There Fell a Shadow

There Fell a Shadow

Andrew Klavan
writing as Keith Peterson

A
MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media ebook

THIS BOOK IS FOR DOUG AND MARY OUSLEY
.

“Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
     Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

Edward Dowson

I
t was the night of the first big snow. I remember that. A slate December sky had threatened the city all that day. The clouds had seemed heavy with the coming storm. The air had seemed brittle with it, like a pane of glass the wind was about to shatter.

Then, around eight that night, the clouds gave way. The air did shatter. The wind blew in. The snow swept out of Jersey and across the Hudson. In Manhattan, at about 8:05 p.m., a single flake drifted gently through the red glow of a Forty-second Street stoplight. It landed daintily in front of Grand Central Terminal and melted to a gray dot on the sidewalk. By 8:07 the air was white and whirling. The gray spot was covered by a white patina. The white patina grew thicker, higher. The red stoplight became a dull rose glow sunk deep in the blizzard's midst.

The last commuters rushing toward the terminal's front doors turned their faces away from the biting wind. They wrestled with their umbrellas or held their newspapers up as shields. The men had to clap their hats tight to their heads. The women had to press the skirts of their coats down against their legs. Bandannas and jackets fluttered everywhere.

Next, as the streetlamps grew halos and dimmed, the horns started. The cars jammed up bumper to bumper on the broad boulevard. The drivers—who by all rights should have missed the evening rush—grew peeved. Their horns wailed and cursed and bleated. The noise rose up and danced in the dancing snow above Forty-second. The line of cars trudged on slowly under the terminal toward the East River Drive.

Manhattan was cold and beautiful. It snowed and snowed. The air around the lighted peak of the Empire State Building seemed almost alive with the whorls and waves of it. The stone lions flanking the steps of the library looked grim and comical under peaked caps of it. And over the bold, arching entrance of Grand Central, the sculpted Mercury spread his arms to it and welcomed it like the god he was.

As for me—as for me and Lansing and McKay—we drank. There was nothing else for us to do. Nothing better, anyway. The Lady and the Tiger story was covered from every angle. The story on the Brooklyn park was solid as I could make it. The bulldog's deadline was past. The late edition was all laid out. The work was done. The snow was heavy. Drinking was just the thing.

We were in the Press Club. Just down Fortieth from the terminal, around the corner from Vanderbilt Avenue and the offices of the
New York Star
from which we'd come. We had beaten the worst of the storm by minutes.

It's a fancy little pub, the P.C. A dark, oaken room. A long bar running through the center. Round oak tables everywhere. Heavy chairs with leather seats and backs held fast by brass studs. The walls are decorated with old newspapers, framed. Not just the splashy headlines like some of the other press bars. Not just Lindbergh and V-E Day and Men Walk On Moon. The good stories, too. The small stories done well. Breslin dancing in a pothole. Clines watching miners go to work in the Pennsylvania dark. Even Lupica giving it to Steinbrenner. Even me, on Frankie and Johnny: the one about the hooker who gunned her pimp down on the Minnesota Strip. The yellow light from yellow lanterns gleams on the fading pages, reflects off the glass in the frames. The rest of the room is dim and pleasant. Not too crowded tonight. Just enough people to keep a buzz of conversation going.

Lansing, McKay, and I sat in a corner by one of the front windows. We watched the snow hit the glass and melt. We watched the glass streak with droplets of water. We squinted through the droplets and watched the snow cover the bags of garbage leaning against each other at the edge of the sidewalk. We drank scotch.

“It's not the tiger banner,” Lansing said. “I don't mind that. I don't mind the sidebars. I don't mind any of it.” She was leaning back in her chair, her arm resting on the table, her hand wrapped casually around her glass. She smiled and shook her head. Her long blond hair slapped at her face lazily. Her hair gleamed in the lamplight. “It's him I mind,” she went on. “It's the way he drools over the blood that gets me. The way his face fell when we told him she'd only lost an arm.”

“The man's an idiot,” said McKay. His mouth drew down at the corners as he studied the surface of his drink. His baby face almost managed to look severe. “That thing with the parents …” He shook his head. He couldn't finish. He was too ticked off.

Lansing reached over and patted his arm. She turned her face to me. “And then when you got confirmation on the borough president, I thought he was going to take your head off. Like you were intruding. Messing up his sleaze with news.”

I laughed.

“Come on, Wells,” she said. “Don't laugh. You know it bothers you.”

She gave me a look. High cheeks. Blue eyes. Rich lips. Rich, rich lips. I stopped laughing. I shrugged instead.

“And don't shrug,” she said.

“Can I drink?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks,” I said. I drank until the ice rattled against my teeth. I set the empty glass down on the table with a thud.

The subject under discussion was Robert Cambridge. He was the managing editor of the
Star
, had been now for a year and a half. They'd hired him off a California paper. His mandate was to revamp the old tabloid. Make it more exciting. More “relatable,” he called it. “Think about your audience,” he'd tell us in his weekly staff meetings. He'd slouch in his chair at the conference table to show us what a regular guy he was. His voice would uncoil softly, like a snake at suppertime. “Does your audience wake up in the morning wondering what happened in South Africa or Iran? No. Of course not. They think about the things that will affect them, that will impact on you and me. That everyone can relate to. Think like them. Think you-and-me. Think relatability. Don't just go around thinking news, news, news all the time!” And here he'd make a dreary news-news-news face. “Think—
infotainment
.”

