by Jon Talton
I walk toward my loft in Pioneer Square. I need to pick up my car. I need to be somewhere. As it rains harder, I wish I had done it before meeting Rachel. The wind gusts straight and hard across Elliott Bay, catching me when I cross the streets and lose the cover of the buildings along First Avenue. I button my trench coat tight but I don’t have a hat, so my hair is soaked. I deliberately do not look up at the skyline. I do not want to see Troy Hardesty’s building. I have to file a column in seventeen hours and I am not prepared. My left eyelid starts to pinch. How could I develop a nervous tick at my age?
By the time I cross Yesler the sidewalks are deserted and it’s raining big, frantic drops. My shoes are ruined and my socks are wet. The street is darker and I am surrounded by the 1890s buildings of the old city, built after the great fire. About a third of them have been completely restored. The neighborhood goes through booms and busts and now it’s down on its luck. Empty storefronts that a few years ago housed expensive galleries. It can’t quite ever escape its old identity as Skid Row: the neon sign of the Bread of Life Mission proclaims “Come Unto Me.” A couple of upscale bars look half full, warm, and inviting. I fight the temptation to slip into Elliott Bay Books. The sidewalk tilts at a slight angle toward the street. I can’t quite keep from thinking about Rachel.
“Can you spare some cash?”
My heart retreats into my throat as a woman emerges from a doorway. A brown leather miniskirt is visible beneath a distressed coat. She might have been attractive once. Now she resembles a cat that has been drowned, then electrocuted. Her long hair is bunched and wet, and her eyes are two lost marbles. Maybe her nose has freckles on it or maybe she’s that filthy.
“Sorry to startle you,” she says. I tell her I don’t have any cash, which is the truth.
“Is there anything I can do to make some money? I fuck for money.”
I shake my head and say I’m sorry.
“I swear I’m eighteen!”
I don’t answer. She’s so skanky looking she could be seventeen or forty.
Suddenly her gaze sharpens. “I know who you are!” The rain stops. It doesn’t turn to sprinkles or drizzle, but stops dead. I turn and walk. I do not want to be this woman’s moment of clarity.
“Hey!” she yells and I hear her heels clicking after me. My initial unease returns. Even though I feel as if I can take care of myself, it’s been years since I’ve been in a confrontation, much less a fight. My pulse jumps into triple digits as I walk faster. Then, “Fuck!” She’s spilled onto the slick pavement. I laugh out loud. It could be worse: we had a story today about a man who kept a dead prostitute in his apartment for a week.
I look back and she’s on the sidewalk, pointing at me.
“Eleven-eleven, motherfucker! You’ll pay! Eleven-eleven!”
For a moment I stand frozen, remembering Troy Hardesty’s question: What do you know about eleven-eleven? My eyelid feels as if it wants to leap off my face and flee down the street. I turn back and stare at her.
“What did you say?”
She backs up against the rough, aged brick of a building, then turns and runs. I run after her, telling her to come back. She trots maybe twenty feet, then slips down an alley. I run faster but when I reach it she’s gone. The alley is narrow and hemmed in by old buildings, five and six stories high. A security light hangs in the middle, surrounded by a cage. I step in, walking slowly on the wet cobblestones. A half dozen big trash bags sit against the buildings on either side, part of the city’s campaign to eliminate dumpsters. Fifteen steps into the alley and the noise of tires on rainy street is swallowed in silence. I do my best to avoid the puddles as I check the doorways and indentations between the buildings; nothing. She couldn’t have run this fast. I can feel the rough, uneven paving stones through my sodden dress shoes. Eleven-eleven.
I’m ready for rats, at least I think I am, but nothing prepares me for the size of the thing that skitters out from a doorway, black, fat, and formless. Then I realize it’s an empty bag, propelled by the breeze. A jumble of ancient industrial flotsam fills five feet of space between two buildings. Doors proclaim business names and the alarm systems to keep you out. I am directly below the security light. Another few steps and the buildings are empty, the doors replaced with old plywood or iron. Decrepit fire escapes cling to walls and through broken windows and half-covered entrances comes the special darkness of abandoned places. Syringes are scattered every few feet. I walk faster, now not so sure I want to find her after all.
