by Dan Newman
I ask him where Trots is and my lucky streak just keeps on streaking. “Trots got his ass pinched, man. Fuckin’ pinched. He’s doin’ a stretch inside for boosting a ride.” I wait for Bosco to tell me that I need to start paying, that Trots left instructions on how much and how often. But it never comes. Bosco just stares at me and shakes his head gently in a knowing, almost forlorn way. For a moment I consider giving him the money, but instead I push it deeper into my pocket. Do criminals have succession planning? Are their accounts handed on when one or the other gets sent away? I guess not, and before I consider it any more, I simply drift off into the crowd, my debt suspended—who knows, maybe erased. Surely it can’t be this simple? Probably not, but lately my life has been making all the right moves, and maybe this is just one more. I’ll take the win and leave it at that, because I know it won’t stand up to a thorough examination.
• • •
Later that day I have my first real meeting with Donna Sabourin. I’ve met her once before, shortly after I started at the paper—that is to say, I was introduced to her and was likely immediately forgotten. And I’ve seen her around since then, of course, and even said a fleeting hello to her while passing in the corridor in a pathetic (and hugely unsuccessful) attempt to get on her radar.
When I see her today she is down in the archives, two stories underground where copies of the paper are stored for posterity. She is struggling to heave a dusty legal box from the top of a wobbly steel shelf and I arrive, much like Spiderman, just in time, and help her with the box. Somehow we get chatting about whatever it is she’s researching. Something on cosmetic procedures. She says she knows it’s fluffy and light, just filler, and that the international scene is where she really wants to be. I don’t really care; I’m just happy that she’s talking to me.
For a moment I try to understand why talking to her is so important to me. I also notice that I’m suddenly making conscious decisions around functions that my body usually takes care of without thought: why is it that I’m standing a little taller right now? In fact, why am I even thinking about how I should stand? Should my hand be placed casually on the steel shelving rack beside me? Or shoved aloofly in my pocket? Is my hair sitting awkwardly? And am I smiling and laughing in the right places? It’s a rabbit hole I can slip easily into, so I fight my way out and refocus on Donna.
She’s looking at me oddly.
Shit.
“Are you okay, Roland?” Her brow is furrowed in concern. Not just the pretense of it, but the real thing.
“No, yes. I’m fine. Good.” Jesus. I’m close to panic. I don’t know what to say; I haven’t been listening for the past few seconds. I lunge in blindly. “You got me thinking—about what you just said…”
“Oh?”
The frying pan I just left was much more comfortable than the fire I am now standing in. “Yeah, what you said just before. Before the am-I-okay thing…” I don’t know if she’s figured me out yet, but she throws me a fire extinguisher without so much as a blink. Generosity comes so easily to her.
“You mean about getting taken seriously—covering real stories?” she asks.
Relief. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, being relevant, as a reporter—that has to require credibility, right?”
Now, I know instinctively that someone with Donna’s looks is well out of my league. Mice don’t chase cats, asses don’t race stallions, and Roland Keenes don’t date Donna Sabourins. Still, perhaps it’s the realization that I don’t have a prayer that lets me speak to her without any of the pressure that goes along with the half chance. It’s oddly liberating, that simple knowledge that I can’t lose because I’m not in the race at all. For a moment I feel bad for all those well-groomed, carefully coiffed guys who have all the right things to say at a chance encounter in a bar. They have so much to lose and so many competitors to lose to.
We spend a few more minutes chatting, and I notice suddenly that the conversation has left the research subject that got us talking in the first place. I then do one of the smartest things I’ve ever done: I simply leave. I say, “Okay, I gotta go, see you later,” and I leave. That’s it. And it feels like a victory. I know I’ll see her later in the halls or across the cubicles, but for now I’m content to let that light and airy feeling hover, and to revel in the fact that I have managed not to screw it all up—whatever it is. I head back upstairs, roll up my sleeves, and refocus on the trade, and on the development of the man I am determined to become.
