Bob Carson was an early riser.
He loved the dark silence of the hours before dawn. Being afoot before light and noise overtook the world gave him a delicious sense of being one up on the day, just that much ahead of all the folks still hugging pillows in the warmth of their beds.
So he was already awake, showered, shaved, and padding around his orderly kitchen, humming vaguely to himself as he assembled the ingredients for an egg-white spinach omelet, when his cellphone rang at 5:52. The electronic burring froze him with Ziploc bags of spinach and mushrooms in hand. The sound belonged to later in the day. In the stillness of predawn, it seemed almost an offense.
Bob sighed, put the bags on the counter, turned off the flame upon which a skillet had been warming, and picked up the phone just as it began to chirp again. The caller ID said it was Doug Perry. What could Doug want at this hour?
Bob touched the green button on the screen and spoke without preamble. “Doug. What’s wrong?”
“Have you seen the paper?”
There was something brittle in Doug’s voice that, for some reason, made Bob shift his weight. “No,” he said. And now he glanced with wary foreboding toward the kitchen table where four papers—the New York Times, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Post—were neatly arranged, the Post on top, the nameplates of the other three peeking out, waiting for him to read them over breakfast and decaf.
“Go take a look,” said Doug.
“What’s…?”
“Front page. Go take a look.”
“Hold on.”
Lowering the phone, Bob went to the table and slid the Post from the top of the stack. He glanced at the images of Obama and McCain, made certain neither man had been misidentified, looked for typos in the headline. Then he flipped the paper over to look below the fold. And felt a dull thump against his breastbone.
“Oh my God,” he said, lifting the phone even as he dropped into a chair. “How did that happen?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I have no idea.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“Lydia called me from the gym just now,” said Perry. “She is fucking furious, you hear me?”
“I can imagine.”
“No, brother, you can’t. And she’s going to be demanding answers. You sure you have no idea how this happened? Something like this would require administrator level access to the system. It’s not something just anybody can do. Maybe you made a mistake somewhere along the way? Maybe you, I don’t know, pressed a send button when you meant to press delete?”
“Doug, for the third time: No. Have you spoken to Sam?” Samantha Welles was the night duty officer.
“Yeah, that was my first thought. She swears that when she signed off on the page, it did not have Malcolm’s column. It had the AP story on the undecideds.”
“Well, I didn’t do it,” insisted Bob. How many times had he said this now? He was conscious of protesting too much.
Doug grunted. It was a sound that could have meant anything. “Well,” he said, “there’s a meeting in the publisher’s office, 7:00.”
“I’ll see you there,” Bob told his boss. But Doug had already hung up.
Time was short, but Bob didn’t go flying to his bedroom to get dressed. Instead, he picked up the paper and, almost as if in a trance, began to read Malcolm’s column, the column he, Bob, had rejected emphatically and then personally spiked to the delete basket, the one that had somehow risen from the dead. It said:
Good morning, friends and neighbors.
What you read here today are the musings of a tired man.
“Tired from what?” you will ask yourselves. “What can Toussaint have to be tired about? He is a respected journalist, he is paid more than he deserves, he has two of the greatest kids in the world and he was lucky enough to be loved by a woman who was gracious and kind and smart and stunning and who stayed married to Toussaint for 27 years—until her death in 2006—despite the fact that he was none of those things and everyone knew she was far too good for him.
What in the world does Toussaint have to complain about? Well, it’s simple, really: I’m sick and tired of white folks’ bullshit.
I know the language catches some of you by surprise, but there you go.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column. You may remember it. It was about Donte Stoddard, the 22-year-old African-American man, father of three, who died in a hail of bullets—52 shots were fired, 27 struck home—when he was confronted by Chicago police late one night outside a McDonald’s restaurant. Police say they shot Stoddard because he reached into his pocket and produced a wallet that officers mistook for a gun. Witnesses said that was a lie. Security camera footage backs them up. It clearly shows Stoddard with takeout bags of fast food in each hand. He transfers them both to one hand and begins reaching toward his hip pocket to produce his ID. But before he his hand even reaches the pocket, much less pulls anything out, the shooting begins—and continues for 12 excruciating seconds.
