He told her it was possible. “This business eats people for lunch,” he added.
That Sunday’s 60 Minutes show got its best ratings of the season. For CBS, it was one of the few times they didn’t lose audience after football. Nonetheless, Ed Bradley’s interview was not what he expected. At first, Isobel gave him no new information. She talked at length about things she’d already written about. Bradley’s frustration surfaced when he came to understand that Isobel was skillfully holding back anything not already public knowledge. The blockbuster news he hoped for, expected, been told he was going to get, was nowhere on the horizon. What’s more, she demonstrated devilish mastery of the process, especially in view of her reputed inexperience. Isobel had the infuriating knack of sounding as though she was offering new, exciting facts while revealing nothing. Eventually, her inquisitor threw up both hands and said, “Stop the tape.” He glared with undisguised anger at Isobel.
“Something wrong?” she asked. A production assistant brought her bottled water. A makeup man worked on her forehead.
“Yes.” He was trying, gentlemanlike, to take the edge off his voice. “I’m not getting anything here.”
“What is it you want?” Isobel asked.
“A b-blockbuster’s what we expected. Something new and exciting.” She thought that it was absolutely odd that her own voice was strong as steel while he tripped on the always dangerous b. “Something we don’t already know. I thought we were going to get into this. In all fairness, that’s what we were led to expect.”
“I see,” she said, returning the water. “Something… b-big. I think I have it now. Get the tape ready and ask me how I feel about Leonard Martin and then about my future.”
“Okay!” He yelled at the crew, and they bustled.
Bradley was all ease and purpose again, speckled beard glowing in the meticulous lighting. “Tell me, if you can, what do you think of this guy? How do you feel about Leonard Martin?”
Isobel said, “When I was a child, in France, my grandmother told me about a neighbor. During the war the Germans occupied the neighbor’s house. They threw him out-him and his wife and his children-into the barn. They made them servants of the Nazis. The man’s wife and both small children died that winter from disease and hunger and despair. When the war ended, my grandmother’s neighbor reclaimed his home. Many years later, she told me-forty years or more-a man came and knocked on the door. He was an older man, a German, traveling with a young boy. He was one of the German officers who had occupied this man’s house. I suppose he wanted to show his grandson where he had been during the war. Well, when the neighbor recognized the German, b-both of them old men by now, he reached behind the door, got the shotgun he’d kept there for decades, and killed the German right there on his doorstep, in front of the man’s grandson.” Isobel paused to take a deep breath. Ed Bradley gave her one of his practiced looks; the one that asks, “What does that mean?”
Isobel said, “Leonard Martin sees himself as that neighbor.”
“Do you?” Bradley asked.
“Do you?”
Bradley was speechless. It was a great look, and Isobel wondered how long it took him to perfect it. Then he said, “This has been quite a ride for you. I mean personally. What does all this mean for Isobel Gitlin? You’ve got a wonderful future ahead of you. So, what are your plans?”
Isobel’s answer, as disclosed to the world on that Sunday evening, sent a wickedly rapturous rush through the breast of the wife of a certain New York Times senior vice president. Few people outside the business would care, but a Richter scale for the global media culture would have surely shuddered and shattered when Isobel said, “I have no contract with the paper I’m with now. [She didn’t even call it by its name!] Who knows, I might like to return to London.”
“Back to England. Back home? Have you thought about that?”
“Yes, I have. There are so many things I’d like to do. I’m not married to the newspaper, you know. [Once more she failed to identify the New York Times. The New York Times!] I feel an obligation to the unfinished obituaries of Christopher Hopman, Billy MacNeal, Floyd Ochs, and Pat Grath. Leonard Martin is really part of that. I started these stories, and until I’ve finished them I cannot walk away. You see that, don’t you? But I’ve no desire to be celebrated, famous, or turned into a journalist with a capital J. ”
Ed Bradley’s face registered no expression at all. But for his unchanged posture he might have been pole-axed. Isobel Gitlin, a woman on the very edge of media stardom, fame, and riches-the crowning achievement of American culture-had just said she wanted no part of it.
“You just want to go back to writing obituaries?” Bradley asked.
She addressed herself to the friendly camera. “People die every day, don’t they. The stories I write are the stories of their lives, and I would hope I do it in a way that’s both interesting to the reader and respectful of the subject. I believe obituaries are a noble part of this country’s freedom of the press. I continue to strive to live up to the standard set by Robert McG. Thomas.”
She was careful not to say “our country.” She was, after all, a proud Fijian, carrying a British passport.
“You’re leaving the Times?” asked Bradley, having quickly refitted the smile that helped make him rich and famous. “You can’t be serious about going back to… to writing obituaries. You’ve got big stories ahead, no? Books maybe. And you’re thinking of leaving the New York Times? Leaving the newspaper business altogether? Going back to England?”
“I might,” she said, light as a feather, and smiled right into the camera.
Watching the show at home in the Whitestone section of Queens, bourbon and soda in one hand, giant salted pretzel in the other, Mel Gold let out a grunt of epic proportions. His wife hurried in from the kitchen, fearing it was something to do with his health.
“Sonofabitch!” said the Moose, unable to wipe the smile from his face.
St. John
Back on the island, Walter read Isobel’s story about the infamous Leonard Martin while enjoying breakfast in his usual spot in Billy’s Bar. On St. John, the New York Times comes ashore with the early morning ferry from the rock. The distribution began with Billy’s because it was right on the square, only steps from where the ferry docked, plus it was well known that Walter Sherman liked to read it with breakfast. They do know everything. The story detailed the things Walter and Isobel talked about, and, while it was news on the most striking order for the world at large, it provided no new information for him. He read every word, examined every graphic: the rifles and ammo, the player chart that was spread out on the page as if they were each key members of the underworld. He couldn’t help feeling there was something missing. He didn’t know what, but he knew enough to keep that uneasy sense in a special file for future reference.
That Sunday he watched the interview with Ed Bradley on the television Tom Maloney had thought of as Radio City. Clara saw it too. She knew something about Walter’s job, although she had never heard him refer to what he did as a job. He did something for people they couldn’t do for themselves, something important, something she was sure was dangerous-that she knew. All those trips he took. Now, looking at Isobel Gitlin talking to one of her favorite TV personalities, that handsome Ed Bradley, telling him she had discovered this man, Leonard Martin, all by herself-Clara wondered just what it was that Mr. Sherman really did.