Through her office door, Katherine saw Scott MacDonald push the elevator button. He had his head down to avoid being noticed; he had a notepad in his hand.
Katherine liked Scott’s looks. She liked his balanced body and his straight nose. She liked the way he walked, as though he had a place to be, as though he had not realized he was the same age as the shufflers in trench coats and fedoras. She liked the fact that he wasn’t part of anything: the potlucks, the card games, the cheese club. He didn’t partake in lunchroom gossip, and he didn’t, as far as she could tell, care about changes at the paper.
Cullen, the legislature reporter, lived for office rumours. MacKenzie was convinced that Cullen had broken into his office at night and copied a personnel file. Sometimes, while pretending to be working, Cullen and the Ports reporter sat at their desks, on opposite sides of the newsroom, and gossiped with each other on their phones.
A practitioner of I’humoir noire, Cullen floated about on a cushion of bad puns and clever bon mots. He had dubbed the massacre of three people in a Sydney River McDonald’s the McMurders, he was first with the bad Waco jokes. Cullen and his wife were a yuppie power couple. For his birthday, Cullen told the lunchroom, she had bought him a ’62 Fender Strato-caster, pre-CBS, fiesta red with a tweed case.
“I’ve been working on the licks, trying to find where the crazy stuff lives,” said Cullen, wearing a Django Reinhardt T-shirt. Django had a smoke dangling from his lips and a thin moustache shaped like a child’s drawing of a cat’s mouth. “You can get some strange articulation.”
Katherine had the impression that Scott MacDonald couldn’t pick Django out of a police lineup and didn’t think that Waco was funny.
The elevator arrived and Scott escaped. MacKenzie, Katherine noticed, had taken a new interest in Sports and the boxing beat, hoping, it seemed, to prove he was still relevant. Katherine doubted that Boomer, obsessed with ad revenue and the rationalization of staff, had noticed.
Katherine had an hour before a meeting with Boomer. She opened a computer file and, in an exercise that had become both crucial and familiar, closed her eyes in composition. She was addressing the past, she reminded herself, laying ghosts to rests. If she didn’t, she told herself . . . This letter was addressed to Deryk, her former fiancé, now living in Toronto. Katherine believed that the letters were ridding her body of toxins that had accumulated in the form of old hurts and injustices. When purged, the toxins left as caliginous clouds of poison, but if left unchecked, they could destroy her as they had her mother.
Dear Deryk:
When I went to London to see you, I was wearing the pearl ring you had given me for my birthday. It was my talisman.
It had been a long trip, but I was thrilled to know that you were working on the movie set as we had long imagined. When you came through the door to meet me, you seemed subdued, and then you looked across the table and gushed as though something marvellous had happened.
“Well, I’ve got news.” I smiled, intrigued. You stuck out your hand and said, “I got married.”
Since you had only been gone three months and we had never broken up, I was speechless. What could I possibly say? Before my mind could clear, an assistant whisked you back to your set, where you remained, ending our meeting and a chapter of my life with an expeditious wave of the hand. You were a coward, Deryk, and a duplicitous person.
Sincerely,
Katherine Redgrave
Katherine entered the publisher’s office, its walls decorated with a Dale Carnegie certificate and plaques of appreciation from community groups. The air was cold. On Boomer’s desk was the largest nameplate Katherine had ever seen: twelve inches of brass, gaudy and polished as the decor of a fern bar. G. K. BOOMER, PUBLISHER, relocated so often (fourteen times in ten years, to be exact) that he left the name of the paper blank.
Boomer bustled in, a short, shoulderless creature drawn by the playful pen of Dr. Seuss. His body was dominated by a tremendous forehead that left his eyes pale and shrunken. His bushy hair was parted but stood straight up, a triumphant weed that had found the sun.
Garth was supposed to be at the meeting, but Boomer started without him.
“What are you going to do about Webberly from Business?” Boomer dumped problems on people abruptly, a tactic he had adopted to take control.
“I talked to him,” Katherine reported. “I told him he can’t wear his volunteer firefighter’s uniform in the office.”
