“What are you doing here?”
“Good to see you too, Dad.”
In the ensuing and awkward silence, it struck Jamie that his father looked thinner, paler, in need of a shave. There was a small Band-Aid strip obscuring his left eyebrow. In his haggard state, he could see a more striking resemblance to Uncle Lou.
“I need to say something,” Jamie said.
Morris shook his head, determined to forego another scene, but he spread his hands apart in reluctant concession. He took a deep breath and thought of Molly.
“Ok, fine,” he said. “But don’t you have work to do?”
“No,” Jamie said. “I didn’t come here to work.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Well, I see that you’re working,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, the strike’s over. We all came back.”
“Not the drivers. Some of them would have lynched me outside a few minutes ago if the cops had let them.”
“It’s complicated,” Morris said. “There’s extenuating circumstances.”
“Really?” Jamie said. “I thought you’re not supposed to cross a picket line under any circumstances. That’s what I heard for the last thirty some-odd years.”
“Jamie, look, I’m not going to discuss this with you—not here or anywhere,” Morris said. “So if you’re not here to work, go home and come back tomorrow for your shift.”
Jamie shook his head.
“I don’t think so, Dad. I’m not coming back.”
“Not coming back where?”
“Here to work,” Jamie said. “I’m done.”
“What do you mean, done? They didn’t fire anyone.”
“No, I didn’t mean to suggest that I was fired,” Jamie said. “I didn’t even know the strike was over until I heard it on the radio driving in from Aaron’s birthday party.”
“So, what then?”
“So I’m quitting,” Jamie said.
“Steve got you in at the Sun?” Morris said.
Another insult, posed as a query. Would the man ever stop?
“I’m not going to the Sun or to any other newspaper. I’m just quitting.”
“To do what?”
“It’s a long story. Do you want to hear it or is this not the time?”
Morris didn’t immediately respond. But after a few seconds he offered a compliant nod, which Jamie interpreted as a triumph. He almost could have walked away satisfied without saying another word.
“I’m quitting the newspaper business, leaving New York,” Jamie said. “Karyn has a job offer. Some guy she knew in college is starting a company and wants to make her an executive with a good salary and benefits. The problem is that the company is not being launched here.”
“Where?”
“Out west.”
“Jersey?”
The hilarity of his father’s response almost made Jamie crack up.
“No, not exactly,” he said.
“Then where?”
“Seattle.”
Morris looked at him, with skepticism bordering on disbelief, as if Jamie was trying to annoy him by making up nonsense.
Jamie, meanwhile, wondered if Morris even had a geographic clue.
“That’s crazy,” Morris said.
“That’s pretty much what I said when Karyn first told me,” Jamie said. “I’ve known about it for a few days, actually since the beginning of the strike. I’ve been agonizing over her taking Aaron away ever since. I thought maybe if I went back to work the other day, she would look at things a little differently. Maybe she’d realize how far she’d be going. But the strike really got her thinking about money, which she—we—don’t have much of. She’s worried about Aaron’s future, college and everything. I started thinking maybe I should be too. Because Karyn works part-time in a bookstore and me, I don’t make enough here to save a penny. The annual union raise is—what?—like twenty-five bucks before taxes? We sat for two hours tonight and the more she talked about it, the less sense it made for me to try and talk her out of it. Then right in the middle of it, this guy happens to call and says he needs to know if she’s still interested. She says she is but she tells him how difficult it will be to move Aaron three thousand miles from his father, which I was naturally happy to hear. But the next thing I know she’s crying, and the guy is telling her he understands. Suddenly he’s asking about me, what I do and then she’s handing me the phone. I start talking to this guy about the newspaper business, how readership has been declining and how many people are predicting that it’s going to get a lot worse in the coming years. Just like that, he’s asking me if I would also be interested in moving out to Seattle to work for him.”
“And do what?”
Jamie could only respond with a reluctant shrug.
“He said he would meet with me to discuss it after Karyn and I made up our minds that we’d both be willing to go,” Jamie said. “All I know is that it’s a new company that’s going to sell books. On the computer, this internet thing everybody’s talking about.”
“Who’s everybody? What’s an internet?”
Again short on specifics, Jamie evaded the questions.
“I know it sounds a little far-fetched. But Karyn says he’s some kind of Wall Street whiz, has money to burn and is sinking millions into this venture. So, what the hell, I said I’d do it. What do I have to lose that’s more important than Aaron? Where am I going here? Do I love this job so much and am I so good at it, that I can’t try something else? Let’s face it: I only got in here in the first place because of you and maybe Uncle Lou. When I heard on the radio that the strike was over, I felt like I don’t even care anymore. I don’t even want to come back.”
“So you and Karyn are back together?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Not as a couple, just, you know, for Aaron. We’re going to do what’s best for him and—who knows?—maybe that will turn out to be good for me.”
“So that’s it?”
“That’s what?”
“What you came here to tell me. You’re picking up and moving to…?”
“Seattle, yeah.”