After all that, police said the man they were looking for when they stopped Stoddard on suspicion of armed robbery actually bore no resemblance to him—10 years older, 50 pounds heavier, and with a medium Afro where Stoddard wore dreadlocks. The only thing they had in common is that they were both black men; apparently, that was enough. In the column, I called the cops out for the execution of yet another black man under dubious circumstances and demanded a Justice Department investigation.
In response, I just received the following email from a man named Joe MacPherson, which I present to you now in its entirety:
“Toussaint, your so stupid. Do you really expect us to shed tears because this guy is dead? Your just another whiny, brainwashed lib who doesn’t have the brains to see the truth or the balls to tell it. Fact: niggers committ the majoraty of the crimes in this country, so dont blame the PO-lice for this man being dead, blame yourselfs. If you really want to help your people why dont you tell them to stop committing all the crimes? This guy Stoddart had a record for drug dealing and domestic violence. I notice you didnt write about that. Or you could tell them to stop making babys they cant take care of. Stoddart had three kids with three diffrent women and he was only 22! Thats something else you didnt say. No, you always want to put everything on white people. Your hatred of white America shines through with everything you write. Your such a racist nigger. Always playing the race card. Always stirring the pot. Its race baiters like you who are destroying this country. And its people like me who wont let you. This is America, pal. Love it or leave it.”
Now, I don’t present this email to you because it is particularly outlandish. It’s a rare day when I don’t get a half-dozen or more just like it, or worse. No, I present it to you because it represents that final drop of water that makes the bucket overflow.
I repeat: I am tired of white folks’ bullshit.
In the first place—and I realize this is petty, but this is my rant, so humor me—does this email not tell you everything you need to know about declining educational standards in this country? Can you appreciate how truly frustrating it is for an educated man such as myself to have his intelligence impugned by someone who failed to master fifth-grade English?
“Your so stupid”? Really? That may be the single most maddening sentence I have ever read in my life—although “Your such a racist nigger” would also have to be in contention. And would someone please buy this man a box of apostrophes?
As to the rest of it, well…I don’t propose to go through it point by point. I have already said what I had to say about the execution of Donte Stoddard and, for that matter, about black crime, black babies, and the criminalization of black existence. You may look it up if you care to.
I didn’t write this column to say any of that. I wrote it only to say, I give up. I surrender. Uncle.
As many of you know, I once met a great man—his name was Martin Luther King, Jr.—who counseled me to have patience and faith where the people he called “our white brothers” are concerned. I was a young man, with a young man’s impatience and rage. My father was a Memphis sanitation worker, one of the men Dr. King had come to town to help, one of the men who paraded through downtown everyday with a sign that said “I AM A MAN,” because white folks needed the reminder.
I didn’t want to march. I wanted to burn. I wanted to destroy. I wanted to tear down the world until everybody in it felt my impotent fury.
Dr. King told me not to waste my life that way. Patience and faith, he said.
Well, here we are 40 years later, friends and neighbors, and I am out of patience and I am out of faith. I don’t want to burn or destroy or tear down. I just want to surrender, to publicly divest myself of the foolish notion that white people can be redeemed, that they can be influenced to once and for all give up the asinine delusion that melanin correlates to intelligence, morality or worth.
I no longer believe they can.
And yes, someone will point out that 40 years after Dr. King spoke to me, here we are with a black man running for president. What about that? they will say. Doesn’t that prove patience and faith have paid off?
Well, what about that? Barack Obama has faced not just the ordinary political questions about his policies, his plans and his experience but also a series of extraordinary questions unique to him: Was he really born in the USA? Is he secretly a Muslim? Is he secretly a terrorist? Does he hate whitey? White people ask these questions because they can’t bring themselves to ask what they really want to ask: Who is this nigger to think he should be our president?
And when Obama gets his ass kicked and he makes that call tonight to congratulate John McCain on winning the presidency, when the social scientists start talking about the “Bradley Effect” and the hidden racism polling did not detect, ask yourself: could it really have ended otherwise? Could white people have done anything other than what they did?
