by Jon Cleary
In late January she applied to The Times, the News and the Post for a position; but none of them wanted a foreigner, not if they had to go to the extent of guaranteeing her for a work visa. It seemed that it was to be the Courier or International and no other choice.
III
She had been working on the Courier a year when she began to worry that she was getting nowhere. She had a good salary and she was still earning money on the outside with articles in various magazines; she kept waiting for Jake Lintas to crack down on her outside work, but so far he had made no move. On the paper itself she was being held down by men much older than herself who were hidebound by their prejudice against women; they laughed at Women’s Liberation and knew that God, who was a man, would eventually convince them of their foolishness. Books by Friedan, Millett or Greer, if they were reviewed at all in the book columns, were always reviewed by men and invariably panned. The mood of the editorial staff was that one had only to look at Washington where, though men had fouled up the White House, women, quite properly, were not trusted with running the country. What was good enough for the country was good enough for the Courier. They conveniently overlooked the fact that they themselves worked for a publisher who was a woman. Like most people afflicted with the cataracts of prejudice, they looked down, never up.
News came in every day, some of it turning into history; but Cleo never felt she was contributing to any story that would last beyond tomorrow’s edition. She had lost interest in what was going on in Vietnam; though she had had experience of it, no editor ever asked her opinion of it. Television had taken over Vietnam: as someone wrote, war was now in the living-room.
Alone in her apartment one Saturday night, she was watching the news when she saw a familiar face turn and stare at her from the screen. Pierre Cain, out of uniform, looking almost ragged in unpressed shirt and trousers, stood in line outside the US embassy in Saigon amongst a crowd of other would-be refugees. There was no sign of Madame Cain. The major, sad—and bitter-faced, stared at the camera, accusing—whom? Cleo suddenly felt a sharp stab of guilt. She was not responsible for his and his country’s plight; but she, too, had deserted him. Out of sight, out of mind . . .
She sat down at once and wrote him care of JUSPAO, unable to think of anywhere else he might be traced. She offered to help him in any way she could, asked after Madame Cain, finished by saying how much she regretted the way the war had gone. She went out immediately and posted the letter, as if Pierre Cain had to be rescued before daylight. But then the weeks went by and she never heard from him. Guilt still troubled her, but it slowly faded. Life, meaning her own, had to go on.
She took two weeks’ vacation and went to Miami. It was the wrong time of the year to go to Florida, Alain told her: wait till Christmas and he would take her down to the Brisson house at Palm Beach. But she wanted to get away from him as much as from New York; she wanted to swim in the ocean, lie on the sand and think. If she was to remain in America she would need to do a lot of thinking.
She did not like Miami, but was fascinated by it; or rather, by the people she saw there. It seemed that everyone wore dark glasses; she felt she was in a city of walking skulls. Though it was a vacation city only the very young seemed to be enjoying themselves. Everyone else walked around with the same expressions she had seen on the faces of New Yorkers. America, she decided, was as worried as herself.
On her third day in the city a Senate Crime Commission came to town. Educating herself in America, she had been reading recent American history as well as past; she now remembered reading snippets on the Kefauver inquiry into crime in the 1950s. That had quietened organized crime down for a few years; it hadn’t lessened it, it had just become less visible. Now, with Richard Nixon gone and Gerald Ford in office, a new moral tone was taking over Washington. The nation was about to be cleaned up again.
Cleo, restless with herself after only three days, called Jake Lintas in New York. “I’d like to cover the inquiry—”
“We’re taking the wire services on it.”
“Mr. Lintas—” They were still formal with each other, keeping each other at a distance. “I’ll be working in my own time. If the paper doesn’t use my stuff, it’ll have lost nothing. I’ll just have lost a few days of my vacation.”
“Go ahead,” he said abruptly and hung up.
