all over the shiny wood tabletop, forgetting to ask even a single question about his views on community journalism or the future use of theRecord ’s foreign bureaus. “Asshole” is a word that came immediately to mind.
Helpless is another, mostly because that’s how I felt. It’s a family-owned newspaper, and a member of that ownership family seemed ready to throw it all away. And here I was, at the place I loved more than any other, answering to a group of strangers that I barely knew, trying to salvage a business that wasn’t mine.
The door swung slowly open, causing me to freeze in place and lean coolly against the wall as if I was just waiting for the local tavern to open so I could go in and get my first drink of the day, if I drank this early in the day, which I u
sually don’t, though now could be the potential exception.
Out walked Brent Cutter. He wore a fashionable brown suit. He padded toward me, shot a smug look in my direction and said in a whimsical tone, “Good luck.”
How do you reply to that? I chose not to, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything appropriately witty to say, though I did stare him in the eye as he sauntered past me, staying completely still. Once he was gone, I turned to make my way into the boardroom when the door pitched open again. This time, out walked Terry Campbell, carrying a briefcase in one hand and a legal pad in the other.
He looked at me with that wrinkled, bulldog face of his, surprised but not flustered. “Good afternoon, Jack,” he said, as if we just ran into each other in line for an Oreo McFlurry at the neighborhood McDonald’s. I quickly recalled my vow to break his grubby hands if he put them on my newspaper again, shot a glance into the boardroom, and decided that this probably wasn’t the time or the proper place to fulfill prior promises. Instead I gave him an imperceptible nod and walked into the room.
Cal Zinkle was standing right inside the door. All the other directors were milling about, pouring cups of coffee or assembling cheese and crackers on the side buffet, many of them talking to each other in inaudible tones. Cal put his arm over my shoulder, and before he could say anything, I said in a voice just north of a whisper, “I’d like to kill that son of a prick.”
“Easy, tiger,” he replied. “We need you on your best behavior right now.” He paused and steered me outside the double doors, back into the hallway that was empty again. He let go of my shoulder and said, “He was making his play. Cutter’s behind him one hundred percent. They’ve struck an agreement. Campbell buys the paper and Cutter becomes publisher, with an arrangement to keep theRecord under local control for the next three years—Brent and this board being in control.”
I knew Brent had no small amount of weasel blood coursing through his body, but I must have missed it when he actually grew whiskers and a big, bushy tail. I knew this was coming. I knew the inevitability of it all. But the sight of Campbell, right here in the boardroom ofThe Boston Record, sent tremors of anger through my exhausted body.
Zinkle added, “I know it’s infuriating, but right now you don’t have the luxury of anger. You have to focus. If you want to make sure thatThe Boston Record remains an independent newspaper with a top-notch publisher, then you have to walk inside that room and give one hell of a presentation.”
I’m a natural pessimist, which isn’t always a bad thing. It gets your hackles up and your sensors firing and pushes you harder to achieve what you want to attain. With that in mind, I asked, “Are you telling me the committee is inclined to go with Campbell and Cutter?”
“I’m telling you, he has made a formidable and attractive offer.”
I shook my head in disgust. I felt the hallway, the world, spinning all around me. Up was down and down was up. There were no touch-stones of normalcy any more, none of the serenity of sanity. I asked, “You got my message on Campbell’s funding of the militant group, Fight for Life, right? He contributed to the bombing over at MIT.”
Zinkle shook his head. “He’ll disavow any knowledge of the group. He’ll say he had no idea it was a violent organization. And the board here will tell you that’s his private business. What the board cares about is the dollars and cents, the stock price.”
I stared at him for a long moment, trying to process what I was hearing, though damned if I was able. So I said, “Fuck it. Let’s go.” And we walked into the room, me ahead of him.
The boardroom ofThe Boston Record is a majestic place, almost antithetical to the pathological disorder of the newsroom downstairs. The table itself is long and wide and glows in the rays of sun that stream through the unadorned floor-to-ceiling windows with the unimpeded view of the downtown skyline. Various directors—there were five of them in the room—came around the table to shake my hand, then guided me to one of the highback leather chairs at the head of the table.
The directors present were Slade Harmon, one of the more respected black ministers in town; Katrina Pelletier, the editor emeritus at theChristian Science Monitor —“emeritus” in this case being the Latin word for “forced out”; Jacob Higham, a successful hotelier, Jewish activist, and, not coincidentally, John Cutter’s roommate at Yale; and Barnaby Stone, manager of the world’s largest mutual fund. Zinkle made five.