If you think that, then you don’t know white people.
I do. That’s why I have given up on them.
So Joe MacPherson, thank you for being that one drop and for thereby helping me to clarify something I have been struggling with for a very long time. Now please, go to hell, and take America with you.
Bob sighed. He sat looking for a moment at the paper, Malcolm smiling a smug little smile and looking younger than he was in a sig photo that was probably ten years out of date. Finally, Bob stood and went about replacing the bags in the refrigerator, putting the skillet in the sink. There would be no breakfast this morning.
As Bob was absorbing that minor disappointment, his telephone chirped again, this time the tone alerting him to the arrival of an email. Bob resented the slightly Pavlovian way the little device had trained him to pick it up at the ringing of a bell to see some ad for erectile dysfunction or plea for help from a distressed Nigerian. For a brief moment, he thought of allowing the chirp to go unanswered—didn’t he have more important concerns?—but in the end, he surrendered as he had known he would, picked up the phone, and clicked open his email.
“A name from your past,” read the subject line.
Bob opened it. What he saw put him back in the chair.
Old friend, you cannot imagine my delight at running across your name while doing some research on the Post website. Well, not just your name…there are a million “Bob Carsons” in the world, after all…but also, your picture. That’s what sealed it for me. Even after all these years, I’d have known you anywhere.
I have always regretted the way it was left between us, the things I said to you so long ago in all my youthful self-righteousness and ideological purity. I’ve thought of you often and wondered what became of you.
These past few months, I have been working in minority outreach for Senator Obama. I am on a plane right now and will land in Chicago at 10:30. I will be homeless for a few hours, unable to check into my room until this afternoon. I know this is criminally short notice and I will understand if you can’t do it, but if at all possible, might we have lunch today?
I’ve missed you, Bob. I’d love to catch up with you. More than that, I’d simply love to see you again.
Let me know.
It was signed, “Janeka Lattimore.”
Janeka Lattimore.
He said it in a whisper just to hear it being said, just to have the words on his tongue and the sound in his ear. All at once, Bob realized he had stopped breathing. He breathed.
He was a trim and orderly man in wire frame glasses, pink scalp peeking through the thin canopy of hair at the crown of his head. Once upon a time, back when his hair had fallen to below his shoulder blades, back when he was another man in another life, he had loved Janeka Lattimore.
Helplessly, that was how he had loved her. Completely.
And she had broken his heart.
No, that wasn’t quite right. She had not broken his heart. She had broken him. She had left him lying in pieces on a dirt road in Mississippi and for the longest time, he had not known if—or even cared if—he could put himself together again. And even when he finally decided to get on with it, even when he did manage to put the pieces back together into something that vaguely resembled Robert Matthew Carson, it had never quite been the same. He felt like a piece of china glued back together by a sixth grader. The pieces didn’t quite fit. The break still was visible.
Bob had never loved again—never allowed himself to. There had been relationships, yes. He had even lived for a couple of years with a free-spirited painter in a crummy little apartment in Soho, and she had borne him a son he adored. But he had never married, much less immersed himself in a woman that way again.
Now he was 59 years old and after all this time, here she was, blowing through town, blowing back into his life and wanting to get together…for lunch?
Bob felt anger kindling in him at the nerve of her, to show up 40 years later as an email in his inbox, blithely inviting him to catch up on old times. As if what had happened had never happened, as if she had not told him they had no future because he was white and she was not. As if he, with an icepack to his head and blood dripping off his chin, sitting in the back of that ambulance, had not begged her to stay. As if she had not turned away from him—literally turned away from him—to be with “her people.” That’s how she had put it in that self-consciously melodramatic way of college radicals of the 1960s for whom the revolution was a foregone conclusion. Her people.
“I thought I was your people, too,” he had said, his voice wounded and confused, as the ambulance door closed on him. He had always wondered if she heard him and, if she did, if she had answered. He didn’t know. The door had closed like finality and he had never seen nor heard from her again.