They emerge silently from the blackest part of the alley, all in bulky layers of clothes, all in hoodies. They look like malign Michelin men. I count five, realizing I can turn around or walk on, neither decision particularly safe. I am thirty feet from where the alley opens out again, but I can see only gloom. The street and park beyond are empty, the buildings dark. Not even a single pair of headlights passes by. I walk on, feeling the medicine ball return to my gut. I look ahead and at nothing, my tough street face on, the one I had learned to use back east. Fifteen more paces and they form up, pretty much closing off the alley. A cigarette end flares. Beyond them, I see a Starbucks sign, turned off, the store closed for the night. The whole street is a dead zone. I keep my pace steady, my face set, and I just walk through the group. Nobody says a thing. I thank God I’m tall, broad-shouldered, and can look tougher than I am.
I turn and walk south again, past darkened galleries, using the windows to discreetly see if anyone is following me. No one is. When I reach the next block there’s traffic and pedestrians, noise and neon, as if I have been teleported to a different city. I walk another block to my place. I will have to change clothes.
“Eleven-eleven! Eleven-eleven! Asshole!”
I turn and she is a silhouette, a block away.
She laughs. “You’ll get yours.”
I shake my head and laugh, too, resigned that she is jabbering and I am imagining connections that don’t exist. When I look again, she’s gone.
Once an old girlfriend put a hex on me, or so she said. It involved chicken bones and a cup of water on my desk. I just thought it was the leavings of the overnight sports writers, who sometimes camped out there to file their stories. It was only the next day that a photographer walked by, asked if I was all right, and told me of the ceremony that had been performed on my desk, with the girlfriend, Linda, and her shaman, arranging the bones and chanting over them. The Stranger found out about the episode and wrote a bit called “Voodoo Economics” about an unnamed business columnist being the victim of a newsroom hex. It was the beginning of the best years of my life.
Chapter Four
Friday, October 15th
I leave Melinda Stewart’s house in Capitol Hill a few minutes into the foggy dawn, tossing her newspapers up on the porch and walking across the damp flagstones. She had called me after she had gotten off work at midnight and then she had wanted to go all night long.
Talking, alas.
Our long, on-and-off love affair has cooled, but her friendship is precious. Halfway into a bottle of wine, it became clear that we were reciting all the old lines about the deaths of newspapers: Industry consolidation; impossibly high profit margins promised to Wall Street; groupthink that dumbed down content; monopoly markets that took away competition. How the intellectual capital of the newsroom was only seen as a cost center, and, at paper after paper, the most capable and experienced journalists were pushed out. How the yes-men and yes-women got ahead in management at too many newspapers. How newspapers are the only consumer product that spend almost no money promoting themselves.
Most of all, the problem was a business model that depended on essentially sending out miniskirted sales reps to sell confiscatory ad rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store magnates. With such profit margins, decade after decade, newspaper executives became complacent. Wall Street wouldn’t tolerate an innovation unless it promised huge and immediate returns. Then came innovations from outside like Craigs
list and the old model collapsed. I’d written about it before, about so many industries: monopolies and cartels always commit suicide.
Trendsetters such as Gannett blamed the newsroom, and “journalism” was degraded into reports about school-lunch menus, entertainment trivia, and missing blond teens. The “experts” blamed new technology. But the heart of the problem was dependence on an unsustainable business model. Giving away our content only made things worse—and then there was no going back, because nearly everybody was giving it away. Nobody wondered just who would be around to produce sustained, sophisticated journalism if people weren’t willing to pay for it.
We’d said it all, so many times, over so many bottles of wine. So we got silly after half that bottle was gone. Melinda and I had both started at a little paper in eastern Washington owned by the Free Press chain, and we had both started writing obituaries. So we took our turn pretending to write obits for the newspaper industry. The cause of death: suicide. As we laughed, I worked very hard to keep Troy Hardesty out of our magic circle.