Cleo had never seen a Senate committee at work. Her first impression was of circus performers, out of costume, milling around looking for a ring-master; hadn’t she read somewhere that Ringling Bros came to Florida for the winter? This was another circus out of season. The committee members, counsel, witnesses, spectators all seemed to be enjoying themselves, determined to be informal, as if organized crime were a sport and not a killing business. But gradually a pattern was imposed on the proceedings; the patient questions, repeated with only a little variation, dampened the jovial air. Frowns began to appear on the brows of witnesses and spectators alike, crime was no longer a game.
Cleo put it all down, writing her piece as she used to write her column in the Examiner, tongue-in-cheek but cattle-prod in hand. She called the Courier and, instead of asking for the re-write desk, asked to be put through to one of the typists she had got to know.
“Annie, do me a favour. Take this down exactly as I dictate it, please. Then put it on the copy desk with my name in caps at the top.”
Annie Rivkin had worked for the Courier for twenty years and hated all the men who worked on it. “Go ahead, honey. I already got your name in red at the top.”
An hour later Alain called her at her hotel. He had been working on the copy desk for the past three months and her gamble, about which he knew nothing, had paid off. “It goes in exactly as is, Cleo. You were lucky—it came to me on the copy desk, not one of the other guys. I didn’t touch a word. I took it in to Jake Lintas and persuaded him he had to run it. With a by-line.”
“You do too much for me, Alain. But I love you for it.”
“I wish you did,” he said quietly. “Goodnight, Cleo.”
On her first day at the inquiry a small, slim young man had sat beside her, nodded hello but said nothing else, then proceeded to make copious notes in a thick notebook in the quickest shorthand she had ever seen. She wondered why he didn’t use a tape-recorder, he seemed intent on getting so much down; then she wondered if he didn’t want to be overheard and further wondered why. At each adjournment during the day the young man disappeared, never once stopping to swap comments with the other reporters.
On the second day Cleo found herself again sitting next to the young man. She introduced herself and after a slight hesitation he said, “Tony Rossano.”
“What paper?”
Again there was the slight hesitation, “Il Corriere.”
“The Courier?”
“It’s not the same as your paper, Miss Spearfield.” Rossano’s small smile seemed to hurt him. “It’s an Italian-language paper in Philadelphia. Excuse me.”
He got up immediately and moved away and never came back to the reporters’ table. Cleo watched him each day, busily scribbling away in his notebook, but he was always on the far side of the big room, talking to no one, clad in an armour of concentration. Only once did he let the armour open, almost like lifting a visor. Cleo, intrigued by him, watching him when the proceedings before the committee grew dull, saw him once look up and nod at someone in the main body of the room. Cleo followed the direction of Rossano’s gaze, but couldn’t be sure whom the young man had nodded to. But the nod was meant for one of four men, all lawyers, seated behind the principal witness of the day, a one-time leading member of the old Anastasia gang in New Jersey and now claiming to be retired and respectable. Cleo wondered if Tony Rossano was working for someone else besides Il Corriere.
Then after four days the Senate committee moved on, to do another show in another town. Once again Cleo had the feeling of watching a circus going through its paces and its itinerary, but she didn’t make that comment in her piece on the last day.
She was still a visitor in the country, still on a visa that could be withdrawn. She kept her tongue out of her cheek, at least on that point.
She did not stay in Miami for the full two weeks. She went out to dinner twice with men from the reporters’ table; both men, one from Atlanta and the other from St. Louis, tried to get her into bed while she was still digesting her dinner. The man from St. Louis, who had a brewery belly like her brother Alex’s, began pawing her while she was having her dessert.
“I never go to bed on a full stomach,” she said, gathering up her handbag. “And yours is fuller than most I’ve seen.”
She went back to New York the following day. Jake Lintas greeted her with grudging praise for her stories and Alain greeted her with almost effusive delight for her mere return. She went to bed with him on the first night, but refused to stay till morning, the first time he had asked her to do so. She did not want Claudine to come down from the penthouse and discover her having breakfast there. She had an old-fashioned respect for a mother’s sensitivities. She also had an old-fashioned idea that if you stayed the night with a man it suggested some form of commitment; going to bed with him for an hour or two could be classed as a social engagement. She smiled at her own hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is a comfort when there is nothing else to fall back on.
