Day 6, Word Count: 5975
Fully revised and reprinted here. Start over right now, or skip down to where you left off.
Chapter One
He picked up the phone on the seventh ring.
“City Desk.”
“Terry,” said a thoroughly flustered voice through the receiver. “It’s your brother--”
“Sorry, Mac, McGruder’s out chasing down a lead,” Terry McGruder said into the phone. He knew the rubes loved that 40s detective lingo. “Message for him?”
“Fuck you, Terry, I know it’s you. I’m your goddamn brother, fer chrissakes! Don’t fuckin’ Mac me!”
“Like I said, sir. Mr. McGruder’s out of the office. He got a hot tip and flatfooted it down to the East Village. Can I take a message?” McGruder had notched his voice up a pitch for this exchange. He was eyeing the NY Post opened before him on his desk. There was a pony named All She Wrote in the late afternoon run at Belmont that was tickling the back of his brain.
“Sure, asshole. Tell Mr. McGruder that he can fucking die,” spat the voice on the other end of the fiber optic line. “I don’t want the grand he owes me and I never want to see his fucking face again. Fuck you, Terry.”
The line went dead.
McGruder hung up the phone without ever taking his eyes off the racing sheet. “Angie, get me Henderson at OTB on 52nd on the horn, wouldja?”
“Screw you, Terry,” said an aging blond from across the bustling City Desk office of the New York Union-Dispatch. “You have enough fingers to dial and to go fu--”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” McGruder cut her off. “What kind of assistant are you, anyway?”
“I’m not you goddamned assistant, Terry. I’m you’re editor. And you should be worrying less about the ponies and more about that assignment that’s due in about, oh, I don’t know . . . two fucking hours!” shot back Angie as she started to stalk towards McGruder’s desk.
“You mean that fluff piece on the old lady whose rent controlled apartment got robbed on Park Avenue? Send the goddamn kid out on that. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“Bullshit. That’s what you’ve got, Terry. Bullshit. And that’s what you are.”
“Hey, language, Angie,” McGruder smirked at the woman as she stood over him. “We’re a respectable news-gathering organization. That language is strictly for the pulps.”
“Listen, Terry, I’ve had it. You don’t want the story? Fine, Skellings gets it. But if you don’t bring me a front page, banner headline by the end of the week, you’re fucking fired,” Angie said, all breathy and exasperated. “Kapish?”
“That’s what I do, Ange,” McGruder said as he stood up, tucked the paper under his arm and threw his ratty corduroy sport coat over his other shoulder. “That’s what I do.”
Chapter Two
McGruder hailed a cab on the corner of 42nd and 6th Avenue, heading uptown.
“116th,” he said and started in on the racing sheet again.
“Columbia University, sir,” said the Jordanian hack behind the wheel.
“That’s right, Mohammed,” wise-cracked McGruder.
“My name’s Robert.”
“Whatever. Just drive. Hold the chit chat for the tourists.”
“Asshole,” muttered the cab driver.
Terry McGruder was a 45 year old red-blooded American. He had salt and pepper close cropped hair, a square jaw, slightly bulbous nose (a few too many nips from Jameson bottles in the last few years), and a barely noticeable scar running from the middle of his forehead through his left eyebrow, over his eye socket and onto the plane of his left cheek. Barely noticeable.
If you were blind.
McGruder had been at the Union-Dispatch for the last three years. Before that he had been with the NY Post, The Daily News, The New York Observer and in the distant past, before “the Incident,” he’d been at the New York Times for twelve years.
But that was all ancient history. Today he wasn’t an investigative journalist. He wasn’t a column man. He wrote for the city desk. Usually uncredited, over-edited and underpaid. Plus, work on the Dispatch’s city beat was far from glamorous.
The Dispatch covered the stuff that was too small for even the Post. They did accounts of neighborhood stories – the guy who’d been found with fifty cats in his studio apartment above a Chinese take-out joint. Or, say, the dudes who were running a White Supremacist publishing company from the basement of the local electrical workers’ union hall. All interesting and exciting if you lived in the same building as the cat guy (or ordered delivery from Mei Sing’s), but to the rest of the city that never sleeps, those stories were the least of its worries.
Today, though. Today, McGruder was going to change that. He actually did have a hot tip on a story. That was the only thing that he had said to his pain-in-the-ass accountant brother that wasn’t bullshit. He’d gotten a call the night before from a friend at the Midtown South precinct house.
It had been the middle of the night and McGruder was still sort of awake – a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead open on his lap, his head nodding up and down, reading the same sentence again for the third time. The rattle of the obsolete rotary phone shaking in its cradle snapped McGruder to attention. He let it ring a fourth time while rubbing the sleep sting from his eyes before reaching for the receiver.
“Yeah,” he had croaked into the phone. Dry mouthed from the two juice glasses of whiskey he had downed earlier that night.
“Terry, its Jim Monahan, from the Two Three,” answered the voice; barely above a whisper.
“James, me foine boyo,” McGruder put on the brogue. “A bit late ta’be callin, innit?”
“Enough with that, Terry. Th’s serious,” answered the cop.
McGruder had come suddenly and fully awake. He smelled a story. He had actually gotten excited, but the second his friend Jimmy had started speaking the excitement turned sour.
Now, riding in the back of the cab towards Columbia, the reporter had a hard time recalling that sick feeling in his gut. He wrote the memory off to the Jameson, the lack of a solid meal and his never-ending ulcer. Besides, he thought, it’s only a goddamned rumor.
Even as that thought went through his head, in his gut the acid started to rumble and his mouth went dry.
Chapter Three
Abraham Krebs woke up with the afternoon sun shining in his eyes. The only thing that saved him from being blinded was the grime that coated the window of his basement apartment in Park Slope. The artists and yuppies had taken over most of the Brooklyn neighborhood, but there were still some slum landlords that preferred anonymous tenants who didn’t complain about the pressure-less showers, the non-working radiators, or the rats in the back alley. They charged less and provided nothing in return.
Krebs was happy being anonymous. Plus, unless he wanted to be the only freckle-faced, redhead from Kansas living in Spanish Harlem, this was all he could afford.
The paper thin young man rose from the mattress on the floor and fumbled with the things on top of the orange crate next to the bed for his glasses. The crate served as his makeshift bedside table.
Now able to see, Krebs moved to the other side of the basement and opened his mini-fridge. The only contents were three ½ gallon containers of orange juice and a brown unmarked plastic bottle of pills. He grabbed one of the open juice cartons and drank deeply from it. He replaced it and then took the pill bottle. Shaking out two of the large pink pills, Krebs shivered in the cold apartment.
It was only the middle of September, but there was already a slight autumn chill in the air and Krebs had found that his humble abode was always ten degrees colder than it was outside, no matter how high he turned up his single rusting radiator. Of course, in the heat of the city summer, the apartment was twenty or more degrees hotter than the outside world and opening the two street-facing windows to allow in a breeze only brought in the exhaust a passing cars, cabs, and busses. Once it had also let in a slow trickle of miniature Doberman Pincher piss. Krebs kept the windows closed after that day.
