Queen of the Underworld (6 page)

“Tell me the truth, now, you wanted to send me back, didn’t you?”

We had been through this before, but I always looked forward to his answer.

“Never considered it. My heart went out to you. Especially when I asked you how you got it and you stuck out your chin and said, ‘Oh, saying goodbye to my stepfather.’ Without a trace of self-pity, almost with, well, humor. This is one spunky kid, I thought. But what was I going to do with you in the meantime? I couldn’t take you up to the Inn and introduce you to the others, have you wait tables, like that.”

“So you took me to your hideaway cabin instead. And sent Aunt Stella down to minister to me with her wet leaves and magic potions.”

“And you were on the job within the week, and everybody at the Inn fell in love with you.”

“But
you
didn’t fall in love with me until I asked you to return my book to the library in Mountain City and bring me volume two.”

“Nope, not even then.”

We’d been down this road before, too, but it was a cherished part of our storytelling ritual.

“But you said that was when things changed.”

“When I hid you away in the cabin and told everyone you’d come down with a bad cold, I already knew I wanted to protect you. Then when I returned your
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (The Early Years)
and told the librarian you wanted the next volume, and she said the author had died before he got a chance to write it, I thought, how am I going to tell her? She’ll be so disappointed. A smart college kid like her and she didn’t know he died before he wrote volume two! I asked the librarian if she had anything else by Mann you might not have read, and she looked up his other books and said your name wasn’t on the card in back of the stories—so I checked them out for you. And then, when I got back to the Inn and told you there was no second volume, you looked kind of deflated, but you recovered yourself and said, ‘Well, that just means I’ll have to imagine the second volume for myself.’ And when I handed over the stories, I could see immediately that you’d read them, but you pretended you hadn’t, to save my feelings, and that’s when something shifted—”

At this juncture, as always, he picked up my right hand and placed it on his bare chest, over his heart. “In here.”

H
E RETURNED
me the quick way, crossing onto the mainland at Broad Causeway and heading straight down Biscayne Boulevard. But instead of following the boulevard all the way to the riverfront entrance to the Julia Tuttle, he turned right into Flagler Street and drove slowly down two blocks of darkened storefronts to the only lit-up building in sight. The way it was positioned, on the corner of Flagler and Miami Avenue, made it look like the prow of an ocean liner bearing down on us, with
“The Miami Star”
glowing aloft in red neon letters. In some of the yellow squares of the wraparound second-floor windows you could see human shadows moving about the newsroom.

But there was more to come. With his typical acumen for planning the next treat, Paul had got us here just in time for the first edition’s press run. He activated the button to let down the window on my side, then switched off the ignition and let the close, balmy night invade the air-conditioned darkness of the car. As though we were royalty and the performance could now begin, a bell went off inside the tall ground-floor windows. Men wearing hats made out of newspaper moved among the big presses—some were up on the catwalks—and the huge press cylinders began to roll, slowly picking up speed to the chop-chop of the folder knives. The folder spewed forth the first complete paper; the foreman gave it a fast page-through to make sure the plates were installed in the right order, then gave the high sign for the presses to accelerate to full speed. The chop of the folder knives got faster and faster until it merged with the roar of the presses into a frenzied blur of sound. There was something erotic about a press run, with its increasing tempo of excitement, its acceleration toward full speed and no return.

“Seventy thousand newspapers an hour,” crooned Paul softly, his hand lightly cupping my knee. “Just think, by this time tomorrow your byline may be hitting the streets seventy thousand times.”

3.

I
SUPPOSE
I
EXPECTED
more fuss when I stepped off the elevator into the noisy
Star
newsroom on Monday morning. Nobody even looked up. Men with rolled-up shirtsleeves assaulted typewriters, smoke rising above their heads. The pervasive odors were of tobacco, coffee, and the pulp copy paper Mother in her reporting days used to bring home from the
Mountain City Citizen
for me to scribble on. Segregated inside a glass cubicle, some middle-aged women in colorful dresses were clustered over fashion layout pages or prancing around in high heels or clacking out copy. All of them were puffing like dragons as well. A lanky, deeply tanned one with close-cropped silver curls caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back coolly and proceeded on to the managing editor’s corner. My acceptance letter had said “general assignment reporter” and I had no intention of getting corralled into the women’s department.