She now had a by-line, but Jake Lintas still stubbornly kept her on police rounds. She knew she was being victimized, but there was nothing she could do about it; neither Carl Fishburg nor any of the other editors would go to bat for her. She did not complain to either of the Roux, Alain or Claudine, though she was doubtful if the former could do anything for her or that the latter would want to. She was on a treadmill, with the months slipping by like a moving diorama that moved faster than the treadmill.
One night in November, at 11.30, her phone rang. It was Stewart Norway. “Sorry to call you so late, Cleo. But I thought you’d be interested in the news—I’ve just had a phone call from Canberra. Kerr, the Governor-General, has just sacked the Whitlam government.”
She thanked him for the news; but he knew her thanks was hollow and he understood. He was a Labour voter and she could imagine him lying awake all night seething at the political crime that had just been committed in Canberra. She herself lay for a while trying to focus her feelings. She was surprised, but not shocked or aghast, as Stew Norway had been; unlike him, she did not know when or even if she would ever return to Australia. It was almost as if news had come in on the press wires of a revolution in a foreign country.
At last she called the operator and asked for her father’s number in Canberra. It was an hour before she got through; the lines to Canberra, it seemed, were being burnt out. Then her father came on the line, his voice as clear as if he were sitting beside her. Which she wished he were.
“I’ve just heard the news, Dad. What happened?”
“John Kerr has just kicked us out.”
“Were you expecting anything like that?”
“Hell, no! We’ve had a crisis here in the Senate, but I don’t think any of us expected it to blow up like this. Gough came back from seeing Kerr looking like a stunned mullet.” Ah Dad, don’t speak Australian tonight. It needs more than that. Be Roman . . . But she could think of no Latin, always her worst subject, to fit the occasion. “There’s to be an election next month.”
“Will you win it?”
“We’ll waltz in, sweetheart. The ordinary voter’s not going to let Kerr and Mal Fraser get away with this. Gough’s come up with a great phrase—Maintain the rage! That’s all we have to do, maintain the rage.”
But then the line became bad, his voice faded. Was he talking into the wind? she wondered. She wished him good luck and hung up. She had a moment of guilt, felt that she should jump on a plane and fly out to comfort him; in the old days he would have had Brigid to stand by him. Then she told herself he was an old campaigner; any man who had been in the Australian Labour Party for forty years had seen more battles than any of the generals from the war colleges of the world. Her brothers, even Perry the conservative who would vote in the secrecy of the ballot booth for Malcolm Fraser, would do their best to keep up his spirits. Sylvester himself would already be polishing his rhetoric, the politician’s weaponry, practising the belly-laugh, getting ready to go out on the hustings, the battleground he had always enjoyed more than Parliament. He’ll survive, she thought, and at last dropped off to sleep.
II
Contrary to Sylvester’s expectations, in the December elections Labour did not waltz back in. The voters, far from maintaining the rage, an emotional state that the average Australian can only achieve politically when drunk, sent Labour into the wilderness again with a landslide defeat. Sylvester himself was returned to the Senate, but, as he told Cleo on the phone, he felt no personal victory.
“One of the press gallery reporters asked me for a comment. I tried to be like Gough, he’s good on the Latin tags, but I couldn’t. In the end all I could give him was Up you Jack.”
Cicero might have made a similar remark, but there had been no press gallery in the Roman Senate. “That was good enough, Dad. Be Australian all the way.”
Cleo went back to her own problems of trying to get off the treadmill. Then the Senate crime inquiry came to New York, the climax of its investigations. Cleo and Hal Rainer went down to the Foley Square courthouse to cover the proceedings.