My early experiences in journalism quickly change me. I am soon keenly aware of the sharp financial imperative pressing into the back of every journalist on every floor. I also begin to understand hardening, a distinct layer that forms about you, like the calluses on so many bare little feet in Rwanda, and through the course of the first fifteen months, I finally come to understand the core tenet of journalism—and it is this: journalism is a business.
I spend time doing errands and research for others—others whose names will appear atop stories they write and publish. One of those, perhaps the most talented of them, is Dave Barret. Dave has been at the Star-Telegraph for six years. He has a good name, a solid portfolio of work, and is widely seen as a rising star—the kind whose face will peer at commuters from a ten-meter billboard as they pour into the city every morning.
But I quickly realize I will never be one of his fans; he talks down to me, and takes every opportunity to make me look like nothing more than an errand boy. And in fairness I really did try—for a while, anyway—to please him and accommodate his menial requests. There were lattes, lunches, and last-minute web searches, and I really did make an effort, as I did with everybody. But where Dave was concerned I just couldn’t seem to get it right. Eventually I stopped trying, and just accepted that I’d reached that point where, well, I just plain didn’t like him. And the feeling, I suspect, is mutual. I like to think it’s because his finely honed journalistic intuition tells him that I’m his biggest threat.
Dave becomes, in some ways, the springboard that puts my world at the Star-Telegraph in motion. A little over fifteen months into my shiny new career, on a Monday, he hands me—tosses me—a piece of paper with two names on it, and tells me to pull whatever we have on the two of them. I recognize one right away, but the other means nothing to me. The first name is Alex Joiner. Easy—executive assistant to David Holt, the celebrity director at USCIS. The other is Mike Peelman.
Barret is something of a closet conspiracy theorist, although he’s smart enough to publish nothing too sensational without solid supporting facts. And to date, his stories have been written on concrete foundations. The two names don’t fit together for me until a day later, when I finish wading through reams of information on the web. There is a glut of information on Joiner—his career is well documented—but there’s next to nothing on Peelman. The reference I do find on him is unearthed as an afterthought, a quick search through the Federal Reporter—a legal publication that catalogues federal district and appellate court rulings—a kind of catch-all for decisions that percolate through the courts. Mike Peelman’s name comes up twice: once in a fraud conviction and then again for theft. He did a total of six years for the two offenses. The documents provide little detail otherwise and I am left with a vague sense of curiosity.
The following day, I drop a stack of documents four inches deep on Barret’s desk. It’s a carefully selected collection of the most bland and obvious Joiner factoids: a list of coauthored federal publications, contact information at the offices of David Holt, travel schedules, letters of reply on behalf of Holt, mentions of Joiner’s name in several Holt speeches and a host of other insignificant citations. The stack contains nothing of Mike Peelman.
It takes me a further two days to establish what it is about Peelman and Joiner that piques my interest. When I find it, which I do in a FedEx envelope sent to me by way of a Star-Telegraph-friendly contact at the District of Columbia Metro Police Department, I immediately understand the significance of my discovery.
&
nbsp; Everything in my world is about to change. Again.
13
How Barret suspected the two names somehow fit together in the beginning is still a mystery to me, and frankly, I really don’t care. The real juice here is the fact that the two names do fit together, but only for me, and no one else.
In my tiny apartment I lay out my next moves and document them in the same tattered book. I see this thing in three parts, and I know that a gamble is in the cards, too. I scratch “Part 1” at the top of a fresh leaf, flip a few pages and then do the same for Parts 2 and 3. The fourth heading is simply “The Gamble.” I close the book and lay back on my futon, hands cupped behind my head, and follow the plotline before me.
It’s been months since I last wrote in this book, and I venture a brief reflection by flipping the pages backward. I scan through the earlier notes, Chloe’s notes, and immediately feel a creeping, gnawing guilt I have wrestled with on many nights like this one.