McKay was right. The man was an idiot.

Last night, up at the Bronx Zoo, some vandals had played a practical joke. This morning a pretty young zookeeper named Suzanne Feldman had become their punch line. And our headline. The vandals had somehow crept into the zoo and cut through the mesh of the tiger's cage. Maybe they'd planned to free the beast. As it turned out, all they managed to do was open one or two of the squares in the mesh. Come morning, as Suzanne was going about her duties, she noticed the damage.

At that point, she should have called her supervisor. Instead she hopped the fence and went over for a closer look. The tiger—her name was Antoinette—was lying down peacefully. She was all the way back against the enclosure's rear wall. Suzanne deemed it safe to poke around at the damaged wire with her hand.

She deemed wrong. Antoinette pounced lazily. Witnesses said it was the movement of a second. A couple of strides and a flying leap. That was all. Suzanne Feldman was yanked tight against the cage. She was screaming as if her arm were being torn off. It was. By the time two janitors rushed to her side, she had fallen away from the cage. She was sitting upright against the fence. She was not screaming anymore. Instead, she was staring wide-eyed into the cage where Antoinette was enjoying a second breakfast.

“Look. She's eating my arm,” Suzanne Feldman had said quietly to the janitors. Then she fainted.

The press has a lot in common with Antoinette: other people's misfortunes are its meat. I've been a newspaperman since I left my brother and sister to bury our mother and hoboed down to New York out of Maine. I was twenty one. Twenty-five years ago. I know a good story when I hear one. I know how to get it and write it and play it big. The Lady and the Tiger could handle the banner Cambridge would lay on it. But Lansing was right. He didn't have to drool over it.

“Did it kill her?” he said, when Lansing first gave him the word.

“No,” said Lansing. “It just ate her arm.”

“Oh. Gee. Well, still. Even so: I love it. Great, great story. Take McKay up there with you, he can do the color. And I'll give you Gershon for the pix.” Making these assignments was the city editor's job. But Cambridge couldn't leave a story this big to the city editor. He couldn't leave anything to anybody. In fact, before McKay left for the Bronx, Cambridge pulled him aside and put his arm around him. He can do that to McKay because McKay is young and has a wife and kid and needs the job.

“Once you get up there,” he told McKay in a confidential voice, “ask around, find out, you know, did she have a husband or a boyfriend. How's he gonna feel now she's only got one arm? You know? Is he gonna sue the zoo or what? And how about her mother? Call her mother, you know. She'll cry. It's good copy.”

McKay's plump cheeks turned beet red. He nodded. He slithered out from under Cambridge's arm. He walked away.

While all this was going on, I was in one of our better Times Square movie emporiums. I was watching the early showing of “The Perils of Francine.” It was a sensitive, insightful epic about a young woman who manages to touch the lives of every male creature in the state of California. It was tough for me to follow the story line, though. The guy sitting next to me kept talking. He was a young lawyer who worked for the city parks commissioner. What he was talking about was the construction of a Brooklyn playground. That playground had now been under construction for seven years. Its projected cost was now five times more than the original estimate and still rising. Slouched in Francine's flickering shadows, whispering in nervous bursts half-lost beneath the cries of passion from the screen, the young lawyer outlined the process by which the contract for the playground had been funneled to a construction company owned by a gentleman named Anthony Giotto. Giotto—who was currently awaiting trial on federal racketeering charges—had apparently directed the payment of a large bribe to a top Brooklyn official. The young lawyer could not give me the name of the official. He didn't have to. I'd been working on the story for two weeks. I knew pretty well who it was.

That evening, about three hours before we adjourned to the Press Club to watch the storm, I got it solid. I'd landed myself a borough president: Glen Robins. I had him dead to rights. I called the man. Gave him a chance to defend himself. He told me to talk to his lawyer. His lawyer refused comment.

I brought the story to the city editor, a decent old guy named Hugh Rafferty. Rafferty sat at the city desk, rapping angrily at his computer. He was going over the day's minor stories. The big story was the tiger. Cambridge had taken charge of that.

“Talk to
him
,” said Rafferty grimly.

I sighed. Cambridge does not look upon me entirely with favor. He seems to feel I oppose his mission to relatabilitize the newspaper. He says I have an attitude problem. He says I have a “problem with authority.” He has invited me into his office for informal chats on the subject. Somehow the problem only grows worse. I'm told he's now convinced I'm trying to “undermine” him. If it weren't for the fact that revelations of widespread municipal corruption keep appearing in our paper before any of the competing papers, I do believe he'd let me go.

But I had no choice. I took my story to Cambridge. He was in Lansing's cubicle. His jacket was off. His tie was undone. He was bending over her shoulder as she sat at her computer terminal. He was telling her how to write her story.