by Sally Quinn
“You really are tough, aren’t you, Sonny.”
“As I said earlier, I have to be.”
For the rest of the lunch they made tense small talk. Jenny got the bill as quickly as she could. Neither one of them could wait to get up from the table.
Walking up the stairs to the exit, Allison stopped by the bowl of chocolate mints to grab a few.
A hand went in on top of hers, practically pushing her aside, and she looked up to see who the rude person was.
It was Sprague Tyson. Beside him was a rather disreputable-looking guy who could easily have been a Mafia type or a gunrunner.
She just stared at Sprague.
“Sorry,” he said unconvincingly.
She stared at his luncheon companion.
“Allison Sterling, Manny Peligroso.”
“Enchanted,” said Allison with mock politeness, reaching out to take Manny’s beefy paw.
“Same,” said Manny.
Manny turned to leave.
“I thought you didn’t do lunch,” said Allison out of the corner of her mouth against her better judgment.
“Not with lady editors anyway.”
Only the slightest turn on the corner of his mouth belied his seriousness.
“Prick,” hissed Allison under her breath after he had walked away.
“Who is he?” asked Jenny. “He’s gorgeous.”
“I don’t know,” said Allison. “I just don’t know.”
* * *
Coffee. The coffee thing was serious. If anybody had told her that her biggest problem as national editor would be coffee etiquette she would have died laughing. Now here she was lying awake at night trying to figure out how to deal with it. And she was a tea drinker.
The problem was this: She had inherited from her predecessor a coffeepot that was in her office. There was also a television and a number of chairs. There was a constant stream of people in and out of her office, at all times of day or evening, watching press conferences, speeches, announcements, resignations, plane crashes, and whatever news happened to be occurring. All of these people functioned on caffeine. When she first arrived she would fill up the pot with water for her tea. Then she found that while she was having meetings or on deadline someone would get up and disappear down to the cafeteria for coffee. It was disruptive and time consuming—cream, sugar, or black; who’s got the money—the key person for the discussion was inevitably the one who had gone for coffee. In self-defense, Allison had started bringing in instant coffee, but that meant that everybody was making coffee in her office and the pot had to be refilled several times during the day. She found herself trooping to the ladies room to fill the pot. She was getting bored and outraged that not a single one of “the boys” would ever take the pot to be filled. Or bring in their own instant. Or cream. Or sugar.
One day she rebelled. She didn’t fill the pot with water. She went down to the cafeteria to get her tea. For three days the empty pot sat there, a rebuke to her entire male staff. She might as well have put a sign on it saying, “Go get your own fucking water.” For three days nobody did anything.
On the fourth morning she arrived to find the water in the pot. As she went over nonchalantly to pour water for her tea she noticed Malkin hovering near the door. She said nothing. They soon ran out of water and the pot stayed empty for the rest of the day.
The next morning the same thing happened. There was Malkin hovering. But still the pot stayed empty.
The following Monday when the pot was full and Malkin appeared he couldn’t resist.
“Did you notice the pot was filled for the last few days?” he asked.
“Yes, I did,” said Allison.
“I filled it.” He beamed with pride.
“Did you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“That’s terrific, Malkin. Congratulations. That’s really nice of you. Above and beyond and all that. Good job. Great work.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” he said. Pleased with her praise, he turned and headed back toward the desk, a special spring to his step.
It was that night she lay awake until dawn.
The next day she unplugged the coffeepot and put it away. When “the boys” came in for her morning meeting at eleven with their empty mugs and saw it had disappeared they quickly shoved their mugs behind them and never said a word. From then on they would get their coffee before the meetings. Nobody ever mentioned coffee around her again.
* * *
It was a slow day in late March when the story broke. Allison was in her office. She had just called the morning meeting. Suddenly the newsroom was chaos. Malkin rushed in with the wires. One of the local TV stations in Washington had been bombed. It had been a small mail bomb and nobody was hurt. Within minutes there were reports of similar bombings in New York and Los Angeles. Then minutes later the wires had more. TV stations in Miami, San Antonio, and New Orleans had been hit. Phone calls from people who claimed they represented the Colombian drug cartel took the credit. One of the four top drug kingpins in Colombia had been arrested and was about to be extradited. The callers said the American people could expect more bombings if they carried out the extradition.
Allison stood at her desk and looked through the glass partition around the room. She was looking for heads. Bobbing heads. Any heads she could find. She did a 360-degree turn and yelled at Malkin.
“Get Tyson, get Conlon, get Lefkowitz. I want Tyson in Miami immediately. That’s the biggest hit. He’s got a lot of contacts down there. See who else you can find. Get somebody on plane reservations. We need rental cars, we need hotels, pull the clips on the drug kingpins. We need money, we need computers.…”
She was dispatching people as quickly as she could as she walked through the newsroom. She was making her way over to Walt Fineman, who was headed her way with a list in his hands, reeling off instructions to two editors who were trailing him.
“We’ve got to cover five cities here,” he said. “We only have correspondents in one. Who’ve we got?”
