Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (3 page)

 
          
“I’ll
do my best, sir,” Jack said.

 
          
“Don’t
do
your
best, boy. Do
my
best.” His head lowered once more,
and he read, “ ‘The
Galaxy
Clones a
Human Being.’ ” Awed, he looked down the table at Jack. “We do? We could do
that?”

 
          
“I’d
need help from the science staff, of course,” Jack said. “It might—”

 
          
“Which
human being?”
Massa
asked. “Man or woman?”

 
          
“Well,
I was thinking of a man originally—”

 
          
“Where’s
the cheesecake?”

 
          
“We
could do a woman, of course,” Jack conceded. “But remember, sir, it’s going to
be a baby for—”

 
          
“A
what?”
Massa
glowered. “You mean we don’t start with a
person?”

 
          
“No,
sir,” Jack said, with every appearance of calm. “Clones have to be bom like
anybody—”

 
          
“You
mean we got a
baby
around here for
twenty years?”

 
          
“Well,
we don’t have to—”

 
          
Binx,
who at odd moments tried to help other people, even though no one ever tried to
help him, said, “It might be a mascot, sir.”

 
          
“Oh,
no,”
Massa
said, with a negative wag of the beer
bottle. “We had that goat that time, and it didn’t work out. A baby isn’t gonna
be better than a goat.”

 
          
Jack
gave Binx a quick expressionless look as
Massa
redlined the clone. Binx smiled like a
poison victim.

 
          
Massa
read, “ There
Are
Alligators in
New York City
.’ ”

 
          
“Sewers!”
Jack cried.

 
          
Potentially
offended,
Massa
glared down the table. “What?”

 
          
“
New York City
sewers,” Jack explained. “That’s where the
alligators are.”

 
          
“Bushwah,”
muttered an editor to Jack’s right.

 
          
Massa
waved Jack’s paper. “Not what it says
here.”

 
          
“My
secretary must have—”

 
          
“Sewers.”
Massa
wrote it in, using a black pen, then picked
up the red again, held it poised, read aloud: “ There
Are
Alligators in New York City Sewers.’ ” An infinitesimal pause,
and the decision: “No.” The red pencil drew the lines. “That’s anti-Florida,”
Massa
said. “Also, there’s nobody
in
New York
.” It was well known that
Massa
had stayed completely away from the Greater
New York Area for the last seventeen years mostly because three of his cousins
in the garbage and jukebox industry would put several bullets in his head if he
ever did go back. Before the move to
Florida
, the
Galaxy
had been published out of
New Brunswick
,
New Jersey
.

 
          
“Can
I help you, young lady?”

 
          
Everybody
looked up at the cold sound of Harsch’s voice, to see him looking at an
attractive but apparently nervous young woman dawdling near the table and
fiddling with her shoulder bag. She was, Jack noted, the girl he had seen from
the window, and she looked better close up.

 
          
Though
nervous. “Oh,” she said, tripping over herself by trying to back up without appearing
to back up. “Mr. Harsch? I’m a new employee, I’m Sara—”

 
          
“All
right,” Harsch said. “Fine.” To
Massa
he said, “What have we got left?”

 
          
“Just
Boy Cartwright,”
Massa
said, rifing papers. “He’s no trouble, you go on.”

 
          
Across
the table from Jack, Boy Cartwright, a despicable Englishman of about forty,
face puffy from years of alcohol and starch, smiled the smug smile of a winner.
Boy
was no trouble. Boy was a
good
Boy.

 
          
Massa
squinted toward the new girl. He said,
“She’ll talk to scientists, right?”

 
          
“They
do like a college girl,” Harsch agreed. Harsch left the elevator to talk to the
college girl, and
Massa
considered Boy’s list. “ The Argentine Navy Caused the Bermuda
Triangle,’ ” he read, and lifted his head to show a happy smile. “That’s terrific,
Boy. Terrific.”

 
          
Boy
purred, eyes half closed in feline pleasure.

 
          
The
strange thing was, Sara had turned the job down back when it was offered. That
was a year and a half ago, up in
Syracuse
, when the recruiters came around in the
spring to talk to the journalism graduates. The
Galaxy
had a terrible reputation, a garish supermarket tabloid full
of TV stars and creatures from outer space, but the recruiter had been a
sensible, plausible woman, not much older than Sara herself, and she’d been
tempted. Here was a chance to move from the cold dark Northeast to sunny
Florida
, to work in what sounded like a fun
environment, to get a fabulous salary.

