BEFORE THE START OF OUR SHIFT, BEFORE WE FIRED UP OUR COMPUTers (the Mighty Wurlitzers, as we called them), before we switched on the TV news and began calling around to correspondents from Soweto to Shanghai, we had taken to meeting at Le Primerose, a café-bar in the Parisian style where the waiters sport long aprons and supercilious demeanors. The owner, known only as Madame, had curly brown hair and eyeglasses and never missed a centime as she guarded the till like a revolutionary tricoteuse. Over time—in the right light and in the broad, soft focus of the true romantic—she became if not exactly lovable then less hostile, almost alluring. From the moment he first met her on his assignment to the Star newsroom, Shelby began a reflexive courtship, smiling, inclining his head in a suitor’s bow to request the honor of a croissant and a double allongé—as if he were about to kiss her hand and sweep her off her feet.
I imagine he thought himself a Don Juan, but he reminded me more of Don Quixote—which made me Sancho Panza, so I discarded the metaphor.
We saw her in the very early hours, when her staff lugged wicker chairs onto the sidewalks and her mysterious, polished chrome machines hissed and rumbled with the first of the day’s caffeine injections and her own cook appeared from the subterranean kitchen with trays of hot, fresh viennoiseries, glistening from the oven.
Outside, the street cleaners sprayed the sidewalks and the traffic began to build. Within, as the lights flickered in cautious greeting of a new day, we felt warm and welcomed. Madame smiled. She delivered our coffees and tartines with grace and sometimes a coy hint of wiggly haunches. The morning’s edition of the Paris Star, its spine clamped in a wooden rod, was laid before us, and we took turns in deconstructing it in the way journalists know best.
Jeez, who writes this garbage?
Oops, we do.
The rest of the world came to know this particular day as the day of the Great Crash, but at that hour in Paris, the bubble of delusion, deceit and denial still enfolded the financiers of Tokyo and London and New York. It was the day I finally planned to transmit Faria’s message from her loft to Shelby, but I did not know how to bring the conversation around to it. I had prevaricated for a long time, trying to work out how to tell him, how to demand his presence after work at her apartment. A weekend had gone by, and I had tried to call him, but his cell phone rang continuously without inviting me to leave a message. I wasn’t sure how to broach the Swede’s question about a fire, either, so to my enduring regret, I left it for another time. Whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not, inaction can be just as devastating as dynamism. History isn’t made exclusively from grand gestures: neglect unravels empires; when small talk replaces decisions, you have to look out for what you’re ignoring. Easy to say now, I know.
That morning, I was recounting the latest episode in a long-running story about an infestation of what I believed to be weasels in one of my barns. I even showed Shelby a leaflet advertising various brands of poison for rodents and bearing the ink stamp of my local feed store. For his part, Shelby was reminiscing about an incident in Africa—a memory triggered, I suspected, by the combination of a warm beverage and some more recent encounter. I was only half listening, halfheartedly trying to summon the courage to tell him I had been with his dying lover just days before while he tarried elsewhere.
“So we were stuck in this conference center, see, and the organizers couldn’t give a stuff about the welfare of the old hacks. Only security: no one comes in; no one goes out. No facilities—no bar, no tea shop, no john, nothing. And no air-con. So we’re all waiting for a press conference by some honcho who was going to tell us it was peace in our time for the Namibians, or some such. I was sitting next to this Brit correspondent called Michael Stanley. Old-school. Eton, Oxford. Always wore pink socks. A bit Graham Greene–ish: tropical-weight suits, shirts in Egyptian cotton from Turnbull and Asser. Could have been the high commissioner of Khartoum or the viceroy of Zanzibar. You know the type: looks like Mr. Respectable till the boudoir beckons and then it’s all whambo-zambo and don’t spare the horses. So the temperature is about a zillion and we are sitting round expiring and suddenly someone—think she worked for one of those liberal papers in Zim—blurts out, ‘Christ, it’s hot in here. A kiss and a cuddle for the first man to bring me a cup of tea.’ I guess it was her idea of a joke. But quick as a flash, old Michael Stanley pipes up and says, ‘Well, if I’d known, I’d have brought my thermos.’”
