The Righteous Men (2006) Page 4

  This was not some new phase. He had always been ambitious.

  Even at college, he had worked hard: when he was not editing Cherwell he was trying to hawk tales of university life to Fleet Street. That was what he was like.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Will?’

  ‘Oh, hi, Dad.’

  ‘I was just calling to see if you enjoyed the concert.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I loved it,’ Will said, running his fingers through his hair and facing the floor. How could he have been so stupid? ‘I should have called. Amazing choir.’

  ‘You sound subdued.’

  ‘No, just tired. It’s been a long day. Remember that thing I was called out on after the concert, that killing? I had this idea to take what everyone thinks is a bog-standard murder and see what really happened. “Portrait of a crime statistic”, the life behind the death, that kind of thing.’

  Beth’s presence behind the slammed door of their bedroom was burning up the apartment. Surely he should be going over there, talking through the door, coaxing her back out.

  Or at least coaxing his way in.

  ‘That’s good thinking. What did you find out?’

  ‘That he was a low-life pimp sleazeball.’

  ‘Well, I guess that’s no great surprise. Not in that place.

  Still, I can’t wait to read your IMF piece: much more you, I suspect. Listen, Will, Linda’s gesturing. It’s a dinner for Habitat — “you know who” is here — and we’re expected to mingle.

  Speak soon/ Even on his nights off, thought Will, his father and his ‘partner’ — a word Will could not bring himself to utter except in quotation marks — were doing something morally worthwhile.

  Habitat for Humanity was one of his father’s favourite charities. ‘I like the idea of a cause that asks you to give your time and your labour, not just your money,’ Monroe Sr had said, more than once. ‘They ask you to open your heart, not just your pocketbook.’ Hanging in the judge’s chambers was a photograph of himself and the former president — ‘you know who’ — each midway up a ladder, both clad in lumberjack shirts, the ex-president holding a hammer. They were taking part in one of Habitat’s trademark events: building a house for the homeless in a single day. In Alabama or somewhere.

  He wondered about all this great do-gooding fervour of his father’s. In fact, he was suspicious of it. The most cynical reading was that it was merely a career move, designed to burnish William Monroe Sr’s image as a man of fine character, eminently suited to a place on America’s highest bench.

  More specifically, Will wondered if his father was trying to improve his chances with the evangelical Christian constituency that were such key players in the nomination of judges to the Supreme Court. Some of his father’s rivals were committed, vocal Christians. A secular liberal like William Monroe Sr could not match that, but if he could smooth out some of his hard, godless edges, it could only help. That, at least, was his son’s guess.

  Will tiptoed over to the bedroom, creaking the door open just a crack. Beth was fast asleep. He closed the door; recovered what was left of the pasta and ate it from the saucepan.

  He felt as if a high wall had just appeared in their apartment — and he and his wife were on opposite sides of it.

  He reached for the remote and jabbed on his default channel: CNN.

  ‘International news now, and more trouble in London for Britain’s finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gavin Curtis, today under fire from the Church. The Bishop of Birmingham took to Britain’s House of Lords to step up the pressure.’

  Will sat up to take a close look. Curtis looked harried and much older than Will had remembered him. He had come to Oxford when Will was a student. Curtis was then in opposition, shadowing the environment department. He had come up to act as lead speaker in an Oxford Union debate: ‘This House believes the end of the world is nigh.’ Will was then the news editor on Cherwell — and he had given himself the plum assignment of interviewing the visiting politician.

  He had not thought about it in years, but at the time Curtis had left quite a mark. He had taken Will seriously, treating him as a real journalist when Will could not have been much more than nineteen. The funny thing was Curtis had not seemed like a politician at all, more like a teacher. He had constantly peppered their conversation with references to books and films, wondering if Will had read some obscure Dutch theologian or seen a new and controversial Polish movie. Will had left their conversation feeling inadequate but also convinced Curtis was destined for oblivion: he seemed too intellectual for the blood sport of high politics.

  As his former interviewee had risen through the Cabinet, Will became embarrassed by his own lack of political foresight.

  CNN was now showing a clip of a white-haired cleric in a grey suit with just a slice of purple showing underneath. The bishop’s face, flushed with wrath, seemed to be trying to match the colour of his shirt. CNN identified him as the leader of the British equivalent of America’s Church of the Reborn Jesus, a fiercely moral wing of Christian evangelism. ‘This is a sinful man!’ he was saying of the Chancellor, to the murmured rhubarb of agreement and disagreement in the chamber. If it is true that he has been embezzling from the public purse, he must be cast out!’

  Will turned it off and went to the computer. Beth would sleep till morning now. He thought about waking her up so they could talk some more. They had a rule: never go to bed on a fight. But she was so deeply asleep he would hardly score any points by disturbing her now. He had seen how she looked. She could wear a dozen different expressions in the course of the night: serene, brow furrowed, even ironic amusement. More than once, Will had been woken by the sound of his wife laughing in her sleep at some secret joke. But just now, even with her autumn-brown hair falling over most of her face, he spotted what he feared was a worry line in her forehead, as if she was concentrating hard.