Now fully hydrated and filled with this half of the day’s medication Krebs moved to the bathroom to shower and dress. This didn’t take long. He had no beard stubble to shave, very little hair to wash (he’d had it buzz cut the week before in the style of 1950s test pilots – or so he thought) and his wardrobe consisted only of faded jeans, saggy-assed chinos, white v-neck undershirts and a few worn plaid flannel shirts. Uniformed, he filled his pockets with keys, subway pass, pocketknife, and wallet and headed for the street.
“Mr. Abraham,” a small voice called to him from the foyer as he was locking his door. The voice was heavily accented, but the origin of that accent was nearly impossible to place. “You owe me the rent to yesterday.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian,” Abraham answered. He turned around, towering over the stout woman in her fluorescent orange babushka. “I will slip it under your door this evening. I am going into the city today to get my paycheck.”
“So you say, say you so,” the super replied. She always talked in this repeating, reversing litany. “But still. One day later your have been.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian. I know, I’m sorry. Next month I’ll be on time, I promise.”
“Last time for a free rider, yes?” She arched a particularly bushy eyebrow. “Free rider for the last time, okay.”
“Okay. No more free rides, I get it,” Krebs answered, shrugging his shoulders and squeezing around the beach ball-shaped woman. He had to get out of there. The smell of fried fish and drying cabbage was making his stomach somersault. “I promise, I’ll be on time next month.” Knowing that he wouldn’t be, couldn’t possibly be on time then, since there would be no next month. At least not for him.
“This is good, Mr. Abraham.” She turned away and headed back for the stinking apartment at the back of the first floor corridor.
Krebs reached the ancient door to the apartment building, slammed it open, moved past the mail slots lined on both walls, and burst through the street door into the sparkling sun and the relatively fresh air. He breathed deeply of that exhaust laden air and the tears that had been forming in his eyes from Mrs. Arkadian’s fish/cabbage stench spilled over his sallow cheeks. He let out a slow sigh and began his journey, heading for the nearest Manhattan-bound 6 Train.
Chapter Four
When Krebs finally left the subway station at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan (after a thirty minute delay for “routine track maintenance”) it was nearly three o’clock. The park where he had risen to from the underground station was nearly empty. A few homeless were rummaging through trash barrels for the leavings of the Wall Street lunch crowd. Those Wall Streeters themselves were no where to be seen; their day coming to a close brokering deals and selling paper in the towering edifices hovering around the park.
Krebs headed north, towards Chinatown and the City's heart. He walked with his shoulders drawn in and his head down. There was little traffic on the streets at this time of day, but in only a
few hours the afternoon rush would start and thousands of commuters would head for the trains, busses, ferries and cabs that would whoosh them off to suburbs in New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island and Westchester County.
Krebs had a different work schedule.
The crisscrossed streets and avenues of lower Manhattan passed under the heavy boots of the young man as he slouched and slinked deeper and deeper into the maze of the City. Passing close to the site of reconstruction at the former World Trade Center, the police presence grew more and more
pronounced. The dark gray of stone buildings, marbled slabs of granite and concrete, shadowed the
narrow streets. A palpable feeling of loss and horror and anguish permeated the air. Here Death
had swept down on three thousand lives and even a man like Krebs was hard-pressed not to feel its
lingering presence.
Penetrating further, Krebs passed through the bustling crowds on the busy Chinatown streets.
Fishmongers, pirates and profiteers all hawked their wares at tourists, commuters, and residents
alike. Here, a human monster of shouting voices argued with itself in a slurry of foreign tongues and
regional dialects. The wave of black haired skulls parted around the ghostly form of the
pale-faced loner as he advanced deeper and deeper into the City. Bright colors from a thousand different cuts of cloth and flashing electronics assailed his eyes, but nothing slowed Krebs from his
northward journey.
Passing the ominous intersection of 1st Avenue and 1st Street, Krebs continued onward, turning
west, but still moving north. The packed streets of Chinatown relented to the more open and trendy
shops and alleys of Soho, Noho, Tribeca, and Chelsea. Now criss-crossing and backtracking, moving
west to east, then east to north and back to west again, Krebs came yet closer to his destination.
Passing the West Village, moving east into Alphabet City and then north again, the streets trailed
behind him in rapid succession. At 4th Avenue and 11th Street he turned north a final time and
headed for Union Square directly ahead of him.
The bustle of students, artists, musicians, lawyers, ConEd workers, bike messengers, and
fashionistas flowed around and over the Square. The wide circular stairs on the park's south side held
people of various makes and models. Dogs pranced and danced in an enclosed area on the west side of
the Square while rollerblading beauties trounced the concrete at the north end vying for territory
with predatory skate rats and surly homeless lunatics. Two wide, three-sided structures bordered the south end of the park. Waves of people entered and exited those gaping mouths, descending into the depths of the City, joining and disgorging from the arteries and veins of the massive subway system.
Abraham Krebs would soon be rejoining those underground canals but first he needed to attend a special matter. The Family owned and controlled a townhouse just to the east of Union Square, on Irving Place, and it was here that Krebs's walking journey ended. A report was due.
Plus, he needed Mrs. Arkadian's rent money.
The Family would provide.
Chapter Five
When McGruder stepped out of the cab on the corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue Columbia University's campus spread itself out before him. A rolling quadrangle of green grass just starting to turn brown under the fall air laid beneath Greco-Roman edifices on three sides. Columned halls and imposing libraries faced off against each other and all of it was surrounded by the
encroaching City. Students moved with industrious purpose from one building to the next while some of their more laid-back counterparts lounged on the quad, frisbees flying and lattes flowing.
McGruder slipped into his coat and headed for a building just to the left of the rear end of the quad. It was smaller and less ornate them some of the surrounding structures and housed a number of the University's faculty. Specifically, McGruder was heading for the fourth floor and the political science department's offices.
Entering the brownstone the reporter was struck by the lack of security. In the post-9/11 world magnetometers, x-ray machines and armed guards were the norm in NYC. But in the Ivory Tower of private education the elite and the intellectual alike felt safe and isolated from the world around them. That suited McGruder fine. The less questions he had to answer and the fewer people who knew where he'd been, the better.
He hit the stairs and made for the office of Urban Civics professor Jennifer Garcia. Garcia and he had known each other for years and if anyone could answer the questions he had from his late night conversation with Monahan, Jenny was the one. The problem was whether or not she'd answer them. Or talk to him at all, for that matter.
The door to her office suite was open and before McGruder could even announce himself to the student manning the secretary's desk, a husky voice rumbled from the adjoining office.
"You sonofabitch. You better turn around right now and get your narrow ass out of my office, McGruder," yelled the voice. A pretty brunette emerged from behind a stack of books piled high on a scarred wooden desk.
Jenny Garcia was tall and dark skinned. Her father had been one of the original Black Panthers, himself the product of a Latin father and Black mother. Jenny had chestnut hair, naturally curly, that fell to her shoulders. Her cheekbones were high and sharp, in stark contrast to her somewhat rounded nose. Sea green eyes shown through her rimless glasses with a clarity and fierceness that was hard to turn from.
"Jenny, jeeze, you act like I did something wrong," McGruder played coy.
"Wrong? Wrong?" She was storming out of the office now and McGruder actually had to restrain himself from backing up. "I'll show you wrong, you hack."