Then my cell phone rang. It was the Asia desk.
Tokyo. Nikkei down.
“So it’s down. So what?”
“Brought my thermos.” Shelby was still chortling. “Bloody thermos and we’d all have got—”
“Eleven percent?”
Shelby stopped laughing. He probably had stock in Mitsubishi.
“And the others? How much down? Christ.”
“Plummet?” Shelby inquired. “Corrective adjustment? Slide? Spiral? Swoon? Fell sharply?”
“Crash,” I muttered.
“Crash and burn. Zippo-zombo.” He seemed almost exultant. I paid Madame in a hurry, almost forgetting the courtesies of “bonne journée” and “à bientôt” that accompanied our partings. I was vaguely aware of Shelby picking up something that fell from my pocket. But I was still thinking of my encounter with Faria Duclos and how I could persuade Shelby to go visit.
Back at the office of the Paris Star, at that hour, we were the only hands on deck. Bereft of its crew, the place looked especially mournful—you had to wonder how many cups of coffee, nuked soup, flat cola, sneaky vodka, or surreptitious Sancerre had gone into creating the particular mottled patina of dark stains on the faded, once-pink carpet. Why pink? You had to wonder about that, too. Who would ever expect news hounds to respect the sanctity of pink?
Shelby was already fizzing, writing straight into an editing program—Clefstik—with direct access to the mysterious procedures that somehow led to posting on the home page of Graphic.com. Normally, I urged him to write in the personal, eyes-only box—Homepatch—that no one else could access. Then it was a simple operation to transfer the finished article into Clefstik, which I could access from my terminal to edit and send to our breathlessly waiting public. Clefstik was open to every signed-on Star or Graphic editor on either paper’s system. It was no place for jokes, errors, cock-ups. So I coached him on the protocols.
“We don’t use ‘crash’ until it’s 1929,” I said.
“It is 1929.”
“Eleven percent is ‘plummet.’ Not ‘crash.’”
“Depends whose pension fund you are talking about.”
He was already writing, pulling together pronouncements by alarmed television news readers and good old-fashioned wire reports. As he wrote, he had the phone on speaker, autodialing stringers in Singapore and Hong Kong, Frankfurt and London and New Delhi, telling them he didn’t care what time it was where they were or whether they were eating muesli for breakfast or masala for lunch, they needed to haul ass and call the dealers and fund managers and all-purpose economic analysts and harvest the quotes and the wisdom that would make the story shine like bling on a stripper’s G-string.
Bylines for all, he promised.
Free lunch next time you’re in Paris.
But get me the quotes and keep them coming. Vox pops. Color. Full-court press. Dealers hurling themselves from windows. Grandmothers marching on banks. Families heading West through the Dust Bowl. Whatever. It was hard to tell whether he was hack, conductor, or general marshaling the troops. Maybe a little of all three—in his own mind at least.
Asian shares plummeted Wednesday as investors abandoned banking stocks after reports that leading Wall Street institutions had run out of cash to cover their trading commitments.
The contagion spread rapidly from the Nikkei in Tokyo, which fell 11 percent, before the Hang Seng index fell back by nine percent in heavy trading.
“This is beginning to look like a panic,” said Tom Rafferty, a fund manager in Frankfurt.
European stock futures—a market device to forecast likely opening prices—were indicated sharply lower.
“Okay. Hand it over.” I took over the first few hasty paragraphs. It reminded me of the days when you would grab paper stories from typewriters, take by take, and pencil them on deadline.
One of Shelby’s lingering habits from the newspaper era was to write the word “endit” after the closing period of every story, but “endit” had no place on the web: the web consumed and moved on, never pausing or ending for a minute or a second. So the first thing you did with Shelby’s stuff was to update it: with one stroke of the backspace, “endit” became endit
Shelby was clicking frantically through opposition websites. Like Graphic.com, our competitors—nytimes.com, wsj.com, ft.com—were still using the early wire service bulletins. No one had a bylined piece from one of the paper’s own correspondents. As the corporate strategists put it, our four original grafs would provide value added—from two guys minutes away from coffee, croissants, and speculative glances toward the emollient Madame.