I had no notes with me, and truth is, barely any wits. As I made myself comfortable, Katrina Pelletier, who looks like Janet Reno, only without the good looks and gushing charm, said to me, “As you know, Jack, we are in an emergency session of the executive committee of the board of directors to address the tragic circumstances of Paul Ellis’s death. Our first priority is to select a new publisher who can lead theRecord at this most difficult time. In that regard, I’m glad you are able to join us today. Do you have any sort of statement you’d like to share with the committee?”
All right, I obviously should have been prepared for this question. I sat there looking at her, thinking of Brent Cutter, whose pretty-boy face I’d like to kick in, of Terry Campbell, whose face really can’t be kicked in any more so maybe I’d pummel his privates. Then I thought of the men and women downstairs, people like Mongillo and Steele who dedicated their lives to the bread-and-butter work of this newspaper.
“I’ll be very brief,” I said, folding my hands in front of me and looking down at a distant spot on the table. “I’d like to keep this newspaper under Cutter-Ellis ownership, and under Cutter-Ellis control, even if one of the Cutters doesn’t seem to want it anymore. The family has given one hundred and twenty-seven years to this publication. They’ve taken it through the Great Depression and countless recessions. They’ve seen it through two world wars, Vietnam, a new war against terrorism. But most of all, the paper has taken its identity from the city, and given the city some of its identity in return. We as a newspaper reported on this city through the violent angst of busing, through boom times, through horrible downturns. And always, always, always, we maintained the highest level of quality, sometimes at considerable cost, because when you’re a member of the Cutter-Ellis family, when you run a newspaper this great, when you’re in a city as sophisticated as this, that’s just what you do. If Brent Cutter can’t see himself clear to play a major role, then I offer myself, because at this point, the paper, its quality, is larger than the family itself.”
Someone somewhere was playing “America the Beautiful,” though I fear I was the only one who could hear it.
I added, “This isn’t a chain newspaper with a corporate office in a city where few of us have ever been. It never has been, it was never meant to be. It’s owned by Bostonians and run by Bostonians. Paul Ellis sure as hell knew that. He told me as much when I sat with him in the Public Garden four days ago, just an hour before he was killed. He wanted to reject this effort by Terry Campbell, or perhaps more accurately, defeat it. You should all want to do the same.”
I concluded, “To that end, I offer myself as a candidate for the next publisher in the rich tradition of the Cutter-Ellis family. I have a vast knowledge of the newsroom. My own father worked for more than three decades in the pressroom. I have an impeccable reputation in this community where I was born and raised. And I will keep this newspaper under Cutter-Ellis control, which is exactly where it belongs.” I paused, then added: “I’d be honored to answer any and all of your questions.”
I would have liked loud applause and hooting and hollering. What I got was silence and Katrina staring at me like a spectator might look at an animal in a zoo exhibit, something, perhaps, in the Jungle House. Before she could say anything, Barnaby Stone spoke from the other side of the table.
“Mr. Flynn, very nice of you to take the time to come up and visit with us today. I’ve looked over your career history, which is certainly impressive in its journalistic credentials and background. But I have to ask you, do you have any management or business experience which we are
not currently aware of?”
As he asked the question, he gave me a squinty look, I suspect more for the dramatics than for lack of vision.
I replied, “None whatsoever, but I can tell you that you should never end a sentence with a preposition, as you just did.”
Just kidding. I said, “I ran a lemonade stand for three weeks in the summer between third and fourth grades, and our revenues averaged between $3.75 and $4.20 per week.”
Kidding again. Now was not the time for humor, at least with these people, and in my current frame of mind, I don’t even think I could get a rise out of the people who make the laugh track forCheers .
What I really said was, “My expertise, or rather my strength, is in the newsroom, on the journalistic side of things. I’ll admit that up front. But I’ll also tell you, in this complicated day and age, with twenty-four-hour cable television and the Internet bombarding every house, that it’s not a bad strength to have. On the business side of things, I’ll learn it, and in the meantime, and maybe for all time, I’ll hire someone who knows that end of things, someone who I can trust.”
Stone again: “So you’ll concede that you don’t know the business end of this company, the circulation reports and the budget figures and the revenue goals and all the complicated equations that lead from one to the other?”
“I know the journalism, which is the point of this company.”
Stone replied, his voice growing less polite and more firm, “Part of the point, sir. The thousands of shareholders this paper has would certainly argue that this being a capitalist society and theRecord being a publicly traded company, its foremost point is to make money.”
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