At least Lib, the managing editor’s secretary, who guarded his office, was expecting me. I had made sure to write down her name after my Christmas interview. She said Mr. Feeney would be out to welcome me shortly. She asked me what I thought so far of the South Florida weather, and before I could answer said not to judge it by all the rain we’d been having, meanwhile giving me the female-to-female once-over and appearing satisfied with my neat French twist and forest green shirtwaist. (“Dark dress, hair out of face, and
stockings,
no matter how hot”—my grandmother Loney’s career-dressing advice.) Lib herself wore a navy dress with a white collar, and her black hair was smartly sheared at earlobe level.

Supertall Mr. Feeney bounded out in his shirtsleeves and with an avuncular bow escorted me into his office. He was a gent, from the category of men I knew how to handle best. Gents tended to idealize bright young women and tried to smooth their way, shielding them from unpleasantness and strife whenever possible.

Since my Christmas visit, another executive desk facing Mr. Feeney’s had been moved into his office, making the room look cramped. A solid, dark-haired figure in an uncannily white shirt was in the act of rising from this desk.

“Emma, this is my new assistant managing editor, Lou Norbright.” That he presented the assistant manager to
me
indicated that Mr. Feeney was indeed of the old school. A lady ranked higher than her corporate superior. Then, in typical self-effacing-gent style, Feeney went on to praise us to each other as if that were his only role in life.

“Lou here came to us six years ago, Emma, all the way from North Platte, Nebraska, as a general assignment reporter for the
Star,
and before we knew it he was running the city desk, and now here he is, my second-in-command. All of which is to say, Emma”—another bow—“the
Star
encourages rising stars, if that doesn’t sound too corny.”

He then rattled off my glories to the new assistant managing editor. “Emma won her J-school’s most prized scholarship and she had her own column in the
Daily Tar Heel.
A real crackerjack of a column, too, timely, lively, subjects resourcefully handled, witty, very witty. Her dean sent me samples. He and I were Nieman Fellows at Harvard together.”

Lou Norbright heard out Feeney’s encomium to me with the same smiling attention with which he had received his own. He was
gleamingly
at attention, you might say. His glasses gleamed, his coal-bright eyes behind the silver rims gleamed, his uncannily white shirt gleamed, his black-and-silver-striped necktie gleamed, his teeth gleamed. A thin edging of gold between his top left canine and the adjoining premolar completed the overall gleaming effect.

I couldn’t place him in any of my male categories; he seemed neither gent, mentor, obstacle, adversary, sexual attractant, useful stepping-stone, buddy-cohort, nor anything potentially personal. He was more like an emblem or an idea, but I wasn’t sure of what. He appeared perfectly cordial toward me, yet he conveyed, almost viscerally, a withholding of judgment that had the effect of shrinking my confidence. It was as if I could read his subliminal reservations in the gleaming mirror of his surfaces. What if Mr. Feeney and Dean Ligon had
not
been Nieman Fellows together? What if Dean Ligon had not been so obviously disposed in my favor? What if Paul had not talked me into traveling to Miami for the Christmas interview “because you come across so well in person.” Where would my bare talents alone have gotten me at this early stage if Dean Ligon, Mr. Feeney, and Paul Nightingale had not been the sort of mentor-gents won over by young women like myself?

“Lou will show you around the newsroom,” Mr. Feeney was saying, “and then we’re going to start you right in at the city desk.” He gave another courtly dip in my direction. “Just like the proverbial little duck being thrown into the water, if that’s not too corny.”

Lou Norbright seemed to glide along beside me rather than walk in ordinary human steps. “So, Emma,” he said, “how are you finding our Miami weather?” The bright eyes behind the gleaming glasses appeared to expect something more “in-depth” than the conventional reply and so I allowed as how I found it a little harder to breathe in Miami. “The humidity, I guess, or my blood needs to thin. Did
you
find that when you first came down here from Nebraska?”

He flashed the gold-edged canine at me and looked as though I had just confirmed his private assessment of me. “No, I can’t say that I did,” he remarked cheerfully.

I was introduced first to Pat and Ed on the copydesk, both of whom wore green visors just like in newspaper movies. Though they both laid down their pencils from their respective slashings of triple-spaced copy and gave me friendly welcomes and appreciative male glances, I was enough under Lou Norbright’s confidence-leaching spell to imagine them foreseeing exactly the kinds of trifles and inadequacies they would soon be slashing out of my prose.

