Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

We were sitting at an outdoor café along Boston’s Newbury Street, Vinny and me — or is that Vinny and I? I never know these things. Anyway, it was the two of us. He had a fresh fruit plate in front of him covered with yogurt, along with a low-fat bran muffin, no butter, as well as a can of V-8 that he had brought in himself.

“You allowed to do that?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t there someone, somewhere, who cracks down on bringing your own vegetable juice into restaurants?”

“Fuck you.”

He had lost five pounds in five days, he said, meaning at this rate, next year this time, he wouldn’t actually exist. Not a bad thought, considering the argument he was waging with me.

He was sitting there extolling the virtues of placing his name first in the title of the crisis management consulting firm that we were about to open. He was telling me that the name Mongillo had become synonymous among the ruling elite and the rank and file of Boston with hard work, with extraordinary contacts, with easy access all along the corridors of power. I was making a stroking motion with my right hand, when he interrupted and said, “I mean it, Jack. You’ve got to start thinking like a businessman now, about making money, and you know and I know that we’ll make more money if my name goes first.”

I didn’t particularly care; I just didn’t want to be seen as a pushover in our first-ever business meeting. “All right,” I said. “You get your name first if I get to pick our slogan.”

“What do you have?” He asked this skeptically with a mouth full of cantaloupe.

“Your downfall is our windfall.”

He speared a large hunk of pineapple with his fork and ate it without expression.

“This is serious shit,” he said, after chewing for a moment. “This ain’t the goddamned newsroom anymore, where we get paid whether we put in a good day’s worth of work or not, and in your case, usually not. Come on, Fair Hair, get with the program.”

It was tough to take him seriously as the next Jack Welch or Lou Gerstner, sitting there in a flannel button-down with a dab of purple-colored yogurt on his upper lip.

He said, “I’ve already gotten calls from the head of the phone company wanting to hire us at ten large a month. Remember they got into that brouhaha for shutting off service to a battered-women’s shelter because the place was a month late paying their bill — and it ended up, the phone company had lost the check?

“And I got another call from a former congressman who will remain momentarily nameless who would like to be governor. He wants us to address the potential publicity around an incident involving him, a prostitute, a Bijon Frise, and a park ranger. That’s another seven-and-a-half large a month.”

I said, “I got a call from my old friend Harry Putnam asking me if I’ve gone nuts.”

I gave in on the naming rights, then ordered dessert — a gingerbread sundae — just to drive him crazy.

When it arrived, I said, “I hate when they drench the damned thing in this delicious hot fudge sauce, so the ice cream melts too fast.” He looked like he was ready to punch me harder than Toby Harkins’s people ever did.

So I changed the subject.

“How close are we on a lease?”

He explained that he had negotiated a deal for space on the twenty-ninth floor of a downtown high-rise that would give us each identically sized offices with views across the harbor to Logan Airport. We would have a shared secretary, additional space for cubicles for any new hires, and with the lease came membership to a top-floor dining club.

“All we have to do is sign on the dotted line and show up at work,” he said.

We both sat in a long state of silence, watching the passersby, seeing nothing at all. I thought of myself reporting to a high-rise office building every day, wearing a suit and tie, maybe carrying a briefcase, sitting with my feet up on a minimalist glass-top desk, phone cradled to my ear, gazing out at the boats bobbing in the water. And what would I be saying on the phone? Hire my company? Run our side of the story? Would I be telling reporters, people just like me, that they have their facts all wrong, even when I know, when they know, they don’t?

Hello, adulthood.

I asked, “You going to miss the newsroom?”

Mongillo almost seemed startled by my voice, or maybe it was the question. I don’t know. He picked up a red grape with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. “Like what? One deadline sneaking up after another? The cell phone ringing twenty-four hours every damned day? The constant pressure to produce? The what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude that Martin gives off?”

I replied, “Yeah, that.”

He looked down and said, “I don’t know, will you?”

I thought for a moment. Actually, what I was doing was scraping the remnants of chocolate sauce from the plate and spooning it into my mouth, but I can do two things at once — what is it that they call it downtown, multitasking? Oh yeah.

“Yeah, I will.”

I thought of the adrenaline rush of nailing a story cold, the omnipotent feeling of badgering some politician who you know had done something wrong, the fascinating paths toward elusive truths. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe I was romanticizing things. But I suddenly had an empty feeling in a place that should have been filled with anticipation.

Now’s as good a time as any to point out that I had hammered the Toby Harkins/Tom Jankle story home. Ends up, that bunker was in Boston Harbor, on Great Brewster Island, almost nine miles offshore. On a clear day, I could probably see it from the balcony of my condominium, not that I ever looked. I slipped out of the woods with Hank that night, as the FBI agents, wink-wink, searched the cliffsides for Harkins. I bet they were searching real hard. At the bottom of one rocky cliff, I asked Hank if we were swimming for safety. “You can,” he replied. “But I’m going to ride in my boat.” And with that, we climbed into the rented outboard he had come in on.

Buzzing along the black skin of the harbor, the chill sea mist flying in our faces, the glittering skyline beckoning from the shore, I felt not just reinvigorated, but enlivened. I had survived, and I decided there and then, so would Hank.

It was 3:00 A.M. when I hit the newsroom, so I didn’t write that night. Martin was, of course, waiting by my desk, pacing, still furious that we’d blown deadline on the story that we’d initially planned, even though I had called him from a pay phone on the way down to give him the reason why. When I elaborated in greater detail in his office, I thought he might climb on my lap and try to neck. We decided I shouldn’t leave the newsroom for fear that some cop or agent somewhere might try to arrest me for leaving the scene of a crime, or worse, so I stretched out on a couch in the conference room and grabbed a few hours’ rest.

The story itself was a thing of beauty. It led with the revelation that Toby Harkins, the nation’s most-wanted fugitive, was a long-time FBI informant, essentially receiving federal protection even as he committed murder and ran what we like to call in newspaper-speak, “a far-reaching criminal enterprise.” I quickly got into FBI Special Agent Tom Jankle’s murder of Hilary Kane, his confession and such. I recounted the gunpoint conversation between Jankle and Harkins amid the old military bunkers on Great Brewster Island, where yours truly was the bull’s-eye that was inexplicably never hit. I pointedly included Jankle’s line that he had tipped Harkins off to the impending indictment that led to the flight from justice. And I detailed Dan Harkins’s involvement, his awareness of his son’s whereabouts and his attempts to convince Toby to turn himself in. My bet was and is, it doesn’t matter that he was trying to do good. The mayor will be thrown out with the dirty bathwater.