Malkin raced over to them.
“We’ve got problems,” he said. “Tyson refuses to go to Miami. He says he’s working here on the big picture, which is more important.”
Allison was stunned.
“You’re kidding. Did you tell him I assigned him to go?”
“Yep,” said Malkin with an unhappy expression on his face. It was clear he did not want to get in the middle of this battle.
“I don’t believe this. Who does he think he is? Tell him to get his ass in gear. He’s going to Miami. We’ve already sent Robeson from Atlanta to Louisiana. Who else have we got?”
“Jacobs overheard Tyson say he wasn’t going. She’s volunteered,” said Malkin.
“Great!” said Allison.
“Jacobs is almost eight months pregnant, Allison. They won’t let her on a plane,” said Malkin. “Besides, she shouldn’t travel anyway.”
“Shouldn’t that be her decision?”
“I don’t think so,” said Fineman. “She’s insisting. She feels she has to prove to you that she’s not a candy ass. The women think you’re tough, Allison. I think it’s our responsibility to refuse her.”
“Okay. Tell her to forget it,” she said finally. “I don’t need one of my reporters going into labor in the middle of a terrorist bombing out in the field. Did you get Corey in Denver? We need him in Texas right away.”
“He says he can’t go. His son’s birthday is tomorrow and he’s taking him and all his friends on a camping trip. They’re all there ready to go and he’s rented a camper…”
“Shit, Malkin. What is this? Are we running a day-care center or a newsroom? I don’t get it. Walt, we need to talk.”
By this time everyone was aware that Allison was upset, and a silence had descended over the newsroom as they stopped what they were doing to gaze at Allison and Walt and Malkin. Many of the reporters had begun to gather around the national desk as the wires kept coming over with more stories of the bombings
, and there was the usual atmosphere of collective excitement over a breaking story.
Allison headed toward Walt’s office with Walt and Malkin close behind. Alan Warburg had seen the commotion with Allison and had come out of his office to see what was going on.
“What’s the problem?” Alan was always curt and to the point.
“We need to talk,” said Allison as she made her way into Walt’s office with the three of them now following. As Walt came in he closed the door behind them. Allison, without sitting down, turned to the three and began to speak, a scene that became a pantomime to the rest of the newsroom, all of whom were riveted by the spectacle behind the glass wall.
“I’m having a hard time dealing with the attitudes on the national staff,” Allison said. “On foreign we never got into trouble by expending too many resources. You can never not do enough, or so I was trained to think. You get a breaking story, you get people on planes, and then you worry about whether or not you have too many. I’d rather have three people too many than not enough or none. But on national everybody always has a problem. On foreign you’re not allowed to have a problem. On foreign everybody is general assignment. On national everybody has a beat. You’re only responsible for what you’re responsible for. I don’t want to be put in the position of having to ask, no, to beg my reporters to cover a goddamn story. It’s their job. They shouldn’t have the right of refusal. I could order them to go, but then I’d pay for it in spades. We’ve got a newspaper to put out. How am I supposed to cover this story with a bunch of prima donnas for reporters?”
“Amen, sister,” said Walt.
“You’re absolutely right, Allison,” said Alan.
There was dead silence. Then they all burst out laughing. Allison, too, in spite of herself.
“So what am I supposed to do, forget the story? Just accept the fact that national can’t handle the ‘crash and burn’ stuff? No way. I’m the editor of this section and we have a job to do and if we can’t chase fires with the people we have we’re just going to have to get some new firemen.”
“Look, you’ve got to realize a couple of things here,” said Alan. “These people are older than the metro reporters. They get set in their ways, they get attached to their beats. They’re not as hungry as they used to be. Plus the fact that they can’t cut corners or their commitments at home like they once could.”
“So what you do,” said Walt, “is go over to metro and find some young tiger and send him on the story.”
“What about the bureau people?” asked Alan. “They’re used to this.”
“The bureau people. That’s a laugh. I’m having just as much trouble with them.”
“Then do something meshugge. Send someone from Boston to Texas.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do first. I’m going to get Tyson off his ass and to Miami. He knows these players better than anybody. He keeps saying he has to stay here for the big picture.”
“Allison,” said Warburg carefully, “the cost of winning this fight is losing. You understand that don’t you? It would be unheard of for a reporter to turn down an assignment flat out if he is forced unless he has a very, very good excuse. It’s grounds for dismissal. You have the right to force him. But you have to ask yourself what the price is. He may quit. If the price of victory is too much, it’s defeat.”
“Alan, I understand what you’re saying. I’m listening. But we have a little male-female problem here I suspect. It’s a new problem for this newsroom. If I don’t get over this hurdle now, it will be left for the next woman editor in this paper to do it. I venture to say that Sprague Tyson would not have refused this assignment from a male editor, and he’s not going to refuse it from me. You’ve got to let me handle this my own way. If I lose this one I’ll lose face with the whole staff, and then I won’t have any credibility at all and I might as well go back to being a reporter. Tyson’s going to Miami.”
