Ba da bing.
As it were.
He should text Angela.
He takes out his phone and turns it on. He looks at his watch. He might even make it back in time for that ten-thirty meeting.
Watch what it does overnight.
Val Brady was certainly right about that. Thursday morning and it’s everywhere, hysterical banner headlines screaming LOOK OUT WALL STREET! and MANHUNT! and WHO’S NEXT? It’s the lead story in most major newspapers across the world. And why wouldn’t it be? Investment bankers being targeted for assassination? Summary executions on the sidewalks of Manhattan?
Ellen puts on a pot of coffee. She then turns on her phone and checks for messages. There are four, and all of them, to her surprise, are about the Ratt Atkinson piece she did for Parallax. She’d forgotten, the magazine is out today, and already, apparently, her piece is causing something of a stir.
Just as the coffee is ready, another call chimes in. She lets it go to message.
“Ellen, hi, Liz Zambelli, great piece today, I think there’s going to be quite a buzz around this, give me a call.”
Liz Zambelli is a booking agent for a couple of the talk shows. One of the earlier voicemail messages was from someone on The Rachel Maddow Show.
But Ellen’s puzzled. What is it? She’s been so preoccupied with this other story for the last few days that she barely remembers what she wrote in the Atkinson piece. She’s about to check online to see what people are saying when her phone rings again. This time she picks it up.
“Max.”
“Hi, Ellen.”
She waits. When he doesn’t say anything immediately, she sighs. “What is it, Max? I haven’t looked yet, but there’s obviously something there, something significant.”
“Well, that’s debatable.”
Ellen rolls her eyes. “Oh, just tell me.”
It turns out that what has caught people’s attention is a passing claim in the article that Ratt Atkinson has been exaggerating his popularity on Twitter in order to make himself look good in the eyes of a potential electorate. She quotes one source inside Atkinson’s own campaign as saying that 89 percent of the former governor’s followers on the site are fake, and that up to half a million either inactive or dummy accounts have been set up, and maybe even paid for, in a spectacular act of what has now come to be known as “astrotweeting.”
“That’s the takeaway? Nothing about…” She pauses, thinking. “Nothing about his… tax arrangements? The state contracts thing? No mention of that stuff about his wife and the soccer coach even?”
“Nope.”
“Jesus, that’s depressing. Twitter trumps sex as material for a scandal? I wasn’t even going to include that bit. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry I would have cut it.”
“But it’s kosher?”
“Oh yeah. It’s all been fact-checked. Talk to Ricky. And I’ve got tons more about it, too, quotes from the search agency that crunched the numbers, there’s a whole breakdown of his follower stats, but I dropped most of it, because… I just didn’t think anyone would give a fuck at this point.”
“Well, a fuck they most certainly do give. I’ve had a dozen calls so far today. Listen, this may not be the Pentagon Papers, but it’s exposure for us, okay, and we could use it.”
“I don’t know, Max.” She looks over at her desk. It’s strewn with loose pages, printouts of different typefaces, hundreds of them. She was up late again last night, chasing this… she hesitates to even call it a lead-especially since it led nowhere-but at least it felt like she was doing something serious. She did suspect she’d be giving up on it this morning, but if the alternative is appearing on cable news shows to talk about Twitter accounts with odd usernames and no profile photos, she’s not so sure. “I’m working on something.”
“What? Not Lebrecht? Not the shootings?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you have something, Ellen?” Pause, no answer. “Because it looks like you were right about it not being a professional setup, but we all know that now. So what else do you have?”
“Nothing, not really, but-”
“Well, then.”
“Not exactly nothing. I need some time, Max. And I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to get distracted by this Twitter shit.”
He groans.
“Trust me, Max. If I get anywhere with this, anywhere at all, it’ll be a whole lot better for the magazine than some pointless story about an ex-governor who’s got no chance in hell of securing the nomination in any case.”
“That’s a big if, Ellen. Have you seen how the story has scaled up? Every news organization in the world is on this now. How do you compete with that?”
“I don’t. I only compete with myself, Max.”
“Well, I hope one of you comes out on top, because-”
“Look, give me a couple of days, okay? The Twitter story can wait, it isn’t going away. If I haven’t made a breakthrough on this other thing by the weekend, I’ll go on goddamn Bill O’Reilly for you.”
Max exhales loudly. “Fine.” He’d clearly like to know more about where she is on the main story, but he knows not to push it.
They’ll talk tomorrow.
Sipping coffee, standing at her desk, Ellen then glances over the stuff she printed out last night.
Hundreds of uppercase A’s.
Which was only a small sample of the literally tens of thousands she could have printed out if she’d wanted to. She’d still be doing it, of course, and that was the main reason she stopped.
Because what was the point?
The first half hour or so she spent researching the difference between a typeface and a font, then between serif and sans-serif, then the general history and development of typefaces, after which she just started banging them out, in different point sizes, five or ten to a page, all uppercase.
It took her another few hours to identify what specific typeface the A was.
Blackwood Old Style, apparently.
It was a meticulous examination and comparison process-tricky, hard on the eyes, exhausting-but she was pretty sure about it in the end. Reaching a conclusion felt good, too. But of course that was deceptive… because what did it mean? What did it tell her?
Absolutely nothing.
The typeface itself was designed in the 1920s by a former San Francisco newspaperman whom a local foundry had commissioned to come up with something they could sell to ad agencies. Not long after that, Blackwood Old Style made its first appearance-on a public billboard advertising the Culpepper Union Brewing Company-and over subsequent decades the typeface proved to be very popular.
But what was she supposed to do now? With drowsiness and near-paralysis taking hold, it occurred to her-as it should have done before she went off on this obsessive tangent-to make a list of categories where a typeface like Blackwood Old Style might be used in more recent times and then to search for examples. The most obvious one, given how young the two guys appeared to be, was colleges. Beers and breweries maybe? Rock bands. What else? Trucks? Automobiles?
But she was hanging on by her fingertips here, because even if she found something-a recent example of Blackwood Old Style-it would still most likely prove to be a dead end. The guy was just wearing a printed T-shirt, and the design on it was probably something totally random. It didn’t have to be significant. It didn’t have to be a coded message.
Conceding defeat, she went to bed.
But now this morning, feeling fresher, and spurred on by a desire to avoid getting caught up in this preposterous Twitter controversy, she reengages. She sits at her desk and reviews the categories she came up with for her search.