"Hack!?"
"That's right. I can't believe you would even show your face here, after what you did to me," She was right up in the reporter's grill now and he actually did have to take a step backwards to avoid a lacquered nail in the eyeball. "You promised me you'd leave my name out. You promised!"
"I tried, Jenny, really. It was my editor," McGruder pleaded.
Now Jenny backed off a step. The fire had left her eyes and she sighed in exasperation. "You know what, Terry? It always the same bullshit with you. Always."
She turned around and headed back for her office. "Just leave."
"Please, Jenny, give me five minutes."
By now the stunned TA at the desk had risen and put himself between McGruder and the professor.
"Sir, I think you should just leave - - " he started, before McGruder pushed him out of the way.
"Jennifer, it’s about Councilman Webster," McGruder said.
The professor had been closing the office door and now she stopped with her back still to the outer office. "What about him?" she asked.
"Let me buy you a cup of coffee, Jen. Please. Ten minutes."
"Fine," she turned and closed the door behind her. "Robert, I'll be back in 15 minutes. If you ever see this man in this building again, call security."
"Are you sure you're okay, Jen?" the boy said. "Do you want me to go with you?"
McGruder let out a short snort. Professor Garcia shot him a glance filled with hatred and he stifled the rest of the laugh.
"No, Robert, thank you," she said. "I can handle this."
Chapter Six
They sat next to each other at the counter of the Washington Heights Diner. McGruder was nursing a black coffee that was far too bitter and Jenny had an herbal tea in a cracked porcelain cup. They had made the five minute walk in utter silence, the taller woman leading McGruder by about five feet at all times.
McGruder put down his cup and swung the swivel chair towards Garcia. Keeping her eyes straight ahead she said, "What do you want, Terry? Just say it and then leave me alone. I don't want to be near you anymore."
"Listen, Jen, I'm sorry about what happened. You know that. I couldn’t have known what was going to happen. If I'd known, I would've done things differently," he said. Sincerely. Which was a rarity for him.
"Bull, Terry. You would have written it just the same. I know it and you know it. That's why I loved you in the first place. Your uncompromising determination," she said softly.
"Not that time, Jenny. Really. I would've . . ." he continued as he turned back to his coffee. "They pulled the rug out from under me . . . well, you know."
"Yeah, I know."
- - -
Two years ago McGruder had been doing an article on corruption in local politics. Certain city council members had been embezzling federal funds earmarked for local scholarships for inner-city grads. McGruder's source had been an 18-year-old girl from Harlem who'd not only had her college money bilked by the local politician-slash-preacher, but also been sexually assaulted by him. When the girl turned to her professor as a confidant, Jenny Garcia called McGruder. She'd figured, with his connections to the department and his info on the embezzling scheme, he’d be able to get the cops to take down the Councilman without a lot of publicity for her or the girl.
One of Terry’s oldest friends was the cop he went to with the story. A detective, Harry Rohmer, was a twenty year man with the Force – true blue.
Rohmer listened to the story and headed the investigation on his own time with a few other trusted cops. With the help of Jenny Garcia, McGruder had begun to dig through piles of banking records, tax sheets, and real estate papers. At the same time, the cops laid a twenty four hour surveillance net around the Harlem Councilman. Eventually, they hit paydirt.
While McGruder nailed down an interview with the Councilman’s personal banker (who’d been skimming a little off the top and was too worried about his own ass to sweat ratting out Councilman Sanders), Rohmer and his buddies caught the esteemed politician at it again with another co-ed. They got the whole sordid affair on video. After a background check, it turned out the girl had skipped her senior year of high school and was only seventeen. So now the pig was up for extortion, misuse of public funds, and statutory rape.
With enough evidence to go to his superiors, Rohmer got the go-ahead to take down the man. Rohmer’s commanding officer kept the whole investigation under wraps until the last possible minute. With the warrants signed and Rohmer and his team ready to go, the CO assigned a tactical team to help with the execution of the warrant and the arrest of Councilman Sanders. One of the cops on the S.W.A.T. team was a Richie Congers. He had just transferred to the force from Chicago and had been with the Midtown South command post about a year.
He’d been on the take for about eleven and a half months.
One of the men paying Congers’ bills was Councilman Sanders.
So when the call went out for a team to put through a high profile warrant and take down a city council member, Congers volunteered asap for the assignment. The second call he made after talking to the CO about getting on the tactical team was to warn the Councilman of his impending doom.
While Congers was the point man for the tactical team, the entire operation was under Rohmer’s command. They kicked in the door to the Councilman’s Harlem brownstone together and charged into Sanders’s office. After his warning, Congers had expected the house to be empty. So it came as a major surprise when the esteemed Councilman opened fire and blew Harry Rohmer away with a single shot to the face. Before Congers could return fire, the Councilman turned the gun on himself and finished it.
The papers had a field day with the story. Dead cops, dead councilman, young girls, corruption, and sex. They couldn’t have asked for more. But they got just that.
Throughout the investigation, McGruder and Garcia had gotten closer and closer. It was a mistake and they both knew it. They just didn’t know what a large mistake it was until it was too late. Garcia’s husband was a hotshot D.A. with eyes on the political prize. At first McGruder was able to keep Jenny’s name out of the stories that were being published about the whole thing. He was the lead writer for most of the stories himself and so, being the source and the writer let him keep that detail in the dark. When the case got to the D.A.’s office, however, things got complicated.
The prosecution of two additional council members who had also absconded with education funds along with Sanders was assigned to Assistant District Attorney Marcus Webster – Jenny Garcia’s husband. Knowing that they could no longer keep Jenny out of it, McGruder went to Webster and laid out her involvement in the events leading up to the shootout at the councilman’s home. Webster easily made the connection to his wife’s recent odd behavior and refused to step back from the case. He vowed to prosecute the case until it was done and even went so far as to put his own wife on the stand. The scandal was a goldmine for the papers. McGruder went from writing headlines to becoming one.
Needless to say, Jenny and Webster split up and were quickly divorced. Jenny’s position at Columbia had been put in jeopardy, but luckily her tenure saved her. Her reputation, however, took a serious beating. She blamed McGruder for going to her husband without talking to her first and that, combined with the loss of his job at the N.Y. Post for conducting such a renegade investigation that cost a cop’s life, threw the reporter into a tailspin. He walked out of Garcia’s life and ended up in the bottom of a bottle.
And now he sat across from probably the only woman he ever really cared about and saw nothing but contempt and disgust in her eyes.
“Look, Jen, I know you don’t want to be here with me. And I know that what I did cost you more than I can possibly imagine, but I need your help,” said McGruder.
The waitress came by and topped off his coffee. She looked at Jenny Garcia and began to ask if she was sure she didn’t want something, but thought better of it. She turned and walked away without saying a word.
Jenny swiveled her seat towards McGruder and slowly looked up from her folded hands resting in her lap. “Why are you here, Terry? And what does it have to do with my ex-husband?”
Chapter Seven
Robin Lockhart sat on a bench under a maple tree in Union Square trying not to cry. She'd spent a lot on the rose colored contacts she was wearing and almost as much on the Keihl’s eyeliner and she'd be dammed if she was going to ruin her face. Fists clenched, perfectly manicured French wraps digging into the soft flesh of her palms, the tears came anyway.
