Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  David turned off the set in disgust, leaving the VCR to record the program. He switched on the radio and there was that awful woman again, the pop psychologist Patty Samson, referring to him as David Brian Fitzgerald (in all his life, he’d only heard his mother call him by all three names, and that was just when she was upset). She started off saying David fit the classic profile of the murderous “loner” and then began harping on his “obsession” with The Catcher in the Rye. “The same book Mark David Chapman was carrying when he shot John Lennon,” she noted cheerfully.

  “We’re clearly talking about the kind of person who experiences an almost orgiastic excitement at creating a disaster and then watching everyone rush around to deal with it. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to guess what kind of sexual dysfunction might be behind that …”

  He turned on the tape recorder and walked out of the room to call his lawyers.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, once he finally got Ralph on the line. “I can’t take this anymore. What if my kid hears what they’re saying about me?”

  “Hey,” said Ralph. “I can have you on six syndicated shows tomorrow to deny the whole shebang if that’s what you want. My friend Lindsay Paul is dying to get you up in front of a live studio audience.”

  “That’s not what I want, Ralph. Can’t we just sue them or something?”

  “Heh, heh, David.” Ralph made a burbling sound. “It’s a free country, remember? Freedom of speech, our forefathers, all that crap. By the way, did you see me on Live at Five last night, defending your good name?”

  “I’m afraid not.” David twisted off the top of a Rolling Rock bottle. “I just recorded it.”

  “Well, short of you going on the air to deny everything yourself, that’s the best we can do for the moment. Judah’s working the law angle.”

  David’s eyes fell on the pile of newspapers he’d been collecting. Most of the morning’s stories were meaningless rewrites of the previous day’s news, plus or minus the sinister detail about the twenty-minute gap in the bathroom and quotes from unnamed students and teachers intimating there’d always been something creepy about him (so why didn’t they say so before?). The only new development was that Sam Hall’s sister was blaming him for the bombing and threatening the school with a civil action. That was bad enough. But the photos were even more excruciating. They made him look stupid, sinister, angry, shameful, haunted, loaded, and most of all, guilty.

  Enough already. He felt like his throat was closing. “Ralph, I’ll be talking to you. I gotta get out of here.”

  He hung up and just sat there for a minute, finishing his beer. What to do now? He realized how much of his day-to-day life was tied up with the routines of teaching. Getting up early, preparing lesson plans, correcting papers, filling out forms, keeping class discussions on track, talking to parents, meeting with kids after school, writing college recommendations, talking to admissions officers. Without these little patterns, he literally didn’t know what to do with himself. How did other people get through the day?

  He decided he needed to get out of town for a while, even though he had no money to travel anywhere. He wasn’t due to see Arthur for four days anyway. He remembered a camping trip he’d taken with his father to a state park in Westchester called Fahnestock. It was one of the few fond memories he had of spending time alone with the old man. He recalled the smell of firewood and the blue glow around the marshmallows on a stick.

  It was too bad that later in the evening his father had frightened him with stories about bears and snakes in the woods and then refused to comfort him by keeping his sleeping bag close.

  “It’s a man’s journey,” he’d said. “Get on with it.”

  Judy Mandel was still way out in front on the story, but worried about falling back. The last thing she needed was to hang out with every other reporter and camera crew in the city outside David Fitzgerald’s apartment. She needed something fresh. Find the gravedigger, Bill Ryan used to say, quoting Jimmy Breslin. When they bury the President, talk to the gravedigger. That’s your fresh angle.

  Instead of the gravedigger, she went looking for the wife. Other reporters had been trying. Channel 2 had a crew in front of the building on West 98th Street for half the night, but all they got was a lousy comment out of her lawyer, pig-face Randy Barrett. The rest of the time, the doorman was keeping the press away and helping Renee sneak in and out of the building. But high on adrenaline overdrive, Judy took the next step and got the address of the son’s school off the Internet.

  That morning, she showed up outside the schoolyard, in her best soccer-mom get-up: sweatpants, old sneakers, oversized man’s shirt, and unwashed hair. Sure, she was a little young to pull it off completely, but at least she didn’t draw undue attention from the other parents dropping their kids off.

  She spotted a nervous-looking redhead coming out of the school just after classes started at 8:30 and recognized Renee from the driver’s license photo she’d also pulled off the computer the night before. Definitely a caffeine addict: looking over her shoulder, picking at her lip, lighting up a cigarette before she was even down the limestone steps. Judy was glad she’d stopped by Starbucks and bought her subject an espresso before even attempting this interview. The woman needed something.

  Like maybe a talk with an old friend. Judy pushed herself off the chain-link fence, affected a nonthreatening neighborhood slouch, and started waving in a reassuring familiar way before David Fitzgerald’s wife even got to the sidewalk.

  “Renee! How are you?”

  The representatives behind the counter at the Hertz car rental office on West 76th Street became giddy and excited when David showed them his driver’s license and then they disappeared into the back to whisper and peek out furtively at him. Even the guys from the garage kept coming into the office to gawk.