“Post it. Post the damn thing,” Shelby said.
I flipped through it, cursor flying, composed a headline: “Asian markets plummet, Europe set to follow.”
I hit the controls that cleared up the text and made Shelby laugh: clean up quotes, clean up dummy tags.
I put his byline in bold.
Paris dateline.
The coveted Paris dateline.
“Post it for Chrissakes.”
I hit the command that said “Copy to Graphic.com.” I pinged the web producer. We waited. Looked at our watches. Scanned the opposition—still abed, we prayed. Why did it always take so long?
The site flickered. High on the homepage, the headline crystallized into view.
“Asian markets plummet, Europe set to follow. By Joe Shelby. One minute ago.”
“Bingo,” he said.
The phone rang.
Marcel Duffie was calling in from home, obviously seeing Graphic.com being fed onto the Star’s own website.
Shelby still had the phone on speaker. Duffie was fuming and his voice echoed through the empty newsroom.
“How come you guys suddenly get to cherry-pick the markets story? I have reporters ready to go on that.”
“I don’t see them, Marcel,” Shelby said.
“They’re on their way in.”
“On the way isn’t good enough. We need to move fast. To the victor, the spoils. As in love and war. Big story and all that. This newsroom looks like the Mary Celeste.”
“That’s my newsroom you’re insulting.”
“It’s the Star’s newsroom, owned by the Graphic, which pays my salary to do this stuff, Marcel, so please take it easy.”
I broke in. It was one thing for Shelby to do fifteen rounds without the Queensberry Rules with the executive editor of the Paris Star. He was independent of Marcel’s command, run from the Graphic in New York. But I was on Duffie’s payroll, and I was on the Star’s masthead. The last thing I wanted was disgrace by association with the flammable Shelby.
“Marcel, hi. Ed. Look. Crossed wires. We tried to reach your guys. Really. But it’s getting pretty competitive out there. And the Star is really looking pretty good. Way ahead of the FT, the Journal. They still don’t have bylines. We are just getting in a crop of quotes for the next go-round. And your guys will look amazing in print. Trust me. We’ll just do the grunt stuff. We’ll build the stage for them. You can tell them how to pirouette.”
“Blarney! Bullshit, Clancy,” he said. But he was mollified. “Well, next time you call me first. Right?”
“Sorry, Marcel. Are you on a cell? Just lost the signal for a moment.”
“Fuck you, Clancy.”
“Marcel, you still there?”
“Build the stage,” Shelby was muttering. “What are we? Carpenters?”
Carpenters, I felt like telling him, should be so lucky. We were on the cusp of the meltdown, pennants flying, riding forth against the heathens of Mammon. But he did not always see it the way I did. There were times when our day would start with screaming messages from far-flung correspondents demanding that cuts in their sacred prose be reinstated, insisting that their oeuvre must on no account be tweaked lest their readers be robbed of the benefit of their wisdom.
“What do they think the web is?” Shelby liked to say. “The garbage can of the vanities?”
He had the story back on his screen. Stringer copy was flowing in, borne on torrents of gloom: Sydney down nine points, Seoul down seven, and the Hang Seng in a tailspin. Analysts in Shanghai and Singapore forecast a protracted decline, a big bear market if it turned out that the reports were true and American banks had gambled the farm on income from shaky mortgages just as the housing market began to retreat. But it would not end there. If American banks had clambered onto the subprime bandwagon, London and Zurich must have, too. Once the bubble burst, the whole world would feel the impact. All those fancy bankers and hedge fund managers in their Gieves and Hawkes suits and Hermès ties, driving their Bentley coupes from their mansions bought from ill-gotten bonuses, would be naked emperors running for cover—at least if people like Shelby and me had anything to do with it.
Across Europe, the markets were about to open—Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, London. They would take their lead from Asia, anticipating a flight from stocks. Gold would surge. Investors would be scrambling, talking down short-sold stocks so that smart investors got rich by destroying the paper wealth of companies while the rest of us perished. I was beginning to think like Shelby.