She’d been sitting on this bench, numb to everything around her since shed left the building at 100 Broadway. The park's dog run was directly in front of her, but even the cute puppies running and falling over themselves could not elicit a smile from the crying girl. Getting even more upset that she could not stem the flow of tears (and the resulting black streaks her mascara was leaving on her cheeks) Robin slammed both fists into the wood of the bench.
"Ow!" she yelled. It had hurt. A lot. But it had also taken some of the helpless feeling away from her. She punched into the wood again with the meaty part of her delicate fist.
This time she let out only a small hrumph of repressed pain. Her hand was red and pulsing with residual pain, but the tears had stopped and that was at least something to be thankful for.
"Fuckers," she whispered to herself. "Goddamnmothafuckers."
A slight smile crept across her boldly painted lips. She’d spent two whole days at the Lord & Taylor make-up counter selecting the color for this morning's meeting. Adam's Apple Red.
Now, reaching into her faux-Luis Vuitton handbag that she’d bought in Chinatown for twenty-five bucks, she pulled out a crumpled bunch of Kleenex. Wiping at the tracks of tears and mangled pitch black mascara, she was afraid to look at herself in a mirror. Careful to keep the blackened mass of wet tissue away from her pink power suit, she unceremoniously dumped the trash on the ground at her feet.
A homeless guy (at least she thought it was a guy -- tough to tell with all those hats and hoods covering its filthy face) yelled at her from another bench, three down from her own. "NO LITTERING BITCH!!" he screamed. "Pick your snot rags up or I will fucking gut you!"
Scared and too flustered to act in the normal New York way of just pretending you didn’t see or hear the street people, Robin quickly picked up the tissues and moved cautiously away from Woodsy the Owl’s bench. As she walked across the path towards the east side of the park, she couldn’t stop herself from constantly looking over her shoulder to make sure the homeless guy
(woman?)
wasn’t following her.
God, she thought. This really is the worst day of my life.
Chapter Eight
Although it was tough to believe that it had only been a few hours earlier, Robin had woken up this morning in possibly the best mood of her life. Looking out the single window from the bedroom of her miniature apartment in Alphabet City, Robin could just make out the sun breaking over the horizon of towering apartment buildings on 1st Avenue. The sky above those buildings was a brilliant blue and there wasn’t a cloud in sight (granted, there wasn’t much of a sight from her vantage point.)
Robin rose from her unfinished pine Ikea Umloti bed and moved into the living room slash kitchen slash dining room. On the counter, jammed between a toaster oven and a crockpot, was a single serving coffee maker. This had been her one major expense for the apartment and the European-style machine was already brewing a large steaming mug of perfect Malaysian java. Smelling the rich aromas, Robin had been even more enthused to jump into the morning.
A late riser (she currently worked nights as a word processor at a corporate law firm in Midtown) being up this early was usually annoying to Robin. But today, she had a lot to look forward to. She had an interview with Mitchell Vahlsing at Zero Programming, the exclusive home of the best, most subversive, and most insanely popular music television channel since MTV. That is, the old MTV that had once been fresh, exciting, and on the cutting edge of music programming not the new, all reality-TV-all-the-time, MTV.
Vahlsing had been a personal hero of the young Robin when she was in college at NYU. An only child, Robin's parents had died when she was still in high school in a boating accident on Long Island. They had been true middle class all their lives – her dad a carpenter, her mother a social worker – but they had still been able to put aside enough money for Robin's college fund. That money, plus the insurance that she received when she turned eighteen was just enough to get her through college and then set up in an apartment in Manhattan.
Three years later, degree in hand and money gone, Robin was working nights in the law firm and surviving on Ramen noodles, office party leftovers, and happy hour hors doeuvres. But since her days in the communications program at NYU, Robin had known exactly who and what she wanted to be. She was tall, blond, perfectly fit and generally just too damned good looking. But she was smart too and more than willing to get her hands dirty.
Mitchell Vahlsing was the wunderkind executive at the fledgling Zero Channel when Robin had started at the University. He was young, energetic, brilliant, and outlandishly in-your-face. He had come up in Zero (which had started as a cable access show in northern New Jersey, before being bought by a media conglomerate from Japan) from the mail room and eventually worked his way into the programming directors slot. Up until his occupying that powerful position, the broadcaster had focused on playing second fiddle to MTV. It was happy with its runner-up market share and its doppleganger format. But Vahlsing saw something bigger there. In the guts of the company he found people of a similar vision and he extolled the virtues of going bigger.
He moved production assistants into producer positions. He turned interns into head writers. He infused the company with fresh blood and left a swath of burned out middle-aged executives in his path. And while some of the stockholders cried foul, they were quickly silenced when the quarterly numbers came in and Zero started eating into MTV/Viacom's market share. As Zero's profits rose, Vahlsing's star in the company rose as well. Within two years of his promotion to program director he had moved into the CEO's office. Not made for a kid with a community college degree in business management.
Vahlsing was Zero. And Robin loved him for his self-made achievements and maverick attitude. She'd been preparing her whole adult life for this meeting with Valhsing and she was not going to fuck it up. The early bird catches the worm, she thought, as she took her first sip of steaming hot coffee.
- - -
Now, walking through Union Square Park, her make-up in shambles, her beautiful new suit rumpled, and feeling like she’d been kicked in the teeth, Robin couldn’t help but want to cry again. But she wouldn’t let herself. Just thinking about her sorry ass sitting on the bench and mewling like an uneducated housefrau made her angry. And that anger started to squeeze out the sadness. As she thought about the meeting in Vahlsing’s 62nd floor office suite, looking over lower Manhattan like some Aryan god’s hovering fortress, she couldn’t help but get even more enraged.
Who the fuck did he think he was? Hed called her boring and accused her of being too 'establishment.' Said she was out of touch with the counterculture. Didn’t know the beat coming from the street. Well, of course she was establishment. She was a Republican for Christ's sake. She was a free-market disciple. She believed in the Market and Profit and the New Economy. And, of course, shed modeled herself after Mitchell Vahlsing and his ilk!
Vahlsing was about as establishment as you could get. He wore Brooks Brothers suits, drove a Volvo and was a self-professed fan of Barry Manilow. Robin idolized him because of those things, and also because he'd subverted the subversive to his own ends. He'd marketed the counterculture like a pair of standard Nike running sneakers. He’d manipulated all those whining artists, turning their tears into scads of profit.
Did he think she liked living in Alphabet City with the junkies and the hookers and the poor suffering artists and the goddamned Marxists?! She did it to know her product. She did it so she could understand exactly what it was she was going to be buying and selling. She was established all right. She’d established herself as an expert on the crap that Zero was shilling.
But none of that had mattered when she walked into Vahlsing’s office. He’d bought into his own product; was high on the drug he was dealing. He’d said she wasn’t what Zero wanted. She wasn’t edgy enough. Wasn’t in 'touch' with the masses of kids that bought what Zero was selling. He had told her Zero was all about image and that security should not have even let her in the building in the outfit she was wearing. That that outfit had marked her as an outsider.