  What do I care? he told himself. I’ve got my dad’s old army surplus tent, a cooler full of beer and cold cuts, and a beautiful autumn day ahead of me. At noon, he set off in a white Ford Tempo, trailed by a convoy of agents in three unmarked cars, plus the regular ragtag band of reporters in secondhand import cars. They followed him up the Henry Hudson and onto the Saw Mill. At the exit for the Taconic Parkway, two television broadcast vans fell in line behind them.

  As he reached the edge of the campground and parked, he noticed roughly a dozen agents and a dozen reporters keeping a respectful distance but definitely still trailing him. The beautiful autumn day was fading, the air was getting unusually chilly for mid-October, and he realized he should have brought a jacket. Nearby, the reporters looked comfortable in stylish barn jackets from Orvis and Land’s End, while the agents had more pragmatic department-store coats.

  Apparently, they were all under the impression that he was heading for some arsenal in the woods where he might have buried additional evidence. Though why he would lead them to it so blatantly was not clear to him.

  He followed the line of pine trees out past a scummy frog pond and up over a steep hill until he settled on a tall gray rock overlooking a gulch full of brown leaves. The ground nearby was hard and cold with wide, vein-shaped cracks in the black soil. A hawk flew by overhead. With the agents and reporters watching him from behind the trees some 150 yards away he felt like an animal being stalked by hunters and National Geographic photographers, but to hell with them. He decided to tough it out and ignore them. He started trying to figure out how to set up his tent poles without the long-lost instruction book.

  As the temperature fell into the low forties and the bleak white sky turned gray and then navy, the news people finally departed, realizing nothing much was going to happen here. He cooked his hot dogs over the little hibachi and retreated into his tent just before eight, to drink Rolling Rocks and read Emerson by flashlight. He felt himself settling in, becoming part of the natural order of things, a man in his element. Why hadn’t he done this before?

  Then the rains came. There was no light drizzle beforehand, no heavy moisture in
the air. A curtain in the sky just seemed to part and the water came straight down, through the trees, through the loosely rigged olive canvas of David’s tent, through his clothes and into his skin. Within two minutes he was soaked to the bone and shivering. The wonders of the natural world. He moved around the tent frantically, trying to reset the poles, but everything he did just let in more water.

  Eventually, he stumbled out of the tent with his flashlight, dripping and sneezing, and found himself surrounded by the wild darkness of the woods, with no idea where his car might be. The rain was coming down in walls, not sheets, and the only light he could see was from a tent a football field and a half away on the right. He staggered toward it like Frankenstein’s monster pursued by mad villagers, trying to avoid the precipice of the leafy gulch.

  It was a good five minutes before he finally reached the edge of the light-filled tent and took hold of one of its flaps.

  “Excuse me,” he called out. “Can I come in and get dry a minute?”

  “Sure thing.”

  He lifted the flap and stepped inside, feeling a breath of hot air move through his clothes. The tent had been assembled with a kind of manly assurance, imposing a comfortable living space—a kind of instant apartment—on the rough landscape. Six perfectly dry people were sitting around a portable heater and a radio, listening to a Rangers hockey game. Donald Sippes, the FBI agent who’d led the raid on his apartment, half-stood and offered David a steaming mug with I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS written on the side.

  “Glad you could make it,” said Sippes. “You want some hot chocolate?”

  David took it gratefully, as well as a plaid blanket offered by a blond female agent.

  Sippes knelt down next to him, looking doleful. “I don’t suppose you want to make some kind of a statement, do you?”

  David hoisted the blanket over his shoulders as he sniffed and shook his head no.

  “Then we should just turn him out in the rain again,” said a man sitting in the corner, whom David now recognized as the pumpkin-headed agent who’d taken his son’s baseball mitt.

  “Chris?” Sippes furrowed his brow.

  “What did I say wrong?” The pumpkin-head flexed his thick neck. “We’re not in the business of coddling suspects, are we?”

  “Come on, Chris,” Sippes said, the reproach in his voice unmistakable. “He’s just going to stay until the rain lets up. Right?”

  “Right.” David crouched near the opening of the tent, facing away from Pumpkin-Head Chris.

  “Besides, he’s not a suspect yet. Officially.”

  The crowd roared on the radio and the announcer began babbling excitedly. Sippes picked up a mug with a picture of Snoopy on it and gestured at David. “You like hockey?”

  “No, not much.” He almost felt like apologizing.

  “Suit yourself.” Sippes went back to his sleeping bag in front of the radio.

  David remained crouched by the opening, watching the hard rain make a mist rise from the earth. His thoughts fell into the relentless rhythm: I can take this, I can take this, I can take this. If this is as bad as it gets, I can take this.

  39

  “PULL THE TRIGGER, LOVE.”

  A few minutes before eleven o’clock that night, Judy Mandel sat at her computer terminal with her finger poised on the send button, listening to Nazi bark orders over the phone. He was actually standing less than twenty yards away, behind his office glass, but somehow it made him feel more powerful, more omnipotent, more like the image of an American tabloid editor, to growl into the phone instead of coming over to speak to her directly.

  “What’s the holdup, doll?” he said with the exaggerated New York accent he put on when he’d been drinking too much. “We’ve got the story, we’ve got the edge. We’ve been holding the front page for five hours for you.”

