Talking Heads

by John Domini

  He’d lobbied for the job, arguing that he was from farm country himself. A calculated risk. Agriculture hardly got the glamour assignments, and on top of that, the work kept him out of the city as much as three weeks a month. But the job had paid off. For starters, he’d loved it. Every assignment cast Kit as the lone gunslinger, fighting for justice. He’d blasted away at the bad guys who owned timberland in Oregon, tobacco in the Carolinas. And this isolation on the job meant, not glamor, but sole byline credit. His best piece, a series on migrant workers in the Carolinas, had put his name on the front page all week. It had won him a Nieman Fellowship. Kit found himself “going back to Harvard in glory,” as Bette put it. Not yet thirty, he found himself a speaker at the Nieman symposia, the same gatherings he’d sat in as an awestruck undergraduate.

  A speaker, hoo boy. So what do you have to say for yourself now, Viddich? What, going to Leo with hat in hand?

  To Leo Mirini, Zia Mirini’s father. President and CEO of Mirinex, Incorporated. Just one flight up.

  Lately Kit had come to know the drawbacks of playing the gunslinger. In the year after his Nieman, as he’d tried to drum up the financing for Sea Level, Kit had been put through a kind of boot camp in interpersonal relations. Ten months of meeting after meeting, white lie after white lie. This when so much of his previous work had been strictly solo, all a-lone by the telephone. It was like learning all over again how to knot a tie. In Kit’s case, the lack of social skills was compounded by all the time he’d spent away from Boston. He’d spent three years studying Mexican emigration routes or Nebraska corn-storage law, instead of his own home city. He was still suffering the consequences, Harvard and the Nieman notwithstanding. Even this morning, he’d thought of Cousin Cal before he’d thought of Leo. He’d needed to see Zia, in her punk lipstick and mascara, before he thought of going to Leo.

  The stairwell had a nasty echo. Cold, too. Kit might as well have been in an MTA station, waiting for a trolley.

  If he’d been better at meetings, better at Boston, he’d have found a backer he was more comfortable with. God knows Leo was rich. Mirinex, Inc. owned not only mid-level properties like this one—Sea Level’s offices had been a sweetener on the deal—but also a number of high-yield condominium conversions in the Back Bay. And the old man had begun by working for the state, a crew chief on Massachusetts’s roads and buildings. He had the contacts Kit needed this morning, but not much else in common with a Minnesota Ivy Leaguer.

  At least, the old man wasn’t Sea Level’s only backer. Kit had cashed in fifteen hundred dollars of his father’s G.I. life insurance. The bonds had proved pretty low-yield, considering how long it had been, but there’d been something left after college expenses at least. He’d also gotten help from Bette.

  When Leo had made his offer, Bette’s family lawyer had looked over the contract. He’d said the question was: Did Kit want to sign?

  Third floor. Outside Leo’s office, Kit went back to an older recollection. A deeper warming. He went back to the Globe series on migrant workers. It remained his best work, his best job making sense of an outbreak above the horizon. Better still, his Lone Ranger act had done some good. After his story had finished its run, the North Carolina legislature had changed the regulations. The gunslinger and the saint, for once, had gone hand in hand. At the recollection, Kit’s joints seemed to loosen.

  Kit remained a believer. His ambition, as big and well-architected as it was, could never stand erect without the more durable struts of conscience. He could imagine no better life’s work than to go on wringing out—Bette shaded this phrase with such irony—the whole truth.

  *

  Mirinex offered something very different from downstairs.

  Kit’s office looked its age. When he wanted to open a window he had to wrestle against the chipping overlay of a hundred earlier paint jobs. When he’d hung a calendar, the nail had punched through the spackle plastered over an earlier hole. He’d wound up jumping around with his hand in his mouth, tasting blood. Not that Kit was complaining. No. What better home for a paper run on shaky money and true grit than an office that went back to the days of yellow journalism? When the place’s rough edges left him bleeding, it was an object lesson from history itself.

  Up at Leo’s, however, they’d left history behind. They’d redone the place in a bewildering ‘70s mix, hard techie gray and dull earthy brown. The receptionist sat at a blinking command console like something out of Star Wars. The walls were decorated with Mirinex product samples, an array of aluminum pipe fittings. Aluminum on suede. You thought of washer-dryers, garden hoses, the ganglia under kitchen sinks.