“Greed,” he was saying. “Every time—the dot-com crash, Russia, Asia—it’s greed. Change and decay is all around I see! It’s arrogant sons of bitches crooking the rest of us and figuring you can fool all the people all the time. Markets just got back to where they were six years ago, and now they’re down the pan again.”
Listening to him, I figured I had better keep a close watch on his stories: the web might offer him the biggest bully pulpit he had ever had. I asked him to start subsequent versions of his story in Homepatch before he transferred them to Clefstik.
By this time, the urgents were beginning to pile up and Shelby ran me through them: Russia announces the suspension of share trading on both Moscow exchanges; Icelanders begin queuing in sub-zero temperatures outside Reykjavik banks, demanding their deposits; gold prices surge; civil aviation authorities in the Cayman Islands report runways overwhelmed by private jets as Mafia dons withdraw cash from secret accounts.
“That true? About the Cayman Islands?”
“Nope. But it sounded good.”
“You didn’t post it?”
“No. It was just in Homepatch. A doodle. Wishful thinking. Film scripts.”
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“No one would see it unless it was in Clefstik.”
“True.”
“But it makes you think.”
“What?”
“Well. It makes you think,” he said slowly, as if an idea was forming that amazed him with the brilliance of its simplicity. “We are influencing this story. We are telling people markets are down. So they pull their portfolios. Sell! Sell! So the markets go down further. They believe us. We can make it come true. We can make events happen by saying that they already have.”
“And your point is?”
“Never mind. I’m just saying that if some unscrupulous person were to put out a ringer that influenced the markets, that unscrupulous person might know a broker …”
“Don’t go there, Joe. Please. Don’t ever, ever go there.”
I can’t recall how many versions we went through that day in the hours New York was dark. In the end it was all a blur of code words and labels—Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, CAC 40, FTSE 100, DAX, Euro Stoxx, ECB and BoE, LIBOR and prime rate, swaps and shorts and spread betters and something called the Baltic Dry, which I might once have imagined to denote a Swedish ship’s captain in rehab or a cheap brand of Latvian gin but turned out to be a way of measuring how much merchandise was being shipped around the world. In any event, it was way down. By midday in Paris, we had a pretty definitive story, a saga whose iterations were defined in the rainbow markings of edit-trace, showing where Shelby had written and I had honed.
Asian and European shares plummeted Wednesday as investors abandoned banking stocks after reports that leading Wall Street institutions had run out of cash to cover their trading commitments. Stock market futures forecast that the leading American indexes would decline sharply.
The retreat was the worst in decades, possibly since the Great Depression, President Nicolas Sarkozy told an emergency session of Parliament here.
From Sydney, Australia, to Leeds, England, depositors besieged banks to demand their deposits, some of them bringing small tents and folding cots to camp out on sidewalks. Trading was suspended at stock markets in Moscow, Milan and Reykjavik.
“I am ruined,” said Ilsa Sigurdardottir, a 67-year-old Icelandic writer who said her savings portfolio worth $600,000 had been wiped out. In London, witnesses said they saw top bankers at their Canary Wharf headquarters loading boxes of files into parked Range Rovers. Home owners in Turin barricaded villas to preempt seizure by bailiffs. Prices of gold, silver, paintings and sculptures rose as investors looked for safe havens. Works depicting dead rodents suspended in formaldehyde sold at auction for $10 million each, a spokesman for Sotheby’s said.
A leading Wall Street banker was seen in television footage boarding his 57-foot sailing yacht, “Derivative,” refusing to specify his destination. Another attempted to flee in a luxury 75-foot motorboat called “The Shorted Stock.” A Coast Guard cutter was reported to have set out to locate the vessels.
Yet another banker was filmed as he balanced on the 27th floor balcony of the head offices of a leading financial institution in Canary Wharf, England, threatening to leap before a police negotiator persuaded him to step down. On the sidewalk below police used tear gas to disperse angry account holders, ruined investors and junior staff chanting, “Jump! Jump!”