 
          
Too
fabulous, that’s what the problem had been. Thirty-five thousand dollars a year
for a trainee? There had to be a catch in it somewhere. Weird scenarios of
white slavery had crossed her mind —Florida was, after all, the same direction
as South America—which was ridiculous, of course, but there had to be something
wrong with it somewhere, or why would they pay so much? Besides, through a
friend at school, she’d been offered a low-paying job on a small
New England
paper. It wasn’t so far from home, it was
real journalism on a comfortably small scale, and the editor looked a lot like
Ed Asner. And the salary didn’t make her nervous.

 
          
But
here she was, after all, a year and a half later, and
everything
made her nervous, including the ice-eyed Jacob Harsch,
approaching now from the elevator, while everybody else returned their careful
attention to Mr. DeMassi. A cold smile on his cold face, Harsch made his way
among the black lines—even he obeyed, she noticed— and offered a hand that Sara
was not surprised to find also cold. He held hers briefly, saying, “Remind me
of your name, dear.”

 
          
“Sara
Joslyn.”

 
          
“Yes,
I remember your resume.” His cold hand on her elbow, he led her away from the
editorial meeting, down along the row of elevators. He was very tall, and he
bent his head above her shoulder, speaking confidentially in a raspy voice.
“You worked for a newspaper in
Vermont
.”

 
          
“
New Hampshire
,” she corrected. “It closed. Or it was
merged, actually.”

 
          
“We
won’t be closing,” Harsch said, merely pointing out the fact, not speaking with
any particular satisfaction. “We fulfill a need, and people come to us,” he
explained. They had come to a stop past the elevators, in an open space just
before a librarylike area of tall bookshelves filled with phone directories and
other reference books. “We think of ourselves as a community service
organization.”

 
          
“Oh?”
Sara said politely.

 
          
“Not
only in our hard news,” Harsch told her, “but also in our features. Our
audience is the modem woman, in all her complexity.”

 
          
Remembering
the gaudy front pages mounted on the entry walls, Sara nodded soberly, saying,
“I see.”

 
          
“Not
only as a housewife and mother,” Harsch went on, his manner calm and secure,
“but as a consumer, a sophisticated audience for today’s entertainment, and as
the keeper of the flame of Western civilization. We think we here at the
Galaxy
know today’s more knowledgeable,
more interested, more
involved
woman
pretty well, and our newsstand figures back us up. Our average weekly sale is
comfortably above five million copies, which gives us sufficient financial
strength to be able to go out and aggressively
get
the stories we want, the stories we know our reader is
interested in.”

 
          
Sara
nodded, listening, keeping her thoughts to herself. This was the way the
recruiter had talked, a year and a half ago, but the recruiter had spoken more
passionately, selling the concept. Harsch didn’t sell; he was more like a
priest describing his religion. His assurance was so total that neither
miracles nor agnostics could faze him. Sara, listening, wondered if the man
could possibly believe what he was saying. We’re all just here for the buck,
aren’t we? It didn’t seem a good question to ask.

 
          
And
what about her dead man, the man with the bullet in his head out on the
highway? Her first story in the new job, and she’d imagined herself running in
with the news, flinging herself into a chair in front of a typewriter, banging
out the copy while co-workers in the comers of her imagination murmured, “The
new kid’s okay, you know?” She already had her lead: “The car radio played a
sprightly melody, but the driver couldn’t hear it anymore. He was dead.”

 
          
Somehow,
Jacob Harsch didn’t seem like a person who would be
interested
in a dead body beside the road. His world was more
rarefied than that. I’ll tell my editor when I meet him, she decided.

 
          
Meantime,
Harsch continued what was probably a set speech: “Our financial strength also
makes it possible for us to hire the people we want, particularly the
hardworking far-seeing young women like yourself who will help us keep the
Weekly Galaxy
brisk and alert and
relevant to that ever-changing audience out there.”

 
          
“Relevant,”
Sara echoed, no expression in her voice.

 
          
“Yes,
relevant,” Harsch said, smiling grimly down upon her. “We’re not afraid of that
word, Sara. All we’re afraid of is getting stale, old, tired. That’s why we
want
young women like yourself, who will
challenge us, make us toe the mark, keep us . . . relevant.”

 
          
“Gosh”
was all Sara could think of to say.

 
          
Having
passed back everybody’s papers—Jack gazed in quiet despair at the many red
lines now crisscrossing his own contributions—
Massa
finished this morning’s editorial meeting
with a little general diatribe, saying, “Nobody’s giving me any news about John
Michael Mercer. Do you people realize that man is the hottest star on
television? Do you know his series,
Breakpoint
,
is the number one rated series? And it’s shot right here in
Florida
!”