Then his phone had chirped and there she was, inviting him to lunch. There was an absurdity to it that almost wrung a bitter laugh out of him. Almost.
Bob glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes after six. He needed to hurry if he was going to make the meeting. He pressed a button and the screen on his cellphone went dark. But it was an effort just to get up out of the chair.
“Janeka Lattimore,” he said, walking down the hallway toward his bedroom.
His anger had burned itself down to a dull throb by the time Bob entered the glass-enclosed conference room outside Lydia Barnett’s office 51 minutes later. He was the first one there and he didn’t bother turning on the lights. Bob took a seat near the head of the table, pulling his cellphone from the holster on his hip.
He opened his email and typed quickly before he could talk himself out of it, come to his senses, lose his nerve. “Janeka, so good to hear from you. I’d love to see you again. There’s a place on Michigan Avenue called Stymie’s, about two blocks from Grant Park. Is noon OK?”
Bob didn’t even bother to read the note over for typos. He pressed send. Only then did he allow himself to breathe. And to wonder what he had done.
“You OK?”
Bob looked up. Doug was at the door, rumpled and fat, a bear claw in one hand and a latte in the other.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“’Cause you look like hell,” said Doug. He used his elbow to bring up the lights and took a seat on the opposite side of the table, two chairs down.
“It’s not this,” said Bob. “Right after we spoke, I got an email from a girl I used to know—a woman, I guess I should say. Haven’t seen her in 40 years and she pops up out of the blue, says she wants to have lunch.” Even as he spoke, Bob wondered where his sudden chattiness was coming from. Nerves, he decided.
“This girl,” said Doug, around a bite of bear claw, “she was something special, I take it?”
“Very,” said Bob.
“I guess that would explain why you got that pasty face thing going, like you were just run over by a ghost. I sympathize with you, but you might want to get your head in the game here. Like I told you on the phone: Lydia is not a happy woman.”
“And I don’t blame her,” said Bob. “But why should that bother me? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Doug stopped chewing. “You’re kidding me, right? You were his editor. If a scapegoat is needed, who do you think gets the nomination?”
Bob stared. Until this second, he had regarded this whole thing as an annoyance—a major annoyance, to be certain, but nothing more than that. But now…
“Are you saying…?”
He didn’t finish the question. He couldn’t.
Doug met his gaze. “Watch your ass. That’s all I’m saying.”
He took another bite off the pastry, dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “I’m assuming you reread the piece?” he said.
“Yes,” said Bob. “Right after you called.”
“You were the closest to him. Did you ever have any inkling he felt that way?”
“What way?”
“That he hated white people.”
Bob took a moment. “Well,” he said finally, “that’s not exactly what he said, is it?”
“It isn’t?”
“No.” A rueful chuckle. “He said he hates white people’s BS.”
“Yeah, well…” said Doug. He finished the sentence with a little shrug that suggested he found it a distinction without a difference.
“Yeah,” agreed Bob. “You’re probably right. I mean, he could always be a little bit out there with the race stuff. Seemed like every other column was a rant about some racist conspiracy or other. But no, I never figured he had anything like this in him. Of course, that’s not the problem right now. We need to figure out how that column ever made it into the paper.”
“We already know how that happened.” It was Lydia. She swept into the room, trailed by Denis Lassiter, the executive editor, carrying a copy of the morning’s paper. Following them came Mindy Chen, who was in charge of newsroom systems, and Hector Mendoza, director of loss prevention. Two of Hector’s men followed him in.
Lydia took her seat at the head of the table, Lassiter sat to her left, directly across from Bob. Bob couldn’t help himself. “How did it happen?” he asked.
Lydia’s glance grazed him like a bullet. She did not answer.
This was not good.
“OK, everyone,” she said, “we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Let’s get right to it.” While everyone else sat, Mendoza and his two men preferred to stand along the back wall, Mendoza with his arms folded across his chest. This was very not good.
Lydia swept the room with her gaze, allowing a beat of silence to intervene. Then she said, “Malcolm’s column was published through Bob’s computer.”
Bob felt something hot spike right in the center of his chest. “What are you talking about? Like I told Doug, I didn’t do this!”
