A Knight of the Word

by Terry Brooks

  “Oh? What’s he investigating?”

  “Well, sweetie, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” She motioned with her head. “Out of my way, I have places to go.”

  He stepped obediently aside, letting her pass. She glanced back at him over her shoulder. “I booked dinner at Umberto’s for six. Meet you in your office at five-thirty sharp.” She gave him a wink.

  He watched her walk down the hall toward Simon’s office. He was no longer thinking about the homeless and abused, about Ray and Carole, about his past and its memories, about anything but her. It was like that with Stef. It had been like that from the moment they met. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He loved her so much it hurt. But the hurt was pleasurable. The hurt was sweet. The way she made him feel was a mystery he did not ever want to solve.

  “I’ll be there,” he said softly.

  He had to admit, his new life was pretty good. He went back to his office smiling.

  Chapter 7

  Andrew Wren stood looking out the window of the Wiz’s corner office at the derelicts occupying space in Occidental Park across the way. They slouched on benches, slept curled up in old blankets in tree wells, and huddled on the low steps and curbing that differentiated the various concrete and flagstone levels of the open space. They drank from bottles concealed in paper sacks, exchanged tokens and pennies, and stared into space. Tourists and shoppers gave them a wide berth. Almost no one looked at them. A pair of cops on bicycles surveyed the scene with wary eyes, then moved over to speak to a man staggering out of a doorway leading to a card shop. Pale afternoon sunlight peeked through masses of cumulous clouds on their way to distant places.

  Wren turned away. Simon Lawrence was seated at his desk, talking on the phone to the mayor about Wednesday evening’s festivities at the Seattle Art Museum. The mayor was making the official announcement of the dedication on behalf of the city. An abandoned apartment building just across the street had been purchased by the city and was being donated to Fresh Start to provide additional housing for homeless women and children. Donations had been pledged that would cover needed renovations to the interior. The money would bring the building up to code and provide sleeping rooms, a kitchen, dining room, and administrative offices for staff and volunteers. Persuading the city to dedicate the building and land had taken the better part of two years. Raising the money necessary to make the dedication meaningful had taken almost as long. It was, all in all, a terrific coup.

  Andrew Wren looked down at his shoes. The Wizard of Oz had done it again. But at what cost to himself and the organizations he had founded? That was the truth Wren had come all the way from New York to discover.

  He was a burly, slow-moving man with a thatch of unruly, grizzled brown hair that refused to be tamed and stuck out every which way no matter what was done to it. The clothes he wore were rumpled and well used, the kind that let him be comfortable while he worked, that gave him an unintimidating, slightly shabby look. He carried a worn leather briefcase in which he kept his notepads, source logs, and whatever book he was currently reading, together with a secret stash of bagged nuts and candy that he used to sustain himself when meals were missed or forgotten in the heat of his work. He had a round, kindly face with bushy eyebrows, heavy cheeks, and he wore glasses that tended to slide down his nose when he bent forward to listen to compensate for his failing hearing. He was almost fifty, but he looked as if he could just as easily be sixty. He could have been a college professor or a favorite uncle or a writer of charming anecdotes and pithy sayings that stayed with you and made you smile when you thought back on them.

  But he wasn’t any of these things. His worn, familiar teddy-bear look was what made him so effective at what he did. He looked harmless and mildly confused, but how he looked was dangerously deceptive. Andrew Wren was a bulldog when it came to ferreting out the truth. He was relentless in getting to the bottom of things. Investigative reporting was a tough racket, and you had to be both lucky and good. Wren had always been both. He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, for sensing when there was a story worth following up. His instincts were uncanny, and behind those kindly eyes and rumpled look was a razor-sharp mind that could peel away layers of deception and dig down to that tiny nugget of truth buried under a mound of bullshit. More than one overconfident jackass had been undone by underestimating Andrew Wren.

  Simon Lawrence was not likely to turn into one of these unfortunates, however. Wren knew him well enough to appreciate the fact that the Wiz hadn’t gotten where he was by underestimating anyone.

  Simon hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. “Sorry about that, Andrew, but you don’t keep the mayor waiting.”

  Wren nodded benignly, shrugging. “I understand. Wednesday’s event means a lot to you.”

  “Yes, but more to the point, it means a lot to the mayor. He went out on a limb for us, persuading the council to pass a resolution dedicating the building, then selling the idea to the voters. I want to be certain that he comes out of this experience feeling good about things.”

  Wren walked over to the easy chair that fronted Simon’s desk and sat down. Even though they had met only once before, and that was two years ago, Simon Lawrence felt comfortable enough with Wren to call him by his first name. Wren wouldn’t do anything to discourage that just yet.

  “I should think just about everyone is feeling pretty good about this one, Simon,” he complimented. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”

  Simon leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk and his chin in his hands, giving Wren a thoughtful look. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way, with nicely chiseled features, thick dark hair, and startling blue eyes. When he walked, he looked like a big cat, sort of gliding from place to place, slow and graceful, never hurried, with an air of confidence about him that suggested he would not be easily surprised. Wren placed him at a little over six feet and maybe two hundred pounds. His birth certificate, which Wren had ferreted out by searching the records in a suburb of St. Louis two years earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to learn something about his childhood, put him at forty-five years of age. He was unmarried, had no children, had no living relatives that anyone could identify, lived alone, and was the most important voice of his generation in the fight against homelessness.

