“Right,” I say. It sounds so simple. “But you know I don’t have any control. I could write a story every day and they might never publish it.”
“They’ll publish it if it’s good.”
“Define good.”
“If it’s got new information in it. Inside information. Information the Ledger and the Times don’t have.”
“So I’ve gone from zero to Bob Woodward in twenty-four hours?”
“Pretty much,” says Iris, grabbing a slice of pizza.
I don’t want to tell her that I’m having a hard time picturing myself being able to pull this off. I don’t even really know who makes what decisions at the Trib. If the paper has a policy on anonymous sources, I don’t know what it is. I was more involved in getting the newspaper put together every day as a summer intern at the Orlando Sentinel than I am now, after more than half a year working full-time for the Trib. The newsroom buried in the middle floors of that black Midtown high-rise is a machine I don’t understand. It’s kind of appalling how incurious I’ve been.
“Here’s what I think,” says Iris. “Do you want to know what I think?”
I nod.
“Okay.” She crosses her legs. “I think there are several things going on here. First, I know this is all very fucked up, but since you started working at the Trib you haven’t talked about a single story like you cared about it. You’re not writing at all.” She pauses and puts her hand up defensively. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I get that they have people on rewrite. I’m just saying that if you took the initiative and got a source and reported out a story no one was telling, and then wrote it, it seems unlikely they wouldn’t publish it, seeing as your name already appears in the paper as if you’re writing regularly. And that would be good for you, as a young journalist.”
“I know,” I say.
“I don’t do work like you. I wouldn’t have the first clue what to do if a cop told me he suspected a murder was going to go cold, other than say, ‘bummer.’”
I roll my eyes-she’s exaggerating.
“I choose to work with products. When I get to write, I write about inanimate objects. But you write about people. People with lives way beyond what you see and what they tell you. I get that that’s what makes them interesting to you. I totally get that. But you’ve got a whole bunch of loyalties going on here. You’ve got the paper and the people you quote and Saul and the dead woman. And you’re the only thing connecting all of them. If it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t come together. So if shit goes wrong-if you write something somebody doesn’t like, or write something that isn’t true-you’re on the hook. And my guess is that none of these people, except maybe Saul, but who the fuck really knows what his deal is, will have your back.”
I’m not sure what to say. She’s right. This is what I signed up for. This is what being a journalist is: sorting through conflicting information and finding the truth and setting it free. Putting yourself on the line with every word, pissing people off and maybe even fucking with their lives in the name of the truth. In college they talked about journalism as being like sunlight, shining light into darkness; revealing. Sunlight, they said, is the best disinfectant. And it sounded exactly right. It sounded like something I wanted to build my life on. I know a lot of places in the world that could use some sunlight; one of them is Borough Park.
“I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore,” I say.
“Fair enough,” says Iris. “Wanna watch a movie?”
“I think I’m going to go back to bed.”
Iris stands up and puts her arms around me. Even after a night of lying around eating pizza, she smells lovely. Like lavender and milk.
SUNDAY
CHAPTER EIGHT
I don’t sleep well. I wake up around six and my stomach is going. Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was in my dream. I had to carry it somewhere, but I was wearing knit gloves that kept getting caught in the sticky open wounds. My first full thought after I open my eyes is that I have to get out of this. I have to call Saul and make up an excuse and just go back to running where the city desk tells me. I get a pill from my bedside and swallow it. I know, even as I’m trying to figure a way out of it, that my job, or rather, the job I want, the job I’ve trained for, is exactly what I’m being asked to do. Not solving homicides, but telling true stories. Finding sources other people can’t find and using those sources to reveal things other people aren’t revealing is exactly what I’m supposed to do. The story of a homicide being overlooked because a powerful, insular community doesn’t want attention is a great story. The problem is that one thing I’m very definitely not supposed to do is help interested parties further their agendas. We may not have had much in the way of ethics training in school, but I definitely remember that. Agendas are what separate journalists from PR people: they have clients; we have sources, subjects. And solving this murder, at this point, is Saul’s agenda. I need to figure out how to make it mine, too.
I open my eyes again around noon to a chalky white sky. Rivka Mendelssohn’s body was in my dream again. She was lying on the metal slab, but this time she was alive, and I said to her, “Wait, I thought you were dead? How did you survive?” And she said, “It’s all a big mistake, honey.” And then she sat up, suddenly fully dressed, but still bald and bruised and bloody around her face, hopped off the slab, and knelt down to lace up a pair of sneakers. “Do you run?” she asked me. And then she took off, without waiting for an answer.
At about 1 P.M., I get out of bed. Iris has left a note saying she’s at yoga, so I make coffee and pull up the Tribune’s Web site on my laptop. Porn mom is splitting the front page with the latest round of health department raids at city restaurants. Brooklyn’s queen of cannoli, a fifty-year-old steakhouse near Grand Central, two noodle shops on the Upper East Side, and about a dozen other well-known places were shuttered yesterday for failing inspections. I scroll down, past an article about a Yankee threatening to pull out of contract negotiations, another about whether the mayor did or did not imply he might close sixteen firehouses within the year, and another about two Child Protective Services workers who say they were disciplined for “speaking out” about turmoil inside the agency.
Nine stories down, I find her:
POLICE QUESTION GARDENER IN SCRAP YARD MURDER
By Marisa Hernandez
An illegal alien with a history of arrests was questioned in the murder of an Hasidic woman found Friday in a scrap pile in Brooklyn.
Miguel Arambula, 41, who does yard maintenance at the Borough Park manse where Rivka Mendelssohn lived, has a rap sheet containing citations for soliciting prostitution, public intoxication, and public urination.
“When he drinks he gets into trouble,” said Francine Singer, 54, who lives downstairs from Arambula in Sunset Park. “I hope they send him back to Mexico.”
Police declined to comment on whether Arambula is considered a suspect in the grisly death of the mother-of-four. A police official close to the case told the Tribune that Mendelssohn sustained massive head trauma and was pregnant at the time of her death.
Mendelssohn’s funeral was attended by hundreds of members of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
“It’s so horrible,” said an elderly attendee whose daughter was friends with Mendelssohn. “She trusted a stranger and look what happened.”
– Additional reporting by Rebekah Roberts