“Good luck and may God be with you,” laughed Walt, as Allison marched out of his office and headed toward Sprague Tyson’s desk.
He was on the phone, as usual, head buried to avoid being overheard by the person next to him. He didn’t see Allison coming.
“Tyson,” she said as she reached his desk.
He looked up, frowned, shook his head, and leaned down into the phone again.
“Excuse me, Tyson, I need to talk to you, right away.”
She moved her body closer to his head so that he was staring down directly at her feet, one of which was tapping. Her arms were crossed, more to contain her anger than anything else.
Tyson mumbled something into the phone and hung up. When he looked up at her his face was stone cold. Rather than sit there and look up at her he chose to stand. He was over six feet tall and his slim body was all muscle. Standing, he looked down on her. She felt suddenly extremely nervous. She was also aware that the entire newsroom had stopped all activity and everybody was staring at the two of them with dread and fascination.
“What seems to be the problem, Tyson?” She hoped her voice held more conviction than it sounded to her.
“I don’t have a problem.”
“Oh, great, then you’ll be going to Miami?”
“Actually, I won’t. As I explained to your little lapdog, Malkin, I’m already working on the story, and I think I can make a better contribution to the paper here than there.”
Allison was outraged but she realized that she could not make a scene in this atmosphere, which had now taken on the silence of a religious service.
“Actually, I think that it is my job to make that decision, don’t you?”
That sounded weak. She shouldn’t have ended with a question mark. What if he didn’t back down? He would quit. The paper would lose the best investigative reporter in the country. He would be snatched up by the competition and win ten Pulitzers. She would lose her job and go down in infamy as the first and last woman editor of the Daily. People would say women just couldn’t be managers because they couldn’t handle men. She would ruin it for all women forever in journalism. So what the hell, she might as well kill herself. If she didn’t die right here of humiliation in front of everyone. Nothing like a little overdramatizing in moments of tension and stress. What would a male editor do now? Deck the son of a bitch, probably. No. That was just the way she liked to think men reacted. They never did what they were supposed to do. A man would never have gotten himself into this spot in the first place. Warburg had made that perfectly clear. But then she wasn’t a man. She was exploring new territory. She had to win and she had to do it on her terms.
“It might have been, if that decision had been well considered. But it wasn’t. You never discussed it with me at all. You just sent Malkin over here to order me to Miami.”
“By the same token you never considered what went into my decision,” she said. She was so angry that her voice was starting to shake, and her mouth was dry. She could tell that he knew she was about to lose it.
“You had no idea what my problems were,” she said. “You just refused.”
He looked surprised. He had unnerved her when he made the point that she hadn’t considered what he was working on. He had been taken aback with the same complaint. It was a standoff. But she was the boss and she had to win.
They stood and stared at each other for a long moment, squaring off.
Finally she lowered her voice to a whisper.
“Tyson,” she said. “You went to military school, as we discussed earlier. The way I understand it, the first rule you learn in the military is to follow orders. ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.’ This is not the military. But we have a breaking story that is our equivalent of battle. I have my orders from my superiors to cover that story. They didn’t tell me how. They just want the story and they want it first and they want it better. You can do the job better than anyone else. You’re the best. I have no doubt that you can be valuable to us on the phone. But it is my judgment, and I reserve the right to be wrong
, that you will be more effective if you’re there. Therefore, I respectfully request that you do as I ask. If we don’t get that story it’s my ass. And if it’s my ass it’s your ass. Do you read me, Tyson?”
She had seen that hint of a smile on his lips only once before, in the conference room. There was something about his eyes, the way he was looking at her, something behind that stony glare. She couldn’t tell whether it was mocking or appreciative. She didn’t want to test it. She was barely able to stand up, much less analyze his expression.
“Yes, sir,” he whispered. Then in a loud voice that surprised her and everyone around them, all of whom were pretending not to notice, he said, “Well, what the hell are we waiting for? I need airplane reservations. If we don’t get on it now the networks will have booked every plane to Miami. I need the clips, I need money. I’ll need a computer…. I’ll need a car when I get there. I’m going home to pack and I want everything ready when I get back.”
“Yes, sir,” she whispered.
She went quickly to Malkin who was grinning.
She shook her head in warning as she headed into her office with Malkin behind her. She didn’t want either of them to be perceived as gloating.
There was a crowd around the national desk watching television and reading wires. Whenever any big story broke everyone wanted a piece of the action, even if it meant just hanging around and knowing what was going on. Some of the younger reporters were making themselves highly visible in hopes of being sent off on the story when their elders couldn’t make it. They were all watching Allison.
“Don’t gloat,” she said to Malkin under her breath. “I don’t want anyone to think I’m enjoying this. And for God’s sake, make sure everything is ready for him when he gets back.”
“We’ve got him booked to Miami. I made sure of that while you were still, uh, negotiating with him. He’s got a car and a hotel room. We’ve got a problem with the machine. I’ve sent someone over to Systems to get him a computer and the fucking door is locked.”
“Well, find somebody with a key. This is not acceptable. What about money?”