Lydia didn’t even look at him. “I never said you did, Bob,” she told him. And then she nodded down the table. “Mindy?”
Mindy Chen cleared her throat. “We traced it back. The digital record is pretty straightforward. The document was saved on Malcolm’s computer several times yesterday morning, then filed to the opinion basket at”—she read from a legal pad on the table before her—“12:37. It was accessed from Bob’s computer yesterday at 2:15, then Doug’s at 2:32, Denis’ at 2:56, Lydia’s at 4:16.”
“That’s when Malcolm was taking the column around the newsroom,” said Bob, “trying to get one of you to overrule me. That doesn’t prove anything.”
Still Lydia did not so much as glance over. Mindy cleared her throat. “The column was accessed for the final time last night at 11:16 from Bob’s computer. It was pulled from the delete basket and stripped across the bottom of the front page.”
“But that’s crazy,” protested Bob. “At 11:16 last night, I was home, asleep.”
Lydia sighed. “Bob, we already know you didn’t do this.” He turned toward her, surprised. She nodded to Hector Mendoza. He wasn’t a tall man, maybe 5’8” or so, but his shaved bullet head and a chest the approximate width of a Buick made him intimidating. Nodding to one of his men to bring the lights down, he produced a silver disc, which he plugged into a console in the back corner of the room. He pressed a button on a control pad and a screen lowered itself across the front of the room from a recessed slot in the ceiling.
“This is security camera footage from last night,” he said. On the screen, there appeared an overhead shot of the security desk downstairs, the light muddy, the colors washed out. There was nothing for a moment, and then a figure appeared, a man, and he wore a baseball cap bearing the logo of the Chicago Bulls. He almost could have been Malcolm, but the cap made it hard to say.
Then the man glanced up, right into the camera, and there was no mistaking. Mendoza froze the image for all to see. It was, indeed, Malcolm. The time stamp said 11:02.
Bob brought a hand to his suddenly open mouth. “Malcolm?” he said. He made it a question, though it no longer was.
Lydia’s nod was tight. “Yes,” she said. “There’s another camera at the elevator on this floor. It recorded him getting off 25 seconds later. As you all know, the newsroom is nearly deserted at that hour and nobody who was here recalls seeing him. But the cameras did.”
“Also my guy on the security desk remembers him,” said Mendoza. “I woke him up to ask him not half an hour ago. He says he remembers thinking it was awful strange to see Malcolm here that time of night.”
“Malcolm also came back,” said Lydia.
“What?” said Doug.
Mendoza nodded. “Before dawn this morning. Ricky here”—he nodded toward one of his men, a thickset black kid with no discernible neck—“was on the desk at the time and he saw him. That’s also confirmed by the security cameras and by Amy Landingham, who was in early to get a jump on some reporting. I’ve checked his office. It looks like he came in, started packing up, then thought better of it. There’s a box on his desk half-filled with pictures.”
Lassiter gave a tight nod. “Consciousness of guilt, sounds like to me.”
“Has anyone tried to reach him?” asked Doug.
“I called,” said Lassiter. “No answer. Can’t say I blame him.”
“What is there to say to him anyway?” asked Doug. “Beyond ‘You’re fired,’ I mean.”
Lydia’s chuckle was bitter as charred meat. “Oh, he is the most thoroughly fired human being in the annals of American journalism. You’d better believe that.”
Bob was relieved. But he was still confused. “How did he do it?” he asked. “Malcolm’s not an administrator. And there’s no way he hacked the computer. He doesn’t even like computers.”
A glance he didn’t understand passed between Lydia and Mindy. Then Mindy said. “He didn’t hack the system. He signed on, using your password. As far as the system is concerned, you made the change.”
“But I didn’t!”
Mindy, a petite, pretty woman with the medium-brown skin of an African-American mother and the almond eyes of a Chinese-American father, regarded him patiently. “We know that,” she said, softly. “But did you ever give him your password? Or is there some way he could have gotten access to it on his own? Is it written down somewhere?”
