Absent Friends

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 3

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Complicated Work

October 31, 2001

Laura came back early in the morning, looking for Leo.

It was Halloween, but that meant nothing to a reporter. (Christmas, Easter Sunday, their mother's birthdays meant nothing to reporters chasing news.) Some years the newsroom sprouted pumpkins and black- cat cutouts on Halloween, but this year what could be more frightening than the view out the window?

Reporters, chomping on bagels and slurping coffee, glanced up as Laura walked by. Some tried to speak to her, to say something kind. Laura nodded to each, didn't stop on her way to her desk. Seated, she fixed her eyes on the glow of her monitor as though she were waiting for something. She wrenched the lid from a coffee cup and gulped at it without tasting it at all. Her comforters retreated.

She stayed at her computer, waiting, tearing through e-mails, not understanding their messages or caring that she didn't, until finally Leo surged from the elevator and sliced through the newsroom like Sherman on his way to the sea. She watched him through the glass of his office like a sharpshooter while he dropped his briefcase, switched on his computer, pulled his fried egg sandwich and coffee from the deli bag. Then she rose and went to his door.

His eyes, colorless as tin, rested on her before he spoke. This was unlike Leo. “Stone.” He pointed at a chair. Given permission, she sat. Steam from Leo's coffee cup slipped into the air as though hoping to sneak away before Leo noticed.

Laura said, “I want the Harry Randall story.” She wished she knew a way to demand things from Leo, to sound imperious, not like a street beggar. Her only comfort, cold, was that all the reporters she knew felt, always, that they were on their knees before Leo.

His answer: “No.”

“Leo—”

“Forget it, Stone.”

“I'm the only—”

“There's no story. If there were, you'd be—”

“I knew him best.”

“You screwed him.”

Through gritted teeth: “No law against it. Not even Tribune policy, Leo.”

“You checked?”

She nodded. Leo's eyebrows shot up, usually a good sign, but not this time. Another beat, and then, “Forget it.” He swiveled his chair, began fingering the papers on his desk. Every reporter knew what that meant, but Laura stayed.

“Leo, there is a story.”

His square iron head nodded, not turning to her. “A full and fitting obit. Carl's writing it now.”

“He didn't kill himself.”

Now Leo did turn, and though she never would have said as much to anyone for fear of being called insane, she swore she saw a softening in his eyes. It was not in his voice, though, each steel word spoken with equal emphasis: “He jumped off the bridge.”

“No.”

Laura meant to say more, but Leo's words burst open in her brain like a booby-trapped box, and out of them sprang a vision: Harry, angry first as his car was forced over, then disbelieving, kicking and wrenching against the grip, frightened, being dragged to the rail. Harry, shouting, cursing, throwing punches that missed—not much of a fighter, he'd always said, that's why he became a newsman: they let you watch. What must it have been like, the push, the fall? How much of a struggle, how tight his grip on the stinging steel? Then Harry untethered, floating, flying, Harry—she suddenly understood—exultant as he knew it was unstoppable.

She heard “Stone!” and she'd heard it before, just now, maybe two other times. The scene on the bridge receded, and Laura was looking at Leo. He held his coffee before him like an amulet, his eyebrows knit tight together. She almost laughed: Leo looked so desperate. It's all right, she wanted to say, I'm a reporter, you can yell at me. I won't dissolve into a puddle of tears on your office floor.

She swallowed the tears she was not going to dissolve into and said, “He didn't jump, Leo.”

“Stone, he jumped.”

“No. Leo”—leaning forward, trying to draw Leo into what she knew—“Leo, the McCaffery story was too huge. It was real. It was Harry Randall. He was back, he knew it, he loved it. Loved it, Leo.” She was trembling, vibrating the way the high-tension wires did.

“Loved it?”

“Of course he did! How could he not? Harry Randall? On to something like this? It's the story he needed, Leo, all these years.”

Leo threw her a sharp look, and Laura stopped herself. “He wouldn't have . . . he wouldn't have done this now, Leo. Not now.” She took a breath. “Six months ago, a year ago, maybe,” she offered.

In her mind she apologized to Harry for that injustice. Leo and the others had seen Harry like that. When he'd sat slumped in his chair, sleeves pushed up on a shirt he'd been in for three days, poking intermittently at his keyboard, scowling at his phone whenever it rang, they thought he was finished, suffering from inexplicable failures of nerve and direction, suffering from gin.