  He imagined smoothing it away, with just a touch of his hand.

  Perhaps he should go back in and do just that. No, he thought.

  What if she woke up and their row reopened? Better to leave it be.

  Might as well pull an all-nighter instead, write up the Macrae story and deliver it first thing. At least that would impress Harden. And it would be an excuse not to go into the bedroom.

  At the keyboard, his mind kept wandering away from Letitia, Howard and the streets of Brownsville. He knew what Beth wanted and biology, or something, was standing in their way. He had been encouraged by the hospital’s attitude: give it time. But Beth was not used to being a patient. She liked to sit in the other chair. And she wanted clarity: a diagnosis, a course of action.

  Besides, he knew, getting pregnant was only part of the story. Beth had become irritated by his professional singlemindedness, his determination to make his mark. When they first met, she would say how much she liked his drive; she found it sexy. She admired his refusal to coast along, to trade on his father’s prestige. He had made things difficult for himself — he could have gone back to America when he turned eighteen and used the family name to breeze into Yale — and she admired that. Now, though, she wanted the ambition to cool down. There were other priorities.

  He finally crashed out just after four am. He dreamed he was on a boating lake, pushing a punt like some cheesy gondolier. Facing him, twirling a parasol, was a woman. It was probably Beth but he could not quite see. He tried squinting, determined to make out the face. But the sun was in his eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Monday, 10.47am, Manhattan

  The good sinner: the story of a New York life — and death.

  Will stared at it, not on B6 or B11 or even B3 but A1: the front page of The New York Times. He had stared at it on the subway into work, looked at it some more as he walked to the office and had spent most of the time at his desk pretending not to look at it.

  He had arrived to a bombardment of congratulatory email, from colleagues sitting three feet away and old friends living in different contin
ents, who had learned of his feat via the paper’s online edition. He was receiving a plaudit by phone when he felt a surge move through his little desk-pod, a silent movement of energy like the magnetic force that passes through iron filings. It was Townsend McDougal, making a rare descent from Mount Olympus to walk among the troops.

  Suddenly backs were stiffened; rictus smiles adopted. Will noticed Amy Woodstein reflexively reaching round to the back of her head to plump up her hair. The veteran City Life columnist sought to tidy his desk with a single back-sweep of his arm, thereby despatching a couple of crumpled Marlboro packets into his pencil drawer.

  The high command at The New York Times was still getting used to McDougal: appointed as executive editor only a few months earlier, he was an unlikely choice. His immediate predecessors had been drawn from that segment of New York society that had produced so many of the city’s best known names and given it so much of its humour and language: liberal Jews. Previous New York Times editors looked and sounded like Woody Allen or Philip Roth.

  Townsend McDougal was a rather different proposition. A New England aristocrat with Mayflower roots and Wasp manners, he wore a panama hat in summertime and tasselled loafers in winter. But that was not what had made Times veterans anxious when his appointment was announced. No, what made the editor and The New York Times an unlikely fit was the simple fact that Townsend McDougal was a born again Christian.

  He had not yet made Bible study classes compulsory, nor did he ask reporters to link hands in prayer before each night’s print run. But it was a culture shock for a temple of secularism like The New York Times. Columnists and critics on the paper were used to a tone that was not quite mocking but certainly distant. Evangelical Christianity was something that existed out there, in flyover country — in the vast midwest or the deep south between the coasts. None of them would ever say so explicitly, still less write it, but the undeclared assumption was that born-again faith was the preserve of the simple folk. ‘Trust in Jesus’ was for the women in polyester trousers watching Pat Robertson on the 700 Club, or for recovering alcoholics who needed to ‘turn around’ their lives and declare their salvation in a bumper sticker. It was not for Ivy League sophisticates like themselves.

  Townsend McDougal unsettled every one of those presumptions. Now Times journalists had to check the default arithmetic that stated that secular equalled smart. From now on, religion would no longer be cast as a matter of poor taste, like big hair or TV dinners. It was to be treated with respect.

  The change, in articles from the fashion pages to the sports section, became apparent within weeks of McDougal’s arrival.

  The new executive editor had not sent out a memo. He did not have to.

  Now he was walking among the Metro staff, with his gaze aimed in only one direction.

  ‘Look, I better go,’ Will said into the phone in what he hoped was a low whisper. As Will replaced the receiver, McDougal began.

  ‘Welcome to the Holy of Holies, William. The front page of the greatest newspaper in the world.’ Will felt himself blush.

  It was not embarrassment at the compliment, nor even McDougal’s klaxon of a voice, bellowing his praise all around the office in an accent that was so Brahmin as to be almost English, though that was embarrassing enough. It was the ‘William’ that did it. Will thought his father had reached an understanding with McDougal: that there was to be no public acknowledgement of the friendship between them. Will knew he would be resented as it was — the hotshot young journo on the fast track — without his colleagues assuming he was the beneficiary of that old-fashioned career-enhancing drug, nepotism.

