"A good story," I said. Before I could go on, Martin stepped in to cut me off.
"Look, we need a larger piece of this. This is our fucking story. You were there. You were almost killed. Somebody's got to want to help us."
As he spoke, the telephone rang, and a pleasant woman's voice asked if I could hold the line for the president of the United States. Would-be assassins, broken ribs, appearances on CNN. Now Sunday-morning calls from my pal, the president.
"I'd be honored to talk to the president," I said, even though by the time I said that, the woman had already put me on hold, but the intended effect was not lost on those around me. Martin, pacing around as he spoke, looked at me skeptically.
"Quit fucking around," he said after a moment. "We have a shitload of work to get done."
I ignored him as the booming voice of President Hutchins filled my ear.
I felt around my desk for a fresh legal pad, tossing aside a folder marked "Presidential pardons," as well as the last three issues of Golf Digest. "The hell are you doing back at work already? You nuts or something?"
"Mr. President, democracy needs to be protected every day of the week, injury or no injury. You know my devotion." He laughed at that, which I appreciated. He didn't seem like such a bad guy. Martin stood in front of me, his eyes glued to mine, like a retriever staring at a brand-new yellow tennis ball, all clean and firm. He sensed our best avenue to another story, and he was trying to will me in that direction. I was already there, waiting for my opening.
"I'm not heading out on a campaign swing until late this afternoon.
You have a few minutes to come over to the house and chat?" Hutchins asked. By house, I assumed he meant the White House.
I knew full well what he wanted to chat about, but I also knew I could trade on that for another story, or at least the pieces of another story. And if I had this anonymous source filling my ear, it was good to get as much exposure to Hutchins as I possibly could.
"Of course I could come to the White House, sir," I said, speaking more formally than before. Martin pumped his fist into the air. I noticed a couple of other early-arriving reporters falling quiet and leaning in my direction for a better hearing vantage.
"Good. How about noon? We'll take a little lunch here, the two invalids. Just show up at the gate, and someone will guide you in."
Hanging up, I said to Martin as casually as I could, "Going in to see the president at noon."
He appeared ready to sit in my lap. His prior look of exhaustion had turned into one of exuberance. One thought did strike him, and he expressed it pretty clearly.
"Why?" he asked.
"Don't know. Maybe he likes my company. Maybe it's good PR for him, lunching with the injured reporter. Maybe he liked my stories Friday and is ready to spout off again. We'll see soon enough."
"Let's draw up some questions and angles before you go," Martin said.
"We should still be scouting for something else, in case he fails to make news." With that, he left my desk in a half trot, half skip. He could have been floating on air. Next I saw of him, he was standing in his glass office, holding the phone up to his ear in a familiar position, a smile spread across his pale face.
By now, a few more colleagues were filtering into the room to cover the assassination or the election that it affected. One or two gave me a hard time about my newfound fame. Julie Gershman was first. When I was married, she was as reliable a flirt as you could ever desire, constantly looking me up and down, tossing seductive smiles in my direction at the drop of a dime. She was compact, tight as a drum, with red hair and almond-shaped eyes that looked like sex personified.
And she knew it. After Katherine's death, she either stopped flirting or I stopped noticing. I think it was the former. I was treated with kid gloves after that, pitied, much to my disdain. I spent most of my time on the road, writing stories from afar, working out of hotel rooms, watching time fly by, stopping in the office only for a day or two at a stretch.
"Well, look who's here, the second coming of Christ," Gershman said, flipping her little Jackie Onassis haircut behind her ears. "Taking a break from CNN and the nets to check your messages in here, Jack?
Calling Hollywood? I hear Brad Pitt wants to play you in the movie."
Well, this was certainly different, and I rather liked it. I had the telephone receiver wedged between my shoulder and ear, and cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. "Julie, give me a minute, okay? I've got Larry King on the line."
Actually, I was waiting for directory assistance, listening to a woman's tape-recorded voice repeatedly telling me to please hold, the next available operator would take my call. Why bog down my important colleagues in the mundane details of my day?
A couple of my pals plopped themselves down around my desk and made small talk. Everyone was laughing and carrying on, and I felt on top again, one of them, where I belonged, not the victim of a tragedy, but a reporter doing his job, and doing it damn well, getting breaks, like I always have. Havlicek walked into the bureau and stood over a desk on the other side of the room, having just arrived on a red-eye from the West Coast. "About time you ended that vacation," he bellowed across the way. Everyone laughed. I gave him the finger, just letting it float toward the ceiling as I calmly looked the other way, carrying on a conversation. A few minutes later, I pulled myself to my feet, grimacing at my sore ribs, and walked across the room. We met halfway, and he gave me a soft half hug, patting me on the back and saying quietly, "Welcome back. Time to get to work."
Newsrooms are inherently cluttered places, and Washington bureaus, while certainly smaller and slightly more sterile, are not much different. In a world of Internet searches and CD-ROM'S, they are inexplicably filled with piles of newspapers, manila folders, and opened books strewn on chaotic desktops. The floors are lined with cardboard boxes holding files and stacks of photocopied documents. The men and women of the newsroom, the reporters and editors, have seen most of what life has to offer and look at everyone and everything with a healthy dose of skepticism. They're a tough lot to impress, tougher still to please. There is the constantly stale smell of overworked people. Phones are ringing every minute, with important-and self-important-professionals on the other end of the line. A bank of facsimile machines gives off an uninterrupted beep, and there is the omnipresent click of computer keyboards. And more than any of that, there is the mystique.
This place was all that and more. Located smack in the middle of downtown Washington, just a few blocks from the White House and, more importantly for my purposes, right next to Morton's of Chicago, the best steakhouse in town, the bureau was mostly one large open room, with about a dozen desks spread quiltwork, a healthy enough distance from each other that you could keep a conversation private if that's what you wanted. Off to one side was a large, plush conference room, and beside that was Martin's office. Both had walls of all glass, and both had vistas, beyond nearby office buildings, of Lafayette Park.
There were characters everywhere you looked. Erskine Berry was the Record's chief economics reporter. He had covered Washington since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and padded around the bureau in a pair of orthopedic shoes, always dressed in a tweed jacket of some sort and a brightly colored bow tie, looking as if he were just about to settle into his regular leather chair at the Metropolitan Club. There was our Capitol Hill reporter, Julie, she of the perfect physique. Michael Reston covered the Supreme Court, and over the two years he had done that job, he had acquired many of the mannerisms you might expect from someone on the bench. He would cock his head. He would occasionally butt into a sentence, politely asking, "Don't you mean…?" He smoked a pipe. Down the hall, at the reception desk, Barbara ruled with an iron fist. She considered me a surrogate son and over the last couple of days had left several messages on my voice mail at home. When I didn't return the calls- I'm not sure why I didn't-she sent a messenger over with an envelope bearing explicit instructions on what I should do and eat to return to health.