“This is really only the beginning,” said Alfred Tannhauser, a broker at Migros cie, a private bank in Geneva. “We are looking at a global crisis, a meltdown.”
Led down by banking stocks, the CAC 40 in Paris was off 12 percent and the DAX in Frankfurt fell 15 percent. The FTSE in London plummeted by 13 percent.
Spread betting agencies forecast a massive decline on Wall Street when American markets opened. Under American market rules, trading in premarket options was suspended when the contracts exceeded their maximum forecast fall of 550 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of leading stocks.
Our version went on to include quotes from press conferences and professors explaining the crisis and the contribution of hedge funds and investment banks to the creation of a huge market that, in the end, was built on the frailest of supports: the ability of poor people to finance debts they were encouraged to run up by bankers and their own politicians and never stood a chance of repaying. But such had been the profits from drilling into this last, large tundra of human hope, folly, and deceit that no one escaped contagion. We were beginning to hear unconfirmed reports of suicides.
It was midway through this maelstrom that a messenger arrived in the newsroom of the Paris Star, laden with arguably the most ostentatious bunch of red roses ever seen outside those markets in Antwerp where the world’s florists buy flowers flown in overnight from Africa, harvested and packed by dollar-a-day laborers to feed the demand for ten-dollars-a-stem blooms. Keyboards fell silent. Screens went into saver mode. Eyes followed the roses’ procession across the stained carpet. The messenger stopped once or twice, reading a name from a card attached to the mega-bouquet and inquiring as to the identity of that person. Gradually, it became clear who the lucky recipient was to be, and people fell back in a semicircle around Gloria Beeching’s desk.
Maybe it was my slight insider knowledge of the preliminary events, but I thought I detected a smudge of tiredness under her eyes, a hint of extra makeup covering part of her neck, but I was not in the business of trying to guess where her meeting with Shelby in Saint-Germain had taken the pair of them later. The roses told their own story of gratification or expectation, hope or thanks, or even apology. She was at least twenty years younger than Shelby, but age differences had never been a deterrent to either of them. As the messenger arrived at her desk, she flushed a deeper crimson than the roses, looked at the card that came with the flowers and shook her head with obvious relief. Some mistake, she seemed to be saying. Wrong address. Wrong name. Return to sender. The messenger remonstrated, then relented. Then retreated.
As he was passing the executive editor’s corner office, Duffie himself emerged to inspect the pasteboard card accompanying the roses, his manner suggesting a disinterested readiness to help solve the problem of who the flowers were intended for. But when he read the note, he too flushed red and glowered first at Beeching, then at the glass-walled box that housed Nonstop News. I noticed that he tipped the messenger and kept the card.
When big news broke, the tough part for Shelby on a big story was always the handover. He had been brought up to believe that if he started a story he would see it through to the final crossed t and dotted i, before the very last print deadline, before the presses rolled and ink flowed and delivery trucks rumbled out of plants laden with bundles of the Graphic. Even then, he stayed with the story heart and soul as the papers flew to America’s front door, muscled into the news kiosks to push aside the girlie mags, fell open on breakfast tables and in railroad cars, nestled in briefcases and purses, before finally lying forgotten, rumpled and abandoned, on the plastic benches of Manhattan diners.
Once, he had told me, early in his newspaper career as a staff reporter, he had been carousing in New York’s West Village with a British colleague who had asked him who his favorite imagined reader was.
“As for me,” the Brit said, “I always think I am writing for an English country vicar—retired—who gets the paper a day late in the deep countryside when the steam train arrives down the branch line.”
That was when Shelby spotted a bearded, frizzy-haired professor-type waiting eagerly for the first sales of the Sunday Graphic late on a Saturday night, and he had approached him and said, “You are my country vicar. Wherever I am, I’ll write for you!”
The man thought he was insane—and said so—and Shelby was more than a little miffed to have his gesture rebuffed. But still he believed that, somewhere out there, awaiting his Sunday Graphic, was that same professor or his descendant. (Once, he told me, he had been driven in from Kennedy by a cab driver of Ghanaian descent and Shelby had told him, “I write for the Graphic from Africa.” And the driver had replied with a laugh, “So you are one of those guys who write all those stories we all don’t want to read about.”)
