There Fell a Shadow

by Andrew Klavan

  There Fell a Shadow

  Andrew Klavan

  writing as Keith Peterson

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  THIS BOOK IS FOR DOUG AND MARY OUSLEY.

  “Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

  There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

  Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

  And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

  Edward Dowson

  It was the night of the first big snow. I remember that. A slate December sky had threatened the city all that day. The clouds had seemed heavy with the coming storm. The air had seemed brittle with it, like a pane of glass the wind was about to shatter.

  Then, around eight that night, the clouds gave way. The air did shatter. The wind blew in. The snow swept out of Jersey and across the Hudson. In Manhattan, at about 8:05 p.m., a single flake drifted gently through the red glow of a Forty-second Street stoplight. It landed daintily in front of Grand Central Terminal and melted to a gray dot on the sidewalk. By 8:07 the air was white and whirling. The gray spot was covered by a white patina. The white patina grew thicker, higher. The red stoplight became a dull rose glow sunk deep in the blizzard’s midst.

  The last commuters rushing toward the terminal’s front doors turned their faces away from the biting wind. They wrestled with their umbrellas or held their newspapers up as shields. The men had to clap their hats tight to their heads. The women had to press the skirts of their coats down against their legs. Bandannas and jackets fluttered everywhere.

  Next, as the streetlamps grew halos and dimmed, the horns started. The cars jammed up bumper to bumper on the broad boulevard. The drivers—who by all rights should have missed the evening rush—grew peeved. Their horns wailed and cursed and bleated. The noise rose up and danced in the dancing snow above Forty-second. The line of cars trudged on slowly under the terminal toward the East River Drive.

  Manhattan was cold and beautiful. It snowed and snowed. The air around the lighted peak of the Empire State Building seemed almost alive with the whorls and waves of it. The stone lions flanking the steps of the library looked grim and comical under peaked caps of it. And over the bold, arching entrance of Grand Central, the sculpted Mercury spread his arms to it and welcomed it like the god he was.

  As for me—as for me and Lansing and McKay—we drank. There was nothing else for us to do. Nothing better, anyway. The Lady and the Tiger story was covered from every angle. The story on the Brooklyn park was solid as I could make it. The bulldog’s deadline was past. The late edition was all laid out. The work was done. The snow was heavy. Drinking was just the thing.

  We were in the Press Club. Just down Fortieth from the terminal, around the corner from Vanderbilt Avenue and the offices of the New York Star from which we’d come. We had beaten the worst of the storm by minutes.

  It’s a fancy little pub, the P.C. A dark, oaken room. A long bar running through the center. Round oak tables everywhere. Heavy chairs with leather seats and backs held fast by brass studs. The walls are decorated with old newspapers, framed. Not just the splashy headlines like some of the other press bars. Not just Lindbergh and V-E Day and Men Walk On Moon. The good stories, too. The small stories done well. Breslin dancing in a pothole. Clines watching miners go to work in the Pennsylvania dark. Even Lupica giving it to Steinbrenner. Even me, on Frankie and Johnny: the one about the hooker who gunned her pimp down on the Minnesota Strip. The yellow light from yellow lanterns gleams on the fading pages, reflects off the glass in the frames. The rest of the room is dim and pleasant. Not too crowded tonight. Just enough people to keep a buzz of conversation going.

  Lansing, McKay, and I sat in a corner by one of the front windows. We watched the snow hit the glass and melt. We watched the glass streak with droplets of water. We squinted through the droplets and watched the snow cover the bags of garbage leaning against each other at the edge of the sidewalk. We drank scotch.

  “It’s not the tiger banner,” Lansing said. “I don’t mind that. I don’t mind the sidebars. I don’t mind any of it.” She was leaning back in her chair, her arm resting on the table, her hand wrapped casually around her glass. She smiled and shook her head. Her long blond hair slapped at her face lazily. Her hair gleamed in the lamplight. “It’s him I mind,” she went on. “It’s the way he drools over the blood that gets me. The way his face fell when we told him she’d only lost an arm.”

