A fucking quarter.
I need a hundred dollars, at least.
Gotta get it tonight. Gotta get it for Glorious Burress. My woman. Gotta get it for the child. To pay a doctor tomorrow. Me, with no I.D. Me, with no credit cards. Me, who doesn’t fucking exist in this world. Gotta get money, even if I gotta take it.
The rain comes. On some narrow street of shops and stoops in areaways, he sees a guy coming toward him. Skinny motherfucker. Sees him trip on a curb, then right himself.
Malik’s heart quickens. The guy comes closer. His jacket soaked. Malik thinks: Head lock, shove him into that doorway. Punch hard. Head. Or neck. Then balls. Reach into the pockets. Grab the bills. One more in the head. Then walk away easy. Into the subway. To Brooklyn. To the Lots. To Glorious.
But then: a police car appears. Slow. Cop sure to be looking. Malik walks as if without care or interest, hands in his pockets. The drunk goes the other way, humming some tune, fumbling for keys in his coat. The police car eases by.
Shit.
Malik thinks: I know you are testing me, O holy one.
But I need you. Not for me. For my woman. For the baby. For a clean warm room in a hospital. Oh please. Now.
And wanders on.
12:20 a.m. Sam Briscoe. New York World, his office.
Briscoe is shadowy in the muted light of the cowled green desk lamp. On the blotter, his secretary, Janet Barnett, has left her usual two pale blue folders. One is marked “Bitching.” Bulging with printouts of e-mail messages, handwritten letters from pissed-off readers. Why is A-Rod still a Yankee? Fire his ass. Why does my grandson, now nine, have to save AIG when he grows up? Why no editorial about Obama wasting our money on the faith-based initiative? Take the BMWs away from the preachers! The other is marked “Important.” He stares at that one, blowing out air like a relief pitcher with men on base.
He glances at the television set, on a shelf beside the bookcase. The remote lies before him on the desk, but he does not use it to turn on the set. He rises out of the expensive chair he bought with his own money to support his back. He stretches, sees the typewriter on the shelf to the right of the television set. The old Hermes 3000. The one he carried to Vietnam and Belfast and Beirut. The one he still keeps oiled. The one for which he buys new ribbons every four months from a hidden typewriter store on West 27th Street. A holy relic.
He lifts the “Important” folder.
On top, a single typed page tells him: Mr. Elwood says you should come to his office at 8:30 ayem Friday. He says it’s urgent.
He pictures young Richard Elwood. The F.P. He sees the narrow face that came from his father, the sharp chin, sees him in expensively sloppy clothes, the four-hundred-dollar black jeans, and carefully cut casual black hair. And sees his mother’s wide-set peering eyes. Briscoe starts talking to himself without speaking a word. I know what the kid is going to tell me. But why at eight-thirty in the morning? Do I work until seven-thirty and then take a cab to 50th Street? Or do I go home now? Christ, I’ve lived too long. I’m being summoned to the palace by a twenty-eight-year-old. The dauphin. A kid who spent two summers here as an intern, couldn’t get a fact straight. And earned his place at the top of the masthead because his mother died.
In the silence of his office, Briscoe glances at the framed photograph of Elizabeth Elwood, high on the top shelf, beside the framed account from the 1955 Times of the end of the Third Avenue El. There’s a photograph there of Briscoe with his daughter, Nicole, standing by the Eiffel Tower when the girl was sixteen. Nicole is now forty and lives three blocks from that tower with her hedge-fund-managing French husband. Briscoe sighs. He looks again at Elizabeth Elwood. How old was she in that photo? Sixty? Thin, with high cheekbones, elegantly defiant white hair, those wide-spaced intelligent eyes, an ironical flick in the smile. Taken around the time her husband died. Harry Elwood. A genius at investment banking, when no bankers aspired to run gambling joints.
In 1981, Elizabeth persuaded Harry to buy the title to the long-vanished New York World. It was Joseph Pulitzer’s great New York paper, a smart, hard-charging broadsheet that lived beyond his death in 1911 until the Great Depression killed it. Elizabeth Elwood wanted to revive the World as an upscale tabloid. To be published in the afternoon, out of competition with the Post and the News, who owned the morning. To be published right here, in the building where the World-Telegram once lived. She would run her World the way Dorothy Schiff ran the New York Post, and Katharine Graham the Washington Post. Her husband agreed, probably with a sigh heavier than the ones that Briscoe has been sighing tonight. Then she tracked Briscoe to Paris, where he was happily writing a column at the Paris Herald, and called him from New York.
— I’m starting a paper, she said.
— What?
— I want you to be the editor, and teach me the business.
He barely knew her. Glancing encounters, at parties, or public events.
— You’re out of your mind, you know, he said.
Two days later she was in Paris, on a day of spring rain, sitting across from him at a table inside the Deux Magots. Three hours later, at the end of lunch, he agreed to edit the new version of the old World.
Long ago. In a different century. A different world.
A world of paper itself, and ink, and trucks, and bundles dropped at newsstands.
A world that is now shrinking. Under assault from digitalized artillery. The future? Yeah. The goddamned future. Probably starting at breakfast with the F.P. Somewhere, his mother weeps.
Briscoe looks at the second message. A printed e-mail. From Cynthia Harding. Sam: I know you can’t be at table tonight, but call me tomorrow and I’ll give you a fill. Much love, C.
Cynthia. He hadn’t seen her in the past six days, but how long now had he been with her? Images jumble in his mind. Going with her to Brooke Astor’s place the first time and to Jamaica another time and how he fell in love with her, and she with him, or so she said. When he wanted to marry her, she said no, not now. When she wanted to marry Sam, he said no, not now. She joked once that they lived apart together. Sometimes other women for me. Other men for her. And then together. As she said, forever. After tonight’s party, she’ll sleep late. Tonight’s a small dinner to raise funds for the public library. Once again, she was saluting the memory of Brooke Astor, whose name, Cynthia always said, must survive her long, blurred good-bye and the ugly legal mess that followed. She never mentions hard times when asking for money from rich friends and acquaintances. Nor how it will be difficult to keep the library going at full strength. She doesn’t have to. For a second, Briscoe is in her bed in Paris, in the suite at the Plaza Athénée, hears her low voice. Remembers that she took the photograph of Nicole that stands now on the shelf in this room. He folds the printed e-mail and slides it into his back pocket. As a reminder. I’ll call her tomorrow, he thinks. After meeting with the F.P. He gazes out at the city room. Young Fonseca is standing beside Matt Logan. With any luck, the kid has the wood.
12:21 a.m. Cynthia Harding. Patchin Place, Greenwich Village.