Saving Grace (36 page)

“Fuck you, Barnaby We’re done. If I were you, I’d get myself another beat—better yet, another line of work.” She marched off, heels clicking on the stone steps.

Harsh words, but Barnaby knew she didn’t mean them. Buscaglio knew as well as he did that no scandal lasts forever. Especially ones that never made the papers to begin with.

For days after the incident at Maxie’s, Barnaby had lain low in an agony of waiting. Every time the phone rang, his stomach turned over as if it were wired to the bell; but no reporter called to ask for his comment. When the story didn’t appear in the next day’s press, he figured they were fleshing it out, looking for confirmation of Gracie’s accusations. A week, two weeks went by; nothing happened. Gracie Fleishman disappeared from view. The rumor was she’d been sent away. Barnaby figured he was home-free. His colleagues were standing up for him, after all.

Roger read it differently.

“They’re protecting the girl, not you,” he said. “And themselves. You make us all look bad.”

That was the attitude: Barnaby had fucked up. It was enough to make a strong man weep. Barnaby was sustained by whiskey and the knowledge that
this too shall pass.
New scandals crowded out the old. A year from now, no one would remember. A year, hell; two months at the outside, and they’d be lining up for his autograph again. In the meantime, he kept working.

Buscaglio kept her word and refused his calls. No one else in Rayburn’s office would give him the time of day. This was unfortunate, because Fleishman’s indictment had totally changed the story, taken it off the street and into the attorneys’ conference rooms. The question was no longer what Jonathan did but how he did it and with whom. If Fleishman was retailing favors and contracts, he had to be purchasing them somewhere. Whose strings did he pull, and with what currency did he pay? Above all: was Fleishman talking?

Working from his apartment, Barnaby went back to his original sources on the Fleishman story. Most wouldn’t take his calls; those who did gave him nothing he didn’t already have.

He tried another approach. From the private treasure chest where he kept all his confidential material, safe from the prying eyes of his colleagues, he drew a list of names, office addresses, and phone numbers: fifty-four city employees who had gotten their jobs through Jonathan Fleishman’s recommendation. The list had cost him two pairs of front-row seats to a Giants game, but it was cheap at the price.

Barnaby lay on his bed with his reporter’s notebook propped against a knee and the list by his side, and one by one he phoned the names on the list.

It took the best part of four days, with multiple calls to most, to work his way through. Most hung up when he gave his name; others had their secretaries screen him out. Barnaby didn’t take it personally; some resentment was inevitable, but by the law of averages, he expected that some of Fleishman’s people would be looking around about now, getting ready to jump ship, maybe score a few brownie points with the press. Yet the few who agreed to talk with Barnaby did so only to harangue him. Words like “persecution,” “vendetta,” “distortion,” and “fabrication” were carelessly tossed about. And for all this abuse, he ended up with nothing more than he’d had when he started: a list of names.

It pissed him off, this unseemly loyalty to a villain; it tested his patience. By all the laws of politics as he knew them, and he knew them from the ground up, Fleishman’s former proteges ought by now to be turning on their wounded mentor in a kind of feeding frenzy. Instead they were rallying round, supporting him like a goddamn pack of dolphins, while Barnaby’s colleagues did a piranha number on him. What the hell did Fleishman have that Barnaby lacked?

What really hurt, what kept him up drinking and smoking weed late into the night, was the way the lines were getting blurred. By all rational standards he was the good guy, Fleishman the bad. Fleishman had betrayed the public trust, and Barnaby had exposed him: you would think people would be grateful. You would think that at the very least, they would turn against Fleishman.

Oh, the high-ranking pols kept a wary distance—they were scared to death. But the people whom Fleishman had robbed and whom Barnaby defended, whose side did they take?

