'I'm not heading out on a campaign swing until late this afternoon.
You have a few minutes to come over to the house and chat?' Hutchins asked. By house, I assumed he meant the White House.
I knew full well what he wanted to chat about, but I also knew I could trade on that for another story, or at least the pieces of another story. And if I had this anonymous source filling my ear, it was good to get as much exposure to Hutchins as I possibly could.
'Of course I could come to the White House, sir,' I said, speaking more formally than before. Martin pumped his fist into the air. I noticed a couple of other early-arriving reporters falling quiet and leaning in my direction for a better hearing vantage.
'Good. How about noon? We'll take a little lunch here, the two invalids. Just show up at the gate, and someone will guide you in.'
Hanging up, I said to Martin as casually as I could, 'Going in to see the president at noon.'
He appeared ready to sit in my lap. His prior look of exhaustion had turned into one of exuberance. One thought did strike him, and he expressed it pretty clearly.
'Why?' he asked.
'Don't know. Maybe he likes my company. Maybe it's good PR for him, lunching with the injured reporter. Maybe he liked my stories Friday and is ready to spout off again. We'll see soon enough.'
'Let's draw up some questions and angles before you go,' Martin said.
'We should still be scouting for something else, in case he fails to make news.' With that, he left my desk in a half trot, half skip. He could have been floating on air. Next I saw of him, he was standing in his glass office, holding the phone up to his ear in a familiar position, a smile spread across his pale face.
By now, a few more colleagues were filtering into the room to cover the assassination or the election that it affected. One or two gave me a hard time about my newfound fame. Julie Gershman was first. When I was married, she was as reliable a flirt as you could ever desire, constantly looking me up and down, tossing seductive smiles in my direction at the drop of a dime. She was compact, tight as a drum, with red hair and almond-shaped eyes that looked like sex personified.
And she knew it. After Katherine's death, she either stopped flirting or I stopped noticing. I think it was the former. I was treated with kid gloves after that, pitied, much to my disdain. I spent most of my time on the road, writing stories from afar, working out of hotel rooms, watching time fly by, stopping in the office only for a day or two at a stretch.
'Well, look who's here, the second coming of Christ,' Gershman said, flipping her little Jackie Onassis haircut behind her ears. 'Taking a break from CNN and the nets to check your messages in here, Jack?
Calling Hollywood? I hear Brad Pitt wants to play you in the movie.'
Well, this was certainly different, and I rather liked it. I had the telephone receiver wedged between my shoulder and ear, and cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. 'Julie, give me a minute, okay? I've got Larry King on the line.'
Actually, I was waiting for directory assistance, listening to a woman's tape-recorded voice repeatedly telling me to please hold, the next available operator would take my call. Why bog down my important colleagues in the mundane details of my day?
A couple of my pals plopped themselves down around my desk and made small talk. Everyone was laughing and carrying on, and I felt on top again, one of them, where I belonged, not the victim of a tragedy, but a reporter doing his job, and doing it damn well, getting breaks, like I always have. Havlicek walked into the bureau and stood over a desk on the other side of the room, having just arrived on a red-eye from the West Coast. 'About time you ended that vacation,' he bellowed across the way. Everyone laughed. I gave him the finger, just letting it float toward the ceiling as I calmly looked the other way, carrying on a conversation. A few minutes later, I pulled myself to my feet, grimacing at my sore ribs, and walked across the room. We met halfway, and he gave me a soft half hug, patting me on the back and saying quietly, 'Welcome back. Time to get to work.'
Newsrooms are inherently cluttered places, and Washington bureaus, while certainly smaller and slightly more sterile, are not much different. In a world of Internet searches and CD-ROM'S, they are inexplicably filled with piles of newspapers, manila folders, and opened books strewn on chaotic desktops. The floors are lined with cardboard boxes holding files and stacks of photocopied documents. The men and women of the newsroom, the reporters and editors, have seen most of what life has to offer and look at everyone and everything with a healthy dose of skepticism. They're a tough lot to impress, tougher still to please. There is the constantly stale smell of overworked people. Phones are ringing every minute, with important-and self-important-professionals on the other end of the line. A bank of facsimile machines gives off an uninterrupted beep, and there is the omnipresent click of computer keyboards. And more than any of that, there is the mystique.
This place was all that and more. Located smack in the middle of downtown Washington, just a few blocks from the White House and, more importantly for my purposes, right next to Morton's of Chicago, the best steakhouse in town, the bureau was mostly one large open room, with about a dozen desks spread quiltwork, a healthy enough distance from each other that you could keep a conversation private if that's what you wanted. Off to one side was a large, plush conference room, and beside that was Martin's office. Both had walls of all glass, and both had vistas, beyond nearby office buildings, of Lafayette Park.
There were characters everywhere you looked. Erskine Berry was the Record's chief economics reporter. He had covered Washington since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and padded around the bureau in a pair of orthopedic shoes, always dressed in a tweed jacket of some sort and a brightly colored bow tie, looking as if he were just about to settle into his regular leather chair at the Metropolitan Club. There was our Capitol Hill reporter, Julie, she of the perfect physique. Michael Reston covered the Supreme Court, and over the two years he had done that job, he had acquired many of the mannerisms you might expect from someone on the bench. He would cock his head. He would occasionally butt into a sentence, politely asking, 'Don't you mean…?' He smoked a pipe. Down the hall, at the reception desk, Barbara ruled with an iron fist. She considered me a surrogate son and over the last couple of days had left several messages on my voice mail at home. When I didn't return the calls- I'm not sure why I didn't-she sent a messenger over with an envelope bearing explicit instructions on what I should do and eat to return to health.
The carnival finally gave way to another day at the office. Havlicek and I agreed to make a round of calls and talk over our angles in the early afternoon. First thing I did, after going through messages and flipping through a large stack of mail, was punch out a number on my phone that got me into the depths of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. A familiar voice answered on the first ring.
'Ron, Flynn here,' I said in my typically warm way. 'Still stuck with the weekend shift, huh?'
'As I live and breathe, if it isn't the star of the fucking city,' said Ron Hancock, a veteran special agent of the FBI.
I interjected, 'I tell you what, first thing tomorrow, I'm going to sign a few glossies for the wife and kids and send them on over.'
'I tell you what, I'll lay them down in the cellar, and the dog will piss all over them.'
Well now, isn't that sweet. Now that we had the niceties out of the way, I cut to the point, even though I wasn't sure what the point was, but you never show the pink part of your stomach to a federal agent, not when you want to use them as a source of information. For all their feigned disgust with reporters, they're actually a bit afraid of us, and a little information goes a long way, if you know how to use it right.
'That's real nice,' I said. 'Listen, one question that's been bothering me since I woke up in the hospital fortunate enough to be staring into her pretty face: what's the line on Samantha Stevens?
Good woman? Bad woman? Respected agent?'
Despite the threat to allow his dog to urinate on the likeness of my face, Hancock was a solid man, an even better agent, and a time-tested friend to the news media, or at least to me. He worked in the intelligence division of the FBI, mostly tracking terrorist activity in the country and outside, shaking down informants, keeping watch on suspected international criminals, plugging into networks of wiretapped information that the average citizen couldn't even fathom existed. I had met him a few years earlier, on a basic drug-smuggling case he worked in Boston. Bored with a pretty small-time investigation, he tossed me a few bones. I got things right and made him look good. We kept in touch ever since, and he was always willing to lend a hand.
Working intelligence, he was clued into avenues all over the country.
Perhaps more important, his natural curiosity made him something of an expert on the internal machinations