  “The man’s an idiot,” said McKay. His mouth drew down at the corners as he studied the surface of his drink. His baby face almost managed to look severe. “That thing with the parents …” He shook his head. He couldn’t finish. He was too ticked off.

  Lansing reached over and patted his arm. She turned her face to me. “And then when you got confirmation on the borough president, I thought he was going to take your head off. Like you were intruding. Messing up his sleaze with news.”

  I laughed.

  “Come on, Wells,” she said. “Don’t laugh. You know it bothers you.”

  She gave me a look. High cheeks. Blue eyes. Rich lips. Rich, rich lips. I stopped laughing. I shrugged instead.

  “And don’t shrug,” she said.

  “Can I drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I drank until the ice rattled against my teeth. I set the empty glass down on the table with a thud.

  The subject under discussion was Robert Cambridge. He was the managing editor of the Star, had been now for a year and a half. They’d hired him off a California paper. His mandate was to revamp the old tabloid. Make it more exciting. More “relatable,” he called it. “Think about your audience,” he’d tell us in his weekly staff meetings. He’d slouch in his chair at the conference table to show us what a regular guy he was. His voice would uncoil softly, like a snake at suppertime. “Does your audience wake up in the morning wondering what happened in South Africa or Iran? No. Of course not. They think about the things that will affect them, that will impact on you and me. That everyone can relate to. Think like them. Think you-and-me. Think relatability. Don’t just go around thinking news, news, news all the time!” And here he’d make a dreary news-news-news face. “Think—infotainment.”

  McKay was right. The man was an idiot.

  Last night, up at the Bronx Zoo, some vandals had played a practical joke. This morning a pretty young zookeeper named Suzanne Feldman had become their punch line. And our headline. The vandals had somehow crept into the zoo and cut through the mesh of the tiger’s cage. Maybe they’d planned to free the beast. As it turned out, all they managed to do was open one or two of the squares in the mesh. Come morning, as Suzanne was going about her duties, she noticed the damage.

  At that point, she should have called her supervisor. Instead she hopped the fence and went over for a closer look. The tiger—her name was Antoinette—was lying down peacefully. She was all the way back against the enclosure’s rear wall. Suzanne deemed it safe to poke around at the damaged wire with her hand.

  She deemed wrong. Antoinette pounced lazily. Witnesses said it was the movement of a second. A couple of strides and a flying leap. That was all. Suzanne Feldman was yanked tight against the cage. She was screaming as if her arm were being torn off. It was. By the time two janitors rushed to her side, she had fallen away from the cage. She was sitting upright against the fence. She was not screaming anymore. Instead, she was staring wide-eyed into the cage where Antoinette was enjoying a second breakfast.

  “Look. She’s eating my arm,” Suzanne Feldman had said quietly to the janitors. The
n she fainted.

  The press has a lot in common with Antoinette: other people’s misfortunes are its meat. I’ve been a newspaperman since I left my brother and sister to bury our mother and hoboed down to New York out of Maine. I was twenty one. Twenty-five years ago. I know a good story when I hear one. I know how to get it and write it and play it big. The Lady and the Tiger could handle the banner Cambridge would lay on it. But Lansing was right. He didn’t have to drool over it.

  “Did it kill her?” he said, when Lansing first gave him the word.

  “No,” said Lansing. “It just ate her arm.”

  “Oh. Gee. Well, still. Even so: I love it. Great, great story. Take McKay up there with you, he can do the color. And I’ll give you Gershon for the pix.” Making these assignments was the city editor’s job. But Cambridge couldn’t leave a story this big to the city editor. He couldn’t leave anything to anybody. In fact, before McKay left for the Bronx, Cambridge pulled him aside and put his arm around him. He can do that to McKay because McKay is young and has a wife and kid and needs the job.