  Now it was out there; McDougal’s decibels had seen to that. The internal emails would be flying: Guess who’s on first-name terms with the boss? As it happened, Will had applied for this job the same way as everyone else: sending in a letter and turning up for an interview. But no one would believe that now. He could feel his neck becoming hot.

  ‘You’ve made a good start, William. Taking some unpromising raw material and turning it into something worthy of page one. I sometimes wish some of your more mature colleagues would show similar degrees of industry and verve.’

  Will wondered if McDougal was deliberately setting out to make his life hell. Was this some kind of initiation rite practised by the Skull and Bones set at Yale, where he and his father had first become such pals? The editor might as well have painted a target on Will’s back and handed crossbows to each of his colleagues.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I shall be expecting more from you, William. And I shall be following this story with interest.’

  With that, and a swish of his finely tailored grey suit, Townsend McDougal was gone. The collective posture of the reporters who had previously been sitting to attention now slumped. The City Life columnist opened up his top drawer, reached for his cigarettes and headed for the fire escape.

  Will had an equally instant urge. Without thinking, he dialled Beth’s number. After the second ring, he abandoned it. A call about a triumph at work would confirm everything she had said about him. No, he still had to do penance.

  ‘Now, William.’ It was Walton, his chair swivelled round to face the common space that linked them with Woodstein and Schwarz. He was looking upward, the lower half of his face covered with a supercilious smile. He looked like a malevolent schoolboy.

  Despite being nearly fifty years old, there was something infantile about Terence Walton. He had the unnerving habit of playing hi-tech computer games while he worked, rattling the keys as he zapped various alien life forms to ‘proceed to the next level’. His fingers seemed to be in constant search of distraction; the moment he had finished one phone call, he would be onto the next. He was always fixing up extracurricular activities, a radio appearance here, a well-paid lecture there. His work from Delhi had been highly praised and he was in fairly regular demand as an expert. His book, Terence Walton’s India, was credited with introducing the American public to a country they barely knew.

  Inside the building, Walton was held in slightly lower esteem. That much. Will had picked up. The seating arrange ments alone confirmed it: a returned foreign correspondent placed alongside the Metro staff’s newest recruit. It was hardly star treatment. Quite what Walton had done to deserve this slight Will did not yet know.

  ‘We were just discussing your front-page triumph. Good job. Of course, there will be doubters, sceptics, who wonder what greater light this tale shed, but I am not one of them. No, William, not me.’

  ‘Will. It’s Will.’

  ‘The executive editor seems to think it’s William. You might need to have a word with him. Anyway, my question is this: why, I wonder, should this little story be on the front page?

  What larger social phenomenon did it expose? I fear our new editor does not yet fully understand the sacred bottom left slot. It’s not just for amusing or interesting vignettes. It should serve as a window onto a new world.’

  ‘I think it was doing that. It was correcting a stereotype about urban life in this city. This man seemed like a sleaze ball but he was, you know, better than that.’

  ‘Yes, that’s great. And well done! Tremendous job. But remember what they say about beginner’s luck: very hard to pull off that trick twice. I doubt even you could find too many “tales of ordinary people”—’ he was putting on a cutesy, Pollyanna-ish voice ‘—that would interest The New York Times. At least not The New York Times I used to work for. Once counts as an achievement, William; twice would be a miracle.’

  Will turned back to his computer, to his email inbox. Woodstein, Amy. In the subject field: Coffee?

  Five minutes later Will was in the vast Times canteen, all but deserted at this morning hour. He paced up and down by the glass cases which housed Times merchandise: sweatshirts, baseball caps, toy models of the old Times delivery trucks. Amy materialized beside him, clutching a cup of herbal tea.

  ‘I just wanted to say sorry about all that just now. That’s the downside
of working here: lot of testosterone, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘It was fine—’

  ‘People are very competitive. And Terry Walton especially.’

  ‘I got that impression.’

  ‘Do you know the story with him?’

  ‘I know he used to be in Delhi and that he was forced to come back.’

  ‘They accused him of expenses fraud. They couldn’t prove it, which is why he’s still here. But there’s certainly some trust issues.’

  ‘About money, you mean?’

  ‘Oh no, not just about money.’ She gave a bitter chuckle.

  ‘What else then?’

  ‘Well, look, you didn’t hear this from me, OK? But my advice is to lock up your notebooks when Terry’s around.

  And talk quietly when you’re on the phone.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Terry Walton steals stories. He’s famous for it. When he was in the Middle East they called him The Thief of Baghdad.’

  Will was smiling.

  ‘It’s actually not that funny. There are journalists around the world who could talk all night about the crimes of Terence Walton. Will, I’m serious: lock away your notebooks, your documents, everything. He will read them.’

  ‘So that’s why he writes like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Walton has this very tiny handwriting, completely indecipherable.

  That’s deliberate, isn’t it? To make sure no one reads his notes.’

  ‘I’m just saying, be careful.’

  When he arrived back in the newsroom he found Glenn Harden sticking a Post-it to his screen. ‘Come up and see me some time.’