Linwood Barclay: Never Look Away

In the end, I did nothing.

Maybe this was how it was going to be. You came in, you churned out enough copy to fill the space, didn’t matter what it was, you took your paycheck, you went home. I’d worked at a paper like that-in Pennsylvania-before coming back to the hometown rag. There’d always been papers like that. I’d been naïve enough to think the Standard would never turn into one of them.

But we were hardly unique. What was happening to us was happening to countless other papers across the country. What might buy us some time was the Russell family’s ace in the hole-a huge tract of land it hoped to sell to one of the country’s biggest private prison conglomerates.

If things didn’t work out here, maybe I could get a job as a bull. Wasn’t that what inmates called guards?

I picked up the phone, hit the speed dial for Bertram Heating and Cooling. If I couldn’t save the state of journalism, maybe I could put a bit of effort into my marriage, which had been showing signs of wear lately.

A voice that was not Jan’s said, “Bertram’s.” It was Leanne Kowalski. She had the perfect voice for someone working at an air-conditioning firm. Icy.

“Hey, Leanne,” I said. “It’s David. Jan there?”

“Hang on.” Leanne wasn’t big on small talk.

The line seemed to go dead, then Jan picked up and said, “Hey.”

“Leanne seems cheery today.”

“No kidding.”

“Why don’t we see if my parents can hang on to Ethan for a couple of extra hours, we’ll go out for a bite to eat. Just the two of us. Rent a movie for later.” I paused. “I could get into Body Heat.” Jan’s favorite film. And I never got tired of the steamy love scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.

“I guess,” she said.

“You don’t sound very excited.”

“Actually, yeah,” said Jan, warming to the idea. “Where were you thinking for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Preston’s?” A steakhouse. “Or the Clover?” A bit on the pricey side, but if the newspaper business was going into the dumper, maybe we should go while we could still afford it.

“What about Gina’s?” Jan asked.

Our favorite Italian place. “Perfect. If we go around six, we probably won’t need a reservation, but I’ll check just to be sure.”

“Okay.”

“I could pick you up at work, we’ll go back for your car later.”

“What if you get me drunk so you can take advantage of me?”

That sounded more like the Jan I knew.

“Then I’ll drive you to work in the morning.”

Taking a shortcut through the pressroom on the way to the parking lot, I spotted Madeline Plimpton.

It was the pressroom that most made this building feel like a real newspaper. It was the engine room of a battleship. And if the Standard ever ceased to be a paper, these monstrous presses-which moved newsprint through at roughly fifty feet per second and could pump out sixty thousand copies in an hour-would be the last thing standing, the final thing to be moved out of here. We’d already lost the composing room, where the paper’s pages had been, literally, pasted up. It had vanished once editors started laying out their own pages on a computer screen.

I saw Madeline up on the “boards,” which was pressman-speak for the catwalks that ran along the sides, and through, the presses, which were not actually massive rollers, but dozens upon dozens of smaller ones that led the never-ending sheets of newsprint on a circuitous route up and down and over and under until they miraculously appeared at the end of the line as a perfectly collated newspaper. The machinery had been undergoing some maintenance, and a coverall-clad pressman was directing Madeline’s attention to the guts of one part of the presses, which ran from one end of the hundred-foot room to the other.

I didn’t want to pass up this opportunity to speak to her directly, but I knew better than to clamber up the metal steps. The pressmen could be a bit sensitive about that sort of thing. They weren’t as hard-line as they used to be, but the men-and handful of women-who ran and maintained the presses were staunch unionists. If someone from anywhere else in the paper got up on the boards without their permission-especially management-it suddenly got a lot easier to carry on a conversation. The presses would stop dead. And they wouldn’t start running again until the trespassers left.

But the pressmen, while still a force to be reckoned with, had softened with the times. They knew newspapers were in a tough period from which they might never recover. And the people who worked in this room found it difficult to dislike Madeline Plimpton. She’d always been able to connect with the average working guy, and knew the names of everyone who worked in here.

Madeline was in her publisher’s outfit: a navy knee-length skirt and matching jacket that was not only impervious to printer’s ink, but set off her silver-blonde hair. She was a curiosity in some ways. Designer duds, but down here on the boards, I wondered if, in her heart, she wouldn’t have been more comfortable in the tight jeans she’d worn as a reporter. She’d look just as good in them today as she did then. I’d only seen Madeline age in the time since her husband had died, and even after that she’d managed to keep any new lines in her face to a minimum.

I managed to catch her eye when she glanced down.

“David,” she said. It was normally deafening in here, but the presses weren’t currently in operation, so I could hear her.

“Madeline,” I said. Considering that we’d come through the newsroom together, years earlier, it had never occurred to me to call her by anything other than her first name. “You got a minute?”

She nodded, said something to the pressman, and descended the metal staircase. She knew better than to ask me to join her up there. The boards were not a place to hang out.

Once she was on the floor, I said, “This Reeves story is solid.”

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“Please,” I said. “I get what’s going on. We like this new prison. We don’t want to make waves. We act real nice and play down local opposition to this thing and we get to sell them the land they need to build.”

Something flickered in Madeline’s eyes. Maybe she’d figure out Brian had told me. Fuck him.

“But this will end up biting us in the ass later, Madeline. Readers, they may not get it right away, but over time, they’ll start figuring out that we don’t care about news anymore, that we’re just a press release delivery system, something that keeps the Target flyer from getting wet, a place where the mayor can see a picture of himself handing out a check to the Boy Scouts. We’ll still carry car crashes and three-alarm fires and we’ll do the annual pieces on the most popular Halloween costumes and what New Year’s resolutions prominent locals are making, but we won’t be a fucking newspaper. What’s the point in doing all this if we don’t care what we are anymore?”

Madeline looked me in the eye and managed a rueful smile. “How are things, David? How’s Jan?”

She had that way about her. You could blow your stack at her and she’d come back with a question about the weather.

“Madeline, just let us do our jobs,” I said.

The smile faded. “What’s happened to you, David?” she asked.

“I think a better question would be, what’s happened to you?” I said. “Remember the time you and I were covering that hostage taking, the one where the guy was holding his wife and kid, said he was going to kill them if the police didn’t back off?”

She didn’t say anything, but I knew she remembered.

“And we got in between the police and the house, and we saw everything that went down, the cops storming the place, beating the shit out of that guy, even after they’d found out he didn’t have a gun. Just about killed him. And the story we put together after, laying it all out just like it happened, even though we knew it was going to cause a shit storm with the police, which it sure as hell did when it ran. You remember the feeling?”