  “Once you get up there,” he told McKay in a confidential voice, “ask around, find out, you know, did she have a husband or a boyfriend. How’s he gonna feel now she’s only got one arm? You know? Is he gonna sue the zoo or what? And how about her mother? Call her mother, you know. She’ll cry. It’s good copy.”

  McKay’s plump cheeks turned beet red. He nodded. He slithered out from under Cambridge’s arm. He walked away.

  While all this was going on, I was in one of our better Times Square movie emporiums. I was watching the early showing of “The Perils of Francine.” It was a sensitive, insightful epic about a young woman who manages to touch the lives of every male creature in the state of California. It was tough for me to follow the story line, though. The guy sitting next to me kept talking. He was a young lawyer who worked for the city parks commissioner. What he was talking about was the construction of a Brooklyn playground. That playground had now been under construction for seven years. Its projected cost was now five times more than the original estimate and still rising. Slouched in Francine’s flickering shadows, whispering in nervous bursts half-lost beneath the cries of passion from the screen, the young lawyer outlined the process by which the contract for the playground had been funneled to a construction company owned by a gentleman named Anthony Giotto. Giotto—who was currently awaiting trial on federal racketeering charges—had apparently directed the payment of a large bribe to a top Brooklyn official. The young lawyer could not give me the name of the official. He didn’t have to. I’d been working on the story for two weeks. I knew pretty well who it was.

  That evening, about three hours before we adjourned to the Press Club to watch the storm, I got it solid. I’d landed myself a borough president: Glen Robins. I had him dead to rights. I called the man. Gave him a chance to defend himself. He told me to talk to his lawyer. His lawyer refused comment.

  I brought the story to the city editor, a decent old guy named Hugh Rafferty. Rafferty sat at the city desk, rapping angrily at his computer. He was going over the day’s minor stories. The big story was the tiger. Cambridge had taken charge of that.

  “Talk to him,” said Rafferty grimly.

  I sighed. Cambridge does not look upon me entirely with favor. He seems to feel I oppose his mission to relatabilitize the newspaper. He says I have an attitude problem. He says I have a “problem with authority.” He has invited me into his office for informal chats on the subject. Somehow the problem only grows worse. I’m told he’s now convinced I’m trying to “undermine” him. If it weren’t for the fact that revelations of widespread municipal corruption keep appearing in our paper before any of the competing papers, I do believe he’d let me go.

  But I had no choice. I took my story to Cambridge. He was in Lansing’s cubicle. His jacket was off. His tie was undone. He was bending over her shoulder as she sat at her computer terminal. He was telling her how to write her story.

  “You better have a look at this,” I said to him. I handed him the pages I’d pounded out on my old Olympia.

  He looked at them. He looked at me. “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” he said. Sarcasm dripped from him like Spanish moss from a Georgia live oak. “You want me to stop the presses? Replate page one? Jesus, Johnny, we’ve got a big story here. I got a fucking zoo can’t keep its tigers away from the customers. I got people getting their arms ripped off right and left. I mean, okay, great, he’s a borough president, it’s a decent story. But I mean, what am I supposed to do about it?”

  Lansing turned in her chair. “You got a borough president?”

  “Corlies Park,” I told her. “I finally found the bribe.”

  “Oh, man! Great stuff.” The way she smiled at me made my teeth hurt.

  It was Cambridge’s turn to change colors. He selected chalky white. I don’t think he likes it when Lansing makes my teeth hurt.

  “Hey,” he said to her, with an ingratiating smile that hurt yet another part of my anatomy. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like having your story on page one?”

  The look Lansing gave him—that was the first hint I got that it was going to snow.

  “I can’t wait,” she said to me now as we sat and drank and talked it over in the Press Club. “He’ll give you the skyline today. Tomorrow, the News, the Times, and Newsday will lead with it. We’ll get beat out on our own story.”

  “Maybe they’ll notice upstairs.” McKay was wilting now over his second scotch. Knocking on Mrs. Feldman’s door to ask her about her daughter had taken a lot out of him. “Maybe they’ll fire him. Maybe they’ll bring charges. Send him to court. Execute him.”