“It’s not written anywhere,” he said. “No need. I know it by heart.”
Still patient, she brought him back to the questions he’d ignored. “Did you ever give it to him? Or is there some way he could have gotten access on his own?”
“Gotten access? No. As I said, he’s no computer genius and I don’t have it written down.”
“Did you ever give it to him?” she pressed.
Her manner was quiet and deliberate as she brought him back to the question he had twice ignored. Bob felt cornered and small. “I don’t remember,” he said finally. “I don’t think so.”
And now, finally, Lydia looked at him. “You don’t think so,” she repeated.
Not a question, but he answered it. “No,” he said.
Mindy spoke. “According to our records, you haven’t changed your password since January.”
“Maybe.” Bob was numb. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You’re supposed to change it twice a year,” said Mindy. “We send out reminders.”
In his personal life, Bob Carson was a disciplined, organized man. He prided himself on this. He paid his credit card balance in full every month. He worked out three mornings a week without fail. He ate a lean, nutritious diet. He spent every New Year’s Day cleaning and reorganizing his closet.
But for all the years he had been in the newspaper business, he had never been able to bring the same sense of order to the office. The news, he had learned very early in his career, was a sprawling, unruly, unpredictable mess, careening every single day toward the brick wall of deadlines. To manage it, sometimes you had to simply go with the flow. Things were seldom as neat and orderly as he would have liked.
That was even truer in this new era of cutbacks and shrinkage when he had more to do than ever before and fewer people to do it with. So how, he found himself wondering for a brief instant, was he supposed to have had time to stay on top of Mindy Chen’s reminders? How, when he had meetings every half hour on the half hour, a stable of columnists to edit, candidates to interview, editorials to write, a department to run, budget requests to oversee, even as his staff was shrinking like an iceberg in a global warming movie?
No one took Mindy Chen’s reminders all that seriously, not even Mindy Chen. And everyone knew it. Sure, they changed their passwords when they remembered, when they got around to it, but it was never anyone’s top priority. It wasn’t like the passwords restricted access to nuclear secrets or financial records, for crying out loud. This was a newspaper.
He looked across at Mindy Chen. “Yes,” he said, “I know.”
“So you don’t think”—Denis was leaning forward, speaking to him in the gentle, saccharine tone you’d use with someone who’d sustained a traumatic brain injury—“you might have given him your password at some point? Maybe to make a quick fix in the column when you were too busy to do it yourself?”
Without meaning to, Bob looked up to the screen where Malcolm was still frozen, his face unreadable.
“I don’t know,” Bob heard himself say. “I guess I could have. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve edited Malcolm Toussaint’s column over the years? Anything is possible.”
“But it would not have been possible if you had just followed protocol,” insisted Denis. Bob just stared. He felt wounded and alone.
Doug Perry had finally had enough. “OK,” he said, “Bob screwed up. We get that. He gets it. But that doesn’t help us now, does it? We can’t change the past, but we have to do what we can to manage the future. What’re we going to do about this?”
Bob breathed. It felt like the first time in a month.
“We are already doing what we are going to do,” said Lydia. “The presses are rolling on a new edition that does not contain Malcolm’s offensive column. We’ve begun recalling the paper from newsstands and racks all over Cook County. As you might imagine, that’s a very difficult undertaking. Some vendors, when we explain what’s going on, are extremely reluctant to give them up. It’s not exactly ‘Dewey Defeats Truman,’ which our friends down the street have been trying to live down for sixty years, but it’s still pretty bad. The vendors think readers will see it as a collectible. They’re probably right on that. We’re already getting reports of lines forming at some of the newsstands and readers buying by the armloads. I would be surprised if we got more than a fraction of them off the street.”
“Then why are we even trying?” asked Doug. “We’ll never get this toothpaste back in the tube.”
“We’re pulling them back,” said Lydia, “because doing so sends the message, in the strongest way I know, that we do not approve or condone what Malcolm Toussaint wrote. At this point, the effort is more important than the success.”
“Must be costing us a bundle,” said Doug with a low whistle.