That wasn't the truth. The truth was this: Harry Randall had distanced himself from their work the way a man of changed appetites rises from a table of delicacies that formerly enticed him. Harry had taken his gin to a seat apart while others feasted; but he'd never begrudged them their meal, and he'd never had a wish to be invited back.

Harry had never cared what Leo or any of the Unbelievers thought of him, of his gin-fueled conversion from man-eater to vegetarian, and so Laura stoutly refused to care, either. But what Leo thought of Laura Stone—that she had not lost her judgment to grief and shock, that she had come to beg for this story because it was a juicy one, not because working on it would keep Harry's name before her all day, keep as hers whatever there was left of him—that was important now. So she agreed with Leo's idea of Harry, false as she knew it to be.

Although, a strange, unfamiliar voice inside her said, maybe right after September 11, when Harry had been more lost than she'd ever seen him, all the other reporters (Laura one of them) chasing after the stories, Harry paralyzed with sadness. Maybe then.

She silenced that voice, said to Leo, “But not since this story.”

“Stone,” Leo said, in a voice that could have been Leo thinking about what she'd said, or Leo thinking about how to tell her that delusional reporters had no place at his paper, “people don't fall off bridges by accident.”

“No.” A point of agreement. Laura forced herself to stay calm. “They don't.”

Leo leaned his chair back, tapped his sapphire signet ring on the newsroom glass. Every reporter who heard looked up. At one of them, Leo pointed. Hugh Jesselson, a cop reporter. Broad, blond, and rumpled, he lumbered to Leo's doorway.

“Jesselson,” Leo grunted. “You hearing anything about the Randall suicide being something else?”

Jesselson looked uncomfortably at Laura, but Leo was not giving him a pass, so he answered with a headshake.

“Nothing? No other theories?”

“No.”

“You have any?”

“Me?”

“Stone here thinks he didn't jump. Is she the only one?”

Jesselson looked at his shoes, a cop reporter's oxfords, worn and dusty. “No one . . . Haven't heard it.”

Contradicting his mountainous presence and abundant prose (that fullness the reason, it was said, that he'd never made the front), Jesselson pared spoken language to a nub. Talking with him was like getting telegrams.

“No police investigation?”

Jesselson looked up, but only at Leo. “Not real popular downtown these days. Randall.”

Leo glared. “In our business that's a good thing, Jesselson. Because of McCaffery?”

“Alive, a legend, McCaffery. Dead, a saint. Untouchable.”

Leo narrowed his eyes and stared at neither of them; both of them waited. “The McCaffery story, the fallout, then the reporter dies,” he said to Jesselson. “No one's interested?”

“The story, the fallout? Sure. Spano, the Fund, that lawyer. Lots of money at stake. Blood in the water.”

“So where are the sharks?”

“Later. When things get back to normal. Feeling seems to be this can wait.”

“But Randall? No one's interested in that?”

Jesselson turned to Laura again, his eyes those of a man regretting the bad news he's brought. “No.”

Leo looked at Laura.

“They're wrong,” she said.

“NYPD doesn't seem to agree.”

“NYPD has enough to do.”

Undeniably true. Detectives in surgical masks were clambering over the landfill mountain on Staten Island, spreading out the rubble that came in in buckets, picking through it for body parts and evidence. Uniformed officers stood at concrete barricades at City Hall, at the reservoirs, at tourist sites as they reopened. Cops in every precinct answered a deluge of calls about letters and packages citizens were afraid of.

“You have anything else?” Leo rubbed his enormous jaw. “Or just that the story was too good?”

“A story like this? That he broke? Harry was never—he was never suicidal.” A tough word, but she got it out. “Not since I've known him. Jesus, Leo, not even after what happened.” Like all New Yorkers, Laura waved an arm toward downtown, toward Ground Zero, when she said “what happened”; and like all New Yorkers, Leo knew without question what she meant. Her voice rose, louder and higher. “Leo, he had something else, he was on to something! And we're supposed to believe he jumped off a bridge now? Why would he do that?”

Leo eyed her, picked up the important words. “Something else?”

Laura nodded, told Leo: “He left papers.”

“Randall?”

“No, Leo! The firefighter. McCaffery. Papers no one had seen. Harry was on his way to see them. It's the last thing he told me.”



Yesterday afternoon—yesterday? No, it must have been years ago, centuries, when her heart, now a barren desert, had been a boundless, teeming sea—Laura had been sitting at her desk, polishing her SoHo merchant story, checking her e-mail every fifteen minutes, as always.