  On the table in the reception area, a copy of Sea Level looked flimsier than ever, in newsprint format among industry slicks. Also out of place was the top-page sketch, a tottering jailhouse. The subhead, In Monsod, Every Cell May Be Death Row.

  “Kit, kid.”

  Leo Mirini, all satchelmouth and ham. Kit once again rolled his first issue into a stick.

  When Zia Mirini was working on a cigarette, downstairs, her face would sometimes reveal its Italian side. Her lips around the Marlboro would look as ripe as the young Brando’s. Leo was the older version, the Godfather. He knew it, too. This morning Leo actually cupped a calloused hand around Kit’s neck. For that matter, what was this big-deal welcome, coming out of his office? Why didn’t he just have Kit sent in? And no way somebody who’d made such a success in this country could still have such a thick accent.

  But, though Kit didn’t buy the act, Leo always made him feel like the tallest, whitest gooney bird on earth. Leo stood a foot shorter and a good eighty pounds baggier. Out here among his product samples, he kept his chest thrust up.

  “Kit, kid,” he repeated.

  Was the nickname part of the charade? “Leo,” Kit said, “I need to ask a favor.”

  “Really, hey. He-ey, no kidding. I was just thinking I had to ask you a favor.”

  “Me? You need something from me?”

  “Yeah. He-ey. Maybe you and me, we can help each other.”

  Didn’t waste any time, did he? Wondering, Kit followed Leo down a buckskin-colored corridor.

  A more formal space, the CEO’s office was decorated by reproductions of murals from Pompeii, scenes of gladiators and heroes. Their reds and flesh-tones had darkened under centuries of ash. On a corner of Leo’s desk sat a white block of stone. A piece of Roman marble, the man had told Kit proudly. Coliseum marble, Leo had said, momentarily revealing a cool appraiser’s eye.

  This morning, Kit found himself stalling and unable to sit. He talked about Zia’s piece in the first issue. Saturday night, at the paper’s publication party, Leo’s daughter had gotten a lot of compliments. “Everybody I talked to was impressed. These are professionals, Leo.”

  The old man had made hiring his daughter the single non-negotiable stipulation of financing. He’d let Kit look over a couple of Zia’s papers from UMass Boston, plus a club review she’d placed in the Real Paper. These might have held a glimmer of something, a few bubbles of possibility. But nothing had prepared Kit for the intelligence and style of her first full-length piece.

  “There was an editor from the Globe,” Kit went on, “who said she’d like to have Zia do some work for her.” Rachel Veutri, an old friend who now worked for the Sunday magazine. “And I’ll tell you, this is a woman who doesn’t know anything about punk rock. She’d never even heard of the band.”

  “Human Sexual Response,” the father said.

  “Human Sexual Response.”

  “Wise guys.” The father blinked impassively. “A buncha faggots.”

  It didn’t take Leo long to put Kit uptight. Human Sexual Response was a gay group, mostly anyway. Their songlist included a ditty named “Buttfuck,” and in interview their leader liked to talk about San Francisco’s new homosexual councilman Harvey Milk. Zia had proven admirably balanced on the subject, neither backing away nor making a fuss.

  “Faggots,” Leo repeated. “I mean, t
hese are the kind of people? The people my daughter runs with?”

  “Leo, frankly, I thought it would never work either. You remember I had doubts about that kind of thing for Sea Level. That kind of … entertainment coverage.”

  Oh Kit, stalling and feinting. When he and Leo had discussed their contract, this had been Kit’s lame attempt at an argument against hiring the man’s daughter. She didn’t fit the editorial stance, he’d said, or tried to say. Sea Level was supposed to cover hard news.

  “I remember,” Leo said.

  Kit twisted the paper stick in his hands. The way Leo sounded, just now, you’d think he wanted nothing to do with Sea Level. This had always been the bedrock quandary of working with him—once Leo had made sure his daughter went on the payroll, he’d acted as if the paper itself were incidental. Stranger still, so far as Kit could see, Zia hadn’t needed Pop to buy her a paper. She’d been making headway, breaking into print. Why hadn’t the old man just set her up with a computer?