  “I just want to try him one more time. This is a very big deal, Robert. It’s much more damaging than all the other stories we’ve had put together.”

  “How many messages have you left already?”

  “Three. But he’s been out in the woods all day and all night. We can’t just run this without any comment from him, can we?”

  Amazing. The further ahead she got on the story, the more she worried. It was like a rabid animal chasing her.

  From across the newsroom, she saw Robert do a little skip-hop and pirouette with a Scotch glass, as if he was remembering being a lithe young boy from Perth trying to pick up girls at a posh London party. It was a bizarrely private scene; he must have forgotten people could see him through the glass.

  “Come on, lover,” he crooned into the receiver. “You’ve given him every goddamn chance to answer back and he hasn’t done it. You’ve got the comment from his lawyers. This is going to be your biggest story yet. If we don’t do it, one of these other fucking bastards will and then we’ll have to kill ourselves. Pull the trigger.”

  “Give me a minute, Robert.”

  She was having a moment. She’d thought she wouldn’t have them anymore, now that she was sure of her role in life. But here it was again. The confusion boiling up in her. The whole world was chasing her story and she wasn’t sure how she could stay ahead.

  How had she gotten this far? Were they about to find out she was a fraud? Who was she supposed to be anyway? When she was fourteen, she’d looked through her mother’s Vogue and thought she should starve herself and become a super-model. But then she’d gone off to Vassar and the lesbian separatists had convinced her she should stop shaving her legs and be one of them for a while. And just lately she was trying to walk the walk and talk the talk to impress Robert and all these Neanderthal cops. What she still didn’t have was a full sense of who she should be in these little in-between moments when no one was watching her.

  She looked around for Bill Ryan, but he wasn’t there. So she put Nazi on hold and tried David Fitzgerald’s number one last time. After the fourth ring, the answering machine kicked on again and that was that. David Fitzgerald’s life would never be quite the same. She switched back to Nazi.

  “Happy now?” he said, tipping back his glass.

  She watched the drink go down and heard the ice clack against his teeth at the same time. “I gave him every chance.”

  “That you did, love. That you did. Now pull the fucking trigger.”

  She hit the send button and the green letters on her screen jumped. Words flew out on fired electrodes and fiberoptic wires, making their way to Robert and the copy editors, who’d eventually send them on to the plant in New Jersey, where a half million papers would be printed up and sent out on trucks in time for the morning edition. Within hours, the story would be picked up by radio, television, and Internet providers around the world.

  Thrilling and frightening to consider, what was beginning at the end of her finger. It could be the start of a new role for her. They’d have her on television news shows to talk about the story. And if she made a good impression, maybe they’d make her appearances a regular thing. Eventually, she’d have her own program, her own web page, she’d become the kind of personality other people wrote about and chased after. They’d write wonderful things and then awful things about her. Building her up and tearing her down. She felt exhilarated and ashamed at the same time. Is this what she wanted?

  She looked across the newsroom and saw that Robert had settled down in front of a terminal and was reading her story. It was too late to take it back, and she felt a tiny spark of apprehension.

  She wondered if somewhere out in the dark, wet woods David Fitzgerald was feeling that spark too.

  40

  DAVID DROPPED THE CAR back at Hertz just before two o’clock the next afternoon and took the subway uptown, feeling sore and still slightly chilled. Yes, the camping trip would be a fair addition to his ever-expanding collection of personal disasters, but at least he hadn’t had to read or listen to any stories about himself for the last twenty-four hours.

  When he came around the corner of 112th Street and Br
oadway, though, they were waiting for him. Except instead of the motley band of thirty, there were at least a hundred and fifty press people gathered outside his building. Where did they all come from and why were they so angry all of a sudden? Up to this point, there’d been a certain collegiality among them. Now they’d turned vicious. They were baiting him like an animal. The photographers stood on car hoods, braying at him. The attractive female reporters, who’d once looked on him with openmouthed interest, were plainly sneering. And the TV camera crews at the back were cursing him out loud.

  “Fuckin’ degenerate lowlife!” an enormous bull moose of a sound man called out, hocking phlegm into David’s path.

  “They ought to lock you up forever, you piece of shit!” shouted a cameraman.

  “What did I do?” David struggled through the group, looking for a friendly face. “What’s going on?”

  Sara Kidreaux thrust a microphone at him. She’d always seemed kind and attentive when she’d interviewed him before. But as she drew closer, he saw her face was a mask of indignation.

  “David,” she said. “What do you have to say in response to these newest allegations?”

  “What are they? I’ve been in the woods since yesterday afternoon.”

  The crowd pressed in around him and everyone began talking at once. Jeering, shouting questions, repeating accusations, asking him what he was going to do next. It was all furious and indistinct. A boom mike smacked him on the ear and a camera lens caught the end of his nose. Someone pulled the back of his shirt. It was like a gang initiation. None of these people would be so wanton and cruel on their own, but together they’d conjured a toxic atmosphere. David couldn’t breathe. He had to get away before they accidentally strangled him with their cables and wires.

  He bolted from the group and started to run for the building’s entrance, almost colliding with Judy Mandel.