Cover Story Page 2

  “Yessir.”

  I walked past them to the brass-doored elevators and punched the button. The doors slid open.

  “Good seeing you, boys,” I said. “Keep those psychos at bay.”

  “Just don’t write nothing to get ’em riled up,” Dominic said. “Write nice stories.”

  “What’s that?” I called.

  And the doors slid shut.

  I never had been very good at nice stories, I thought, as the elevator moved upward. Not at the Times. Not at any of the other papers where I’d worked over the years. I’d been drawn to the stories that had a serrated edge, stories that tore away pretensions and comfortable misconceptions. My instincts had served me well in the early years when my eagerness to tackle the toughest subjects had separated me from the pack. Most reporters, like me, wanted to move up the ladder as far and fast as possible. I moved faster than most, farther than almost all. I was hired by the Times from the Providence Journal after I crossed paths with the Times’s organized-crime specialist. We both were doing stories on an aging mobster and the chaos caused by his infirmity.

  Back in New York, the Times reporter mentioned me. She said she thought I was pretty good. The Times metro editors read my stuff and agreed. They invited me to apply. I did, and I was hired. But as they say, be careful what you wish for.

  As the elevator moved to the third floor, the clip whirred yet again. By Jack McMorrow. My byline in the Times. Thrilled to be there, pinching myself to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Working nights and weekends for the metro desk. And soon finding my stories edited back, their volume turned down. Hints here and there. A metro backfield editor who reminded me that the Times wasn’t the Post. A night metro editor who objected to the “breathless quality” in my prose.

  And then my story proposals seemed to get knocked down more and more. The veracity and motives of my sources were questioned more closely. And then the first glimmer of death: a memo from on high in which the editor had underlined phrases in one of my stories that he said betrayed bias. And when I was called before my inquisitors, I was accused of worse. For my future at the Times, it was a kiss of death, square on the mouth.

  I shook my head at the memory, and then the elevator door opened and I was back.

  2

  I’d known it was going to be strange. You define yourself by what you do, pretend to have sought what actually was plopped in your lap by circumstances. Was I Jack McMorrow, Times metro reporter, or Jack McMorrow, freelancer from the Maine woods? Had I run from my life at the Times, or had I walked away?

  In Prosperity, Maine, I didn’t have to ask that question. Or if I did, I could invent an answer. In New York, that wouldn’t be so easy.

  For that reason, when the Times had called, I’d first decided to stay home. But Roxanne, my voice of reason, had told me I should give it a try. Tom Wellington, my former editor at the Boston Globe, had moved to the Times national desk and issued the first invitation. And then, on the phone, Ellen, my former Times editor and stalwart supporter, had told me the newsroom atmosphere had changed, that my nemesis had retired to devote himself to writing an editorial-page column and going to parties with rich people.

  The coast was clear.

  As was the newsroom on a Sunday night.

  I walked through, past the blowups of historic Times photos of Times Square full of buggies, into the vast, sprawling newsroom, and once again felt that tingle that came from the thrill of being part of this newspaper.

  The newsroom had changed. They’d taken out the false ceilings, replaced the dim lights with industrial-looking fixtures that bathed the place in a white, surgical glow. The room was brighter, the carpets a pale gray, the partitions lowered. But still it was the Times, an institution, a newspaper with a tradition of excellence like no other. I took a paper out of the rack on my way in and continued on.

  I was Ebenezer Scrooge. This was Christmas Past.

  It was a skeleton crew on Sunday nights, and the few reporters and editors on duty were staring intently at their monitors. They didn’t look up. They hadn’t gotten to the Times by engaging in newsroom banter.

  I recognized a few. A photo editor called the Bird Man because his passion was bird watching in Central Park. A national backfield editor named Stanley, a pedigreed, cardigan-garbed Upper West Sider. A reporter from Biz Day named Nadine, who walked by me, then stopped and turned.

  “Hello, Jack McMorrow,” she said. “How nice to see you. How have you been?”

  Nadine was carefully groomed, big-boned and attractive with prematurely gray hair and soft, fine skin. She was married to the sort of industry giant she wrote about. I remembered her once telling me her $70,000 Times salary was travel money.

  “Hello, Nadine,” I said. “I’ve been fine. How are you?”

  “Well,” she said. “Are you back?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Freelancing.”

  “Didn’t you go to live in Maine?”

  “That’s right. I still live there.”

  “How nice,” Nadine said, twiddling the gold chain around her neck. “We had the boat in Northeast Harbor for a month last summer. Had friends over from France. It was positively gorgeous sailing. Do you sail?”

  “No,” I said. “Mostly I cut wood.”

  Nadine laughed, then realized I was serious. She looked vaguely alarmed.

  We parted with the usual phony niceties, and I moved on. From the next cluster of cubicles a head rose like a target in a carnival game.

  “McMorrow!” D. Robert Sanders exclaimed.

  “D. Robert,” I said.

  I stopped. He came around, a reporter’s notebook in his hand. He switched it to his left, shook mine with his right. He gazed into my eyes with his customary look. Intense. Humorless. Furiously ambitious. My rival from our first days at the Times hadn’t changed.