  Kit had fallen a long way from this morning’s good news. Abruptly, half angrily, he told Leo: “So, listen, there’s something you should know.”

  Kit told him and went on to point out how neatly the BBC’s timing—going into the prison Thursday morning—fit Sea Level’s deadlines. And he brought up the danger of doing nothing. “I mean, Leo, you can bet the Globe’s going after this hammer and tong.” The confirmation call this morning, in fact, had come from a Globe stringer. “You can bet that, right this minute, there’s someone at the Globe who’s on the line to the State House.”

  Folding back into place beside the desk, he gave the old man a long moment to reply.

  “But see,” Kit continued finally, “so far I have an advantage on the Globe. I know more than they do.”

  The stringer had been in touch with the BBC about an entirely different matter. He’d been part of a Globe Spotlight investigation into the city’s current arson wave. Small world, that investigation had helped Kit think of Cousin Cal. The stringer had mentioned that in two recent arson cases, two apartment buildings that had burned down over Christmas, title was held by Halterstock & Steyes.

  “Right now,” Kit said after another long moment, “I know more about Monsod Penitentiary than just about anyone in the city. All I need is some help from the Building Commission.”

  The stringer had been so talkative, of course, because he was fishing for an assignment. Since Kit had reached the editor’s side of the desk, freelancers had gotten a lot more generous with tips, ideas, whatever they had. Today’s was typical, a Monday-morning eager beaver. So why was this old man before him just sitting there, a Brando-on-a-log?

  “The BBC takes a reporter along every now and then,” Kit said. “A reporter or a politician or somebody.”

  The old man’s hands lay still. His vest, bunched up around his slouch, revealed a shadow-silver lining.

  “They’ll take someone along now and then,” Kit repeated. “Even if it’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous,” Leo said. His voice came rheumy, showing his age. “Hey Kit, yeah. A place like that could be dangerous.”

  “Ahh …”

  “They got murderers in there, Kit,” the old man said. “Murderers, rapists, real slime. They had a riot a coupla months ago, right?”

  “There’ve been disturbances, yeah. They’ve had trouble on and off for a year now.” Trouble enough to prick up Kit’s muckraker antennae. Once he had the paper up and running, Monsod was the first place he looked for a story.

  “Disturbances, bullshit. They put a guard in the hospital. Kit, there’s no telling what those animals might do.”

  Kit refolded his arms.

  “They’re gorillas in there, Kit. Dangerous guys.”

  But surely Leo realized the BBC people would have a security escort. A proper inspection wouldn’t allow for contact with the prisoners. “I mean,” Kit said, “they’ve got a job to do, these inspectors. Just to check out that closet …”

  “Oh yeah, the closet,” Leo cut in. “That’s an incredible story, Kit. Where’d you get something like that?”

  Where’d he get it?

  “See Kit, that closet, I mean, that’s just what I’m talking about. That’s really dangerous, Kit. Where’d you ever hear about that?”

  “Leo, come on now.” Kit was careful to smile. “I don’t remember anything in the contract about giving you my sources.”

  The publisher had worked himself forward in his chair, gesturing. At this he dropped his hands.

  “Kit, I’m not kidding around here. Monsod, a place like that, they’ll rip you open and pull you inside-out.”

  “Leo,”

  “Place like that, no way you want to go in there.”

  “Leo, I have to.”

  Back to the silent treatment. His heavy face hidden, Leo fingered the white hunk of stone between them, the two-thousand-year-old marble. Kit knew enough to leave him alone. Leo must have long since figured out what he was here to ask. In fact in the next half-minute, Kit realized he knew this old worker with the horny palms better than he’d thought.