But in the digital era you did your shift; you handed off; you split. You did not wait for the presses to roll because there were no presses. There was no professor to stand in line because he could read the paper on his PC or his cell phone or his tablet. So you stepped aside. Like a relay runner, you passed the baton and left it to someone else to cross the line first, to win the accolades.
Shelby had no idea who read him on the web, except for the people who e-mailed indignant messages protesting errors in punctuation or spelling or accusing him of bias to one side or the other or both, usually in stories from the Middle East. “How much did Hamas pay you for that one?” was one of his favorites. These cyber-correspondents had little shame, much anger, and usually very bad manners. “Call that journalism? It reads more like propaganda from the Tehran playbook,” someone would write. “As usual, you Graphic whores are Zionists’ lickspittle,” another opined. Most were anonymous.
It was impossible to know if anyone other than the crazies even noticed who wrote the endless gigabytes of “content” that spewed from the network of servers and hard drives and cables that gave the web its digital spine. As one particularly disgruntled web editor described the process, it ended not with the glory of a page one byline but in a journalist’s equivalent of coitus interruptus.
Shelby wanted to own what he wrote—if only for a news cycle. His stories were his creations. He had launched them into the world, and he needed to see them crawl and toddle and walk to their readers.
Handing over was bad enough. Worse still was handing over to Gibson Dullar.
The two men had similar careers, both traveling widely to hell-holes, both filing prize-winning dispatches (I had worked on both and knew which one I thought more skillful, more fluid, more rooted in truth), both achieving an after-hours reputation that others might envy. But their similarities ended with their résumés.
Dullar, Shelby liked to say, had a knack for claiming he had been in the right place at the right time, especially when no one was around to disprove it. Now, in this digital era, you never even knew where Dullar was when he took the handover. Sometimes you would glimpse an unusual number on the digital readout of your office phone and figure he was in this country or that. But he kept his whereabouts close, and the bosses seemed to treat that as his foible—a quirk of genius.
Gibson Dullar had limpid, pool-like brown eyes that begged mothering, set in features reminiscent of the deities of heavy metal. Somehow he had preserved jet-black locks swept back, Elvis-style, from his forehead. His slender frame had resisted the bumps and swells of other well-past-forty-years-olds. He functioned with ratlike cunning, sensing, rather than knowing, which way the wind was blowing and how he should trim his sails in response. There were plenty of people left in his wake who rued the day they had entrusted confidences to Dullar only to find their secrets betrayed or manipulated.
Every day at the close of our shift, Dullar would call up in his precious way—at the beginning of his workday wherever he was, six hours behind us or four hours ahead—and we would bring him up to speed on our activities and he would say with a faux-reluctant sigh, “You guys have done everything, real worker bees, so I guess I’ll just take it from here and tidy up the scraps.”
And then, if you looked in Clefstik, you would see the edit-trace with his initials, spilling over your story like a rash of tiny veins, or a gossamer web enfolding and suffocating your creation. You could almost hear him saying to his bosses, “Well, I just gave it a little tweak here and there”—which translated as “Christ, these guys in Paris would be nowhere without me.”
But the thing about Dullar—“The Dullard,” as Shelby misnamed him—was that he was very smart. He knew when to seem to give credit, when to take it. He had a reputation for somehow going that extra mile of reporting that yielded the moment of illumination. He was, much as I hated to admit it, a pro on the keyboard and a formidable player in the politics of the Graphic newsroom. He knew his way around the complexities of Clefstik and Homepatch like no one else. He was the guru who retrieved stories that had disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of a suddenly and mysteriously blank screen; he knew how to put acute accents on words in French and umlauts in German and weird strokes through the letter o in Scandinavian tongues. (It crossed my mind—maybe uncharitably—that the Argentine soy vote imbroglio might well have his gumshoe footprints beneath it, if only we knew how to look for them.)
