Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

I checked the clock on the wall—11:20 P.M. — and thanked him for his time. I declined the offer of a ride from his trained apes, jotted down his office phone number and headed for the door. It was, as they might say in journalism school, a killer story. I just didn’t understand yet in what way.

I walked into the newsroom carrying nothing more than a couple of scribbled pages of quotes in my hand and one of the more intriguing stories of the year in my head. At the far end of the room, the crazy, zany lords of the copydesk were spending the last minutes of deadline gloomily searching stories for punctuation and grammar mistakes that would no doubt cheer them up. Otherwise, the main part of the newsroom sat still and barren, nothing more than the sickly green haze of so many quiet screensavers waiting for tomorrow’s daily frenzy.

I sat at my desk in the middle of the room and immediately began typing. I had already called Elizabeth on my cell phone on the cab ride over and warned her that I might be a while, and not to go hanging around with Toby Harkins tonight. Just kidding about that last part. I think.

More important, I also called Peter Martin, he of the Red Sox tickets, and flagged him on the night’s events. As usual, he picked up the telephone on the first ring, regardless of the fact that it was after 11:00 and he was no doubt planning to be in his office by 7:00 A.M. the following morning, as he always was. Confident that my cabdriver could speak English as well as I could speak his native Ukrainian, I calmly told Martin what I had and from whom I had it. He simply said, “I’ll see you in the newsroom in twenty minutes.”

Martin was my editor back when I was an investigative reporter for the Record in Washington and he was the paper’s bureau chief. Since then, I’ve come back to Boston as a senior reporter, and in a recent and not uncontroversial shake-up, he became editor in chief. He’s a diminutive guy, even weaselly in the wrong light, perpetually nervous, always pale, someone whose idea of outdoor activity was opening the sunroof on his Hyundai as he drove to work on a sunny weekend morning. But the truth is, he had the journalistic heart of a lion tucked into the body of a tabby cat, and at this time, on this night, I was glad to have him here beside me. Thrilled, actually.

As I said, we were hard against the paper’s drop-dead deadline for what’s known in the business as the Sports Final, known as such because it carries scores from games all over the country, including the late-finishing matches on the West Coast, and is usually the paper’s last edition. It’s distributed to subscribers in the city and the close-in suburbs.

I jumped onto my computer and quickly banged out a first paragraph which read, “Federal investigators have intercepted key information that links Toby Harkins, the fugitive mobster and son of the mayor, with the 1990 heist of more than $300 million in treasures from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the largest unsolved art theft in American history.”

Okay, it’s not poetry, but given the considerable constraints, it makes an unmistakable point.

Second paragraph: “A key investigator, speaking last night on the condition of anonymity, said agents were trying to determine if Toby Harkins was himself involved in the actual heist and if he is currently aware of the whereabouts of the eleven paintings and two artifacts stolen from the museum by two bandits dressed as Boston police officers.”

And so forth, until I had a story that made it look, as these things tend to do, like I knew a lot more than I actually did.

I was typing so fast, concentrating so hard, that I never heard Peter Martin breeze into the room and right up to my desk, until he finally said in a voice just north of an alarmed whisper, “Holy fuck.”

He was reading over my shoulder, breathing quietly through his nose, not wanting to disturb me while I was on this obvious writing roll. He was one of the rare newspaper editors in this world who knew to never get in the way of a reporter on a good story. Others aren’t happy until they’ve left what they might describe as “their imprint.” In most cases, think of a goose shitting all over a dewy lawn.

A few paragraphs later, I took a quick break and pushed my chair back, rubbing my palms hard across my tired eyes. Martin continued reading the screen. He asked, “Tell me about the source again.”

The rules of the road in newspapering require reporters to reveal the identity of their anonymous sources to their editors. Some editors, the best editors, always ask. Others don’t. Martin’s an asker.

I rolled back up to the computer. “Tom Jankle. FBI.”

“Doesn’t get much better than that. He a regular kneeler at the altar of Jack Flynn?”

“No. Truth is, I can’t explain to you why he came to me, but he did. I was just sitting at the game minding my own business, or rather, the Red Sox’s business.”

Martin asked, “You have any sense of how this is going to affect the Dan Harkins nomination?”

Good question. He was referring to the fact that the senior senator from Massachusetts, Herman Harrison, was at that very moment being treated for a cancer that was known to be taking over a body already worn down by too much booze and too little attention. In the inevitable event of Harrison’s death, the governor would appoint his successor to fill out the next year and two months of his term, until the next federal election. She had already leaked word that Mayor Daniel Harkins was her likely choice, though now, with more revelations about his son, she might reconsider.

“Don’t know,” I replied. “The mayor will keep denying contact, and his enemies will keep jabbing at him with it. Stay tuned.”

“You’ll mention this in print.”

I would.

“Keep writing,” Martin said. “I’ll warn the copydesk that we’re going to have to rip up the front page, and I’ll try to buy you some time.” With that, he literally jogged off to the populated part of the newsroom.

The man was beautiful, Martin was. Most editors these days dedicate themselves to what they commonly describe as “manicured news,” stories that are conceptualized by their dim-witted underlings in morning meetings, assigned to willing reporters, edited over the course of several days, and finally paired with an artistic photograph on the front page. Put them on something resembling a deadline involving unwieldy issues like anonymous FBI agents warning of underworld figures stealing priceless paintings, and they start frenetically paging through the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review for answers they’ll never find.

I finished, though you never really finish these stories; you just kind of acknowledge that you’ve run out of time. Martin returned. “Get up. I’ll edit you right here,” he said. And as I stood and paced the aisle, he sat in my seat, asked a couple of cogent questions as he read, made some small fixes in my story, and sent it on its uncertain way.

He leaned back in my chair in a position of faux relaxation — I say faux because Peter Martin, like most of the newspaper people I’ve ever worked with, was never truly relaxed.

“We’re going to banner it,” he said. “This thing’s going to be the talk of the city tomorrow, the country maybe, and we’ve got it alone. Maybe we even end up doing some good by helping this thing get solved. You ought to feel great.”

He was right, I should have. I mean, I broke the story of the week, the month even. As important, I broke out of something of a running slump. Journalism, specifically newspapering, is a business that requires constant reinvention and revitalization. Reputations are good, but they can get as old, as quickly, as yesterday’s news. But truth be known, something nagged at me. It all seemed too easy, too pat. One minute I was watching the Sox stick it to the Yankees, the next minute I’m being handed a gift-wrapped bombshell destined for tomorrow’s front page, and from there, the lead story on the network news. I’d have liked to think this is just what it meant to be Jack Flynn, but like I said, something nagged.