Diversity, an ongoing enterprise and a major cultural force at the Times, is not an inordinately difficult pursuit for that institution. Droves of Latinos, African Americans, Euros, Asians, and diverse others, representing the wide world’s groups and classes, constantly besiege the paper for jobs. Yet some at the Times contend that management is never satisfied. They hold that its Human Resources barons (hardly newspaper people themselves) hunger unreasonably for the still-under-represented. Pacific Islanders were always at a premium. Thus, a female Fijian (white or not) crossing the HR horizon appeared as glory incarnate, a pearl very much above price. That Isobel suffered, on frequent occasion, from a vexing stutter added to her luster. The Times chose to classify it as a disability. After her first long interview, Isobel Gitlin e-mailed her parents that she had much to be cheerful about. The following day the Times offered her employment.
Isobel Gitlin wrote Christopher Hopman’s obituary. Although the news section of the paper carried a prominent story about the killing, her obit’s high point was the cause and manner of death: great man gunned down on golf course by high-powered rifle, no trace of physical evidence, no suspect, no hint of motive. She researched his life as a captain of industry, arts patron, and philanthropist. It was well documented and easily discovered through standard sources. Amid a generation of senior corporate executives that blossomed in the Reagan years, Hopman excelled as a driver of corporate expansion wielding leveraged debt as his weapon of choice. He didn’t run companies. He bought and sold them. His business was rerigging, repainting, rewrapping them for sale. As Isobel studied Hopman’s history she identified only one exposed mistake: his acquisition of controlling interest in a Houston-based holding company that included among its assets Knowland amp; Sons-the company most thought had precipitated the great southeastern E. coli disaster three years earlier. She highlighted that point in her notes and included it as a subordinate clause in a lengthy sentence somewhere in the middle of the piece.
“There are only two places in the paper,” an editor told her once, “where you’ll find absolute certainty: Sports and Obituaries. You make sure you get the score right.” She took that more seriously than he could have hoped.
New York
Nathan Stein was angry. He hated whatever he did not understand, and now he felt that a good deal of gobbledy-gook had been shoved in his face, possibly to make him feel small, trapped, mocked, morose.
“Agar? What the hell’s ‘agar’?” he demanded, “and this ‘sorba whatever, something MacConkey’? And what the fuck is ‘smack’? I thought it was some kind of heroin. What the hell kind of equipment is that?” He’d liked this Hindu woman, or whatever the hell she was, at first glance. She was pretty as a picture: dark and sharp featured, with little green stones in her ears and a nice yellow, silky thing hanging off her shoulder. He thought she was supposed to have a dot in the middle of her forehead, but no matter. She looked like a lovely doll and stood a good six inches shorter than him, a difference he enjoyed infrequently. She’d been standing there for half an hour before she had a chance to say a word.
“Sorbitol, Mr. Stein,” she replied in a lilting, chimelike voice. “It’s called a sorbitol-MacConkey agar. That is S-M-A-C, or smack, if you will. As noted in the report before you, the agar itself is made up of agar-agar. It’s-”
“Agar-agar?” he exploded. “Give me a break! And smack is a goddamn illegal drug. Christ, Tom!” he whined, exasperated, appealing to the man on his left. “This sounds like Abbott and fucking Costello. Agar’s on first and agar’s on second.”
Big Irish Tom Maloney shifted position wearily, it seemed to Dr. Ganga Roy, perhaps in an effort to keep his suit jacket from getting stuck beneath his ample backside. She was almost as bemused by her odd little class as she was by her remarkable classroom.
The main section of Nathan Stein’s office, where they were meeting today, was twenty-five feet wide and eighteen feet deep. Its windows looked from the fifty-third floor over Manhattan north of the Battery. Stein’s battleship of a desk occupied the southeast corner of the room, and the light behind him lasted all morning long. He set it up that way purposely. The light was so bright behind him it hid his facial expression from anyone sitting in any of the four leather chairs that lined up to face him across the desk. Ten feet behind them, in the middle of the room, was a brass-fitted glass conference table surrounded by a dozen very different, very expensive chairs. Beneath that grouping a large red Bactrian rug, perhaps a hundred feet square, bespoke the anguished labor of a thousand tiny fingers. At the far end of the office were a black leather sofa, two huge chairs, and a massive sleek black-wood coffee table. Two doors, set off to the right of that furniture, led to Stein’s private bathroom and bedroom, so Dr. Roy supposed, completing his home away from all his other homes.
She’d stood and been ignored for the past twenty minutes, sunlight behind her, an easel at her side. Because she was standing, and because of the easel, where she stood became the head of the table. Tom Maloney faced her from his least favorite chair, the unforgiving mahogany number that forced his body into an awkward forward lean. He was stuck with it because Nathan had chosen the velvet to his right.
Nathan Stein was a genius at making things as difficult as possible. Today he was at the top of his game, and no wonder. The Knowland business had just hit the fan.
Not twenty-four hours ago, when Tom first called Dr. Ganga Roy, he’d modestly introduced himself as Senior Vice President and Director of Mergers and Acquisitions. “Which is,” he said, “when you come right down to it, just a lot of words.” He’d heard from a research director he knew that Dr. Roy was quite good and “quite tiny,” and hoped that the latter might have a soothing effect-that Napoleonfucking Stein, as he was known to so many at Stein, Gelb, Hector amp; Wills Securities, might find her smallness pleasing. This morning Tom had personally helped her set up the flip-chart easel she’d brought. He buzzed around her cheerfully until the others tromped in, none of them extending even the courtesy of a glance her way, and then Tom too acted as if she wasn’t there. She might have been the cleaning woman patiently waiting to make some slight move without causing notice. And so she stood for twenty minutes as the others argued, Tom took his seat, and the spectacle progressed.
She gathered that the big black man, the one Tom told her was Wesley Pitts, had incurred Mr. Stein’s disfavor. The matter had something to do with Houston. “Did you talk to Pat Grath yourself?” Mr. Stein was asking as they entered. Pitts said he’d talked to Grath and Billy MacNeal too. Now they were sitting, and she chose not to. Tom Maloney’s chubby, English-looking cheeks seemed to sag as he followed the conversation. Pitts said, “They’re all scared shitless. They’ve got hundreds of millions at stake.” Now Stein snarled most unbecomingly. “Tell me again,” he demanded.
Pitts’s eyes were large and round, fraught with more than information-bulging with urgency, fighting an anxious tension. “Pat got a call from the plant manager in Tennessee. His name is Ochs.” Pitts’s extraordinarily large hands fumbled through a tiny notepad. “Floyd Ochs. One of his foremen, a guy named Wayne Korman, told him to shut down his line. He, Korman, said something about the readings being incomplete. Stuff was getting by untested. He said they’d been shipping out beef with E. coli bacteria since yesterday. He wanted to clean the whole operation, scrap the meat supply, and get new cattle before they started again. It seems they’ve been running around the clock. Ochs mentioned ‘operator fatigue’ to Grath. Anyway, Ochs told Korman not to do a fucking thing. He told him to take no action. He told him to wait for instructions. Then he called Grath. Grath told Billy Mac and Billy’s shit turned to water. The IPO-that’s all he thinks about. That’s when Pat called me. And that’s it, Nathan. That’s all I’ve got.”