Deadline (41 page)

Finney found himself wondering if Little Finn would someday occupy this role of teacher in the new world, and if he would have the privilege of sitting at his son’s feet. The thought caused his spine to tingle, and even as he wondered it, he knew the answer would be yes. Finney listened in rapt attention as the young man moved on to develop the favorite theme of heaven:

“Elyon’s Son is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. As he was at the beginning, so he is now, and at what men call the end, so he will yet be. He sees that coming end as one more beginning, the beginning of a new world. It will be built on the foundation of his character, defined by the cornerstone of his grace. It has been conceived by the master Architect, drawn out with the meticulous pen of the great Engineer, and will be constructed with the skilled hands of the Builder. The hands, pure and strong, the hands scarred for eternity, the hands of the Carpenter.”

The child’s voice became more powerful with every sentence, his angelic face racked with synchronous joy and pain, the latter at the reference to the scarred hands.

“The Carpenter of Nazareth, building the house of faith, joining with the mortar of heaven apostles and prophets, fishermen and seamstresses, farmers and shepherds, bricklayers and teachers, businessmen, homemakers, and nurses.”

Finney felt he was beholding the beauty of a great river, watching the current and its white caps highlighting rocks and fallen trees buried beneath. But now there was a change, for he had fallen in the river, was caught up in the current, surrounded by the rushing sounds of moving water, dragging him pell-mell down the rapids. Thrown into the currents of a divine and awful momentum, he felt one part of what he once knew as consuming fear—the exhilaration of being lost in something far greater than himself, the feeling at the top of the roller coaster, about to fall into the abyss. Yet he did not feel the other part of consuming fear, the loathing of the horrors of destruction. Only after adjusting to the flow of the current, Finney could again evaluate what he was not simply watching, but was now a full-fledged participant in.

This child had been “handicapped” in the other world. Handicapped and unable to deal with life in conventional ways. He could never make much money, never hope to be
Time
magazine’s Man of the Year. The majority, on knowing what he was, would elect to take his life before he was born, or let him die of neglect afterwards. But here in Elyon’s realm his value was so obvious it showed such thoughts to be unspeakably evil, unthinkable to the sane mind.

On earth he would not qualify for a seat on the orchestra. But here and now, he was the conductor, surrounded by rapt and attentive musicians, ready to do his bidding. Finney could see the coat and tails, the flying hands and baton. He felt the line between audience and orchestra blur until there was no audience now, only orchestra, conductor, music. Melodies and harmonies. And yet, there was an audience. An audience so great and all encompassing that Finney had been no more aware of it a moment before than a fish is aware of water. But the conductor was intensely aware of the audience and bent upon finding approval in its eyes.

Feverishly, Finney played his instrument. What it was he could not say, though it seemed as much like him as his ear-to-ear smile. He could hear it now, its sounds blending into the whole. One member would solo, and then another, and then the power of the whole dominated again. The attention of the orchestra was always on the piece, at once carefully composed and directed with discipline, yet wonderfully free and spontaneous. He sensed this piece of music had been played countless thousands or millions of times, yet never like this, and therefore never before. Finney soloed now, the orchestra creating a splendid and dazzling background to the focused and inspired rendition of his singular part.

There
was
an audience. It was the Audience of One. And the sense of his approval swept through the orchestra and its delighted childlike conductor in a profound sense of joy and completion. The orchestra played on. The Master was pleased. And for the moment, and for ever, that was all that mattered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

J
ake crammed his verbal foot in the door of the clinic, first with the receptionist, then a nurse, in an attempt to get the doctor on the phone. In shameless journalistic fashion (actually, it was a honed skill he took pride in), he’d used everything from “urgent” to “I’m calling from New York” to “it’s a highly confidential official matter.” He’d been on hold five minutes.

“Marsdon here. This better be good, Mr. Woods.”

“Yes, Dr. Marsdon. Thanks for talking to me. I’m calling from New York and—”

“I don’t care if you’re calling from the Sistine Chapel. What’s this about? I’ve got patients waiting.”

“It’s about Dr. Greg Lowell. There’s an investigation into his death.”

Marsdon paused. “If I talk to anyone, it wouldn’t be a reporter.”

“This isn’t for publication. I’m assisting Police Detective Ollie Chandler in his investigation.” Jake knew the detective department brass wouldn’t appreciate his self-promotion to assistant detective, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

“A reporter assisting the police?” Marsdon asked skeptically. “How about I just call your Detective Chandler and ask him?”

“Good idea. He’ll vouch for me. Look, I fly home tonight. If I come by your clinic tomorrow afternoon, is there a chance I can grab you for half an hour?”

Marsdon laughed. “Oh sure, I’ve got plenty of time.”

Jake felt as if he were about to lose a fish he’d expected to reel in. Finally Marsdon sighed and said, “Okay, Woods, I’ll call Detective Chandler and see if this is for real. If so, I’ll try to squeeze you in between patients, sometime after 2:00. You’ll get fifteen minutes max. Bring something to read. Could be a long wait.”