Even at this stage in his career, he still planned to go further still, and anyone who crossed him would not be invited along for the ride to glory. So you played a careful hand with Dullar. I noticed that Shelby himself refrained from talking to Dullar to his face in the same way as he talked about him to me. When I asked him what he thought made his rival tick, Shelby told a story he claimed to have heard from Dullar himself.
Someplace in Africa, he said, a guide had told Dullar that the lion prevailed over all other beasts because it stands at the head of the food chain: no one else wants to eat lion meat, but the king ate everything that moved.
“He wants to be king of the jungle,” Shelby said. “Simple as that.”
So, on the day of the meltdown, it was with some pain that we handed over the story, knowing that we had no control over how the quotes, stringers, and color from correspondents and contributors we had conjured forth after that first call over coffee in Le Primerose would be applauded, or warped, or misrepresented, or simply woven into the building symphony of the Dullard’s triumph.
He had called in with his usual chummy congratulations, and I could see from my phone that he was not in New York. The number looked surprisingly familiar, but I was too distracted by the technicalities and maneuvers of the handoff to pay too much attention.
On the Graphic website, I could see Dullar’s byline creeping into a lowly slot at the end of story—normally reserved for mere contributors rather than masters of the scribbled universe. But I knew his tactics. His byline was viral. Once unleashed, it conquered all. Like a coiled leopard, it was poised for the hungry leap to the top of the story and the easy, greedy swallowing-up of its predecessors, notably the line that proclaimed “By Joe Shelby.”
We were about to close down our systems when Marcel Duffie dropped by. His face was contorted and pink with the effort to suppress white rage. While we had been batting out the ledes and new tops and writethrus, he had been to lunch, signaling his approach to us now with a rich, odorous bow wave of wine and garlic.
He tossed two pieces of paper onto Shelby’s desk. One was the card that had accompanied the bouquet of roses. The other was the poison ad from my local feed store.
“You might at least have got her name right, Shelby, you snake in the grass. What the fuck is this “Mon Aurélia”? Her name is Gloria. Or don’t you inquire? And as for you, Clancy. That’s your locality, isn’t it?”
He pointed at the inky stamp of my local feed store.
“So you want to poison me, eh, Clancy? Like a ferret, stoat, weasel, or rat? Well, let me tell you, you toxic shit, that if anyone is going to get poisoned around here … I give you a month. Make that weeks.”
“Mea culpa,” Shelby broke in. “Just a joke, Marcel. All my doing. Nothing to do with Clancy.”
“If you didn’t spend so much time joking,” Duffie said with a sneer, “and spent more time working like Gibson Dullar, you wouldn’t miss so many angles. How you two hotshots missed that Mafia line beats me.”
“What was that about a month?” Shelby asked as Duffie stamped his way across the newsroom floor, his footfalls sounding like receding thunder.
I went back into Clefstik and looked up the latest iteration of the meltdown story. As I had suspected, Dullar’s byline was now up top with a jumble of names at the bottom including “Joe Shelby contributed.”
But Shelby was not rising to that particular bait. He scanned the story and began to read out loud.
“‘Civil aviation authorities in the Cayman Islands reported run-ways overwhelmed by private jets as Mafia dons withdrew cash from their secret bank accounts …’ Now where the hell did that come from?”
“More to the point, how in hell did he get his hands on it?”
As we wound up for the day—“the day I lost my 401(k) and my byline and didn’t know which hurt the most,” as Shelby put it—I noticed that he had slotted a USB stick into his computer and was busy copying over files, then deleting the originals from the PC on his desk. Then he deactivated the virus shield and spyware protection and left the machine online. With any luck, he muttered, the machine would be so infected by the next morning that the techs would have to scrap and replace it. And anyone hacking in would go down with a severe case of contagion.
I was closing down my own computer when the news alert device monitoring the French wires brought up a two-line item marked “Urgent.”
The headline declared: “Renowned War Photographer Dies.”
The brief story below it said:
PARIS—Faria Duclos, one of the first female photographers from France to cover the Vietnam War, died suddenly after a long battle with a neurological illness. Police are investigating. Obituary follows.
I looked for Shelby to break this terrible news to him, but he had left the building. So, too, I noted, had Gloria Beeching.