“I haven’t seen the numbers yet,” said Lydia, “but yes, I’m sure it’s going to cost us plenty—and not just in dollar terms.”
“Credibility,” Bob heard himself say.
“Exactly,” said Lydia.
“We should be braced for a force-five media shit storm,” said Denis. “That’s surely coming our way.”
“It’s already here,” Lydia replied. “This has already been picked up by Drudge, and I expect Romenesko and Journalisms and any other journalism blog you can name will be all over it just as fast as they can type. Local radio is talking about it and I’ve already had calls and emails from the overnight editors at Fox, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, the AP, you name it. It’s going to really crank up once the business day starts in earnest. Thank God there’s another, slightly more important story unfolding today, or it would be even worse.”
“It’s going to be big,” said Bob.
She looked at him. “In the elevator on the way up here, I got a call on my cellphone from Telemundo. Fucking Telemundo! Yes, Bob, it’s going to be ‘big.’”
He felt himself shrink again. “We’re going to have to report the story,” said Doug, coming to the rescue again.
Denis was rueful. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m thinking maybe we should give it to Amy?”
“You think?” said Doug. “You know, she’s always looked up to Malcolm.”
“He was a hero to half the newsroom, especially the kids.”
“They’re all kids now,” said Doug, mouth twisting into a smirk. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.”
“You and me both. As to Amy, it’s your call, but I don’t think she’d be compromised by hero worship.” A shrug.
Doug nodded and Denis went on. “I’ll be drafting a statement as soon as we break here. It’s important that we speak with one voice on this. There will be a newsroom-wide meeting this morning so that people can ask questions about how this happened. I’m sure there will be some venting, too. But I intend to stress that nobody gives any off-the-record interviews to any other media outlets. We’ve got to control the message.”
“You really expect them to abide by that?”
“Hope springs eternal,” said Denis.
“This, too, will pass,” said Lydia. “That needs to be the tone we take with the staff. We’re in for a very difficult next few days, there is no doubt about that. But the way we’re going to get through it is by putting our heads down and concentrating on our core mission, which is to provide world-class journalism for the people of Chicago and Cook County. If we just do that, I am convinced the rest of this will take care of itself.”
There was a silence, people looking from one to another, their faces taut with the realization of what they were in for. On the screen above, Malcolm still stared up into the camera, mouth open, eyes wide, frozen in the moment of misdeed. Then the screen went mercifully white. Mendoza ejected the disc. Lydia said, “Very well, then, thank you all for coming in so early on such short notice.”
Bob stood to join the procession leaving the room. Lydia laid a restraining touch on his wrist. “Bob, you stay. Denis and I need to talk to you a moment.”
He sat. Just like a puppy, he would later think. Doug shot him a glance as he left the room. It was the sort of look you might give a mortally wounded man.
When the rest had filed out, Lydia turned expectantly to Denis, who cleared his throat. “Bob, there’s no easy way to say this and I respect you too much to beat around the bush.”
Bob felt his stomach lurch sideways. Oh, God. It was happening. Just like that. It was actually happening.
“We have to let you go.”
Oh, God.
“Denis, you can’t be serious.”
“There’ll be a generous severance package, of course. And I want you to know, this was not an easy decision for us.”
“Not easy for you?” A bark of laughter escaped him. “Trust me, it’s a lot harder from this side of the table.”
“I know that, Bob, and I’m sorry. But try to look at it from this side of the table. You caused a security breach.”
“No, I forgot to change my password.”
“Same thing.”
“When’s the last time you changed your password, Denis?”
Lassiter drew back. His cheeks glowed. “We are not talking about me, Bob,” he said.
“Look,” said Lydia, palms up in a peace gesture, “let’s get back to the business at hand, shall we? Now as Denis said, Bob, we’re not exactly throwing you out in the cold here. There will be a very nice severance package. You’ll have to talk to HR, of course. And I’m sure the office of the general counsel will draw up some papers for you to sign, a standard nondisclosure agreement and things like that.”
“I’m not signing anything,” Bob snapped.
Denis and Lydia glanced at each other. Then Denis said, “Bob, don’t be a fool. If you don’t sign the agreement, you don’t get the money.”