  His was a remarkable story. He had come to Seattle eight years ago after spending several years working for nationally based programs like Habitat for Humanity and Child Risk. He worked for the Union Gospel Mission and Treehouse, then, after three years, founded Fresh Start. He began with an all-volunteer staff and an old warehouse on Jackson Street. Within a year, he had secured sufficient funding to lease the building where Fresh Start was presently housed, to hire a full-time staff of three, including Ray Hapgood, and to begin generating seed money for his next project, Pass/Go. He wrote a book on homeless women and children, entitled Street Lives. A documentary filmmaker became interested in his work and shot a feature that won an Academy Award. Shortly afterward, Simon was nominated for the prestigious Jefferson Award, which honors ordinary citizens who do extraordinary things in the field of community service. He was one of five statewide winners, was selected as an entry for national competition, and was subsequently a winner of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award.

  From there, things really took off. The media began to cover him regularly. He was photogenic, charming, and passionate about his work, and he gave terrific interviews. His programs became nationally known. Hollywood adopted him as a cause, and he was smart enough to know how to make the most of that. Money poured in. He purchased the buildings that housed Fresh Start and Pass/Go, increased his full-time staff, began a volunteer training program, and developed a comprehensive informational program on the roots of homelessness, which he made available to organizations working with the homeless in other cities. He held several high-profile fund-raisers that brought in national celebrities to mingle with the locals, and with the ensuin
g contributions established a foundation to provide seed money for programs similar to his own.

  He also wrote a second book, this one more controversial than the first, but more critically acclaimed. The title was The Spiritual Child. It was something of a surprise to everyone, because it did not deal with the homeless, but with the spiritual growth of children. It argued rather forcibly that children were possessed of an innate intelligence that allowed them to comprehend the lessons of spirituality, and that adults would do better if they were to spend less time trying to impose their personal religious and secular views and more time encouraging children to explore their own. It was a controversial position, but Simon Lawrence was adept at advancing an argument without seeming argumentative, and he pretty much carried the day.

  By now he was being referred to regularly as the Wizard of Oz, a name that had been coined early on by People magazine when it ran a fluff piece on the miracles he had performed in getting Fresh Start up and running. Wren knew Simon Lawrence wasn’t overly fond of the tag, but he also knew the Wiz understood the value of advertising, and a catchy name didn’t hurt when it came to raising dollars. He lived in the Emerald City, after all, so he couldn’t very well complain if the media decided to label him the Wizard of Oz. Or the Wiz, more usually, for these days everyone seemed to think they were on a first-name basis with him. Simon Lawrence was hot stuff, which made him news, which made Andrew Wren’s purpose in coming to see him all the more intriguing.

  “An accomplishment,” Simon said softly, repeating Wren’s words. He shook his head. “Andrew, I’m like the Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in the dike and the sea rising on the other side. Let me give you some statistics to think about. Use them or not when you write your next story, I don’t care. But remember them.

  “There are two hundred beds in this facility. With the new building, we should be able to double that. That will give us four hundred. Four hundred to service homeless women and children. There are twelve hundred school-age homeless children, Andrew. That’s children, not women. Twenty-four percent of all our homeless are under the age of eighteen. And that number is growing every day.

  “Ours is a specific focus. We provide help to homeless women and children. Eighty percent of those women and children are homeless because of domestic violence. The problem of domestic violence is growing worldwide, but especially here, in the United States. The statistics regarding children who die violently are all out of proportion with the rest of the world. An American child is five times more likely to be killed before the age of eighteen than a child living in another industrialized nation. The rate of gun deaths and suicides among our children is more than twice that of other countries. We like to think of ourselves as progressive and enlightened, but you have to wonder. Homelessness is an alternative to dying, but not an especially attractive one. So it is difficult for me to dwell on accomplishments when the problem remains so acute.”

  Wren nodded. “I’ve seen the statistics.”

  “Good. Then let me give you an overview of our response as a nation to the problem of being homeless.” Simon Lawrence leaned back again in his chair. “In a time in which the homeless problem is growing by leaps and bounds worldwide—due, to varying extents, to increases in the population, job elimination, technological advances, disintegration of the family structure, violence, and the rising cost of housing—our response state by state and city by city has been an all-out effort to look the other way. Or, as an alternative, to try to relocate the problem to some other part of the country. We are engaged in a nationwide effort to crack down on the homeless by passing new ordinances designed to move these people to where we can’t see them. Stop them from pan-handling, don’t let them sleep in our parks and public places, conduct police sweeps to round them up, and get them the hell out of town—that’s our solution. Is there a concerted effort to get at the root problems of homelessness, to find ways to rehabilitate and reform, to address the differences between types of homelessness so that those who need one kind of treatment versus another can get it? How many tax dollars are being spent to build shelters and provide showers and hot meals? What efforts are being made to explore the ways in which domestic violence contributes to the problem, especially where women and children are concerned?”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It’s obscene.”

