“Subpoena for what?” I said.
Myron Greene smiled slightly. “For Congressman Royker’s subcommittee.”
“Royker’s a fool.”
“Even a fool can open up a can of worms,” Greene said wisely.
“What can?”
“He could start poking into what really happened to the shield and the Africans and the oil crowd. He’s good at things like that as long as they produce headlines. And the headlines should be interesting, but you’d know more about that than I would.”
“You were supposed to have fixed it,” I said. “You were supposed to have gone around with dustpan and whisk broom and tidied it all up.”
Myron Greene smiled again. It was broader this time, almost friendly. I also noticed that he was no longer wheezing. “Oh, I did,” he said. “I told them that you’d be there.”
I walked over to the door and gazed down the long flight of stairs. If I hurried, I could be in Mexico tomorrow. Guadalajara perhaps; that had a nice ring. Instead, I turned and went slowly back to Myron Greene.
“How much are the kidnappers asking?”
“For the ambassador?”
“For the Chicken.”
“Is that what you called him?”
“We did when he was managing editor. I don’t know what they called him when he got to be publisher. He’d fired me by then.”
“A million dollars.”
“You didn’t say it right, Myron. There wasn’t enough reverence in your tone and that means that there’s not going to be any ten percent.”
He nodded.
“Five?” I said without much hope.
He shook his head this time. “Three,” he said, “and I had to press for that.”
“Hard?”
“Very hard.”
“State must not think he’s worth a million either,” I said. “How long have they had him?”
“Since day before yesterday. Saturday.”
“Another day or two and whoever’s got him will make State an offer to take him back.”
“I don’t think so,” Myron Greene said.
“You don’t know him.”
“The kidnappers are demanding something more.”
“What?”
“Not what. Who.”
“All right. Who?”
“Anton Pernik. The poet.”
“He’s in jail.”
“House arrest really.”
“I never could read him.”
“He won the Nobel Prize,” Myron Greene said.
“So did Sinclair Lewis and I can’t read him either.”
“Well?” Myron Greene asked.
“I don’t know anyone in Belgrade.”
“It didn’t happen in Belgrade,” he said. “It happened in Sarajevo.”
“It sometimes does,” I said, “but I don’t know anyone there either.”
“The Yugoslav government has expressed its willingness to cooperate.”
“They’ll give up Pernik?”
“Yes.”
“They probably can’t read him either.”
“Your services were requested, of course.”
“By whom, Killingsworth?”
“No,” he said and smiled again, even more broadly than before. Myron Greene was enjoying himself. “Not by the ambassador. By Anton Pernik.”
“Maybe I’ll try to read him again,” I said.
4
Amfred Killingsworth had been managing editor of the Chicago Post only six months in 1957 before Who’s Who got around to sending him a form letter that contained a request for a brief life history along with the usual hard sell pitch to buy the 1958 edition at a sizable discount.
Killingsworth ordered a dozen copies and then used four 8½" x 11" sheets, single-spaced, to tell all about himself and the high points of his life, beginning with the American Legion oratory prize of five dollars that he won in 1932 when he was eleven and in Miss Nadine Cooper’s 6-A class at Horace Mann school in Omaha. I know because he gave me his own draft to boil down to three pages.
“Four pages is just a shade too long, don’t you think?” he said in that deep butterscotch voice of his that made “please pass the salt” sound even better than the first line in Moby Dick.
“I don’t know,” I said, rolling a sheet of paper into my typewriter, “you’ve led a rather fulsome life.”
I’m not sure why I bothered to play my word games with Killingsworth because all he’d said was, “Yes,” nodded his big, square, blond head in thoughtful agreement, and added, “I guess that’s the right word for it.” Then he’d started to leave, but turned back to say, “By the way, if you can’t boil me down to three pages, Phil, three and a half will do just fine.”
I think the only person with more space in Who’s Who the following year was Douglas MacArthur.
Killingsworth had been thirty-seven when he was named managing editor of the Post and his autobiography (which modesty kept him from writing until he was forty) could have been called I Was There, Charlie, because he had been. Instead, he called it The Killingsworth Story and it sold 619 copies. An untroubled cynic on the Post once remarked that the only thing Killingsworth had missed during World War II was the line at an army induction center.
He had been at Pearl Harbor, of course, on December 7, 1941. He was on his way back from the Moral Rearmament oratorical finals for college seniors in Manila and when the attack came, Killingsworth was delivering an abbreviated fifteen-minute version of his speech over a Honolulu radio station. After the staff announcer panicked, a quick-thinking engineer hustled Killingsworth up to the roof, handed him a microphone, and told him to start talking. He was good at that and so by shortwave Amfred Killingsworth gave one of the first eyewitness accounts of the Japanese attack, describing everything he saw and a hell of a lot of what he imagined — such as the Japanese landing at Waikiki.
An hour after the radio networks had transcribed and rebroadcast his description in the States, Killingsworth received six job offers. He picked the one from the Chicago Post because his father had bought it every Sunday morning for seventeen years on the strength of its comic section.
After that, Amfred Killingsworth’s by-line topped warm, often soggy human interest stories from Corregidor, New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Washington, North Africa, London, Normandy, Leyte Gulf, Chungking, Iwo Jima, Rome, Rheims, Berlin, and from aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945. He usually managed to get either a dog or a cat into his stories.
When the war ended, Killingsworth was made editorial page editor of the Post where it really didn’t matter whether he could write or even spell. He was twenty-five years old. A year later, with his eye on his future if not on his bride, he married Norma, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Obadiah Singleton, editor and publisher of the Post. Singleton was then seventy-three and obsessed with his antivivisection crusade, his paper’s annual National Junior Wrestling Tournament, the Communist conspiracy (both international and domestic), the machinations of Wall Street, and the welfare of his daughter — in just about that order. Norma suffered occasional mild seizures, endured a bad case of postadolescent acne, and lusted after bellhops, delivery men, cab drivers, and bartenders. “The best time to catch her,” a cab driver had once told a mildly interested Post reporter, “is when she goes into that fit. I mean it’s a real tough ride.”