  I jammed my cigarette out in the table’s huge glass ashtray. “That’s not the way it works. I’ve seen a lot of Cambridges in my time. That’s not the way they go.”

  The two young folk lent an ear to the ancient mariner.

  “He’ll be fired all right,” I told them. “Another six months, a year, year and a half at most. But it won’t be for incompetence. The guy who hired him will make sure of that because if his hire looks bad, then he looks bad. But, one way or another, soon enough, relatability will become the status quo. They’ll want something new, something with more pop to it. Just like they wanted when they brought Cambridge in. Then Cambridge’ll be gone.”

  “Then there’ll be another Cambridge,” said McKay.

  “There’ll always be a Cambridge,” I said. “But Cambridge is one of the worst.”

  McKay sank disconsolately toward his glass.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting home?” Lansing said to him. She said it kindly. Then glanced over at me.

  I ignored the glance. Lansing is half my age, and not so tough, I’d guess, when no one’s looking. I shook another cigarette out of the pack. Jabbed it between my lips. Lifted a match to it. I kept ignoring the glance. But, as the match flame screened me, I raised my eyes a little. As I did, I saw an answering flame flare up in the rear of the bar, in one of its dark corners.

  The burst of fire drew my gaze. At first I thought it was a reflection. Then I saw a man sitting alone at a table in the back. He was lighting a cigarette like I was. I saw his face glow red in the match light.

  It was a haunted face, drawn and weary. The face of a fairly young man, no more than thirty-five, with hair still thick and black. But his cheeks were craggy, his expression hard, his eyes sunken, brooding under heavy brows. As he held the match to the tobacco, those eyes peered across the room, fixed and fascinated by something at the front of the bar.

  The man shook the match out. He sank into shadow. He sat huddled in the smoke from his cigarette as if for warmth.

  I turned, following his gaze. The door to the club had opened. Three men had come in.

  They stood together in the doorway, stomping the snow off their shoes, shaking it off their overcoats. They cursed the blizzard in booming voices. They sounded like men who had drunk and eaten well.

  I knew th
em. I knew two of them, anyway.

  One of them was a friend of mine, Solomon Holloway. He was the bureau chief for one of the wire services here. He was a chubby, elfin man. Dignified in his way. Bald on top with a halo of gray. Small, round, friendly features with mischievous eyes. Chocolate-colored skin that gleamed in the light.

  On his left was Donald Wexler, the editor in chief of Globe, the newsweekly. Short, thin, small boned. Graying yellow hair, well coiffed. A delicate face, sagging a little. Moist eyes and pursed lips. He tried to hire me from the paper once. We were still on decent terms.

  I didn’t know the third man. A long, lean, wiry fellow. Tan and rugged. Looked like a cowboy.

  They peeled off their coats, draped them over the hatcheck counter. I turned to look again at the haunted man on the other side of the room. His shadow had faded away completely. He was gone.

  When I turned back, Holloway had spotted me.

  “John Wells!”

  Wexler looked my way and smiled. “Wells it is!”

  I saluted them. They approached our table, the third man trailing.

  Holloway gestured at him. “Timothy Colt, I’d like to introduce you to the dean of New York crime reporters.”

  “He’d like to,” I said, standing. “But I’m all he’s got.”

  Colt and I shook hands. I’d heard of him. I’d read his stuff. He was one of those guys who travels around the world, following the sound of gunfire. A foreign correspondent, and one of the best. He had a way of writing about war as if there were nothing in it but sadness. No right, no wrong, just sadness. I was pleased to meet him.

  I introduced McKay. Then I introduced Lansing. Colt’s eyes narrowed at her. The three grabbed chairs and sat down with us. Colt made sure he got his seat in next to hers.

  A waitress came over. A pretty blond in regulation black tights, white skirt. The three newcomers ordered. Again, I glanced toward the table in the rear. Still empty. Cigarette smoke hung over it.