Bob stared hard at his former boss. “Denis, you can shove your nondisclosure agreement up your butt.”
Again the publisher and the editor looked at each other. Bob had the sense they had not expected this from him. He swelled with a momentary sense of triumph. Then, just as suddenly, he felt himself deflating like a leaky balloon. What did it matter if he said something that stung Denis Lassiter and Lydia Barnett? The victory wasn’t simply hollow, it was meaningless. All at once, it was as if he could see everything, as if he had a God’s eye view of the entire mess. And he knew: The paper needed to be able to say it had taken some action in response to this humiliation, something that went beyond the obvious point of sacking Malcolm Toussaint. In days to come, it would announce new computer-security protocols, new quality-control measures. But for now, it needed to show that it was taking this seriously, needed to put a face on this disaster. And his was that face.
Bob heard himself breathing. He felt his meticulously constructed world falling to pieces, everything he had worked for fluttering apart in a sudden gust. He was a 59-year-old man, suddenly out of work in a dying industry and a bad economy. He had a God’s eye view of that situation, too. It wasn’t pretty.
“This is all Malcolm’s fault,” he heard himself say in a soft voice. “I’m going to kill him.” He was startled by his own words.
“Bob,” said Lydia, “you are not to have any contact with Malcolm Toussaint.”
Bob almost smiled. “Beg pardon, Lydia, but I don’t work for you anymore, so I don’t take orders from you.”
There was some small pleasure in watching those words sink in. Lydia was not a woman who was used to taking no for an answer. But for once, he thought with bitter satisfaction, she had no choice.
Bob stood. Denis Lassiter stood in response. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “Sorry for all of it. Hector will escort you out. We’ll pack up your office and someone will run your things out to your house for you.”
“Yeah,” said Bob. And here was the point, in any ordinary parting, where they would have shaken hands, wished each other good life. But this wasn’t an ordinary parting. This was getting fired. So there was an awkward moment where a handshake would have gone. Then Bob said, “Yeah,” again, just to be saying something, just to fill the empty space.
He moved around Denis to the door. Hector and his two men were waiting for him in the lobby of the editorial suite. Like it would take the three of them to wrestle Bob out of the building. He supposed he should have been flattered.
But he wasn’t going to make the scene they feared. No tears, no cursing, no punching of walls or of former colleagues. Bob was determined to salvage as much of his dignity from this humiliation as he could. So they fell in behind him as he headed for the elevators, enduring this executive-suite version of a perp walk with his head held high, looking neither right nor left, just straight ahead. The newsroom, thank God, was still relatively empty. Once or twice, a head bobbed up from a cubicle, a jaw dropped open, but that was all.
Still, it was enough. This would be the stuff of newsroom gossip all day, of industry legend by the end of the week.
He saw Doug from the corner of his eye watching from his glass-enclosed office. The expression on his face suggested the mortally wounded man had died. As, thought Bob, in a sense, he had.
Down the hall and into the elevator. Punch the button. The three men behind him, silent and stolid as statues. The elevator opened on the lobby. He went through the turnstiles. The guard at the security desk affected not to see him.
They paused there, the three of them. Hector reached an open palm toward Bob. For an absurd moment, he thought they were going to shake. Then he realized. And he unclipped from his belt his building ID, a press badge with a magnetic strip on the back, and handed it over to Hector. “I’m sorry, man,” the security chief said. And then he walked away, his two men trailing him.
Bob moved to the second bank of elevators, the one that served the parking garage. His brain was fighting itself. He didn’t know what to do.
And then he did. He whipped out his cellphone, brought up Malcolm’s number, punched it. The call went straight to voice mail.
“This is Toussaint,” said Malcolm’s voice. “Can’t take your call right now.” And then the beep.
Bob thumbed the phone off. His career was over because of this jerk. He stabbed the down button on the parking elevator.
You are not to have any contact with Malcolm Toussaint?
Heck with that. Bob was going to find Toussaint if it was the last thing he did.
Where are you, Malcolm? Where are you?