  Wren nodded. “But you can’t change that, Simon. The problem is too indigenous to who we are, too much a part of how we live our lives.”

  “Tell me about it. I feel like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.” Simon shrugged. “It’s obviously hopeless, isn’t it? But you know something, Andrew? I refuse to give up. I really do. It doesn’t matter to me if I fail. It matters to me if I don’t try.” He thought about it a moment. “Too bad I’m not really the Wizard of Oz. If I were, I could just step behind the old curtain and pull a lever and change everything—just like that.”

  Wren chuckled. “No, you couldn’t. The Wizard of Oz was a humbug, remember?”

  Simon Lawrence laughed with him “Unfortunately, I do. I think about it every time someone refers to me as the Wiz. Do me a favor, Andrew. Please refrain from using that hideous appellation in whatever article you end up writing. Call me Toto or something; maybe it will catch on.”

  There was a soft knock, the door opened, and Stefanie Winslow walked in carrying the lattes Simon had sent her to purchase from the coffee shop at Elliott Bay Book Company. Both men started to rise, but she motioned them back into their seats. “Stay where you are, gentlemen, you probably need all your energy for the interview. I’ll just set these on the desk and be on my way.”

  She gave Wren a dazzling smile, and he wished instantly that he was younger and cooler and even then he would probably need to be a cross between Harrison Ford and Bill Gates to have a chance with this woman. Stefanie Winslow was beautiful, but she was exotic as well, a combination that made her unforgettable. She was tall and slim with jet-black hair that curled down to her shoulders, cut back from her face and ears in a sweep so that it shimmered like satin in sunlight. Her skin was a strange smoky color, suggesting that she was of mixed ancestry, the product of more than one culture, more than one people. Startling emerald eyes dominated an oval face with tiny, perfect features. She moved in a graceful, willowy way that accentuated her long limbs and neck and stunning shape. She seemed oblivious to how she looked and comfortable within herself, radiating a relaxed confidence that had both an infectious and unsettling effect on the people around her. Andrew Wren would have made the journey to Seattle just to see her in the flesh for ten seconds.

  She set the lattes before them and started for the door. “Simon, I’m going to finish with the SAM arrangements, then I’m out of here. John has your speech all done except for a once-over, so we’re going out for a long, quiet, intimate dinner. See you tomorrow.”

  “Bye, Stef.” Simon waved her out.

  “Nice seeing you, Mr. Wren,” she called back.

  The door closed behind her with a soft click. Wren shook his head. “Shouldn’t she be a model or an actress or something? What sort of hold do you have over her, Simon?”

  Simon Lawrence shrugged. “Will you be staying for the dedication on Wednesday, Andrew, or do you have to get right back?”

  Wren reached for his latte and took a long sip. “No, I’m staying until Thursday. The dedication is part of what I came for. It’s central to the article I’m writing.”

  Simon nodded. “Excellent. Now what’s the other part, if you don’t mind my asking? Everything we’ve talked about has been covered in the newspapers already—ad nauseam, I might add. The New York Times didn’t send its top investigative reporter to interview me for a rerun, did it? What’s up,
Andrew?”

  Wren shrugged, trying to appear casual in making the gesture. “Well, part of it is the dedication. I’m doing a piece on corporate and governmental involvement—or the lack thereof—in the social problems of urban America. God knows, there’s little enough to write about that’s positive, and your programs are bright lights in a mostly shadowy panorama of neglect and disinterest. You’ve actually done something where others have just talked about it—and what you’ve done works.”

  “But?”

  “But in the last month or so the paper has received a series of anonymous phone calls and letters suggesting that there are financial improprieties in your programs that need to be investigated. So my editor ordered me to follow it up, and here I am.”

  Simon Lawrence nodded, his face expressionless. “Financial improprieties. I see.” He studied Wren. “You must have done some work on this already. Have you found anything?”

  Wren shook his head. “Not a thing.”

  “You won’t, either. The charge is ridiculous.” Simon sipped at his latte and sighed. “But what else would I say, right? So to set your mind at ease, Andrew, and to demonstrate that I have nothing to hide, I’ll let you have a look at our books. I don’t often do this, you understand, but in this case I’ll make an exception. You already know, I expect, that we have accountants and lawyers and a board of directors to make certain that everything we do is above reproach. We’re a high-profile operation with important donors. We don’t take chances with our image.”

  “I know that,” Wren demurred, looking vaguely embarrassed to deflect the implied criticism. “But I appreciate your letting me see for myself.”

  “The books will show you what comes in and what goes out, everything but the names of the donors. You aren’t asking for those, are you, Andrew?”

  “No, no.” Wren shook his head quickly. “It’s what happens to the money after it comes in that concerns me. I just want to be certain that when I write my article extolling the virtues of Fresh Start and Pass/Go and Toto the Wonder Wizard, I won’t be shown up as an idiot later on.” He tacked on a sheepish smile.