  He dropped my hand, stuck his in his pocket. Enough touchy-feely.

  “What, pray tell, has brought you in from the cold?”

  I told him about the stringer job.

  “Well, great,” he said, relieved that I would still be out to pasture. “I’ll be looking forward to more of that compelling McMorrow prose. Guy we had up there the last couple of years wrote like a lost tourist.”

  He attempted a smile, but came up short. D. Robert’s smiles were reserved for professional purposes. Relaxing a reluctant source. Easing his way into a gathering closed to the press. Back in the newsroom, he was all business, a passable writer but a tireless reporter, unfailingly accurate. The joke in the newsroom had been that before D. Robert made love with his dour currency-trader wife, he asked if she would spell her name for the record.

  “What do you think of the city?” Sanders asked.

  “Sanitized,” I said. “But I suppose it’s an improvement if you live here.”

  “Comes at a price. We have to see Johnny Fiore on the news every night. His Honor the mayor takes credit for the sun coming up.”

  “I don’t know. He must be doing something right.”

  Sanders looked at me.

  “Well, that’s high praise, McMorrow. Coming from you. I mean, after what happened.”

  I felt the barb in the comment, the pick at my past. And then a tremor of misgiving about coming here at all. A pull toward the elevator and the exit. But it passed and I set off deeper into the newsroom, wondering just where I’d crossed it.

  The point of no return.

  She’d jettisoned her black dancer’s bun and was blonde now, and the first sight of her, swiveling toward me in her chair, was strange, almost unnerving.

  “I turned fifty,” Ellen Jones said, giving me a hug. “What can I say?”

  “I turned forty,” I said. “But I couldn’t settle on a color.”

  “You’re getting a little gray, McMorrow.”

  “I worry too much.”

  “In Maine?”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said.

  “And you got muscles, McMorrow,” she said.

&nb
sp; I glanced down at my forearms, rerolled my sleeves.

  “It’s all those lobster traps I’ve been hauling.”

  “Really?”

  “Just kidding. I live twenty miles from the coast.”

  “What about the scar on your cheekbone there?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “It’s very sexy. Very Zorro.”

  “They throw the scar in when you get your buns lifted.”

  “With liposuction you get two?”

  “And an eye patch,” I said.

  “We laugh,” Ellen said. “It could catch on in New York. The right celeb gets slashed and the rest is fashion history, as they say.”

  She smiled, brushed at her blonde hair and stretched her legs. She was wearing khakis, a blue Oxford cloth blouse, and heeled sandals. It was a New York look I’d forgotten. Ellen’s manner—vaguely playful, probingly flirtatious—I remembered well.

  “Well, Jack. So is there life after New York? Tom Wellington tells me you live at the absolute edge of nowhere.”

  “I don’t know. Some of us think it’s the center of the universe.”

  “Like the New Yorker cover of Manhattan?”

  “Except the center of our world is the general store.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And farms. And woods. Mostly woods.”

  “Does the store have the Times?”

  It was her instant gauge of civilization.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Not even on Sunday? Do you get the Times?”

  “You can get it in Belfast. That’s twenty miles away. Or you can get it in the mail, but it’s two or three days late.”

  “Ick,” Ellen said. “Don’t you feel, I don’t know, isolated and primitive?”

  I laughed.

  “I like it. Last week a bear crossed the road when I was coming home.”

  “A wild bear?”

  “With two cubs. That’s when the sows are dangerous. You don’t want to surprise one.”

  “Right near your house?”

  “A couple of hundred yards away. It was great.”

  “Oh, great. Go for a walk and come home mauled.”

  “See,” I said, grinning, “just like New York.”

  “I’ll take my chances in Manhattan, thank you very much. Now, McMorrow, how long are you staying? Are you here alone?”

  Ellen Jones. Getting right to the nitty-gritty.

  “I’d planned to come down with a friend.”

  “A friend?” she said.

  “Yes, a good friend.”

  “A close friend?”

  I smiled. “Yes, Ellen. A very close friend.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Roxanne. But she had an emergency. She works for the State in Maine. Child Protective, they call it up there.”

  “And she had to go protect a child?”

  “Yeah. I came anyway.”

  “Interesting. Any kids of your own, McMorrow?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Longtime friend?”

  “Years. Several years.”

  “Well, oh, my goodness,” Ellen said, leaning back in her chair. “He’s finally been landed. Speaking of which, guess who I saw just last week.”

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  “Christina.”

  “Really.”

  “She had a show. Right around the corner from me, actually. Very nice blurbs. It looks like she might actually break out.”

  “Good for her,” I said.

  Ellen swung her long legs around and looked at me slyly.

  “I told her you were coming to town.”

  She waited for my reaction. I tried not to show any, but her grin meant I’d let something slip through.

  “She said she’d love to hear from you. She looks gorgeous, I might add. Even modest success becomes her. Of course, Christina looked smashing when she was a struggling artist.”

  I wound back the years and agreed.

  “We had a nice chat. Talked about what rats men are.”

  She smiled.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “We didn’t mean you, McMorrow. Well, I didn’t, anyway. We talked about other men. Christina was with this fellow named Christophe. Several years.”

