The Sixth Station(23)

“None, actually,” I answered, “but…” I didn’t finish and just let the sentence hang in the air, because gossip is to a newsroom what Big Macs are to fat guys. We are reporters, so that’s what we do—report. Even about one another. I could feel in my bones that I was about to do it again—really piss off another editor and end up on my ass. I couldn’t stop, though. What they’d done was so wrong on so many levels.

At 8:20, Bob came slouching in carrying his coffee and cursing because he’d spilled it all over his new tie. I knew this was the worst possible time to confront him, but the destruction of my column—the turning it into a right-wing rant against fairness and justice—had to be addressed.

“Russo, Russo, Russo,” Bob said wearily, spotting me clutching my iPad. “Well, you may as well come in and get it over with.”

OK—that wasn’t good. We went in and he sat behind his desk and put his feet up, leaving me to sit in the “bad student” chair in front. No matter, I still felt like the mad bomber despite the power-seating trick.

Bob went immediately on the attack. “I’d like to say ‘nice job’ but you should be down on your hands and knees thanking me for saving your sorry ass—and the good name of this paper! What you turned in was a lefty, amateur job that belonged in the NYU student newspaper.

“If I would have let it run as it was, we’d have picket lines around the block, and I’d be out there with them. What in hell were you thinking?”

“Wait a minute, here,” I growled out, sounding possessed, fear and loathing rising in equal measure. “I should be the one asking that question! I mean, for whatever reason Demiel picked me—me—out of the crowd—”

He cut me off. “Demiel? So you do know him personally?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not. I never laid eyes on him except in photos and videos, as you well know!”

“After that column, I know nothing about you.”

“Puleeze. Anyway, can I finish? As I was trying to say before you cut me off: Dammit, Bob, the world has the right to know exactly what I saw, how I saw it, what I felt, and how I was affected!”

He slammed his feet back onto the floor and slammed his fist onto the desk. “What are you—Patty Hearst? No. No more bullshit like that—and I don’t give a rat’s ass if the asshole confesses to you personally. We are not apologists for mass murderers who want to overthrow the U.S. and our right to worship as we please!”

He was up out of his seat, so red in the face he looked like he was on his tenth straight-up scotch at Langan’s.

“Are you telling me,” I screamed back, now standing up facing him too, “that I’m not supposed to write the truth?”

“Not if the truth is a lie,” he said implausibly, angrier than I’d ever seen him.

“I don’t even know what the hell that means,” I shot back.

He came around the desk and menacingly put his finger in my face and said low and dangerously, “It means our truth.”

“I can’t do our truth.”

Bob turned his back. “Then you can’t write for this paper.”

Again. But this time it was probably finished, the end. Yesterday I had the “get” of gets, and today I was out with yesterday’s paper.

As I was turning to go, he said, from behind his desk again, “You blew the biggest opportunity of your life, Russo. Maybe you never were as good as I thought you were.”

“May I say the same about you?” I snapped, and then: “Can I get my stuff?”

“You can get whatever you can carry in your bag.”

I went back through the newsroom to my desk, intending to pick up what few things I could carry, grateful that most of the staff wasn’t in yet. Why I was embarrassed for being canned for doing the right thing, I don’t know.

Not knowing what to pick up first, I hit the button for my voice mail, before the dreaded HR ladies cut that off and I wouldn’t be able to access what was already there. Maybe somebody was offering me a job, what with my new notoriety and all.

“You have sixteen messages,” the recorded voice informed me. “Your mailbox is full; please delete any unnecessary messages.”

“Hey, Ali, Tony Boxer, CBS, here…” “Hey, Alessandra, Morgan Stiffe, BBC America…” “Miss Russo, I’m a reader, and I just want to say you are so coura—” “Alison Rizzo? Hold on for Pierce James…”

Then: “Ms. Russo? This is Maureen Wright-Lewis.…” I hit the rewind button. I wanted to hear that message again, make sure it was real. Wasn’t that the name of a famous double agent who was involved—was it the Iran-Contra thing?—way back in the Reagan administration? I was a kid when it happened, but I remember either reading about it or seeing a PBS documentary about it. Wasn’t she dead?