WARILY, WATCHFULLY, POINT ON PATROL IN HOSTILE TERRAIN, JOE Shelby surveyed the newsroom of the Paris Star—the stained carpeting and exposed air-conditioner ducts; the battered, battleship-gray paintwork of his new professional home, his Valhalla.
He walked with a cane made of ebony, its handle fashioned of yellowing ivory from some distant age when laws did nothing to protect the elephant. His gait seemed slightly lopsided, crabbed. The years had whittled him, made him skinnier, in the spindleshank manner of aging rock stars. His hallmark black linen jacket hung slightly from his shoulders. I couldn’t help thinking that, when our backs were turned, our enemies (and there were ever more of them) would draw sniggering comparisons to Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, somewhere between The Front Page and Grumpy Old Men, dinosaurs let loose for a final lumber around the news paddock they had once galloped as stallions.
When they joked about endangered species, they wouldn’t be talking about the creature that provided the handle on Shelby’s cane.
In the old print days, I had edited his telexed dispatches as they winged in from N’Djamena and Kinshasa, Beirut and Grozny. There had been times when I took dictation from him over the phone from Gaza or Soweto or Saigon to the background drumbeat of gunfire. As he declaimed his stories, using his peculiar phonetic orthography, you could almost smell the cordite and hear the boom-boom. “No, you dummy, P for Peter, H for Harry, U for Uncle … the girl’s name was Phúc …”
Now, at the perilous, uncharted intersection of the digital, Internet, warp-speed web era and our own middle years, we had been assigned to run Nonstop News, a distant outpost of the Graphic, a font of news for its website and sometimes its hallowed pages, a digital acolyte for New York and the Paris Star. We worked the hours when the mother ship in New York was dark, straddling the razor edge, the front line, the first, crepuscular flush of the digital dawn. Our unit—the Nonstop News Desk, usually abbreviated to NND—was located in Paris to take advantage of the time zone six hours ahead of New York. Our mission was to keep the websites of both papers up to speed, even as Gotham City snoozed in fitful slumber.
If you looked at the site at 2 a.m. or 5 a.m. on the eastern seaboard of America, you would see the telltale marks of our presence—tiny, spidery notations in red that denoted our updating and reworking and rejiggering of the news as it happened: three minutes ago, posted 03.33 a.m., updated one minute ago, NEWS ALERT.
Just like in the old wire service days, we would bat out ledes and bulletins, snaps and urgents.
Whambo-zambo-zippo.
I was not sure if either of us—let alone our employers—understood fully what we were getting ourselves into.
“Hello, sweetheart, gimme rewrite.”
“Clancy! Ed Clancy! Jesus!”
Shelby looked me up and down as if I had failed to pass muster at some inscrutable parade, then took my outstretched hand and shook it, stooping from his great shambling height to grab me in a bear hug. For all his uncertain health, he was still a powerful guy. I found myself looking up at those familiar, aquiline features once likened (by himself, primarily) to Hollywood’s best—the long crooked nose and hooded eyes offset now by the dark concentric rings of tired flesh below them. The onetime mop of curly brown hair had turned pan-scrub gray, verging on silver. The tropical suns of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had tanned his skin to a texture of cracked leather and a hue of bleached gold.
He eased himself in behind a steel desk, propping his cane against a chipped and slightly unsteady file cabinet. I had somehow prevented the cost-cutters of the IT staff from confiscating his desktop computer when they learned he owned a laptop, but by way of compensation, they had removed the printer that went with the desktop. I would not, in fact, have been surprised to find them measuring his workspace to see if it could be trimmed to size, like undertakers eyeing a sickly patient for a cut-price coffin and a pauper’s grave.
“So how’s this going to work?”
“I ping you.”
“You ping me? You—ping—me?”
He repeated the words slowly and with puzzlement, as if trying to decipher an obscure and difficult text.
“Ping. Instant messaging. I write a message over there”—I gestured to my desk across the early-morning newsroom, becalmed before the deadline panic that would overtake it later—“and I press a button and it pops up here.”