We told old newspaper stories—about the time young Melinda got so mad she threw a typewriter at one of her tyrannical editors (he promoted her); the famed “women’s page” columnist who had the answers to remove any stain or fix any household emergency; the old courts reporter who would fall asleep in his chair for hours after filing his story for the day and the new assistant city editor (Melinda) who feared he had died that way; Jack Emery, the longtime entertainment writer who would attend press galas so he could stuff his pockets with hors d’oeuvres to eat all week at home; the people who had copulated on the historic conference table of the Governor’s Library.
“Not me,” I said.
She laughed, “Yeah, sure.” Melinda years ago taught me the word “louche.” I like it.
We reminisced about all the great scoops the Free Press had over the years, all the major news events we covered, when the newspaper enjoyed its greatest prestige and influence throughout the Northwest. At its best, the paper told the people what they needed to know to be informed citizens, told them the things that those in power didn’t want them to know.
We screamed together in unison: “It is the mission of the newspaper to report the news and raise hell!”
Next came our one-downsmanship contest—the worst assignments we ever had at the Free Press. And notorious corrections. Here the winner was the young features writer years ago, before they started charging for wedding announcements, who wrote up a notice about the nuptials being held in a “pubic ceremony.” It ran through 100,000 copies before a night editor caught it.
“And,” she said, nearly snorting wine through her nose, “what about Bob McClung?”
Indeed. The legendary sports columnist who spent 55 years at the Free Press had asked that his ashes be buried in the building. After his death, the publisher, Maggie Sterling, had arranged for him to be interred in the lobby, under an unassuming plaque. Journalists would bend down and rub the plaque for good luck. No one then could imagine a world without the Free Press. What would happen to Bob now if they closed the building?
We stopped laughing. We long knew the mortal danger facing newspapers and the near impossibility of ever finding a news job again, but somehow we thought the Free Press might survive. It was privately held, had little debt; readership was stable in print and growing fast online. But the advertising market continues to struggle. I cursed James Sterling, but Melinda was more philosophical.
“He’s probably doing the only thing he can,” she said. “The heirs control the board. As you probably know, the family covenants allow the board members to call for the sale of the newspaper if earnings fall below a certain level, and they have.”
“And nobody on the board wants to keep the paper going?”
“They just want their checks every month. Now they’re afraid that not only will that go away but they’ll also be on the line for the losses. So they’re cutting staff to make the paper more attractive for a buyer. But they’re sure as hell not going to sit through months or years of being in the red.”
“Bastards.”
“I think Sterling would keep the paper if he could. He’s not the bad guy. Blame the board. You still have a crush on Maggie Sterling. You never realized how dysfunctional this family is.”
I understand dysfunctional families. I don’t understand rich people, even though I have spent most of my career writing about the messy business of money. I was careless in picking my parents, didn’t get a trust fund, or the gold door-opener from the Ivy League university. All I could ever do was work harder than anybody else. Now even that won’t be enough. “Maybe,” I said, “I can get a job in the courthouse lobby, the guy at the information desk.”
“Yeah,” Melinda said, “I can see Mister Big Personality doing a job like that. Sure.”
We fell asleep, spooning against each other. But that was it. Me, I’d rather keep tension, unemployment, mortality at bay with sex. Melinda isn’t built that way.
Outside it’s cool and the air is thick with fog. It takes me a moment to notice the man leaning against my car. He wears a leather jacket and jeans, and as I get closer I can make out his close-cropped brown hair. Seattle is one of the safest large cities but the crime of the season is mentally-ill transients that murder strangers out on the street. I’m on guard but armed only with the warm memory of Melinda’s company. But as I get closer he looks pretty normal and well scrubbed, with clean clothes and an expensive brown leather jacket. He has a jock’s face. His eyes are very blue under the streetlamp. People in this neighborhood walk their dogs at all hours. He stands and walks away when I approach. He’s not walking a dog.
