Jude Harley had a thin, angular face with long dark hair that fell into his eyes when he leaned over the keyboard to type a story. His looks were protean, a woman had once told him: one minute he might be almost ordinary, but the next — seen on a street corner with his collar up, reading intently by a fire, telling an outrageous joke at dinner — he could catch the eye and dazzle. He had been flattered by the description. So how come he had been alone for three months now?
He came to the sunken plaza. With the warm weather, the skating rink was gone, and in its place was a forest of umbrellas. Too bad. He enjoyed watching the skaters cutting figure eights with their long-legged strides, their sheer exhibitionism. But something about the place also unnerved him; even as a newcomer to the city years ago, he had felt its oppressive anonymity. Out of nowhere, he thought of Holden Caulfield, the eternal alienated adolescent, coming to skate with his "phoney" date with the cute ass, and he felt a stab of loneliness.
He resumed his walk up Fifth Avenue. Otherwise — meaning professionally — things were breaking for him. He was getting good assignments at the New York Mirror and had hit his stride with three or four bylines a week. At this rate, he might get a column, someday, a perch that would allow him to trumpet his talent. He liked the rough-and-tumble world of the tabloid, and he knew he was good at it. He had sharp elbows and natural instincts. Once he had gone for a job interview at The New York Times; he'd been put off by the self-satisfied smugness of the editor who'd met him in the reception room, and by a newsroom as deadly as an insurance office. He'd skipped the second interview.
There was something else: a novel that he had written years ago and peddled fruitlessly around town had finally been published. Much to his surprise, it was even doing well, thanks in part to the publisher's vigorous advertising and publicity campaign. He had to admit, he got a kick when he strolled into a bookstore and saw the display built around that familiar cover, a dark blue jacket with a grotesque face in white plaster of paris. The title, Death Mask, was printed in raised silver letters.
Jude stopped at a coffee wagon on Fifty-fourth Street, an aluminum-plated trailer run by Bashir, an Afghan. Bashir loved to talk, especially about the Taliban, the religious fundamentalists who had overrun his country. Jude had been to Afghanistan for a series on refugee camps — two years ago, when the Mirror had been printing foreign news in a bid for respectability — and Bashir had been delighted to discover someone who at least knew the names of the provincial cities. He treated Jude as a special friend.
But today Jude wanted to preserve his solitary mood, and so he plunked down his two quarters for coffee — regular with milk and extra sugar — with a wordless nod.
In his lilting New Yorkese, Bashir asked him if he had heard that a northern village — the name was hard to make out — had fallen. Jude said he had not.
"They control ninety percent of the country now," said Bashir sadly. "The situation is very bad."
Jude nodded sympathetically.
"I don't know what will happen. My poor country. The way they treat people is horrible."
"I know," said Jude, accepting his coffee in a brown paper bag with the neck twisted into a handle.
They shared a moment of silence.
"You have a good day," exclaimed Bashir, suddenly smiling and showing a gold tooth.
Jude responded: "You, too."
Ducking into the building, he thought about Bashir, and people like him who had real problems, struggling to make ends meet. His coffee wagon seemed so compact and homey. Photographs of beautiful, dark-haired children were taped onto a side window; change piled up on a kitchen towel spread on the counter as he bustled about amid the thick fumes of Colombian coffee. He was moving up in the world, making something of himself. With a twinge of middle-class guilt, Jude found that he envied the man — his certitude, his striving, even the political convictions that gave an organizing principle to his life. Most of all, he admired his passion.
The Mirror occupied three floors at 666 Fifth Avenue, a nondescript skyscraper that nonetheless rose high enough to cast its red neon number into the haze sometimes overhanging mid-Manhattan. The sight of 666 up in the sky had caused one wag with Biblical knowledge to call the newspaper "the Beast." For the literate, the nickname also carried an allusion to the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and so it had stuck.
It also had the ring of descriptive truth. The owner was R.P. Tibbett, a New York real estate mogul who was assembling a media empire and had moved his headquarters to Washington, D.C., to be closer to the politicians he financed. He used the tabloid shamelessly for vendettas and payoffs. The Mirror was not so much the flagship of the Tibbett fleet as its garbage scow. When he wanted to campaign for more TV licenses, he did it with a steady drumbeat in its pages, and when he wanted to skewer an enemy, which happened more and more frequently these days, he did it with the stiletto-sharp prose of its best writers. To cloak their shame, the reporters espoused the mystique that their paper was street-wise and "in touch with the people" — whatever that meant.
Jude passed an honor box in the lobby — Tibbett was too cheap to give the paper away even to the people who produced it — and recoiled at the hype of the page-one headline: KILLER FLU STALKS CITY. Apparently, two people were in the hospital.
The elevator stopped on the third floor, and as the doors were closing, a hand intruded to send them skittering back. Jude saw long, curving fingers bearing an opal ring, and his heart sank — he knew that ring. Betsy entered, and her eyes widened in surprise, which she quickly tried to damp down.
"Oh, it's you," she said icily.
Jude was nonplussed. He didn't know how to answer that statement—"Yes, it's me"? So he simply said: "Hello."
His voice echoed without a response, as she stared straight ahead at the doors. In the silence he could hear the elevator cables grinding. Betsy was a fellow reporter; they had lived together for nearly a year before she'd thrown him out three months ago — or more precisely, when he had decided to leave but let her salvage a bit of pride by showing him the door. He recalled how furious she had gotten during their tag-end fights, and how she had slapped him once, tearing a bit of skin on his cheek with her ring. She had screamed that he was incapable of feeling, "emotionally retarded." What did she expect? she said, given his abysmal childhood. Then she had cried, which he hated.
Still, they had had some fantastic lovemaking. Working nights, they used to sneak into the library and make out among the boxes of microfilmed newspapers. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and he could tell she was doing the same. The elevator came to her floor, and she gave him a pinched smile and a flat but reasonably warm "Good-bye," as if to say: I now care so little, I can treat you like anyone else. When she was gone, he was relieved.
The elevator door opened, and he stepped out on his floor.
"Morning, Barry," he said to the receptionist, a fellow with a heavily waxed blond handlebar mustache that gave him the lugubrious look of a water buffalo.
"Well, if it isn't the big novelist."
Jude groaned inwardly. He was in no mood to deal with sarcasm.
The newsroom had that familiar Saturday feel — people casually dressed, hoping for catastrophe to strike somewhere but not right on deadline. Only a dozen or so reporters were in; they were keeping their heads down, out of the line of sight of the editors.
Jude was up for a good breaking story. The interview he had just done had been a bust. He had recently finished a takeout on gun control, complete with wrenching stories of children who had found loaded revolvers and shot their siblings, and he wanted something neat and fast—"quick and dirty" was the newsroom expression — to wipe his synapses clean.