My mind floats to Dr. Coyle, whom I’ve not seen in probably six or even eight months, and I wonder if I should change that. I know I should. But things have been good. No extremes. I’m okay. Things are okay. But her last comments are never far away: these events may yet come home to roost.
• • •
Between coffee errands and research tasks I catch Donna’s eye from time to time. We develop a quirky relationship, although to call it platonic would be an understatement of titanic proportions. It’s fun, though, and built on nothing more than comical glances. There is the James Bond: one eyebrow dipped and one raised as high as possible. It’s cast across the room at almost any occasion—when people say something controversial, when people say something redundant, when people say anything at all and we manage to lock eyes. And there’s the Get Me Out of Here: a pained look that conveys the angst of the modern cubicle dweller.
But today it’s the Slow Blink, a move best delivered in concert with the Nearly Imperceptible Head Shake, which acknowledges the more spectacular gaffes of the mere mortals that work around us. At the far end of the floor someone has just dumped hot coffee into their lap, which gives birth to an attendant scream and a flurry of cusses. Of course, the rest of the newsroom stands immediately, prairie-dogging over cubicle walls to see just what happened. I lock eyes with Donna and let fly with the Slow Blink/Head Shake combo, and she stifles a laugh with her hand and disappears behind a cubicle wall. I know she’ll pop back up so I keep going, and when she inevitably does look over a few seconds later I’m still there, slowly blinking and head shaking away. She dissolves into giggles and I admit it makes me feel every kind of wonderful.
For me, it’s an exotic form of foreplay that will surely never to reach fruition. For her, an amusing office distraction—a silly and immediately forgettable exchange that will never even achieve the status of flirting.
Reenergized, I push the tasks assigned to me aside, and begin to hammer out the structure for the three-parter that will usher me into mainstream journalism. Each piece is about 750 words—short and punchy, but driven by as much fact as I can pull together. Each story leans against the next for support, like books on a shelf, building momentum and leaving just enough unanswered to draw in the questions—and the critics. I know that selling this to Ed Carroway will be the toughest part, as he will want the story’s conclusion—the payoff—up front. Editors always do. They don’t want the well-crafted path that weaves through a story—not at first pitch, anyway—they want to know where it’s going, and hear about the details that got you there afterward.
But for this story to fly, and for a cub reporter like me to fly it, I will have to sell it to him the way it was designed to unfold. Blurting out the payoff would likely get me little more than an embarrassed smile from Carroway—and a bulletproof glass ceiling inserted directly above me.
No. Carroway has to open this story like a carefully wrapped gift. The story’s payoff is so big, so significant that even if I did get past the pitch it would be stripped from me and assigned to a veteran known and trusted by the readership. It’s a career killer and a career maker all in one. My mind runs back to the notebook, briefly brushes up against Chloe, Professor Bowman, and then Dr. Coyle, then on through the pages to my overly dramatic heading, “The Gamble.”
I will bet it all here.
• • •
It’s nine forty at night and the Star-Telegraph is quiet, relatively speaking. Most of tomorrow’s stories have been committed to paper, submitted to editors, rewritten, and are now sitting on plates in the press center just north of the city. Deadlines have been met, and journalists are sipping specific drinks in specific bars—the journalistic equivalent of cocking a leg. I’m through with my assignments. I have spent the last three hours working on my own story, and I can already taste the cold beer at the bar where my cubicle mates—and Donna—are gathering.
Outside, summer’s first early surge is in full swing, and the restaurants are spilling their business into the streets with tablecloths and candles. The city is stirring from the deep chills of February; the sidewalks have been swept, the awnings are rehung with new color, and streetlights have been dressed with banners. It has all the makings of a beautiful evening, but out of the corner of my eye I catch a quick, darting movement. And without fully turning my head, I know it’s Trots.
As I sprint through the crowd of prospective diners, all I can think of is that after fifteen months Trots is now out of jail, and he’ll kill me if he catches up. I don’t mean that he’ll kick the proverbial shit out of me; I mean he’ll put a knife in my gut and smile as I juggle the mess of blue-black hosing that used to be inside me.