“It’s just a repeat,” said Hal, like a TV re-run. Twenty-four, twenty-five years ago I saw the same thing when the Kefauver committee came to town. Even this dame they’ve got on the stand today, Billie Locke, she’s like a re-run. She could be Virginia Hill’s daughter. Hill, she was Bugsy Siegel’s girl friend, she’s still around somewhere.”
“Well, I suppose crime is like everything else. The more things change et cetera, et cetera.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, unless I’d said it in French, which I can’t. Frank Costello was the Big Fish back in those days. That was the first time they’d televised anything like that. Frank said he wouldn’t appear on camera and he won his point. The TV directors had to satisfy themselves with focusing their cameras on his hands. For a week there Costello’s hands were famous. Palmists tried to read them, manicurists criticized the work on the cuticles, Liz Arden wanted to buy the commercial time on the TV broadcasts. It was all a lot of hoopla and all it added up to was that Kefauver got to run for the Democratic nomination in ‘52 and finished up out of the money. The Syndicate didn’t lay any bets on him.”
As Cleo and Hal arrived in the crowded, faded, shabby courtroom the principal witness for the day was just taking the stand. Billie Locke was draped in furs (“silver mink,” Cleo whispered to Hal, “The Empress would write her off at once for wearing that during the day”) and wore a tight-fitting purple hat, like a Twenties cloche. She looked older than Cleo had expected, more than the thirty-two she was supposed to be, and the life she had led was stamped there on her face like faded immigration seals. She had red hair and bright green eyes and a smile like a whore welcoming a Shriners’ parade. Billie Locke had come to town from Saratoga and, being a lady or anyway an ex-lady, she had kept the gentlemen waiting.
Cleo was fascinated by the woman and her performance. She was a gangster’s moll, as outdated as the phrase itself might be; Cleo had seen the likes of her in 1930s movies in the Late Late Show, played by Glenda Farrell or Claire Trevor; but here she was, real. Cleo wandered round the crowded room. She had never seen such a fascinated audience, certainly not down at the Miami hearings; they’d be asking the tough-talking woman for her autograph before she left the court. Billie Locke talked, but told the committee nothing; she was a fallen angel who, she claimed, still had her innocence. All her gentlemen friends had been exactly that, real gentlemen.
“They weren’t gangsters or racketeers or all them dreadful things you’re calling ‘em . . .” The green eyes blinked, she was blinded by her own attempt at honesty.
Then Cleo saw Tony Rossano, face as impassiv
e as it had been down in Miami, seemingly no more impressed by Billie Locke than were the committee members. He was scribbling away with the same mechanical fury as he had shown at the previous hearing; Cleo wondered if he had followed the inquiry at its dozen or more stops throughout the country. Crumbs, she thought, he must be writing a book. Then she got her idea.
She squeezed Hal’s shoulder, nodded goodbye and threaded her way out of the court. She stood in the corridor and waited. At last Billie Locke had finished her testimony and was coming out of the court. She came out on a wave of reporters and photographers. She stopped, swung her fist and one of the reporters fell back holding his jaw. Then she shouted, “You fucking shits, I hope an H-bomb falls on every fucking one of you!” and was gone, leaving behind a mixed smell of perfume and brimstone. Women are hell, Sylvester Spearfield had once said, but had asked not to be quoted.
Cleo pushed her way through the crowd, picked Tony Rossano up from the floor. The other newsmen had trampled over him, going after Billie Locke, on heat for another quote, even though the four-letter words would never get into print. Rossano was still holding his jaw, still dazed, and for a moment he didn’t recognize Cleo.
“Cleo Spearfield, from the Courier. Miami, remember? What did you say to her that made her slug you?”
“None of your business,” said Rossano, working his jaw to see if the lady had broken it.
“Righto, none of my business. But I’d like to put a proposition to you, Mr. Rossano. You work for an Italian-language newspaper. Most of the mobsters who’ve been before the committee, they’ve been Italian. That must upset a lot of honest, hard-working Italians, being tarred with that sort of brush. How would you like to do a piece for the Courier on what the Italian community at large thinks of the Italian gangsters?”