Chapter One
He picked up the phone on the seventh ring.
“City Desk.”
“Terry,” said a thoroughly flustered voice through the receiver. “It’s your brother--”
“Sorry, Mac, McGruder’s out chasing down a lead,” Terry McGruder said into the phone. He knew the rubes loved that 40s detective lingo. “Message for him?”
“Fuck you, Terry, I know it’s you. I’m your goddamn brother, fer chrissakes! Don’t fuckin’ Mac me!”
“Like I said, sir. Mr. McGruder’s out of the office. He got a hot tip and flatfooted it down to the East Village. Can I take a message?” McGruder had notched his voice up a pitch for this exchange. He was eyeing the NY Post opened before him on his desk. There was a pony named All She Wrote in the late afternoon run at Belmont that was tickling the back of his brain.
“Sure, asshole. Tell Mr. McGruder that he can fucking die,” spat the voice on the other end of the fiber optic line. “I don’t want the grand he owes me and I never want to see his fucking face again. Fuck you, Terry.”
The line went dead.
McGruder hung up the phone without ever taking his eyes off the racing sheet. “Angie, get me Henderson at OTB on 52nd on the horn, wouldja?”
“Screw you, Terry,” said an aging blond from across the bustling City Desk office of the New York Union-Dispatch. “You have enough fingers to dial and to go fu--”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” McGruder cut her off. “What kind of assistant are you, anyway?”
“I’m not you goddamned assistant, Terry. I’m you’re editor. And you should be worrying less about the ponies and more about that assignment that’s due in about, oh, I don’t know . . . two fucking hours!” shot back Angie as she started to stalk towards McGruder’s desk.
“You mean that fluff piece on the old lady whose rent controlled apartment got robbed on Park Avenue? Send the goddamn kid out on that. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“Bullshit. That’s what you’ve got, Terry. Bullshit. And that’s what you are.”
“Hey, language, Angie,” McGruder smirked at the woman as she stood over him. “We’re a respectable news-gathering organization. That language is strictly for the pulps.”
“Listen, Terry, I’ve had it. You don’t want the story? Fine, Skellings gets it. But if you don’t bring me a front page, banner headline by the end of the week, you’re fucking fired,” Angie said, all breathy and exasperated. “Kapish?”
“That’s what I do, Ange,” McGruder said as he stood up, tucked the paper under his arm and threw his ratty corduroy sport coat over his other shoulder. “That’s what I do.”
Chapter Two
McGruder hailed a cab on the corner of 42nd and 6th Avenue, heading uptown.
“116th,” he said and started in on the racing sheet again.
“Columbia University, sir,” said the Jordanian hack behind the wheel.
“That’s right, Mohammed,” wise-cracked McGruder.
“My name’s Robert.”
“Whatever. Just drive. Hold the chit chat for the tourists.”
“Asshole,” muttered the cab driver.
Terry McGruder was a 45 year old red-blooded American. He had salt and pepper close cropped hair, a square jaw, slightly bulbous nose (a few too many nips from Jameson bottles in the last few years), and a barely noticeable scar running from the middle of his forehead through his left eyebrow, over his eye socket and onto the plane of his left cheek. Barely noticeable.
If you were blind.
McGruder had been at the Union-Dispatch for the last three years. Before that he had been with the NY Post, The Daily News, The New York Observer and in the distant past, before “the Incident,” he’d been at the New York Times for twelve years.
But that was all ancient history. Today he wasn’t an investigative journalist. He wasn’t a column man. He wrote for the city desk. Usually uncredited, over-edited and underpaid. Plus, work on the Dispatch’s city beat was far from glamorous.
The Dispatch covered the stuff that was too small for even the Post. They did accounts of neighborhood stories – the guy who’d been found with fifty cats in his studio apartment above a Chinese take-out joint. Or, say, the dudes who were running a White Supremacist publishing company from the basement of the local electrical workers’ union hall. All interesting and exciting if you lived in the same building as the cat guy (or ordered delivery from Mei Sing’s), but to the rest of the city that never sleeps, those stories were the least of its worries.
Today, though. Today, McGruder was going to change that. He actually did have a hot tip on a story. That was the only thing that he had said to his pain-in-the-ass accountant brother that wasn’t bullshit. He’d gotten a call the night before from a friend at the Midtown South precinct house.
It had been the middle of the night and McGruder was still sort of awake – a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead open on his lap, his head nodding up and down, reading the same sentence again for the third time. The rattle of the obsolete rotary phone shaking in its cradle snapped McGruder to attention. He let it ring a fourth time while rubbing the sleep sting from his eyes before reaching for the receiver.
“Yeah,” he had croaked into the phone. Dry mouthed from the two juice glasses of whiskey he had downed earlier that night.
“Terry, its Jim Monahan, from the Two Three,” answered the voice; barely above a whisper.
“James, me foine boyo,” McGruder put on the brogue. “A bit late ta’be callin, innit?”
“Enough with that, Terry. Th’s serious,” answered the cop.
McGruder had come suddenly and fully awake. He smelled a story. He had actually gotten excited, but the second his friend Jimmy had started speaking the excitement turned sour.
Now, riding in the back of the cab towards Columbia, the reporter had a hard time recalling that sick feeling in his gut. He wrote the memory off to the Jameson, the lack of a solid meal and his never-ending ulcer. Besides, he thought, it’s only a goddamned rumor.
Even as that thought went through his head, in his gut the acid started to rumble and his mouth went dry.
Chapter Three
Abraham Krebs woke up with the afternoon sun shining in his eyes. The only thing that saved him from being blinded was the grime that coated the window of his basement apartment in Park Slope. The artists and yuppies had taken over most of the Brooklyn neighborhood, but there were still some slum landlords that preferred anonymous tenants who didn’t complain about the pressure-less showers, the non-working radiators, or the rats in the back alley. They charged less and provided nothing in return.
Krebs was happy being anonymous. Plus, unless he wanted to be the only freckle-faced, redhead from Kansas living in Spanish Harlem, this was all he could afford.
The paper thin young man rose from the mattress on the floor and fumbled with the things on top of the orange crate next to the bed for his glasses. The crate served as his makeshift bedside table.
Now able to see, Krebs moved to the other side of the basement and opened his mini-fridge. The only contents were three ½ gallon containers of orange juice and a brown unmarked plastic bottle of pills. He grabbed one of the open juice cartons and drank deeply from it. He replaced it and then took the pill bottle. Shaking out two of the large pink pills, Krebs shivered in the cold apartment.
It was only the middle of September, but there was already a slight autumn chill in the air and Krebs had found that his humble abode was always ten degrees colder than it was outside, no matter how high he turned up his single rusting radiator. Of course, in the heat of the city summer, the apartment was twenty or more degrees hotter than the outside world and opening the two street-facing windows to allow in a breeze only brought in the exhaust a passing cars, cabs, and busses. Once it had also let in a slow trickle of miniature Doberman Pincher piss. Krebs kept the windows closed after that day.
