John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Her look might have lightened up, Kit couldn’t be sure. Corinna wouldn’t let him alone. “Kit,” she said, “I don’t think you thought this through. I mean, what am I supposed to tell people when they call?” Good question. The phone had rung twice during their conversation already, and the speaker on the message machine could only be turned down so far. Twice Kit had needed to raise his voice, working against the electronic rumble of puzzled callers. Worse, he’d told the women that they’d both remain on salary. Both of them, yes, though he knew the bank balance couldn’t support it. He’d be broke by Valentine’s Day. But how could he tell Corinna that he was going to keep sending her a paycheck and not do the same for Zia?

Now came a knock on the door. A knock, something else he hadn’t considered. The way he’d been thinking — if you could call it that — the demands of carrying around the hottest story in Boston would be vaporized as soon as he closed the paper. Vaporized, poof, Star Wars . Kit thought of Junior’s father, run off to Hollywood.

The knock sounded again, more loudly.

“What about this guy, Kit?” Corinna asked. “Should I get this or not?”

At the door was Rick DeMirris, frowning at Kit’s bruises as he unzipped a parka patched with duct tape. He’d brought a list of the Monsod contractors. “The list, you know. The bad guys.” Freelancer’s initiative — no wonder Rick was Kit’s favorite. And even now Kit couldn’t resist a look. There between the front room’s partitions, still on his feet, he searched Rick’s list till found the name he wanted. Joints, fittings, misc. plumbing: Mirinex, Inc . Kit had been on to a story, this time. He’d been on to something people deserved to know, and something for which other people deserved to get spanked. It looked like he was still learning about the power of that story. It had a life of its own, regardless of what Kit might do with his shoestring newspaper.

Corinna bent over the phone’s answering machine, Zia pulled out a messed-up legal pad. Kit took DeMirris back to his private office, hoping that in there the bad news might go over more quietly.

No such luck. “Christ, Kit, you locked the door on me,” the freelancer erupted. “Can’t you at least tell me why?”

Kit gestured at the legal paper on his desk … you are hereby commanded … “There are larger issues.”

“Larger issues?” Rick yanked on his sweater. “Kit — the next issue of Sea Level , now that’s a larger issue.”

You had to admire the guy. A card-carrying member of Agitators Anonymous. He’d come in with his list, terrific initiative, and he wanted his byline. It didn’t help any when Kit reminded Rick that he still had the piece on the new MBTA station. They’ve unearthed some interesting stuff down there, Rick … it didn’t help. A few old bones under the city floor were nothing compared to what had turned up out at Monsod. Rick strode round the office arms akimbo, very Greek, and one of his quick, angry connections gave Kit an idea. Like Corinna, the freelancer pointed out that the subpoena made no mention of a gag order. “Man, you can publish,” he said. “You’re clean. ” With that, Kit began thinking of Forbes Croftall.

Croftall too could come out clean, in an open Grand Jury. Not that the Senator was holding the strings, here — the investigation came under a different jurisdiction — and not that Kit knew just what the Senator was up to, yet. But doing without a gag order seemed to serve the man’s purposes. It seemed of a piece with sending Kit out to the penitentiary in the first place. It fit with CYA, looking good for the papers.

Struggling to make sense of it, struggling with working-world speed, Kit shepherded Rick out of his office. Sighing, he repeated that his mind was made up. Finally the freelancer played to the two women. “Kit,” he said loudly, “I’ve got a feeling I’m saying goodbye for the last time. ” Aw, Rick. For the remainder of the morning Kit set himself up at an empty desk out front. No gag order at Sea Level: he was out where everyone could take their best shot. He would have made his callbacks from Corinna’s phone if the switching from line to line hadn’t proved so clumsy. Ma Bell was such a stick-in-the-mud monopoly, slow to make changes. Kit returned to his office but left the door open, as he worked through one no-comment after another.

He’d been putting this off for days, he hadn’t touched the memos on his kitchen table — yet compared to what he’d faced already this morning, making the calls came easy. What little he could say felt routine. Even the tone of voice was a painless charade, apologetic but businesslike. These weren’t people who knew him, or knew him more than a handshake’s worth, and didn’t he have injuries? Didn’t he have a lawyer? Soon Kit’s eyes wandered back to the list of prison contractors, lying across the subpoena on his desk.

Mirinex, Inc . If the paper had exposed its own publisher, the next issue really would have been its last. It would’ve gone out in a blaze of glory.

Topsy Otaka came by, with fresh Monsod sketches. Kit particularly liked an M.C. Escher parody — these days you saw the man’s stuff everywhere — a manipulation of perspective in which tattooed cons and suit-and-tie politicians chased each other in circles within thick prison walls. He showed the piece to Zia, propping it on the halfwall before her desk. This got something out of her at least. It got her to laugh, though darkly, full of smoke. She’d been puffing away, bent close over her legal pad, scribbling hard. As Kit stood before her he got a taste of her Marlboro, and he could pick out a word or two of her bird-like scrawl. “Oedipus,” “basement.” But when Zia spoke, she spoke to Topsy. Abruptly she told her friend about Kit’s decision for the next issue.

Topsy, open-mouthed, blinking, reached for her forearm. Kit wound up writing her a check on the spot, a kill fee.

The one person he didn’t seem to have hurt was Tad Close. The Circulation Manager came in looking happier than any of them, fashionable even, in matching beige turtleneck and mud-brown corduroys. The first issue, he announced, had already sold out both at the kiosks on Arlington Street and over in Harvard Square. “We’re big!” Tad said. “M- tellin -ya!” At least that gave Kit an opening: Yeah Tad now people want to read about Monsod but I’m afraid … Yet Kit’s news had the Circulation Manager looking, if anything, even happier. He took the chair opposite Kit, in the middle of the front room; grinning, he finger-combed his mustache.

“Kit,” he said after a bewildering moment, “you know I realize who I’m working for.”

“Really.” Kit managed a grin of his own.

“I realize, Kit, you’re a true believer. You’re a martyr, man, you’re beautiful. Look at you.”

Tad’s bullshit was a sight for sore eyes. An act of great delicacy. He had only the smallest improvisational space, a sliver between confidence and self-mockery.

“And this is a beautiful thing, closing down awhile. It’s like Carlos Castañeda out in the desert. Not doing, you know? The Yaqui way of knowledge.”

Tad went on a moment about the rightness of Kit’s decision. “But Kit,” he said then, “let me ask you something.”

And the Circulation Manager was utterly unfazed about working in public. He lay both hands palm-up on the desk between them, nothing to hide.

“Let me ask you. What do you think makes people read about the scum of the earth down in Monsod?”

“Tad. Scum of the Earth was what I was going to call the paper. Until I thought of Sea Level, Scum of the Earth was it.”