Jamie lied with such a straight face he actually surprised himself. That wasn’t what he’d come to say. He’d accepted no such unidentified position with the invisible bookstore. He hadn’t so much as pondered the question of resigning his job and moving to Seattle.
The call and the offer were real enough. But all Jamie had done was promise Karyn that he would think about it. He made no promise beyond giving her friend an answer within twenty-four hours.
“It would be great for Aaron to have both of us out there,” Karyn had told him. She also said she was going to go no matter what Jamie did. “I know that’s a lot of pressure on you, Jamie,” she said. “But I need to do this.”
If nothing else, Jamie could see that he had gotten his father’s attention, even if he had to stretch the truth to do it.
For the moment, anyway, the benefit of telling Morris that he was quitting the Trib had given Jamie leverage, a feeling of liberation. I can do this, he thought. I can pick up and move across the country, if that’s what I decide to do. Maybe that’s the only way he’ll ever respect me—if I get the hell out of here.
Their roles were reversed now on a multitude of levels, even across the labor divide. That brought Jamie back to the original point of his coming here: to confront his father with his own contradiction, lash out at him for betraying the principles that had overrridden everything—and everyone—in his life.
“Just one more thing, about what happened the other day,” Jamie said.
Morris stared at him, tight-lipped and solemn, with eyes that looked tired of coping.
“I’m sorry for embarrassing you on the picket line,” Jamie said. “Like I said, I had this thing with Karyn hanging over my head, all this pressure.”
Jamie broke eye contact, looking down at the wrinkled neck in the opening of Morris’ shirt collar. The words had come unre
hearsed and unfamiliar, as if they’d been smuggled into his mouth by a subversive part of his brain. But in the context of this intriguing new dynamic, it was what he suddenly felt. While setting the conditions, on some unconscious level he could recognize the senselessness of taunting or gloating or punishing a man who seemed so…so…sad.
“That’s it, I’ve said what I needed to,” Jamie said. “I’ll be going.”
He almost wanted to tease Morris, to tell him, And you can’t do anything to stop me.
Jamie was half a dozen steps down the corridor when Morris did do something to stop him.
“Hold on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Jamie half-turned, looked back at his father, hesitated and cautiously retraced his steps. Morris pushed the door open and held it for him. He followed Jamie inside and motioned for him to pull up a chair from the vacant desk nearby.
“I know what you’re probably thinking, about us coming back to work,” Morris said. He lowered his voice. “Believe me, there’s good reason.”
Morris comically pecked at the keyboard with stiff index fingers. Jamie had to admit that his own typing skills, developed informally on the job, weren’t much better.
“This stuff we do here, it’s nothing like the old days,” Morris said, making small talk, eyes on the screen. “Do you remember the composing room?”
Not happily, Jamie thought. “A little bit, mostly the noise,” he said.
“The couple of times I brought you in, you hated it. It was a lot different than this…”
Jamie beheld the spartan surroundings, two other once-upon-a-time printers parked at terminals and another on the telephone with one leg splayed over the side of his desk.
“You never did explain just what it is you do,” he said.
“Nothing too much,” Morris said. “We, uh, you know…”
“Move pages, yes. But what does that actually mean?”
Morris turned to him and nodded. “This is kind of like the traffic station for the paper. The editors make up the pages with the stories and photos and send them here. Then we tag them for the guys who operate actual presses—the pressmen—so they can identify the pages, know which ones go to the city edition and which ones are meant for Brooklyn, for Queens, etcetera.”
He punched a couple of keys and a Trib front page appeared.
TRIB UNIONS CROSS DRIVERS
“This is tomorrow’s first-edition wood,” Morris said. “It’s already gone to press. But now we get the changes, the re-plates, for the later editions. The basic stuff most nights would be a ballgame in sports—you know, the updated sports scores, maybe a late-night shooting in the Bronx. When the new page comes to me, I put a star over here on the top right corner. This way the pressmen know that this page has to be re-set for the late city. Two stars for last city edition, a circle for the sports final. That’s the last one we do every night.”
The circle was the edition that was sold most days on the stands in Brooklyn Heights. Jamie had counted on it religiously for the late Lakers box scores from the West Coast.
“The pressmen, they only know to look for the stars or the circle. They don’t know one story from another. They don’t know or even look at what’s on the page. So if we don’t let them know with the markers, they’ll just leave what’s already in the paper.”
“How do you keep track in here who’s supposed to send out which page?”
“The other guys mainly check the pages to make sure the ads are in the right place, that all the holes are filled,” Morris said. “But all the pages come through this machine right here. It’s the only one that can change the edition markings and send the pages downstairs.”
“Why only one?”
“It’s the way the system is set up, so that only the foreman can authorize a re-plate. That way there’s no confusion, no mistakes, once the pages get down to the presses.”
Jamie understood he was sitting with the man in charge, if that was the point. It didn’t seem to be, given the tone of Morris’s voice. It was soft and almost solicitous.
He turned to Jamie and dropped his head so that it was below the top of the computer screen. His whisper made Jamie lean uncomfortably closer to the stubble on the side of Morris’ face.
