“No sir,” laughed Blacklock. “They do not. In fact, in a newsroom barely large enough to fit all the over-sized egos, they are the two biggest prima donnas in the place. Hate each other. Passionately.”
“Won’t that create a lot of friction?” asked the Publisher, raising his eyebrows.
“You mean, I think, negative energy, sir,” said Blacklock, finishing his coffee.
Jinnah was savouring a cigarette on the open-air plaza of the cafeteria, writing his story in his head for about the fourth time when the senior assistant city editor Peter “Perma-Frost” Frost came to give him the bad news
“You may consider that cigarette your last request,” said the white-haired desker.
Jinnah smiled. He liked Frost. Once, he had been a golden-haired young man, back in the Sixties when it was still possible to tell your boss to go to hell, quit, and get a job at another paper overnight. Then, Frost had adopted his trademark wardrobe of bright, floral Hawaiian shirts, sandals, and shades. Always calm, always cool under deadline pressure. But the years had slowly turned Peter Frost’s hair a paler and paler yellow until now it was a thinning mass of snow-white, limp locks, which had earned him his sobriquet. Like Jinnah, Frost was one of the few smokers left on the Tribune. The nicotine-addicted shared a common craving and a sense of solidarity born of their persecution by the no-smoking forces that had banished them to this one designated smoking area. The tips of Frost’s fingers were browny-yellow with nicotine and Jinnah could see the man looking enviously at his cigarette.
“It is indeed my last cigarette, my friend,” he grinned. “So don’t think of bumming one — I’m out.”
“This has nothing to do with trying to collect some of the thousands of smokes you owe me,” said Frost, gently taking the cigarette from Jinnah’s hand and taking a drag off it. “You have been summoned to the inner sanctum.”
“I know,” smiled Jinnah. “I specifically asked for the meeting. It’s me or that asshole Grant for the line.”
“Would that it were so simple,” said Frost sadly. “It’s no longer an either-or situation.”
Jinnah looked at Perma-Frost with a dismay that had nothing to do with the loudness of his shirt.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “What now?”
“I think Blacklock wants you to work with Grant on this Schuster death.”
“Son of a bitch,” repeated Jinnah vehemently. “Grant got to him first!”
“Not, actually,” said Frost, patting his own pockets for a pack of cigarettes and failing to find one. “He’s been closeted with Junior since he got back from lunch.”
Jinnah winced. This was even worse news. Junior was the nickname for James Tiberius Church, the Managing Editor, who was indecently young to hold such an exalted position — which wouldn’t matter, if he’d had any professional experience, but Junior’s qualifications were purely of the ass-kissing variety and everyone in the newsroom despised him, except Blacklock. The editor-in-chief used Junior as a sort of messenger-boy/lackey, making sure his wishes were carried out on the floor and throwing him into the breach when there was a distasteful task that needed doing like a firing or suspension. Blacklock was constantly giving Junior lectures and putting him into situations to test his fitness to succeed him at the paper’s helm. There could only be one reason for including Junior in a meeting between himself, Jinnah, and Grant: Blacklock wanted to teach his ME some evil facet of employee management. Well, Jinnah wasn’t about to managed. He would be calm and professional about the whole thing. If they wanted to make idiots of themselves by including Grant in what was undoubtedly a contract killing of some sort, then so be it. It wasn’t Jinnah’s problem. He would wait them out and when the truth finally emerged (with a little help) he would be the one in a position to modestly say “I told you so.”
“Let me at ‘em,” said Jinnah, crushing his cigarette underfoot.
Frost smiled faintly.
“Do not go gently into that lion’s den,” he said.
“Listen, buddy — you don’t have to be afraid of some syphilitic lion when you’re a Kenyan Tiger!”
Frost refrained from mentioning there were no tigers in Kenya as Jinnah walked quickly back to the newsroom. He noticed Sanderson motioning to him as he moved along the row of glassed-in offices where the executives held court, but ignored him. He found Blacklock already in his office with Junior and Grant. The editor-in-chief was sitting at his side-desk, on which rested a massive Macintosh terminal that, unlike Jinnah and Sanderson’s smaller screen, was designed to lay out the entire paper, if necessary. Close beside him was Junior and slouched insolently in a chair against the far wall was Grant. Everyone looked at him pointedly as he entered.
“Ah, Jinnah,” said Blacklock with that genteel contempt unique to the English accent that has successfully endured public school but failed in Fleet Street. “Just what have you been doing while we have been here planning?”
“Working,” said Jinnah, taking a seat beside Grant. “I’ve got the line story.”
Grant raised his eyebrows and smiled without warmth.
“I rather doubt that,” he said.
Jinnah looked at Blacklock to see his reaction, but the editor’s face revealed nothing. Church’s face was a study of anxiety: he was anxious to please his boss, anxious to understand what was going on, and anxious to add something — anything — that appeared to be half-way intelligent to the conversation. He was such a contrast to Blacklock, Church. While the editor-in-chief was a larger-than-life man with a small, black moustache and affected English accent, Church was a thin, wiry figure, his ginger hair a legacy of his Scottish/Irish ancestry. Together, Blacklock and Church reminded everyone in the newsroom of Laurel and Hardy. It was rather hard to take them seriously, but unlike the famous comics, these two were not funny intentionally — they were always in deadly earnest. Jinnah ignored Grant and spoke directly to Blacklock.
“We have a hero who risked his life trying to pull Schuster from the flaming inferno that claimed his life,” Jinnah enthused. “It’s a fantastic story.”
Blacklock looked singularly unmoved. Church, waiting for a cue from his mentor before speaking and seeing none, was silent. Grant leapt into the gap.
“I don’t think anyone who tries to save Shyster Schuster’s skin can be called a hero,” he said dryly.
Jinnah felt the admittedly thin veneer of his cool, professional demeanour flaking.
“For God’s sake! The man is in hospital recovering from burns!” he cried. “He risked his life to save another human. He didn’t ask the bastard to fill out a questionnaire before crawling through the smoke and flames —”
Blacklock held up a hand.
“Enough, Jinnah! Let us bring some order to this chaos. Let’s start with what we know for certain. Now, what do we know about Sam Schuster? Mister Grant?”
Grant, slumped somewhat arrogantly in his chair to effect just the right air of feigned indifference to the proceedings, lazily leafed through his notebook.
“Schuster was fifty-three,” he said without really glancing at his notes. “Medium-sized player on the VSE before the merger with the Alberta Exchange created Canadian Venture. Prime mover of the Northern Frontier Oil and Gas scam in the early 1980s —”
“Scam?” interrupted Jinnah. “Nothing was ever proven.”
Grant looked at Jinnah with a pained, pitying expression.
“And O.J. Simpson is innocent.”
“A lot of oil and gas exploration companies went under in the early Eighties,” insisted Jinnah. “Not all of them were scams.”
“Well, Schuster’s was,” said