“Thanks, doctor, I really appreciate your…” Jake stopped self-consciously when he realized there was no one on the other end of the line.

Jake checked his watch, cursing to himself because he had so little time. He rushed to catch a cab over to 43rd Street, to the
New York Times
building. He needed perspective and in that building was a man he’d gone to for perspective for the past twenty years.

A half dozen different newspapers, all today’s, were strewn across an eight-foot counter that served no other purpose. Next to the
New York Times
, Jake saw the
New York Daily News
and the
Wall Street Journal
, three out of the five U.S. papers with circulations over a million. They were joined by
Newsday
and the
New York Post
, themselves reaching over a half million. New York was the center of American journalism, the fountainhead from which a nation’s information and worldview flowed.
The Washington Post
distinguished itself as the only “outside” publication on the counter. Several of the papers had been marked with heavy red lines and circles, while two others had headlines and opening paragraphs highlighted in yellow.

The room was cluttered, yet suggested its own peculiar order if the observer understood the master of the place, Cornelius Leonard. Jake talked to his old mentor on the phone at least once a month, but it had been two years since he’d been in Leonard’s New York office. He felt like an eager devotee who’d been too long away from a holy place. He drank in every sight, sound, and smell of Leonard’s inner sanctum.

The slow burn of the cigar in the transparent ashtray left a vapor permeating the room. The gray-haired codger nodding and occasionally barking into the telephone looked maybe sixty, but Jake knew he had to be seventy-five. He appeared almost ordinary, even a little quaint with his retirement-center-vintage, open-collared white shirt and red suspenders, but he was anything but ordinary. He was one of the last, and one of the best, of a dying breed—a crusty, fearless, investigative journalist devoted to the pursuit of the truth, no matter who it incriminated and who it exonerated. His investigations had brought down whole families of organized crime, and he had lived to tell the story.

Leonard had been hated, maligned, and feared by the powerful. In the back of his top file drawer he still kept two files, both bulging, marked simply “Death Threats.” Once his hair grayed, he’d been promoted to a sort of journalism hall of fame, and even many who had suffered at the hands of his printed words gave him begrudging respect, as pitchers who hated Babe Ruth years later bragged they had faced him from the mound.

Leonard’s secretary let Jake in while the master was still on the phone. Leonard gestured, indicating Jake should make himself at home. The invitation to browse was more welcome here than anywhere. Leonard’s walls were lined with framed exposés and stories, most of them front pagers. Many had been picked up by other major dailies, so among his trophies were feature stories in the
Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times
, and
Miami Herald.
His stories had broken into magazines ranging from
Atlantic Monthly
, to the
New Yorker
, to
Life, Look
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
Village Voice, Rolling Stone
, and
Lady’s Home Journal.
He’d never come to them, hat in hand, like most writers. They came to him, all of them. But none of his magazine articles found a place on his wall. When Jake once asked him why, his simple answer summed up the man himself—“They’re not newspapers. I’m a newspaper man. Always have been, always will be. I don’t care much about anything else.”

Jake looked reverently at Leonard’s impossibly crowded walls. They were a private museum of journalism, most written by Leonard himself. Some news clips went back to the forties, many were from the fifties and sixties, a few, long after his official retirement, trickled right into the nineties. Subjects included the Korean War, Bay of Pigs, JFK’s assassination, the Mafia, Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Kent State, Woodstock, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam, and Watergate. Civil rights pieces were everywhere. Those yellow and brownish headlines, most underneath glass but some exposed to the room’s air, injected their distinct fragrance into the room. The cleaning lady dismissed it as the bothersome stale smell of old paper, but to Leonard, and to Jake, it was the sweet fragrance of aged newsprint, as appealing to the trained palate as a vintage wine.

Jake gazed nostalgically at a familiar quote, written in calligraphy, hung next to Leonard’s prize-winning article on the South American drug czars, the earliest of its kind. “The power to mold the future of the republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.” Below the quote was the name, Joseph Pulitzer.

Next to it was a little “Hawker” pin from the
Times
, one of Leonard’s most prized possessions. Leonard had begun in the newspaper business the way he was convinced everyone should—hawking newspapers on the street for a nickel apiece. This, Leonard had reminded Jake, was back when people were honest enough that many newspapers had “honor boxes,” open newspaper vending receptacles where the buyer was trusted not to take any more than he paid for, and at the end of the day the seller wasn’t a single nickel short. Nowadays, Leonard lamented, even the locked vending machines weren’t safe, often rifled for a handful of quarters to feed video games.

Leonard cleared his throat and rolled his eyes and gestured palm up to Jake, indicating whoever was on the other end of the line was droning on and on. Winking at Jake, Leonard suddenly took on an urgent tone. “Look, Roger, I’ve got something hot here. A major lead that could go cold on me. Yeah, I was sure you’d know how it is. Gotta run. Talk to you later.”

In a single motion he slammed down the phone and swung his right hand across the huge desk. He picked up his cigar with the left hand, drew in deeply, and stood there with his firm right hand on Jake’s, eyeing him with the satisfaction of a colonel inspecting the troops.

