“What happened last night, those were isolated incidents,” he said. “We can’t control every man. But you’ve got to remember that these union brothers have kids to feed, mortgages to pay. We opened our arms to this billionaire when he sailed into our city on his fancy boat to buy our newspaper. We’ve already sacrificed jobs and made other concessions to make it easier for him. He seems to have already forgotten that.”
Givens began to pull away, phrase another question. Colangelo leaned forward, almost making contact with the crown of the mike.
“He wants our jobs, our homes, so now we do what we have to do,” he shouted. “Now…now we close Lee Brady down.”
The pause for dramatic effect set off the drivers behind Colangelo. It was the perfect segue for Givens to throw it back to the studio. Jamie pointed the remote at the screen and clicked it off. He tossed it over his shoulder onto the bed.
“I need this right now like a damn root canal,” he mumbled.
He sat for a spell, sipping more coffee, feeling slightly flush from the effects of the sun-drenched room.
He headed for the shower and let the warming water drench his hair and soak the unblemished side of his face. He wished he could wash away the echoes of Colangelo’s voice.
Now we close Lee Brady down.
As if Colangelo’s face were etched into the shower tile, Jamie said aloud, conviction enhanced by the bass echo chamber: “You think you’re the only one who has a mortgage to pay? Child support? A kid to feed?”
He thought about the stack of bills sitting on his desk—the cable and electric bills, the credit card on which he would have to make the minimum payment. Again.
And, he thought, Lord knows what Karyn will call and ask for.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let his forehead rest against the tile.
Chapter Four
Jamie checked his watch and quickened his pace through the newspaper-strewn and otherwise filthy outskirts of Chinatown. It was warm for early November, the sky a cloud-pocked blue. He wore his checkered-colored flannel shirt tied around the waist of his jeans. A light corduroy jacket was draped across his right shoulder. His tangle of nappy brown hair was still wet.
On frigid days, his habit of procrastinating at home and rushing from the shower to make an appointment would create frozen clumps he feared would snap like small pieces of gnarled, uncooked pasta.
On the train, Jamie stretched his neck—a chiropractic tic he resorted to when it was sore or he was stressed.
The musty union hall was already jammed by the time he arrived and hurried through the long narrow corridor. Rows of folding chairs were filled, with standing room scarce along the cracked and vomit green walls. Jamie stationed himself near the entrance for what he hoped would be a convenient exit. At the same time, he scanned the crowd for his cousin so he could make eye contact and his presence might duly be noted.
He nodded to a sports guy who occasionally dropped by Jamie’s desk to talk NBA hoops—the only sport he seriously followed. One of the police reporters casually scanned the Sun’s front page. Dotty, the nice lady in charge of the morgue, flipped open a mirror to check her makeup.
Jamie suddenly smelled the odor of nicotine breath in his ear, felt a hand on his back.
“Strike three, yer out.”
Without turning, he knew it was Patrick Blaine, the Trib’s senior columnist.
“You see my cousin?” Jamie said.
Blaine winced at the discoloration around Jamie’s eye that was visible through his glass frame. Jamie cursed himself for forgetting his shades.
“You piss someone off at the bar?” he said. “As for John L. Lewis, he’s in the back—with the big boys.”
Jamie smirked, as if he knew who this Lewis was.
“What’re you hearing?” Jamie asked.
“Matter of fact, I talked to Robbins earlier this morning. He told me what happened last night.”
An unlit cigarette dangled from Blaine’s mouth. He lit it.
“Fuck the fire codes,” he said. Jamie found himself in the familiar position of admiring the old man’s disdain for rules and political correctness, in no particular order.
“Robbins is back in the conference room, probably on the phone to Colangelo and the other union guys. They’ll come out soon to talk it over with the membership but—forget it—this union will be out on strike in less than an hour with all the others.”
The way Blaine said it—matter-of-factly, like they were all on the way to some Disney theme park—was unnerving.
“And I’ll have to head back to the office and cross a picket line for the first time in my life,” he said.
Jamie looked up, just in time to inhale a cloud of smoke.
“I’m not one of you anymore,” Blaine said. “I’m under contract. Signed a three-year deal a couple of months before the old broad sold the place to that cocksucker Brady. He owns me now.”
Blaine took another languorous drag, his eyes narrowing as he sucked the smoke into his lungs.
“Why’d you do that?” Jamie said.
Blaine rubbed the thumb of his left hand against his index and middle fingers.
“Did the column twenty-three years and maybe twice I got something more than the union-scale raise. I think, in the end, Maxine felt bad about that. She knew I wasn’t going anywhere, not at my age. Any kid she hired—like your brilliant cousin, for example—she had to pay market value. So she calls me into her office one night as I’m finishing up a piece. She’s sitting behind her desk, stocking feet propped up, reeking of Dewar’s. She pushes a piece of paper at me and says, ‘Sign this.’
“I say, ‘What is it?’
“She says, ‘Just sign or you’re off the goddamned column!’ I sign. She pulls it away and puts it in her drawer.”
In his next check, Blaine explained, he discovered an extra two-fifty and no standard union dues deduction.
“So what if you don’t go in?” Jamie said.
“Contract’s null and I’m void.”
“You sure we’re going out?”
“No choice,” Blaine said.
He scratched a wide landing strip of a nose containing more colored lines than the city transit map.
“You know what happened last night, how it started?” Blaine said.
Jamie nodded, in the way he would when bluffing his way through an interview. He understood that Blaine was going to give it to him “Blaine and simple,” as the columnist was fond of describing his writing style. The young Trib reporters considered it corny as Barney and Blaine generally as outdated as the dinosaur. But if anyone had the right to tell them to go fuck themselves with their RAMs and ROMs it was Blaine.
He was a throwback and damn proud of it. Out of spite, it seemed, he was still tapping out columns on a typewriter and handing the copy to a clerk—Jamie, in fact, not all that long ago—to load into the system.
Blaine was the kind of shoe leather reporter who seldom emerged from the city’s blue-collar taverns as tipsy as the civil servants he had fleeced of secrets. He still wore a tie every day to the office and an impeccable starched blue shirt with an off-white collar, even as he reeked of tobacco, needed a shave and more than a few nose hairs clipped.
“The drivers were