Now fully hydrated and filled with this half of the day’s medication Krebs moved to the bathroom to shower and dress. This didn’t take long. He had no beard stubble to shave, very little hair to wash (he’d had it buzz cut the week before in the style of 1950s test pilots – or so he thought) and his wardrobe consisted only of faded jeans, saggy-assed chinos, white v-neck undershirts and a few worn plaid flannel shirts. Uniformed, he filled his pockets with keys, subway pass, pocketknife, and wallet and headed for the street.
“Mr. Abraham,” a small voice called to him from the foyer as he was locking his door. The voice was heavily accented, but the origin of that accent was nearly impossible to place. “You owe me the rent to yesterday.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian,” Abraham answered. He turned around, towering over the stout woman in her fluorescent orange babushka. “I will slip it under your door this evening. I am going into the city today to get my paycheck.”
“So you say, say you so,” the super replied. She always talked in this repeating, reversing litany. “But still. One day later your have been.”
“Yes, Mrs. Arkadian. I know, I’m sorry. Next month I’ll be on time, I promise.”
“Last time for a free rider, yes?” She arched a particularly bushy eyebrow. “Free rider for the last time, okay.”
“Okay. No more free rides, I get it,” Krebs answered, shrugging his shoulders and squeezing around the beach ball-shaped woman. He had to get out of there. The smell of fried fish and drying cabbage was making his stomach somersault. “I promise, I’ll be on time next month.” Knowing that he wouldn’t be, couldn’t possibly be on time then, since there would be no next month. At least not for him.
“This is good, Mr. Abraham.” She turned away and headed back for the stinking apartment at the back of the first floor corridor.
Krebs reached the ancient door to the apartment building, slammed it open, moved past the mail slots lined on both walls, and burst through the street door into the sparkling sun and the relatively fresh air. He breathed deeply of that exhaust laden air and the tears that had been forming in his eyes from Mrs. Arkadian’s fish/cabbage stench spilled over his sallow cheeks. He let out a slow sigh and began his journey, heading for the nearest Manhattan-bound 6 Train.
Chapter Four
When Krebs finally left the subway station at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan (after a thirty minute delay for “routine track maintenance”) it was nearly three o’clock. The park where he had risen to from the underground station was nearly empty. A few homeless were rummaging through trash barrels for the leavings of the Wall Street lunch crowd. Those Wall Streeters themselves were no where to be seen; their day coming to a close brokering deals and selling paper in the towering edifices hovering around the park.
Krebs headed north, towards Chinatown and the City's heart. He walked with his shoulders drawn in and his head down. There was little traffic on the streets at this time of day, but in only a
few hours the afternoon rush would start and thousands of commuters would head for the trains, busses, ferries and cabs that would whoosh them off to suburbs in New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island and Westchester County.
Krebs had a different work schedule.
The crisscrossed streets and avenues of lower Manhattan passed under the heavy boots of the young man as he slouched and slinked deeper and deeper into the maze of the City. Passing close to the site of reconstruction at the former World Trade Center, the police presence grew more and more
pronounced. The dark gray of stone buildings, marbled slabs of granite and concrete, shadowed the
narrow streets. A palpable feeling of loss and horror and anguish permeated the air. Here Death
had swept down on three thousand lives and even a man like Krebs was hard-pressed not to feel its
lingering presence.
Penetrating further, Krebs passed through the bustling crowds on the busy Chinatown streets.
Fishmongers, pirates and profiteers all hawked their wares at tourists, commuters, and residents
alike. Here, a human monster of shouting voices argued with itself in a slurry of foreign tongues and
regional dialects. The wave of black haired skulls parted around the ghostly form of the
pale-faced loner as he advanced deeper and deeper into the City. Bright colors from a thousand different cuts of cloth and flashing electronics assailed his eyes, but nothing slowed Krebs from his
northward journey.
Passing the ominous intersection of 1st Avenue and 1st Street, Krebs continued onward, turning
west, but still moving north. The packed streets of Chinatown relented to the more open and trendy
shops and alleys of Soho, Noho, Tribeca, and Chelsea. Now criss-crossing and backtracking, moving
west to east, then east to north and back to west again, Krebs came yet closer to his destination.
Passing the West Village, moving east into Alphabet City and then north again, the streets trailed
behind him in rapid succession. At 4th Avenue and 11th Street he turned north a final time and
headed for Union Square directly ahead of him.
The bustle of students, artists, musicians, lawyers, ConEd workers, bike messengers, and
fashionistas flowed around and over the Square. The wide circular stairs on the park's south side held
people of various makes and models. Dogs pranced and danced in an enclosed area on the west side of
the Square while rollerblading beauties trounced the concrete at the north end vying for territory
with predatory skate rats and surly homeless lunatics. Two wide, three-sided structures bordered the south end of the park. Waves of people entered and exited those gaping mouths, descending into the depths of the City, joining and disgorging from the arteries and veins of the massive subway system.
Abraham Krebs would soon be rejoining those underground canals but first he needed to attend a special matter. The Family owned and controlled a townhouse just to the east of Union Square, on Irving Place, and it was here that Krebs's walking journey ended. A report was due.
Plus, he needed Mrs. Arkadian's rent money.
The Family would provide.
Chapter Five
When McGruder stepped out of the cab on the corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue Columbia University's campus spread itself out before him. A rolling quadrangle of green grass just starting to turn brown under the fall air laid beneath Greco-Roman edifices on three sides. Columned halls and imposing libraries faced off against each other and all of it was surrounded by the
encroaching City. Students moved with industrious purpose from one building to the next while some of their more laid-back counterparts lounged on the quad, frisbees flying and lattes flowing.
McGruder slipped into his coat and headed for a building just to the left of the rear end of the quad. It was smaller and less ornate them some of the surrounding structures and housed a number of the University's faculty. Specifically, McGruder was heading for the fourth floor and the political science department's offices.
Entering the brownstone the reporter was struck by the lack of security. In the post-9/11 world magnetometers, x-ray machines and armed guards were the norm in NYC. But in the Ivory Tower of private education the elite and the intellectual alike felt safe and isolated from the world around them. That suited McGruder fine. The less questions he had to answer and the fewer people who knew where he'd been, the better.
He hit the stairs and made for the office of Urban Civics professor Jennifer Garcia. Garcia and he had known each other for years and if anyone could answer the questions he had from his late night conversation with Monahan, Jenny was the one. The problem was whether or not she'd answer them. Or talk to him at all, for that matter.
The door to her office suite was open and before McGruder could even announce himself to the student manning the secretary's desk, a husky voice rumbled from the adjoining office.
"You sonofabitch. You better turn around right now and get your narrow ass out of my office, McGruder," yelled the voice. A pretty brunette emerged from behind a stack of books piled high on a scarred wooden desk.
Jenny Garcia was tall and dark skinned. Her father had been one of the original Black Panthers, himself the product of a Latin father and Black mother. Jenny had chestnut hair, naturally curly, that fell to her shoulders. Her cheekbones were high and sharp, in stark contrast to her somewhat rounded nose. Sea green eyes shown through her rimless glasses with a clarity and fierceness that was hard to turn from.
"Jenny, jeeze, you act like I did something wrong," McGruder played coy.
"Wrong? Wrong?" She was storming out of the office now and McGruder actually had to restrain himself from backing up. "I'll show you wrong, you hack."
"Hack!?"