Leonard stood five and a half feet tall, though Jake thought he must have lost another inch since he’d seen him last. Many famous bodies were a lot more impressive, Jake thought, but they’d all come and gone. None of them had shaped journalism, and in turn the country, the way this man had. The mind was still as firm as the grip, and the tongue as sharp as ever. Leonard still struck a powerful image.

“Woods! Long time. I see you’ve been doing well out there. Some of your columns are good, as good as columns can be compared to real reporting, I mean. Maybe you’ll make those west coast papers competitive yet!”

“Thanks, Leonard…I think.” No one called Leonard by his first name. Jake had to think to remember it was Cornelius.

“How was your conference?”

“All right. Nothing life-changing. I’d hoped to get here earlier.”

“Okay, Woods, how much time before you head to the airport?”

“Should be out of here a little before five.”

“All right.” Leonard clasped his hands together. “We’ve got an hour before you hail a cab. Enough to get started. You said you had some things on your mind—what are they?”

That was Leonard. No small talk. He once told Jake, “Cut the extraneous talk and you’ll buy yourself two more hours a day to be a reporter. It’s like extending your career ten years without having to live a day longer.”

“Actually, Leonard, I’ve got a lot on my mind. I’m concerned about some trends at the
Tribune.
I see certain stories spiked and others edited into oblivion because they might offend certain special interests groups. If we write a piece that knocks religious fundamentalists, we pride ourselves we’ve done tough, honest reporting and don’t give a fig about reprisals. We pass around the critical mail as if it were a badge of honor proving how fearless we are.”

Leonard nodded intently, listening carefully to every word.

“But if we do a piece that offends gay groups or feminists or environmentalists or whoever, then we do penance, have special editorial meetings, establish sensitivity groups, promise to hire more reporters of that color or persuasion or orientation, and vow to be more careful in the future. This has been sneaking up on us for ten years, and I’m just now waking up to it. I don’t like what I’m seeing, Leonard. We stay away from stories, good stories, if they look like they could show a negative side to certain groups. Yet we seem to take delight in nailing others. We’ve become so selective, so partisan, so…political.”

Jake surprised himself with his own words, as if someone else had said them. He sounded more like Finney or Clarence than himself.

“We used to take delight in nailing everybody, Jake. That was the fun of it. One week we’d nail a gangster, then the cops, then management, then labor, then the Republicans, then the Democrats. Nobody felt safe. If they liked what we did one day, the next day we’d put their rear ends to the fire. Sure, you had to do meticulous research, check and double check your story. But the reward was in catching the fat cats with their pants down.” Leonard chuckled with obvious glee, then his craggy face turned sour and somber.

“But now things are different. Not just at the
Trib
, either. Every paper I visit, somebody pulls me over in the corner, looks around to make sure the thought police don’t hear him, then tells me the same story. It makes me sick. Newspapers pussyfooting around, kissing up to this group and that one as if they were, well what you said…politicians.”

Leonard said the word with disgust, as if on an occupational scale it was somewhere, say, below serial killer.

Leonard waved his cigar hand at the counter under the window, covered with newspapers. “Almost every daily in the country has a half dozen major stories a week we never would have let in forty years ago. They read like press releases from special interests groups. What’s really scary is, sometimes that’s exactly what they are. Want an example? Okay. I still read five dailies almost cover to cover, every day. Remember the gay rights march in DC, the big one in ’93? Three of the five papers said there were a million marchers, even though the DC park police estimated 300,000. Every beltway journalist knows that’s the official estimate, the one you always use.”

Leonard paced now like a prosecuting attorney. “It wasn’t my beat, but since it was front page, I thought, what’s with this? So I checked around and got hold of the press releases sent to all the papers by the gay and lesbian groups. Well, they said there would be a million people there. That was just a guess, of course. It was obviously way off. But the papers used the figure anyway, as if it were true. I looked closely and saw a couple of the reporters had virtually plagiarized whole paragraphs from these press releases. Right down to the wording comparing it to the civil rights marches, and the treatment of gays and lesbians being the great ethical issue of our day, and the monumental importance of the march in fighting bigotry and all that.”

Leonard looked around the room as though he was ready to spit, but there was no appropriate receptacle, so he continued.

“Can you imagine? They took the one million figure from a press release! They just ignored the actual figures, I guess because they were too low for their tastes. And that’s the whole problem. The facts hardly matter anymore. ‘One million’ gave credibility and importance to the march—it wouldn’t do to say ‘Less than one-third of the predicted numbers showed up to march for gay rights in the nation’s capital.’ It would have been true, of course, but it just wouldn’t do.”

Leonard sat on the front of his desk now, leaning toward Jake. “I mean, the
Today
show and a bunch of television stations used the one million figure, but what do you expect? ‘Television journalism’—there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one. These are the people who put explosives on cars so they’ll blow up for the camera, then use the footage to prove how dangerous the car is. Or the Minnesota station that did a special report on underage drinking, and the TV crew bought these teenagers two cases of beer so they could film them drinking. You know I’m against capital punishment, but I’m willing to make an exception for people who do that to journalism.