One night Barnaby turned on his TV and gnashed his teeth in rage as he watched a delegation from three south Eastborough housing projects present Fleishman with a check for $12,485 for his defense fund. The money had been raised entirely in the projects, through hundreds of contributions of five and ten dollars each. All three networks covered the event. The Hispanic woman who led the delegation recited a little set speech whose gist was: You’ve been on our side all these years, Jonathan; now we’re proud to be on yours.

She hugged him. The cameras pulled in close, and Fleishman wiped a photogenic tear from his eye. “This means more to me than I can say.”

Barnaby hurled an ashtray at the wall, banged his head against the back of his chair. The injustice of the thing drove him mad. Letters to the
Probe
were running three to one in favor of Fleishman, ten to one from his borough. Some were damned offensive attacks on Barnaby’s motives, competence, and parentage. “Who are you?” one woman wrote to him. “When you do for the people a tenth of what Mr. Fleishman did, then you can talk.”

Idiots. They treated Fleishman like Robin Hood, when all the while he was picking their pockets. The businessmen Fleishman hit up didn’t foot the bill; they passed it along, in increased prices, lower wages.

But people see what they wanted to see, which as far as Barnaby was concerned was damn near nothing. He was the fool, painting pictures for the blind. The people were ungrateful; almost, they deserved what they got.

Although, officially, Barnaby was on vacation, the biorhythm of his life was set to the
Probe’s
weekly cycle. Tuesday was the deadline for that week’s edition; by Monday evening, when he had nothing new to report, his blood pressure began to rise. Again and again Barnaby went back to the list of Fleishman’s political debtors. Slowly an idea began to emerge, like a chick pecking its way out of a shell. Barnaby, like most writers, thought better with a pen in his hand. He took a yellow legal pad and turned it sideways. On the bottom he drew a small circle around the initials J.F. He divided the page into vertical columns and headed each with the name of a municipal agency. Then he took the list of names and began slotting them in. When he’d finished, he had a kind of flow chart, a diagram of one man’s political reach.

From a chaotic-looking desk drawer Barnaby pulled out another list, compiled during the early days of his investigation. Beside the typed names of the six companies that paid Fleishman or Kavin in one capacity or another, he had penciled in a list of favors, services, exemptions, and contracts facilitated by Fleishman (presumably it was Fleishman, not Kavin, who had far less power citywide than his friend). Barnaby laid one list next to the other, and his eyes went back and forth. After a while, without noticing, he began to hum a Beatles tune.

Tuesday morning, Barnaby entered Hasselforth’s office and tossed a thin stack of papers onto his desk.

“What’s this?”

“Read it.”

Roger read one line. He looked up. “Do you have a memory problem, Barnaby?”

“Yeah—too many of ‘em.”

“Not one week ago, in this very room, I took you off Fleishman.”

“Just read the damn piece.”

“Sit down,” the editor said testily. “You’re looming again. I hate it when you loom.” He skimmed the pages rapidly, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. Hasselforth watched too many old newspaper movies. Once, for a gag, Barnaby had given him an old-fashioned eyeshade. Roger wore it till it fell apart.

He read the piece a second time, more slowly. Barnaby lolled in his seat, batting away smoke. When Roger finished, he fastened his eyes to Barnaby’s face but said nothing.

“Well?” Barnaby said.

“You expect me to print this?”

“Up to you, Rog, old boy. If you don’t, there’s plenty that will.”

“No, they won’t,” Hasselforth said. “This is garbage.”

Something lurched inside of Barnaby, but he kept it off his face. “Harsh words,” he said very gently.

“All this putrid moralizing, Jesus. Did you ever stop to think how it would read, coming from you?”

Barnaby yawned delicately.

“The other papers would come after us with machetes, and who could blame them? It really is the most awful crap, Barnaby. That trite old corruption-equals-cancer bit, for example.”

“I thought it was a damned good analogy,” protested the writer, stung more by this attack on his literary taste than the slur on his morals. “Corruption really does spread exactly like cancer, once it metastasizes.”

“Apparently it does; everybody says so.”