“Couldn’t you just call? Or walk over?”
“No. These days, we ping.”
“Ping?”
“It’s the sound it makes when it lands. Ping.”
“And I Pong?”
“Okay, okay, ha, ha. So I ping you and say, ‘Riots in Mongolia. Five dead.’”
He was about to light a cigarette before I stopped him: company policy, French law, universal edict. Smoking bad, longevity good.
“And I do what? Call their next of kin? Jump on a plane? Hold the front page?”
“You call the Mongolia bureau and say, ‘Five dead?’”
“Do you we have a Mongolia bureau?”
“No.”
“So I call … ?”
“Beijing. Hong Kong. Someplace in Asia.”
“So how do you know there are five dead in Mongolia riots?”
“I read the news wires.”
“So I call up someplace in Asia where they also read the wires and may indeed already have determined that the rioting in Ulan Bator has been inconsequential, and I say, ‘Five dead in Mongolia. Gimme three hundred.’”
“No. You say, ‘Is this true and who says so and who can I quote?’”
“And then I ping you?”
“No. You give me three hundred and then you ping me and then I put it on the web.”
“Whambo-zambo.”
“Whambo-zambo.”
“Do you remember the days—” he began.
“Don’t go there,” I muttered, almost begging.
“—when we were real journalists?”
“Are there really riots in Mongolia?”
“Actually, no. But there are flash floods in Kyrgyzstan.” Even to my own ears, I sounded overeager. “Near the American base.”
“You don’t say. Do we care?”
“We care.”
“Because?”
“Because news is nonstop. An actuality loop. Because the goat must be fed.”
“Who’s that?”
A predatory flicker stirred in Shelby’s baleful green eyes—a warning sign I recalled from the old days when he and the Africa rat pack transited Paris from Nairobi en route to N’Djamena and raised hell at La Coupole and the Georges Cinq.
I followed his gaze across the deserted newsroom to the copydesk, where the powers-that-be always insisted that an editor start early to turn around the columns and the artsy stuff.
“That,” I said, “is the executive editor’s squeeze. Rumored squeeze, maybe I should say. Gloria Beeching.”
“You know, I believe I met her someplace—Bucharest. East Berlin. Sarajevo. The Wall.”
He was already sucking in his gut and dripping Visine eye drops to banish the early-morning bloodshot.
As surreptitiously as was possible in a large and empty space, I looked across at her, trying to see her through Shelby’s eyes. The Gloria I encountered most days was part of the ambience of the newsroom. But seeing her now through Shelby’s eyes, she made quite an impression: my thesaurus of tired metaphors came up with swan-from-cygnet, butterfly-from-chrysalis—that kind of thing. She sat straight-backed, her luxuriant chestnut curls tied up in a loose bun that showed off the pale curve of her neck. Her posture accentuated the lines of her torso. She glanced in my direction, but her hazel eyes fell on Shelby. She smiled. I grimaced.
“How many ‘don’t go theres’ do I have to spell out for you?”
“Whambo-zambo,” he said enthusiastically. “Ping-Pong.”
On Day One of operations at Nonstop News–Paris Outpost (the Paree OP, as Shelby liked to call it from his time covering the Marines), Marcel Duffie, the executive editor of the Star, rolled in fashionably late—just to remind everyone else that the hours of toil allocated to the hoi polloi did not apply to him. He was a short, pudgy man, with slightly bulging dark eyes and a smear of black hair across his shiny, cue ball skull. His hands were unusually pale and small, and they reminded me of the claws of a vole, designed to scrabble through dirt toward invisible light. It was unwise, though, to underestimate Marcel Duffie. As a practitioner of the political maneuver, the deft jab of the stiletto, he was peerless. He harvested snippets of information the way a good quartermaster stores ammo for the big battle, the overwhelming barrage, the shock and awe. The only door he left open to his enemies was the exit.