It was one of the first things the legendary Harry Randall had noticed about the new kid, Laura Stone: the way she surfaced from the depths of a project to snap at e-mail like a trout at flies. Harry's desk was behind Laura's, a little off to one side. She'd never dared speak to him except, on the day she'd joined the Tribune, to shake his hand and tell him how thrilled she was to be working at the same paper with him. (That, in the five minutes Leo allotted a new reporter to get settled before he started asking where the hell her copy was.)

Toward the end of her second week at the paper, as she was typing a fast e-mail confirmation of a meeting finally agreed to by a reluctant source, a quiet voice in her ear made Laura jump: “You're driving me crazy.”

She spun around, and Harry Randall was leaning over her, cockeyed sardonic grin, blue eyes, shirtsleeves and all.

“I—but—” In her mind Laura had been rehearsing approaches to the great man since the moment she'd started. Now, one hand on the back of her chair, the other on her desk, he was bending to talk to her as though they already knew each other well.

“It's hard,” he said, “for an ancient beached whale such as myself to continue doing as little as possible, in order to avoid disturbing the balance of the universe, in the face of Leo's insistence on introducing a tiger shark such as yourself to disrupt what small tranquillity I've been able to create in this goldfish bowl.” He waved his arm to show her reporters rushing in and out, or creating private tempests at their desks. “But do I complain? No, I do not. I try to go on. At least at first. But more and more, each day, my peace is destroyed, my meditation upon the great nothingness interrupted. And finally, I must speak.”

Laura, realizing her mouth was open, closed it. The only coherent thought she had was: He has freckles.

“Every time you check your e-mail”—he stabbed an accusing finger at Laura's monitor—“your screen flickers, a great wave crashing onto the peaceful beach of my thoughts. And you do this every five minutes.”

“Fifteen,” Laura sputtered.

“Aha! So you admit it, then?”

“I— Of course I do! In case something's come up. In case someone—I'm sorry. I don't mean to disturb you. What if I tilt it?”

“Don't tilt it. Turn it.” Harry pushed Laura's monitor a quarter of an inch with his fingertip. He went back, sat at his own desk, shook his head, came back, and pushed it again. This time, back at his own desk, he nodded happily. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” said Laura. She turned back to her work, and, ignoring the heat in her cheeks, tried to remember what it was she'd been doing.

Fifteen minutes later she checked her e-mail. The only new message was from Harry Randall: HAVE LUNCH WITH ME?



And so yesterday, as always, Laura had clicked on her e-mail every fifteen minutes. Routine; nothing interesting. Then, midmorning, this, from Harry: Subject Line: WOO-EEE! Text: I'M ONTO SOMETHING, MY LITTLE TIGER SHARK. MCCAFFERY LEFT PAPERS! HOT STUFF. OR SO I'M TOLD. ON MY WAY TO GET A GLIMPSE—MORE LATER. H

What had she done, when she'd read that? Smiled, probably. Seen in her mind the gleam in Harry's eye, the predatory glint he got. (They all got it, people like Harry and Laura, and though others had long said gin had dulled Harry's eyes and the glint was no more, Laura knew that was wrong.) And—oh God, this came back to her now, how was it such small things remained?—she'd hoped, before he'd gone to see his source, the person who was offering him this treasure, that Harry had remembered to shave.



A thunderclap. No; Leo's voice. “McCaffery?”

The glint in Harry's eye, his note on her computer screen, both vanished, and Leo's office swam back into view. The thunder had been a question, so Laura answered it. “Yes.”

“You have these papers?”

“No.”

“You saw them?”

“No.”

“Randall had them?”

“I don't know.”

“What's in them?”

“I don't know. Hot stuff, Harry said.”

“How do you know about them?”

“He e-mailed.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Where'd they come from? Where are they now?”

“I don't know. But I can find them, Leo. So you see—”

He waved a hand, as all gods do to silence mortals.

Leo sat unmoving as a boulder. Laura prayed for Leo's phone to stay silent, for all the reporters typing and talking and buzzing around the coffee machine to be satisfied with their sources and their assignments and not need anything, right now, from Leo.

The boulder finally stirred. “Three days,” a rocky voice rumbled from its depths. “Bring me something that says you're right. No extension, no maybe. Show me there's a story.”

Laura, ready with her next argument, a fresh assault of convincing words, tossed away those words and grabbed some new ones. “Thank you.” She stood quickly.

Leo had no more to say. Laura, afraid something would occur to him, turned and hurried away, resisting (as she was sure everyone always had to) the urge to back out of Leo's presence, bowing.