“Make sure it’s in writing, a formal letter on his file.”
Katherine nodded and decided not to mention Webberly’s belt buckle, which was engraved with shooting flames.
“Half of those volunteer firefighters are pyromaniacs,” Boomer added.
Garth shuffled in late. Clearing his throat, he settled in a chair. He pulled out a pen and a notebook, mumbling out of range. There was a terse discussion about overtime and early retirement, and Garth muttered something under his breath about Sports. Boomer ignored him and asked about pagination.
Garth had three stock facial expressions, Katherine had noted: the tense, pursed lipped face of disapproval that he wore when employees were summoned to his office; the fist-pumped, let’s-go-get-em look of a ball-busting newsman; and the look of total confusion, as blank as a TV that had just lost cable — a look that appeared, without his knowledge, whenever the topic became too complicated.
Noting the blank look, Boomer shot Garth a glare.
Katherine wondered whether Boomer was still angry at MacKenzie over the Bentley funeral debacle. Richard Bentley had sold the Standard, a family newspaper, to Gem and died three months later at his country estate. Garth had been one of four people asked to speak at Bentley’s funeral; he was the working press, followed by a senator, a horse breeder, and a nephew.
The church was tiny, with wide pine floors and scarred pews marked with heather and a single mauve ribbon. MacKenzie was wearing a white shirt and his good blue suit.
“Richard Bentley was ahead of his time,” he boldly declared. MacKenzie looked out at the crowd, hoping to convey the proper image: forceful, reflective, but humbled by the occasion, a mere employee of the great man. Bentley’s father and grandfather had run the Standard before him, operating on the time-tested principle of noblesse oblige.
“He told reporters to use their eyes and ears.”
A woman in an Eva Gabor wig breathed heavily as MacKenzie extolled the dead publisher for his integrity, his foresight, and his contribution to modern journalism.“I always remember Richard Bentley telling us: ‘Go further. Give the readers more.’” His voice rose. “‘Let them feel, smell, and hear the places you’re writing about. Let them know what makes a person tick. You’re journalists, journalists, not some damn recording secretary like Albert Conrad from the Cumberland County Bugle.’”
Garth’s eyes panned the crowd, past a chic woman in a leopard-print suit and cat’s-eye glasses, past a teen in a yachting blazer.
He ignored a photographer kneeling up front, and he glanced at Boomer for reaction. MacKenzie panned until his gaze came to rest on a pot-bellied man in a threadbare suit. The man had the same stunned look of a woman he had once seen on a Cancun beach, pummelled by a wave and knocked to the swirling bottom, groping through sand and confusion. When she had stood up, blood dripping from her nose, the top of her suit had been pulled to her waist, exposing flaccid breasts.
The man was Albert Conrad, Garth realized far too late, and no, he was not dead.
Boomer now stood up from his desk and rocked on his toes, gaining two inches of precious height. Up. Back down. Uuup. Boomer had risen beyond his dreams and his natural place in the order of man, Katherine realized, passing taller, smarter, more genetically gifted humans. He had tasted success, sweet and surprisingly bitter, and he was not about to let it go.
It had not been lost on Boomer that Conrad and Garth were the same age. Both had started in the business as copy boys, although Garth had insisted, for days after the funeral, that they “had nothing in common.”
“Now, this business with who’s it from Lifestyles,” Boomer said.
“Glenda?” volunteered Katherine.
“Is she still visiting that murderer in Dorchester?” Boomer asked.
“Yes. I talked to her. I explained the paper’s position.”
“Did she mention his press releases?”
“No, although it’s pretty clear she’s writing them . . . And . . . ah . . . ” Katherine was reluctant. “She says they’re getting married.”
“Happy honeymoon. She gets one more warning.”
“She says she has a lawyer.”
“Good. He can find her a job. When we fire her, she’ll be blackballed from Heart’s Content to Squamish. Make sure she understands that.” He shook his gigantic head in disbelief. “How did these people ever get hired?” he asked, apparently not expecting an answer. He ended the meeting before Garth could speak. “That’s all.”