Next I met Bert, a soft-voiced, cherub-faced man who doubled as book editor and religion editor; he said to let him know if I wanted to review any new books for him.

“Perhaps later, when she’s settled in,” Norbright smilingly answered for me.

Next came a disheveled reporter with wild eyebrows and a crooked red bow tie, Dave Bisbee, who cocked his head impudently up at Norbright from an appallingly messy desk and invited me to “bug” him with any questions I was afraid to bother the “brass” with.

“We’ll all try to give Emma the benefit of our best guidance, Dave,” Lou Norbright suavely countered.

At her own corner desk, guarded by a large basket-shaped straw pocket-book with fake cherries on it, presided the woman reporter I already considered my rival because of her frequent sensational front-page stories: Joelle Cutter-Crane.

“Nice twist on the Jiménez stash, Joelle,” Norbright complimented her. “Readers have been calling in to comment. I’d like you to meet Emma Gant from North Carolina; she’ll be joining us in the newsroom.”

It hadn’t escaped my notice that Norbright had presented me to everybody rather than the other way round.

“I’m honored to meet you,” I told the small, brittle-featured woman with scarlet nails and a marcelled hairstyle and hair color similar to Tess’s. “I’ve been admiring your stories ever since I began subscribing to the
Star
in February.”

“How do you do?” said Joelle Cutter-Crane, barely glancing at me. She fixed Norbright with a hard, lipsticked smile. “It was my idea, not the copydesk’s, I want you to know, Lou, to give all that equipment in dictator Jiménez’s custom-built Cadillac—the machine gun and grenade racks as well as the luxury items—a box of its own.”

“Ah, Joelle, don’t we give you enough credit as it is?” Norbright teased.

As we continued on our rounds he said, “Joelle’s the ribbon on our package and we try to keep her happy. The team concept of newspapering is completely beyond her.” As he seemed too calculated a type to indulge in gossip merely for its own pleasures, I concluded he was giving me a token of his own “guidance.” The only trouble was, I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was saying it was better to be a ribbon or a team player.

Next stop was the morgue, the library in newspaper offices where you looked up the people and events you wanted to know about and the stories of yesterday you needed for background. The stories were stored in open cardboard file boxes containing alphabetically labeled envelopes stuffed with all the paper’s clippings on that topic. Tess’s sad story from the forties was lying there right now in an envelope bearing her ex-husband’s surname, and all Joelle Cutter-Crane’s old scoops could be found under the the letter
C,
as well as under the first letter of the subject of each scoop. The career of rapidly rising Norbright was stuffed into its envelopes, to be tracked whenever I could find the time. There would probably even be a file on P. Nightingale’s Club and its owner. And perhaps starting as early as tomorrow under
G
would begin the clipped and filed documentation of my own rising star.

The librarian for the morgue was the first person in our round of introductions to whom Lou Norbright showed deference. This person sat within her bubble of remoteness, a stack of Sunday
Miami Star
s spread out on a long table perpendicular to her desk. As we entered her glassed-in sanctum, she was in the act of clipping multiple copies of yesterday’s front-page lead,
WHERE THE DICTATOR STASHED HIS MILLIONS
, as its eight-column banner headline read, to go into the various envelopes: “Cutter-Crane,” “Jiménez,” “Venezuela,” “Dictators,” “Ex-dictators,” plus those of all the minor figures mentioned in the story, and probably even “Cadillacs, custom equipment,” from Joelle’s very own box idea.

“Moira, this is Emma Gant. We’ll be starting her off on the city desk. Emma, meet Moira Parks. I’m sure you know from J-school what an indispensable shop Moira runs.” Though Norbright spoke with his usual assurance, he seemed, in Moira’s domain, to take up only a normal amount of human space and not flow into hers. Moira Parks ceased applying her massive shears to yesterday’s big story and raised her thick, smoke-tinted glasses toward us. It was impossible to guess her age. She wore a shoulder-padded dress in a style from the forties. Her incredible mass of springy gray hair, the bottom clump somewhat restrained by an old-fashioned snood, suggested thousands of quivering electric wires conducting messages to and from her head.