"That's right. I can't believe you would even show your face here, after what you did to me," She was right up in the reporter's grill now and he actually did have to take a step backwards to avoid a lacquered nail in the eyeball. "You promised me you'd leave my name out. You promised!"
"I tried, Jenny, really. It was my editor," McGruder pleaded.
Now Jenny backed off a step. The fire had left her eyes and she sighed in exasperation. "You know what, Terry? It always the same bullshit with you. Always."
She turned around and headed back for her office. "Just leave."
"Please, Jenny, give me five minutes."
By now the stunned TA at the desk had risen and put himself between McGruder and the professor.
"Sir, I think you should just leave - - " he started, before McGruder pushed him out of the way.
"Jennifer, it’s about Councilman Webster," McGruder said.
The professor had been closing the office door and now she stopped with her back still to the outer office. "What about him?" she asked.
"Let me buy you a cup of coffee, Jen. Please. Ten minutes."
"Fine," she turned and closed the door behind her. "Robert, I'll be back in 15 minutes. If you ever see this man in this building again, call security."
"Are you sure you're okay, Jen?" the boy said. "Do you want me to go with you?"
McGruder let out a short snort. Professor Garcia shot him a glance filled with hatred and he stifled the rest of the laugh.
"No, Robert, thank you," she said. "I can handle this."
Chapter Six
They sat next to each other at the counter of the Washington Heights Diner. McGruder was nursing a black coffee that was far too bitter and Jenny had an herbal tea in a cracked porcelain cup. They had made the five minute walk in utter silence, the taller woman leading McGruder by about five feet at all times.
McGruder put down his cup and swung the swivel chair towards Garcia. Keeping her eyes straight ahead she said, "What do you want, Terry? Just say it and then leave me alone. I don't want to be near you anymore."
"Listen, Jen, I'm sorry about what happened. You know that. I couldn’t have known what was going to happen. If I'd known, I would've done things differently," he said. Sincerely. Which was a rarity for him.
"Bull, Terry. You would have written it just the same. I know it and you know it. That's why I loved you in the first place. Your uncompromising determination," she said softly.
"Not that time, Jenny. Really. I would've . . ." he continued as he turned back to his coffee. "They pulled the rug out from under me . . . well, you know."
"Yeah, I know."
- - -
Two years ago McGruder had been doing an article on corruption in local politics. Certain city council members had been embezzling federal funds earmarked for local scholarships for inner-city grads. McGruder's source had been an 18-year-old girl from Harlem who'd not only had her college money bilked by the local politician-slash-preacher, but also been sexually assaulted by him. When the girl turned to her professor as a confidant, Jenny Garcia called McGruder. She'd figured, with his connections to the department and his info on the embezzling scheme, he’d be able to get the cops to take down the Councilman without a lot of publicity for her or the girl.
One of Terry’s oldest friends was the cop he went to with the story. A detective, Harry Rohmer, was a twenty year man with the Force – true blue.
Rohmer listened to the story and headed the investigation on his own time with a few other trusted cops. With the help of Jenny Garcia, McGruder had begun to dig through piles of banking records, tax sheets, and real estate papers. At the same time, the cops laid a twenty four hour surveillance net around the Harlem Councilman. Eventually, they hit paydirt.
While McGruder nailed down an interview with the Councilman’s personal banker (who’d been skimming a little off the top and was too worried about his own ass to sweat ratting out Councilman Sanders), Rohmer and his buddies caught the esteemed politician at it again with another co-ed. They got the whole sordid affair on video. After a background check, it turned out the girl had skipped her senior year of high school and was only seventeen. So now the pig was up for extortion, misuse of public funds, and statutory rape.
With enough evidence to go to his superiors, Rohmer got the go-ahead to take down the man. Rohmer’s commanding officer kept the whole investigation under wraps until the last possible minute. With the warrants signed and Rohmer and his team ready to go, the CO assigned a tactical team to help with the execution of the warrant and the arrest of Councilman Sanders. One of the cops on the S.W.A.T. team was a Richie Congers. He had just transferred to the force from Chicago and had been with the Midtown South command post about a year.
He’d been on the take for about eleven and a half months.
One of the men paying Congers’ bills was Councilman Sanders.
So when the call went out for a team to put through a high profile warrant and take down a city council member, Congers volunteered asap for the assignment. The second call he made after talking to the CO about getting on the tactical team was to warn the Councilman of his impending doom.
While Congers was the point man for the tactical team, the entire operation was under Rohmer’s command. They kicked in the door to the Councilman’s Harlem brownstone together and charged into Sanders’s office. After his warning, Congers had expected the house to be empty. So it came as a major surprise when the esteemed Councilman opened fire and blew Harry Rohmer away with a single shot to the face. Before Congers could return fire, the Councilman turned the gun on himself and finished it.
The papers had a field day with the story. Dead cops, dead councilman, young girls, corruption, and sex. They couldn’t have asked for more. But they got just that.
Throughout the investigation, McGruder and Garcia had gotten closer and closer. It was a mistake and they both knew it. They just didn’t know what a large mistake it was until it was too late. Garcia’s husband was a hotshot D.A. with eyes on the political prize. At first McGruder was able to keep Jenny’s name out of the stories that were being published about the whole thing. He was the lead writer for most of the stories himself and so, being the source and the writer let him keep that detail in the dark. When the case got to the D.A.’s office, however, things got complicated.
The prosecution of two additional council members who had also absconded with education funds along with Sanders was assigned to Assistant District Attorney Marcus Webster – Jenny Garcia’s husband. Knowing that they could no longer keep Jenny out of it, McGruder went to Webster and laid out her involvement in the events leading up to the shootout at the councilman’s home. Webster easily made the connection to his wife’s recent odd behavior and refused to step back from the case. He vowed to prosecute the case until it was done and even went so far as to put his own wife on the stand. The scandal was a goldmine for the papers. McGruder went from writing headlines to becoming one.
Needless to say, Jenny and Webster split up and were quickly divorced. Jenny’s position at Columbia had been put in jeopardy, but luckily her tenure saved her. Her reputation, however, took a serious beating. She blamed McGruder for going to her husband without talking to her first and that, combined with the loss of his job at the N.Y. Post for conducting such a renegade investigation that cost a cop’s life, threw the reporter into a tailspin. He walked out of Garcia’s life and ended up in the bottom of a bottle.
And now he sat across from probably the only woman he ever really cared about and saw nothing but contempt and disgust in her eyes.
“Look, Jen, I know you don’t want to be here with me. And I know that what I did cost you more than I can possibly imagine, but I need your help,” said McGruder.
The waitress came by and topped off his coffee. She looked at Jenny Garcia and began to ask if she was sure she didn’t want something, but thought better of it. She turned and walked away without saying a word.
Jenny swiveled her seat towards McGruder and slowly looked up from her folded hands resting in her lap. “Why are you here, Terry? And what does it have to do with my ex-husband?”
Chapter Seven
Robin Lockhart sat on a bench under a maple tree in Union Square trying not to cry. She'd spent a lot on the rose colored contacts she was wearing and almost as much on the Keihl’s eyeliner and she'd be dammed if she was going to ruin her face. Fists clenched, perfectly manicured French wraps digging into the soft flesh of her palms, the tears came anyway.