“The other guys aren’t involved with what I’m about to show you. They don’t have to be so keep your voice down and don’t make a big deal about it. And you can’t walk out of here and let anyone know. Another hour, it won’t make any difference. But for now this has got to stay between us.”
Jamie nodded, clueless as to what Morris was getting at. He played along as Morris pecked away at a couple more keys. Another Trib front page appeared, with a bold-faced headline that was as big as any he’d seen.
HO MY LORD!
Under which, in smaller typeface, was the explanatory sub-head:
Feds Say Trib Captain Brady Has Hookers On Board
“What the hell…?” Jamie looked at his father, who shushed him and motioned for him to read on.
Trib publisher and conservative values champion Leland Brady, known for entertaining the city’s power elite with flamboyant parties on board the customized yacht named for his wife, has had ongoing dealings with a woman soon to be charged by the U.S. government with running a highbrow prostitution ring, the Trib has exclusively learned.
Ruth Ann Hollender, known to high-rolling clients by the pseudonym Ms. Annie, has told federal investigators that Brady has been a steady client for the last year and a half and has often had call-girls visit aboard the Vanessa Queen, typically docked off a South Street pier, a short distance from the Trib building.
Hollender has long advertised her business as a legal escort service but investigation sources say other clients, offered immunity from prosecution by the feds after being confronted with bank records and wiretapped conversations, have admitted to paying as much as five hundred dollars an hour for sex romps. The feds have also wiretapped conversations between Hollender and Brady, as well as his son, Maxwell, executive editor of the Trib.
Law enforcement sources also say some of the women may be underage immigrants from Eastern European republics recently freed of Soviet rule and that further charges could be forthcoming.
Brady’s name and contact telephone number were on the client list provided to authorities by Hollender, whose name has also frequently appeared on guest lists for bashes thrown by Brady in the two years since he purchased the Trib from former publisher Maxine Hancock.
Story continued on Page 3.
“You want to see the jump?”
At the moment, Jamie was still trying to fathom the five astonishing paragraphs on the front, alongside of which was a photo of Brady’s yacht and the caption: LOVE BOAT? He pointed to the sub-head, having finally noticed the clever reversal of the H and O in the large-print headline—Ho as a derivative of whore.
“This is incredible,” Jamie whispered. “Where did this come from?”
“From the newsroom, like every other story,” Morris said. “Like I said, my job is just to make sure the re-plate gets tagged so the pressmen know what they’re looking for. This is the new front for the late city. It closes at eleven-thirty, on the presses by midnight.”
Morris checked his watch again. It was a couple of minutes past eleven. “It’s got to go soon, in fact.”
“This is really going into the paper?”
Morris again motioned for Jamie to come closer.
“This is why we came back in tonight. They couldn’t put it in the first edition because Brady is around most of the day and the son checks the first couple of pages when it comes off the press, and then supposedly disappears for the night. It had to be a re-plate to get this in and since they had management people or some guys from one of Brady’s papers in Canada working in here during the strike, they needed one of us—me—back on the job. Otherwise…”
“But how does putting a story like this help? Brady will go nuts. He’ll fire everyone.”
“What I was told by your guy Robbins is that they think it’ll disgrace him so much that he’ll have to sell, even if he somehow beats the rap. They say there are a couple of big shots who want to buy the paper, especially some Canadian real-estate guy. Tell you the truth, I don’t know if what they’re doing is a smart move or not, but I do know this guy Brady was up to no good. He’s screwing with all of us, and nobody wants to work for him. So when they asked me if I would help, I said I would.”
Jamie nodded his approval, strange as it was that Morris seemed to be asking for it. He re-read the story, taking note that it contained no byline. He’d actually forgotten that Brady was married, but now did recall a profile in New York Magazine about the socialite wife who stayed behind at a Surrey estate, who was said to have developed a dislike for America while spending a year studying abroad. She was quoted as saying she would visit from time to time, but that she had her own cultural and philanthropic interests in Ireland and England, as well as several grandchildren from a previous marriage, while Lord Brady had his newspaper to attend to in New York.
Among other more rapscallion endeavors, apparently.
The story’s jump on page three contained only a few paragraphs alongside a photo of the alleged madam. She was a pretty woman with styled medium-length brown hair. Her age was difficult to ascertain due to oversize sunglasses perched on a sliver of a nose. She wore a spaghetti-strap blouse that paid homage to her full breasts. Jamie read on, but there was little additional information, no other names mentioned. The juiciest material was crammed onto the front page. Given the surreptitious haste in which it was no doubt prepared, understandably so.
But by whom? There had only been those fictionalized bylines in the strike paper, no reporters, with the exception of…”
Cal is a great man—you know what I’m saying? I’ve been telling him that I’m working on something for thirty years. Once in a while, I actually deliver more than the usual crap. In this business, that’s all it takes…
Blaine—who else? This had to come from him. I should have known that Blaine was biding his time.
Carla was close to Willis and had known something was brewing that morning. The story was ready. That’s what she had been tempted to tell him. That was the forthcoming development she had tried to lure him back to the picket line with.
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