Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Sumner frowned, but either he had not recognized Hackett’s name or was pretending to have forgotten it. “So what are they going to do,” he said, “the cops?”

“They’ve launched a murder investigation.”

Sumner gazed down at him, his mustache twitching. “A ‘murder investigation,’” he said. “Jesus, Clancy, you’ve been working in newspapers too long, you’re beginning to talk like them.” He walked to the window and stood looking out at the river, his hands in his trouser pockets. “You know I almost missed it?” he said.

“Missed what, Mr. Sumner?”

“The report of this kid’s death. It was buried at the bottom of page five.”

“Page three.”

Sumner gave a harsh laugh. “So it was page three! Great.” He turned and came back and tapped hard on Harry’s desk with the tip of a thick, blunt, but perfectly manicured finger. “The point is,” he said, “why the goddamn hell wasn’t it on page one? Why wasn’t it all over page one? Why wasn’t it all of page one, period?”

“This is a delicate one, Mr. Sumner,” Harry began, but Sumner pushed a hand almost into the editor’s face.

“Don’t talk to me about delicate,” he said. “What do you think we’re running here? House and Garden ? The Ladies’ Home Journal ?” Now he jammed both elbows into his sides and splayed his hands to right and left over the desk, like an exasperated hoodlum in a gangster film. “It’s a newspaper, for God’s sake! We have a story! One of our very own reporters gets kicked to death and thrown stark naked in the river and you bury it on page five ? Are you a newsman, or what are you?”

Noosman, Harry repeated to himself, and in his imagination curled a contemptuous lip.

There was a brief, heavy silence, Sumner leaning over the desk with his hands held out in that menacingly imploring gesture and Harry looking up at him wide-eyed, his mouth open.

“Canal,” Harry said, before he could stop himself.

Sumner blinked. “What?”

“It was the canal he was dropped into, not the river.”

Sumner, frighteningly quiet, nodded to himself. He let his hands fall to his sides in a gesture of helpless resignation. He pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down and planted his elbows on the desk. “How long have you been in this job, Harry?” he asked, purring, sounding almost friendly, as if he really wanted to know.

“A year,” Harry said defensively. “Two, in September.”

“You like your work? I mean, you get satisfaction out of it?”

Harry’s mouth had gone dry again. “Yes, of course,” he said.

Once again Sumner was nodding. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I like to think the folk working on my newspapers are happy. It gives me satisfaction, to know that you ’re happy. You believe that?” Harry only looked glum, and Sumner smiled, showing his big white teeth. “You’d better believe it, because it’s true. But you’ve got to realize”—he leaned back and brought out from the breast pocket of his jacket a box of cheroots and flipped open the lid—“I’m in business here. We’re all in business here.”

The cheroots were of a blackish-brown color, obviously handmade; long and thin and misshapen, they reminded Harry of shriveled dog turds. Sumner selected one, held it up before himself between his fingertips, and gazed at it with satisfaction. Harry pushed a heavy desk lighter towards him but Sumner shook his head and brought out a box of Swan Vestas. “Lighters taste of gasoline,” he said. “A good cheroot deserves a match.”

He lit up with a flourish, making a business of it, while Harry looked on in dull fascination. Sumner shook the flame until it died, then set the smoldering matchstick carefully on a corner of the desk, ignoring the ashtray Harry was offering, and exhaled with a soft sigh a flaw of blue, dense-smelling smoke. “The point is, Harry,” he said, settling back on the chair and crossing his left ankle on his right knee, “newspapers thrive on — well, you tell me. Come on. Tell me. What do newspapers thrive on, Harry?”

Harry regarded him helplessly with a glazed stare. By now he felt less like a rabbit than a torn and bloodied mouse that a cat had been toying with for a long time and was about to eat.

“ Noos, Harry,” Sumner said, almost whispering the word. “That’s what they thrive on— noos .”

He smoked in silence for a time, smiling to himself and gazing at Harry almost benignly. Harry was bitterly reminding himself that although Sumner had taken over the Clarion less than a year before, obviously he saw himself as an expert at the business.

Below them, deep in the bowels of the building, the presses were starting up for a dummy run.

“So,” Harry said, “what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Me? I don’t want you to do anything. What I want is for you to tell me what you ’re going to do. You’re the professional here, Harry”—he paused, seeming about to laugh at the notion but settling for a broad smile instead—“you’re the one with the know-how. So: impress me.”

Harry could feel the sweat forming on his upper lip; he was sure Sumner could see it, beads of it glittering against his already forming five-o’clock shadow, which on him always began to appear midmorning. He had spent time in the army when he was young. He had been had up on a shoplifting charge, nothing very serious, but the judge had given him the option of Borstal or the ranks. It was a period of his life he did not care to dwell on. There had been a sergeant who was the bane of his life — what was his name? Mullins? No, Mulkearns, that was it. Little stub of a fellow, built like a barrel, with slicked-back hair and a Hitler ’tache. He was a bully too, like Sumner here, the same dirty, gloating smirk and the same air of enjoying himself hugely at others’ expense. You say these here spuds are peeled, do you, Clancy? Well, now you can get going on peeling the peelings . Oh, yes, Mulkearns and Carlton Sumner were of a type, all right.

“We could run a feature, maybe,” Harry said, though it sounded unimpressive even to his own ears. “The increasing instances of violence in the city, gangs on the rise, Saturday night drunkenness, the youth running wild…”

He let his voice trail off. Sumner, lounging on the chair, had put his head back and was gazing at the ceiling, slack-mouthed and vacant, the cheroot in his fingers sending up a swift and, so it seemed to Harry, venomously unwavering trail of steel-blue smoke. Then he snapped forward again, straightening his head with such suddenness that a tendon made an audible click in his thick, suntanned neck. “No no no,” he said, with a broad gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing aside a curtain of cobwebs. “No: what I see is a front-page splash. ‘JIMMY MURDER: NEW DEVELOPMENT.’ Run it across eight columns, top of the page. A photo of Jimmy — what was his name?”

“Minor.”

Sumner frowned. “Sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it, ‘Jimmy Minor’? If he’d been a kid it would be fine—‘Little Jimmy Minor,’ like ‘Little Jimmy Brown.’” He brooded. “Still, run a nice picture of him, with something in the caption like ‘Our man, brutally slain.’ Right?”

“Right,” Harry said, trying to sound in forceful agreement. He fingered a sheet of copy paper on the desk in front of him. “But,” he said, “this ‘new development’—what would that be?”

Sumner looked at him, his cheeks and even his eyes seeming to swell and grow shiny. “What do you mean?”

“Well … there haven’t been any developments.”