I drive down the hill into downtown, trying to use the windshield wipers to wash the seagull attack away. The bay is shrouded in fog and the Space Needle looks like a ghostly alien craft from a 1950s movie. Back home I shower then dress and make a quick run through the Free Press, the Seattle Times and the Wall Street Journal. It is a good day for the Free Press: an exclusive by our Washington bureau that the FBI had violated the law more than a thousand times in its domestic surveillance work. We’re proud that our D.C. staff punches above its weight class. Close to home: another scoop about poor security against terrorism at the local ports and a story about corruption in the city streets department. It’s a good day to be a journalist. Except for the story in the Seattle Times about the pending sale or closure of the Free Press. It’s on the front page. Of course, we wrote about it, too.
The Seattle Times has a sidebar about the history of the paper, including the fabled infighting of the extended Forrest and Sterling families, the uniting figure of Maggie Sterling, the seventy-eight heirs to the family fortune who are shareholders of the company, and even Tyee Island in the San Juans. The private compound was built by the colorful patriarch, Gov. Eugene Forrest, and features some grand houses and little cottages built by some of the leading architects of the 1920s. Family members are able to reserve a house there one week a year. I think: If they sold the damned island, it would probably keep the newspaper going for ten years. But this isn’t the way rich people think.
I get a call back from New York, where it’s a little after nine. A good source at Global Insight and he’s willing to be quoted. He doesn’t know of an impending deal but he sees how it could work.
“The best part of the company is Olympic Defense Systems,” he says.
I tell him I’ve never heard of it.
“That’s the way they want it. But it’s a very solid unit. They’ve done a lot of contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, avoided the taint of outfits like KBR. Also a major supplier of night-vision goggles.”
“What about the defense cutbacks?”
“Don’t fall for that. Some programs are being cut, but the budget keeps growing.”
I wear my phone headset and make notes on my laptop. I thank him, shut down the computer, decide to head into the newsroom and start writing.
Ou
tside on the street, a tall, skeletal young man stops me. He wears a denim jacket adorned with arcane patches and has a silver chain hanging from his pocket. And he is wearing a kilt. I’m wearing a gray suit and one of my favorite ties, sartorial armor for the day ahead. We momentarily stare at each other like members of isolated tribes who suddenly discovered the other. He uncorks the earbuds from his head.
“I read your column yesterday. Why are you always making excuses for big business? The middle class is under siege. Don’t you get that?”
I thank him for reading. Long ago I decided to let the columns speak for themselves. I’m not a reporter. As a columnist, I’m paid to have an opinion. How much opinion varies from paper to paper, but at the Free Press I have considerable latitude. I try to use it wisely. One day I might take readers into the executive suite, to hear what Steve Ballmer or Howard Schultz has to say. Another day, I connect the dots, backed by twenty years experience as a financial journalist. I’m the one who’s paid to see around corners, demystify the news, analyze, and investigate. I start conversations. I start arguments. Three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Sixteen inches on the weekdays. Twenty-four inches on Sunday—more if I need it. I have the best job in journalism.
This reverie ends when I encounter another man. He’s the same one who had been leaning against my car outside Melinda’s house. This time he has a friend in a dark suit. They walk toward me.
He calls me by my first name and shows a black wallet with a small badge and credentials. He pockets it after five seconds.
“We need to talk.”
I make excuses and ask if I can contact them after deadline. I already talked to Sgt. Mazolli. They stare at me. The man in the suit is more compact than his partner but has one of those ageless, unlined, churchgoing faces. He might be thirty. He might be fifty. I guess that he’s older than the first man. His dark hair is thinning, worn unpretentiously, and he looks amiable. But he steps to one side of me, way inside the comfort zone, boxing me in. The first man leans in and smiles at me. His eyes are still supernaturally blue and his skin is flawless. His chin is prominent, nearly overwhelming the rest of his features. He’s not a person who looks better when he smiles. He takes my shoulder and steers me toward a black Chevy Suburban.