 
          
Massa
glared around, waiting for an answer, and
finally an editor to Jack’s left said, “Mercer doesn’t seem to be doing
anything right now, sir.”

           
“John Michael Mercer?”
Massa
stared, popeyed. “What kind of answer is
that? He’s
interesting!
People want
to know about him.
I
want to know
about him! Last night— On the show last night, he drove that little sports car
right
through
a burning bam! It was
terrific! I was on the edge of my chair! You tell me he doesn’t
do
anything? He drives through a burning
bam, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he tell us what he thinks about
that?”

           
A different editor,
reluctance in his face and in his voice, said, “Uh, sir, John Michael Mercer
won’t talk to us.”

 
          
“What?”
Massa
was astonished. “But we’re
America
! The
Galaxy
is the American people!”

           
The editor nodded. “We have
explained that to him, yes, sir.”

           
Pointing generally—but glaring, it
seemed to Jack, particularly at Jack—
Massa
said, “I want John Michael Mercer stories.”
Then, using the same fmger, he poked the button that caused his desk to recede
back into the elevator and the elevator doors to close. The editorial meeting
was over.

 
          
His
cold hand once again on her elbow, Harsch led Sara back toward the conference
table, saying, “Let’s get you settled now. I’m giving you to one of the best
editors in the shop. You’ll learn a great deal from Jack.”

 
          
“I’m
sure I will,” Sara murmured.

 
          
The
editorial conference was apparently over; DeMassi and his elevator/office were
gone, and many worried-looking people were getting up from the table, moving
away. Harsch called, “Jack! Just a minute, Jack.”

 
          
It
was the rude man, who’d run into Sara on arrival. Now she could see he was
about thirty, tall and well built, with thinning brown hair, and that he would
probably be handsome if he didn’t look so cranky and discontented. He made an
obvious effort to smooth out the bad temper in his face when Harsch approached
him, but failed. “Jack,” Harsch said, “this is Sara Joslyn, she’ll be on your
team. Sara, this is Jack Ingersoll.”

 
          
Jack
Ingersoll was so thoroughly dislikable that Sara put on an extra-large smile to
acknowledge the introduction, saying, “How do you do?”

 
          
“I’ve
been worse,” Ingersoll said, which was hard to believe.

 
          
“Jack
will take care of you now,” Harsch said, with a distant smile, and he left.

 
          
“You
might as well come along,” Ingersoll told her. He had some crumpled pieces of
paper in his hand, which he waved vaguely toward the area of the black lines.
“What was the name again?”

 
          
“Sara,”
she said, as they started off.

 
          
“I’m
Jack.” They walked between the lines.

 
          
“I
remember,” Sara told him, with a
faint edge in her voice.

 
          
“Don’t
kick me, lady,” Jack Ingersoll said, “I just left my bowels back there.”

 
          
“What
was
all that?”

 
          
“Every
morning at
ten a.m.
,”
he said redun- dantiy, “the editors, of whom I am at least one, go to that
shrine back there and lay thirty story ideas at the feet of—”

 
          
“Thirty!
Every
day?”

 
          
“Believe
it or not,” Jack Ingersoll said, “I came here as a young and beautiful woman.
Much like yourself.”

 
          
She
looked sharply at him, but somehow the remark hadn’t had the quality of a pass,
or a compliment. That left it unanswerable, so Sara continued beside him in
silence.

 
          
The
result of the editorial conference was a great increase in the noise and
activity within the land of the black lines. Many reporters had abandoned their
tables on the other side of the room to run over here for quick meetings with
their editors. Other editors were on the phone, or running back and forth
between their own and their neighbors’ offices; always going around to the door
space, of course.

 
          
But
why was that man over there putting on a Bela Lugosi mask and a black cape? Why
were four women with English accents fugally singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”
into a cassette recorder? Since today was the twelfth of July, why was one man
assembling an artificial Christmas tree on his desk?

 
          
One
thing about working here; it wasn’t going to be dull.

 
          
Jack
led the new one into his squaricle, where Mary Kate said, “What’s the score,
boss?”

 
          
“Five.”

 
          
“Ouch.”
Mary Kate shook her bewigged head. Bonuses and awards and raises and squaricles
beside the windows were all dependent on how many stories a team actually
got into the paper
. Jack’s team usually
did pretty well, but for the last week or so he’d been in a slump, and the team
had reason to be worried.