Barnaby winced.

“And all the hyperbole about Fleishman himself.” He turned to a page at random and read; “ ‘Fleishman played Lancelot to his own King Arthur, Iago to his own Othello: a great man brought down by his own evil impulses.’ “

“That’s a great line!”

“Aw, please. You wanna preach, go preach in the subways. I got news for you, my friend. Jonathan Fleishman is just another politician on the take, one of a million. Your problem is you got snookered; and that hurts your pride.”

“I never denied it.” Barnaby crossed his arms over his chest and studied the ceiling. “Fine,” he said in the tone of one making a great concession. “Cut that part.”

“Sure, cut that, and what have you got left? A bunch of names, Fleishman appointees. So the system runs on patronage: welcome to America.”

“You’re missing the point. I’ve broken down the services Fleishman provided by the agencies he needed to manipulate. He’s got people in every one.”

“So what? At this stage of his career I’d be surprised if Fleishman didn’t have people in every city agency. Ditto for the Democratic leaders of the other boroughs.”

Like a teacher instructing an incorrigibly stupid child, Barnaby said, “Every one of those people owes Fleishman their job. Do you really think they’d refuse him anything?”

“Just because he recommended them doesn’t necessarily mean they’re corrupt. You’ve got to
show
they bilked the system for him, not just imply it. Jesus, Barnaby, I feel like I’m talking to a tyro here. What’s happened to you?”

Barnaby scowled. “This from the King of Guilt-by-Association.”

“I’m worried about you, man. This piece doesn’t even sound like you. Another reporter turned this in, you’d burn his buns.”

“I don’t have to take this shit.” Barnaby lunged for the pages.

Hasselforth slapped a hand on top. His face assumed a crafty look. “I’m not saying it’s totally worthless. I can’t run it, but it’s suggestive, okay? It opens up lines of inquiry. Leave it with me; we’ll work on it.”

Barnaby snatched the pages from under Roger’s hand, folded and stashed them in his pocket.

The editor sighed. “Did you even try for confirmation?”

“Of course. I called everyone on that list.”

“So? What’d you find out?”

“I found out that Fleishman’s people are a hell of a lot more loyal to him than mine are to me.”

“Tell you something about loyalty, Barnaby. It’s like social security. What you pay in is what you get out.”

“You’re saying I wasn’t loyal to the
Probe?”

“The
Probe
was your power base, you said it yourself a million times. You were out to make a name for yourself.”

“I never heard you complain.”

“I didn’t. It worked for us too. But not anymore. Not like this.”

“Tell me how I wasn’t loyal. Tell me one single thing I did that wasn’t good for this rag.”

“Just one?” Roger blew smoke at the ceiling. “How many women on this paper have you screwed?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Fifteen? Twenty? Half the female work force? Look at the grin on your face. You’re proud of it.”

“You’re jealous.”

“No, just sick of you treating every new female employee like fresh meat in a lion’s cage. Leaving aside what this says about your emotional maturity, it’s bad for morale.”

“Whose, yours?”

A geyser of smoke spewed from Hasselforth’s mouth. “Go home, Barnaby.”

“Kiss my ass.”

* * *

“Do you have an appointment, sir?” The receptionist looked doubtfully at Barnaby’s jeans and black T-shirt. He’d thought of going home to change but had discarded the notion. He was Barnaby, not some kid out of school applying for a job in the mailroom.

“Just tell Rossiter I’m here,” he said.

Rossiter himself came out to greet him. They shook hands, and the
Times
editor led him to his office. A secretary served coffee while Barnaby gazed around appreciatively. Leather chairs, mahogany bookshelves, perfect order, and a secretary who did coffee; why had he wasted so much time?

“What can I do for you, Barnaby?” Rossiter asked when they were alone.

“The question is what I can do for you.” Barnaby tossed his story onto Rossiter’s teak desk.

“What’s this?”

“My dowry.”