She’d been sitting on this bench, numb to everything around her since shed left the building at 100 Broadway. The park's dog run was directly in front of her, but even the cute puppies running and falling over themselves could not elicit a smile from the crying girl. Getting even more upset that she could not stem the flow of tears (and the resulting black streaks her mascara was leaving on her cheeks) Robin slammed both fists into the wood of the bench.
"Ow!" she yelled. It had hurt. A lot. But it had also taken some of the helpless feeling away from her. She punched into the wood again with the meaty part of her delicate fist.
This time she let out only a small hrumph of repressed pain. Her hand was red and pulsing with residual pain, but the tears had stopped and that was at least something to be thankful for.
"Fuckers," she whispered to herself. "Goddamnmothafuckers."
A slight smile crept across her boldly painted lips. She’d spent two whole days at the Lord & Taylor make-up counter selecting the color for this morning's meeting. Adam's Apple Red.
Now, reaching into her faux-Luis Vuitton handbag that she’d bought in Chinatown for twenty-five bucks, she pulled out a crumpled bunch of Kleenex. Wiping at the tracks of tears and mangled pitch black mascara, she was afraid to look at herself in a mirror. Careful to keep the blackened mass of wet tissue away from her pink power suit, she unceremoniously dumped the trash on the ground at her feet.
A homeless guy (at least she thought it was a guy -- tough to tell with all those hats and hoods covering its filthy face) yelled at her from another bench, three down from her own. "NO LITTERING BITCH!!" he screamed. "Pick your snot rags up or I will fucking gut you!"
Scared and too flustered to act in the normal New York way of just pretending you didn’t see or hear the street people, Robin quickly picked up the tissues and moved cautiously away from Woodsy the Owl’s bench. As she walked across the path towards the east side of the park, she couldn’t stop herself from constantly looking over her shoulder to make sure the homeless guy
(woman?)
wasn’t following her.
God, she thought. This really is the worst day of my life.
Chapter Eight
Although it was tough to believe that it had only been a few hours earlier, Robin had woken up this morning in possibly the best mood of her life. Looking out the single window from the bedroom of her miniature apartment in Alphabet City, Robin could just make out the sun breaking over the horizon of towering apartment buildings on 1st Avenue. The sky above those buildings was a brilliant blue and there wasn’t a cloud in sight (granted, there wasn’t much of a sight from her vantage point.)
Robin rose from her unfinished pine Ikea Umloti bed and moved into the living room slash kitchen slash dining room. On the counter, jammed between a toaster oven and a crockpot, was a single serving coffee maker. This had been her one major expense for the apartment and the European-style machine was already brewing a large steaming mug of perfect Malaysian java. Smelling the rich aromas, Robin had been even more enthused to jump into the morning.
A late riser (she currently worked nights as a word processor at a corporate law firm in Midtown) being up this early was usually annoying to Robin. But today, she had a lot to look forward to. She had an interview with Mitchell Vahlsing at Zero Programming, the exclusive home of the best, most subversive, and most insanely popular music television channel since MTV. That is, the old MTV that had once been fresh, exciting, and on the cutting edge of music programming not the new, all reality-TV-all-the-time, MTV.
Vahlsing had been a personal hero of the young Robin when she was in college at NYU. An only child, Robin's parents had died when she was still in high school in a boating accident on Long Island. They had been true middle class all their lives – her dad a carpenter, her mother a social worker – but they had still been able to put aside enough money for Robin's college fund. That money, plus the insurance that she received when she turned eighteen was just enough to get her through college and then set up in an apartment in Manhattan.
Three years later, degree in hand and money gone, Robin was working nights in the law firm and surviving on Ramen noodles, office party leftovers, and happy hour hors doeuvres. But since her days in the communications program at NYU, Robin had known exactly who and what she wanted to be. She was tall, blond, perfectly fit and generally just too damned good looking. But she was smart too and more than willing to get her hands dirty.
Mitchell Vahlsing was the wunderkind executive at the fledgling Zero Channel when Robin had started at the University. He was young, energetic, brilliant, and outlandishly in-your-face. He had come up in Zero (which had started as a cable access show in northern New Jersey, before being bought by a media conglomerate from Japan) from the mail room and eventually worked his way into the programming directors slot. Up until his occupying that powerful position, the broadcaster had focused on playing second fiddle to MTV. It was happy with its runner-up market share and its doppleganger format. But Vahlsing saw something bigger there. In the guts of the company he found people of a similar vision and he extolled the virtues of going bigger.
He moved production assistants into producer positions. He turned interns into head writers. He infused the company with fresh blood and left a swath of burned out middle-aged executives in his path. And while some of the stockholders cried foul, they were quickly silenced when the quarterly numbers came in and Zero started eating into MTV/Viacom's market share. As Zero's profits rose, Vahlsing's star in the company rose as well. Within two years of his promotion to program director he had moved into the CEO's office. Not made for a kid with a community college degree in business management.
Vahlsing was Zero. And Robin loved him for his self-made achievements and maverick attitude. She'd been preparing her whole adult life for this meeting with Valhsing and she was not going to fuck it up. The early bird catches the worm, she thought, as she took her first sip of steaming hot coffee.
- - -
Now, walking through Union Square Park, her make-up in shambles, her beautiful new suit rumpled, and feeling like she’d been kicked in the teeth, Robin couldn’t help but want to cry again. But she wouldn’t let herself. Just thinking about her sorry ass sitting on the bench and mewling like an uneducated housefrau made her angry. And that anger started to squeeze out the sadness. As she thought about the meeting in Vahlsing’s 62nd floor office suite, looking over lower Manhattan like some Aryan god’s hovering fortress, she couldn’t help but get even more enraged.
Who the fuck did he think he was? Hed called her boring and accused her of being too 'establishment.' Said she was out of touch with the counterculture. Didn’t know the beat coming from the street. Well, of course she was establishment. She was a Republican for Christ's sake. She was a free-market disciple. She believed in the Market and Profit and the New Economy. And, of course, shed modeled herself after Mitchell Vahlsing and his ilk!
Vahlsing was about as establishment as you could get. He wore Brooks Brothers suits, drove a Volvo and was a self-professed fan of Barry Manilow. Robin idolized him because of those things, and also because he'd subverted the subversive to his own ends. He'd marketed the counterculture like a pair of standard Nike running sneakers. He’d manipulated all those whining artists, turning their tears into scads of profit.
Did he think she liked living in Alphabet City with the junkies and the hookers and the poor suffering artists and the goddamned Marxists?! She did it to know her product. She did it so she could understand exactly what it was she was going to be buying and selling. She was established all right. She’d established herself as an expert on the crap that Zero was shilling.
But none of that had mattered when she walked into Vahlsing’s office. He’d bought into his own product; was high on the drug he was dealing. He’d said she wasn’t what Zero wanted. She wasn’t edgy enough. Wasn’t in 'touch' with the masses of kids that bought what Zero was selling. He had told her Zero was all about image and that security should not have even let her in the building in the outfit she was wearing. That that outfit had marked her as an outsider.
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posted by RJackson at 1:31:00 AM
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