I clip an older woman and spin her around, but I can’t stop. Trots has nearly a foot on me in height and he’s built like an Olympian. But fear is on my side. My high school bio teacher pops into my head, shadowboxing in his cardigan: It’s the fight-or-flight gland, folks! The sidewalk is a blur below me, and as I whip my head back for a glance at Trots, I know I’ve made a mistake. The hydrant I hit is hard and immovable, but I feel nothing. All I register is the sensation that my feet are no longer in motion, no longer propelling me forward and away from Trots. My hands go out ahead of me, and I feel the skin smear as I fall face first into the street. Within seconds hands are upon me, hauling me upward by the back of my clothes and popping the seams in my shirt as it bites into my neck.
His voice is winded but victorious nonetheless, and I can feel the satisfaction in it as he pulls me up easily by the back of my sweatshirt with two balled fists. “Got you, you fucker.”
I am jerked round and dragged onto unwilling legs. I throw my bloodied hands across my face, but I know the act is futile; Trots will gut me, and as I reach for my stomach he will arc the blade upward and carve a neat smile below my chin.
But what I see momentarily confuses me: I can see Trots, but he’s not the one holding me. There’s a small crowd, and I’m being held by two large, well-dressed men, both of whom are huffing and catching their breath. At the back of the crowd I see Trots. He’s watching me, his eyes narrowed and his index finger flicking back and forth across his neck. I can hear him in my head, hissing at me: I gwan cut you latah, man. I gwan cut you latah. Then he’s gone, and a sharp shove turns my head to the men holding me.
“You knocked down an old woman, you prick.”
“Kick his ass, Derrick.”
“What’s the matter with you, man?”
I look around again, bewildered, muttering apologies, but my focus is on finding Trots’s face in the milling crowd. I put up no resistance and Derrick and his pals shove me to the floor with an entourage of threats and boot soles. The crowd thins as a policeman wades in and I’m once again hoisted to my feet. In five minutes it’s all over, and I’m sent nervously on my way. Derrick and his friends are gone. The police have moved on. I quickly stop a cab and flee with my tail well tucked.
Upstairs in my apartment, I look at the hotplate and can’t seem to understand why I still live here, why I still li
ve this way, the way I did before the job at the Star-Telegraph. It occurs to me that I have to move—not just because I’m living like a squatter, but because if Trots can find out where I work then he can sure as hell find out where I live. But I know that this logic chain is not all that’s worrying me: there’s been a question lingering for a while, unformed but quietly making itself known: does Trots now know who I am? Has he put it all together: the photos in the paper, the interviews? A surge of panic ripples through me. No, I rationalize; he can’t. The photo is old, I had a beard, and Trots isn’t a follow-the-news kind of guy.
But I need to move. And I need to do it soon.
• • •
I’m at my desk by seven thirty the next morning, the brief chase of the night before a memory I can shake—temporarily—from the safety of my cubicle. I know leaving the building later on will be an exercise in paranoia, but for now I can immerse myself in a sense of safety—however fleeting. Focusing on work will bring calm, so I throw myself headlong into the job given to me by the assignment desk the day before. One of the senior writers, Paula Cross, is working on a story about municipal overspending, and my task for the day involves getting copies of invoices and expense sheets submitted by certain city councilors. We’re looking for fat, for good times at the taxpayers’ expense—for anything that helps support a story pointing directly at greed.
I spend the first part of the morning making formal requests under the Freedom of Information Act, a handy piece of legislation that compels government agencies to provide copies of public documents. I make requests against expense reports from every city councilor named in the story, and pick up the phone twice to speak to federal employees known to be Star-Telegraph friendly, asking for help on shaping the request, and making it move through the system at its best speed. I play my rookie status to the hilt, coming across as nervous, in awe of their role but enthusiastic to learn how “all this works.” They are flattered and eager to help.