City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(44)
30
BRYCE HARRIMAN BEGAN to ascend the steps to the main entrance of the New York Post building, then stopped. He’d climbed these steps a thousand times over the last few years. This morning, however, was different. This morning, Boxing Day, he’d been summoned to the office of his editor, Paul Petowski, for an unscheduled meeting.
Such a thing was very unusual. Petowski didn’t like meetings—he preferred to stand in the middle of the newsroom and yell out his commands, rapid-fire, scattering assignments and follow-ups and research jobs like confetti over the surrounding staff. In Harriman’s experience, people were summoned to Petowski’s office for one of only two reasons: to get either chewed out—or fired.
He climbed the final steps and went through the revolving door into the lobby. Not for the first time since the day before, he felt plagued with self-doubt about his article—and the theory behind it. Oh, naturally, it had been vetted and okayed before publication, as had its follow-up, but he’d heard through the grapevine that it had caused quite a reaction. But what kind of reaction? Had it backfired? Was there blowback? He stepped into the elevator, swallowing painfully, and pressed the button for the ninth floor.
When he stepped out into the newsroom, the place seemed unusually quiet. To Harriman, the quiet had an ominous undertone: a watching, listening quality, as if the very walls were waiting for something bad to happen. Christ, was it really possible he had screwed up big time? His theory had seemed so sound—but he’d been wrong before. If he got booted from the Post, he’d have to leave town if he was going to find another job in the newspaper business. And with papers everywhere losing circulation and cutting costs, it would be a bitch to land another position, even with his reputation. He’d be lucky to get a job covering the dog races in Dubuque.
Petowski’s office was in the back of the huge room. The door was closed, the shade pulled down over the window—another bad sign. As he threaded his way between the desks, passing people who were making a show of being busy, he could nevertheless feel every eye swiveling toward him. He glanced at his watch: ten o’clock. It was time.
He approached the door, knocked diffidently.
“Yeah?” came Petowski’s gruff voice.
“It’s Bryce,” Harriman said, working hard to keep his voice from squeaking.
“Come in.”
Harriman turned the knob, pushed the door open. He took a step in, then stopped. It took him a moment to process just what he was looking at. The small office was crowded with people: not just Petowski, but Petowski’s boss, the deputy managing editor; her boss, the executive editor; even Willis Beaverton, the crusty old publisher himself. Seeing Harriman, they all broke out into applause.
As if in a dream, he heard the ovation; he felt his hand being pumped; felt hands slapping his back. “Brilliant piece of work, son!” Beaverton, the publisher, told him in a blast of cigar breath. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“You doubled our newsstand circulation, single-handedly,” said Petowski, his usual scowl replaced by an avaricious smile. “That was the biggest Christmas issue we’ve had in almost twenty years.”
Despite the early hour, somebody broke out a bottle of champagne. There were toasts; there were plaudits and laudations; Beaverton made a short speech. And then they all filed out again, each congratulating Harriman in turn as they went past. In a minute, the office was empty save for him and Petowski.
“Bryce, you’ve stumbled on something big,” Petowski said, moving back behind his desk and pouring the last of the champagne into a plastic cup. “Reporters search their entire lives for a story like this.” He drained the cup, let it drop into the wastebasket. “You stay on this Decapitator story, hear me? Stay on it hard.”
“I intend to.”
“I have a suggestion, though.”
“Yes?” Harriman asked, suddenly cautious.
“This one percenter versus ninety-nine percenter angle. That really touched a nerve. Play it up. Focus on those one percenter predatory bastards and what they’re doing to this city. Guys like Ozmian in their glass towers lording it above the rest. Is this city going to become a playground for the uber-rich while the rest barely scrape together a living in the darkness below? You get what I mean?”
“I sure do.”
“And this phrase you used in the last piece, City of Endless Night. That was good. Damn good. Turn it into a kind of mantra, work it into every piece.”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, and by the way: as of now, I’m giving you a hundred-dollar-a-week raise.” He leaned over the desk and—with a final slap to the back—ushered Harriman out of his office.
Harriman stepped through the door and into the big newsroom. His shoulders stung from Petowski’s hearty blow. As he glanced slowly around at the sea of faces staring back at him—and, in particular, took in the sour expressions of his young rivals—he began to sense, with a kind of golden inner glow, the upwelling of a feeling quite unlike any he’d ever experienced before: intense, total, and consummate vindication.
31
BALDWIN DAY DETACHED the five-terabyte external hard drive from the desktop computer and slipped it into his briefcase for the short journey to the top floor of the Seaside Financial Center building near Battery Park. He made the same trip once a day, carrying the precious data that kept the company, LFX Financial, speeding along the highway of profit and yet more profit. On that drive were the names and personal information of many thousands of people his data-marketing team’s research had turned up as leads, or, as they called them in the maze of call center cube farms that occupied three floors of the Seaside complex, “colonels.” The leads were mostly retired vets and the spouses of soldiers on active duty. Most precious of all the “colonels” were the widows of vets who owned homes with paid-off mortgages. Every day at 4 PM sharp, Day delivered this hard drive to the executive office suite on the top floor, where the founders and co-CEOs of the firm, Gwen and Rod Burch, had their offices. The Burches would peruse the lists of leads, and they had a nose for sniffing out the best from the extraordinary masses of data. They would pass along their edited and annotated list to the massive boiler room operation of LFX Financial, which would go to work on it, calling thousands of “colonels,” trying to land them as “clients,” although the more appropriate word, Day thought, might be suckers. Every boiler room caller had to sign up at least eight clients a day, forty a week—or be fired.