  After Kit’s father had been killed, Kit had been raised by ranchers. By his uncles, his mother’s two brothers, men without children of their own. One preferred life as a cowboy bachelor and the other—this was supposed to be a secret—preferred men. The brothers raised beef cattle on a spread of nearly three hundred acres in central Minnesota. And while Kit was growing up, again and again they’d taken him through the same style of talk as Leo liked to use. A style with a built-in contradiction. The body language came across crystal-clear, impossible to misunderstand, while the words spoken remained fuzzy and elliptical. Kit’s uncles had always kept him guessing. They’d mention something Kit had never seen, some place he’d never been to, and expect him to understand a whole range of implied meaning. “Hibbing,” an uncle would say, or “Mesabi red.” From that alone Kit was supposed to deduce an entire way of life. Plus out of nowhere these ranchers could come up with intensely personal questions he shouldn’t have had to answer in the first place.

  “What about your wife?” Leo Mirini asked, still fingering the stone on his desktop. “Can’t she help you?”

  Kit touched his neck.

  “Your wife,” Leo said, “she’s old Boston, right? Old Boston, an old family. They gotta have somebody over at the State House.”

  “I can’t do that,” Kit said.

  “You can’t? A reporter can’t ask his wife?”

  Kit took a crack at silence himself. Trying to relax, he stared from under his eyebrows. Leo changed the angle of his chin.

  “You’re sure they’re going in there?”

  Kit waited out the black thought that neither the Saturday call nor this morning’s confirmation had got it right.

  “Of course I’m sure,” he said.

  The old man left off stroking the desktop rock. He refolded his hands under his belly. Kit remembered his misguided attempt with Bette and wondered if, in coming to Leo, he was again out of line. What was the protocol here? He tried to reckon meaning from the bulge of Leo’s paunch, the shrunkenness of the neck. He’d never seen the father so still, so thoughtful.

  “Well, Kit, hey,” Leo said finally. “It’s good news, yeah. Very good news. Hey!”

  Surprised him. Something like ten minutes late, the old man at last got around to congratulations. His hands came back up and his satchelmouth showed teeth. Kit worried for a moment that there might be another round of neck massage. The CEO’s office was small enough that with his “hey” and “how ‘bout that,” the man may have made the pictures on the walls shiver. Kit may have seen it happen. He tried to keep up, grinning.

  “Thanks,” Kit said, “thanks.”

  “And I think I got an idea here, Kit. I think I can help.”

  “You can?”

  Surprised him, surprised him. One of Leo’s brown hands remained in mid-air between them, but its message had changed. A moment ago that hand had been a celebration, gimme fiv
e, but now it was a warning: Hush. With that one statement the old man’s voice had dropped. Kit latched up the jack-in-the-box in his chest—he can help!—and checked the window, the doorway. The view was of blind waterfront warehouses, and the office remained closed.

  “You remember my business down in Surinam?” Leo asked.

  Surinam?

  “Sure Leo,” Kit said, “I remember. Your bauxite.” Raw material for the Mirinex product line. Leo had set up one of his sons down there, along with a Caribbean bank account.

  “Right,” Leo said. “Cheap labor, cheap product.”

  Kit nodded. The Texas Observer, he figured, probably had a little dirty money behind it too. Baptist sleazeball oil money or something.

  “Right. I mean, I been thinking about Surinam, Kit. You help me out down there, I’ll help you out up here. I been trying to figure a way I could get some more cash to my boy.”

  “Cash?”

  “Kit, kid. Cash, I mean, that’s how you do business down there. You don’t pay much like I told you, you don’t hardly pay anything, not real money. But you have to be down there with like three thousand, maybe five thousand dollars. Cash. You have to be ready, see what I mean?”

  Kit fitted his paper stick upright beneath his chin.

  “Lately, whenever my boy tries to do business,” Leo went on, “it seems like somebody else’s got the cash. Somebody else’s trying to cut in.”

  Kit’s stick was straight up, his spine likewise. Not only did Leo’s problem seem a long way from the Building Commission, but also the whole subject left Kit feeling unready. In the newspaper network people rarely talked about cash. Whether a writer was at the East End News, the Phoenix, or even the lower rungs of the Globe, everyone understood that there simply wasn’t much money involved. Kit’s friends tended to mention specific figures only when they’d worked up a good head of contempt—contempt being, of course, the best camouflage for envy. Can you believe, someone might say, they paid twelve hundred dollars for that piece of shit? The sort of steeply pitched attitude that made Zia Mirini a natural for the job.