  “Lived together?”

  “That was an issue. He didn’t like the ‘willywacks’ of Brooklyn.”

  “What happened to SoHo?”

  “Christina finally got bounced. Did you know we have Vuitton on Greene Street now? It’s turning very high-end. Real estate is through the roof. So Christina went to Dumbo.”

  It took me a moment.

  “Down under the Manhattan Bridge?”

  “Still frontier artsy. Gave Christophe the absolute willies.”

  “So he left?”

  “He directs commercials. He went to do something on location in Saint Kitts and pulled a Gauguin.”

  “What, a native woman?”

  “Well, actually she’s Australian.”

  “So he didn’t come back?”

  “Nope. Took his son, for whom Christina had been attempting to be some sort of mother figure.”

  “How old?”

  “Fifteen. Sixteen. I guess he was hell on wheels.”

  “And Christina as his surrogate mom? Good luck to him.”

  “She was quite good at it, in an odd way,” Ellen said, giving me the smile again. “Sit down, McMorrow, now that I know you’re a married man and it’s safe and proper.”

  “You still with . . .”

  “Robert?” Ellen looked at me and smirked thinly. “No,” she said.

  I didn’t press and Ellen didn’t offer. There was an awkward moment and then she gathered herself together and switched gears, from flirtation to business. She talked about the job, that it wasn’t full-time, that it would be a mix of assignments and my own enterprise. The money was good but it was sporadic.

  “A perfect match,” I said.

  “Now, Jack, you haven’t turned into a hermit on me, have you?”

  “Hell, no. I get out every day. Shoot at passing airliners.”

  “Glad to hear it. Tom said you did some good work for the Globe. I saw a few of your pieces. I wasn’t surprised. You did good reporting for us, too.”

  “That’s one school of thought.”

  “Some of us here thought you got a bit of a raw deal back then.”

  And there it was. My retreat, revived and well.

  I looked up at the TV on the stanchion over the national desk sign. CNN was on but the sound was off. A correspondent was reporting amid generic rubble. I often thought they had just one tape.

  “Well, some of it was deserved,” I said.

  “But not all.”

  “No, not all.”

  “If you’d stayed, you probably could have ridden it out.”

  I shrugged.

  “I know. Not your style, McMorrow, letting things ride. Or keeping your mouth shut.”

  I looked at her.

  “I suppose.”

  “What was it you called him? A sycophant to celebrities? A Ken doll of a journalist? If I’d been suicidal, I would have applauded.”

  She leaned toward me. “He is a pompous ass.”

  I shifted in my chair, tried to ward off memories of that tirade.

  “I don’t remember any of that fondly,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t, McMorrow. And now you’ve gone to Maine to forget it all.”

  I looked at her and almost winced.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That was just always my theory.”

  Ellen stood up. She said she had to prepare for the five o’clock meeting. She looked at the national budget on the computer screen.

  “Clinton trying to show he no longer has a libido and the White House is now a monastery. A fourteen-year-old boy who killed his parents and two sisters in Idaho. The dad was trying to get the boy into counseling the day before it happened.”

  “Sad.”

  “Ye
s. The world is going to hell, as usual. Let’s see. And also for outside, a piece on migrant workers and how their housing situation is getting worse. Very strong art.”

  She handed me a color printout. A man was asleep in his car. His cowboy hat was on the rear shelf.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Ellen turned to me. “So, McMorrow. Still have the fire?”

  I thought it over. “Yeah, I do.”

  “We’ll be looking for news features. Stories on big news events. But also anything you unearth that’s small but sublime.”

  I nodded. Got up from my chair and rolled it over to its place at the next desk. Ellen got up, too, uncoiling herself in her languid dancer’s way and taking my hand briefly in hers.

  “So McMorrow,” Ellen said, “a pleasure to make your reacquaintance. How ’bout lunch tomorrow?”

  “It would have to be breakfast. I’m leaving early.”

  “That might work. I’ll call.”

  “The Meridien.”

  “Fine. And now that we’ve got you back at the Times, maybe we’ll get you back to New York.”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think so. I like it where I am.”

  Ellen smiled knowingly.

  “I don’t know. I had a friend tell me once that New York is like malaria. Once you catch the bug, it never quite goes away.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “And you did have the bug, McMorrow.”

  Ellen turned back to her desk and picked up a legal pad and a printout of a story list. I could see headings for Los Angeles and Detroit. She whirled back to me, stood close.

  “You know what you told me once, McMorrow? You told me you wanted to be the Ernie Pyle of New York City, telling the story of the war through the guys on the battlefield.”

  I didn’t remember that, but it was the eighties. How many hours had I wasted waxing on in some smoky saloon?

  “How presumptuous,” I said.

  I said good-bye and turned toward the aisle that led between the cubicles to the elevators. I had gone just a few feet when I felt Ellen touch my arm.

  “Jack, I do have to run,” she said. “But I was wondering, whatever happened to that detective?”

  I hesitated before I answered. Ellen’s eyes were alive, her mind working something over, spinning as it considered all the angles. Ellen Jones wasn’t “just wondering” anything.