Duffie did not like intrusions into his scheme of things, and Shelby was the worst kind of interloper, which made me his accomplice, his abettor.
Usually, his first port of call was the copy desk on those days when Gloria Beeching had been assigned the early shift, sitting rapt in front of her screen, arching her back with artful languor as she crossed i’s and dotted t’s in the silence of computerized editing.
In newsrooms of yore—and still on period-movie sets—there had been the rattle of typewriter keys and the ring of a bell as the carriage reached the end of its travel and was slammed back to start a new line with the abrupt ferocity of a train wreck. There had been muttered curses and vicious metal spikes skewering palimpsests of discarded copy paper and service messages. There had been ashtrays and clerks scurrying hither and thither, pneumatic tubes whizzing metal containers stuffed with folded pieces of paper from copyeditors to typesetters in the Linotype room. There had been the loud chorus of news arriving on long-forgotten machines as the world trembled on the brink of history.
Snap—coup in Nigeria! Bulletin—Saigon falls!
Modern newsrooms were quiet as the grave, a particularly apt simile for our industry. We communed in the dark interstices of cyberspace. We could announce World War Three in a whisper. (In a way, as it turned out, we did.)
I kept an old metal spike on my desk just to remind myself that the Star had once been a buzzy, paper-strewn place where you breathed ink and felt the floor rumble under your feet when the presses started to roll, like a quake-zone aftershock.
But Duffie was not perambulating down memory lane because he was not really old enough—or perhaps he was just too smart—to have acquired a history to call his own. In any event, he had other things on his mind, as he invariably did when he approached Gloria Beeching. Ostensibly, his route led to the water cooler, but as he passed her, he glanced toward her and, as if synchronized by nature’s oldest chronograph, she paused in her editing and stretched, her eyes roaming around the newsroom until their glances crossed—a coded, silent semaphore so swift that you’d have missed the moment if you weren’t on the lookout for it.
On Day One of NND, he got halfway toward the copydesk, strolling with the nonchalance of a boulevardier confident that his faithful paramour waited at the next pavement café. And then he came to a confused halt.
Gloria was not alone.
Abandoning his cane, Shelby had sidled over to remind her that they met in Bucharest or Berlin or Bangui or wherever. He had clipped his new Star credential onto the loop of ’Nam-era webbing around his neck that carried his smorgasbord of identities, some of them slightly, even ludicrously, out of date—NYPD, ISFOR, KFOR, ISAF, IDF, INA, NATO, NYG—some no more than faded hieroglyphics in Cyrillic script, Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, Mandarin, Hindi.
“Your best is on your chest,” I heard her murmur, curling her fingers through his bandolier of laminated photo IDs and tugging him gently toward her.
Emboldened, he was regaling her with war stories that seemed to be having the desired effect of making her laugh.
“So the second pigeon carried a message saying, ‘This bird is accompanying the bird that’s got the story.’ And that’s what got them so confused in Bulawayo. Because the bird with the story had headed out to Botswana!”
I had heard Shelby’s punch lines a thousand times. They never got any better but he spun his yarns with such feeling that most people laughed just to humor him. Gloria Beeching seemed genuinely amused. Marcel Duffie did not seem to get the joke at all.
“Shelby!” He grunted at me as he retreated past my door to his big corner office. “Always was an asshole.”
“But now he’s our asshole,” I said, sounding helpful, I thought.
“If he survives here a month, it’ll be a month too long.”
“And I guess you’ll make it your business to make sure he doesn’t.”
“Count on it, Clancy. Him and you both. Jeez. This place needs some new blood. Wasn’t there something with him about a leave of absence, therapy, stress disorder? Breakdown? Burnout?”
“Not to my knowledge,” I said.
At that moment, I was almost telling the truth.
Across the newsroom, Gloria Beeching chuckled merrily as Shelby pirated someone else’s anecdote to tell her: “And if your mom asks what you do for a living in Paris, honey, don’t tell her you work for a newspaper. Tell her you play the piano in a whorehouse.”