Page 23 of We Could Be So Good
The circumstances that precipitated Andrew Fleming and Margaret Kelly’s divorce were well documented, having occurred in the newsroom of a major newspaper, surrounded by journalists with steel-trap memories and a penchant for gossip. Andy’s mother wanted to go to Germany to see what in hell was the matter over there. TheChroniclehad always been progressive, and had only become more so under the stewardship of Andrew Fleming II, and while the staff might take their quarrels with one another about Stalin to the pages of the paper with unfortunate frequency, everyone agreed that Hitler was just a dirty fascist.
But Andrew Fleming insisted that sloping off to fascist countries was not something that the mother of a newborn did; his wife accused him of being a fascist sympathizer. She went to Reno for a quickie divorce and then directly to theHerald Tribune, a betrayal that smarted much more than when she subsequently took up with her photographer in Berlin.
This left Andrew Fleming with an infant and a paper to run. Only one of those required his personal attention and it wasn’t the baby. When Margaret Kelly returned to the States, she scoopedthe child up and deposited him in an apartment on the Upper East Side with a succession of housekeepers.
She then went back to Berlin, and then to Prague and London and Paris. She was there for the liberation of Dachau. As a woman, she didn’t have official press credentials, so she made her own access, and in doing so made herself something of a legend.
The first words Andy remembers reading were his mother’s reporting on the fall of Paris. Every few months she returned to New York with stories and presents and new scars and more gray hair, and he almost felt guilty for wondering why she wasn’t around more, because he was so proud of her. She went to Nuremberg. She went to Moscow and East Berlin, and then to Korea. She came back to the States long enough to shout at Senator McCarthy, then went to Budapest and won a Pulitzer. She likely would have kept on in precisely the same manner, darting from conflict to conflict, if she hadn’t been caught in a bombing in Algiers. At her funeral, several of her colleagues told Andy that it was how she would have wanted to go, as if this was supposed to bring him some comfort, as if she hadn’t told him so herself enough times that whenever he saw her off at an airport, he never quite expected to see her again.
Andy’s father, meanwhile, built theChroniclefrom something of a communist-inflected scandal rag to a respectable, if unapologetically progressive, newspaper. The taint of communism lingers, though, and is largely to blame for the way circulation plummeted after the war.
And so when Andy thinks of theChronicle, when he thinks about journalism, he thinks of both of his parents and two of his grandparents. If anything is in his blood, it’s this.
And the fact that it’s all going to go to hell on his watch keeps him up at night.
***
The subway lurches to the side and suddenly Andy gets a clear look inside the newspapers of two fellow passengers.
“Look,” Andy whispers, jabbing Nick in the ribs.
“Ow! What is wrong with you?”
“The paper!”
Nick follows Andy’s gaze. “Yes, Andrew. People read theChronicle. This can’t be the first time you’ve seen someone—”
“Not the front page, dummy. The article. They’re reading your article.”
“Huh.”
Ever since the news of the money missing from the police evidence locker, Nick’s been on that story like a dog with a bone. It’s not that the amount of money stolen was so huge; it’s not like this is the biggest police corruption scandal they’re likely to cover this spring, let alone this year. It’s under Nick’s skin, and whenever he writes about it, the paper gets a flood of letters. New Yorkers love stories about dirty cops, even if Nick—at Jorgensen’s insistence—has been very careful not to come right out and say what everyone already assumes, which is that the money was stolen by the police, and that access to the evidence locker is considered something of a perk.
Last week Nick went up to Rikers Island to interview a recently convicted safecracker about what you’d have to do to break into the specific model of safe the police used. Then he interviewed the security company who made the safe. The resulting article should have been anticlimactic—just two different kinds of experts agreeing that this safe couldn’t be broken into without leaving marks. But instead Nick’s story is... Well, it’s entertaining. There’s a colorful old jailbird and a buttoned-up securityexecutive and both of them are all but holding up signs that say “It Was an Inside Job.”
No wonder people are reading it on the train, their eyes darting quickly from one line to the next, smiles tugging at their lips even though it isn’t even nine in the morning and nobody should be smiling. Especially not about dirty cops.
“I have a lunch date with a secretary from the Property Clerk’s Office,” Nick says when they’re in the elevator heading up to the newsroom.
“Tell her I say hi,” Andy says.
Nick’s been buying this girl lunch once a week and she tells Nick the names of cops who’ve been assigned there. He’s trying to figure out why cops get assigned to the Property Clerk’s Office. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be staffed by officers with injuries minor enough that they can work desk jobs. But in practice, dozens if not hundreds of cops with similar injuriesaren’treassigned. Instead they do desk work in their regular precincts.
There’s no love lost between the police commissioner and theChronicle. But now Nick is waving a red flag in front of a bull, and the readers love it and Jorgensen and Epstein love it and so Nick isn’t stopping.
And now Andy knows Nick’s brother Michael is a cop in addition to being a nasty piece of work. It’s not that he thinks Nick’s interest is purely personal—but it’s always seemed at least a little bit personal and now Andy has a clue as to why.
He can’t help but think that if he were Nick, he’d want to be a bit more careful. A lot more careful, really. He wouldn’t want to provoke the police. Aren’t plainclothes cops forever going into queer bars and arresting men as soon as they show interest? It would be easy for them to ruin Nick’s life, if they knew.
He wants to ask Nick to back down, to leave this story tosomeone else, even though this is absolutely none of Andy’s business. In fact, theChronicleis very literally Andy’s business, and it’s served by Nick continuing to dig. The fact that Andy would still prefer for Nick to leave it alone is just another reason why he isn’t fit to run the paper.
***
On Wednesday morning, Andy waits until Nick is arguing with Jorgensen about changes the editor wants to make to one of Nick’s stories, then he dials a familiar number, holding his breath as he waits to see who will pick up the phone.
“Warburton residence,” says Jeanne. Andy breathes a sigh of relief—Emily rarely answers the phone unless she’s expecting a call, but he doesn’t know what he’d have done on the off chance she answered. Probably hang the phone up, to be honest.
“Hi, Jeanne. It’s Andy.”
