“What do you mean a journalist or whatever?”
“I just mean when your career is on track. When you’re doing whatever you want to do.” I shook my head, tossed the pillow onto the headboard, where it lay at an awkward angle.
“You’ve never had faith in me.”
“That’s not true. I’ve always stood by you.”
“That’s easy to do in college, easy to say when you’re not even there. But what about now? Would you stand by me now?”
Mya’s face grew cold, all the life fell away from her. “Don’t you ever dare talk to me about not being there.”
Mya stepped forward and put her arms limply around my neck. She pressed her lips against mine, then removed them. I left moments later.
The next time I spoke to Mya, three men wanted me dead.
3
If I was less ambitious, none of it would have happened. But I was stubborn, impatient. I like to think all great minds are. But I never dreamed ambition might cost me my life.
My fourth day at the Gazette, Wallace offered up my first reporting assignment. It came at the perfect time, too. Mya and I hadn’t seen each other in days. I was in desperate need of a pick-me-up. And an assignment did a better job of that than a six-pack.
When Wallace called me into his office, the possibilities flew through my head. I knew the stories Jack O’Donnell was reporting. Sometimes when I passed him on the way back from the Flavia machine, I’d look over his shoulder and see the words on his computer.
For the last six months, Jack had been working steadily on a story so big, the Gazette was planning to run a weeklong feature upon completion. I knew what the story was. Everybody in the office did. Jack had risked every source and even his life to dig it up. Jack was investigating the brewing war between two organized crime families, a story that first took shape twenty years ago when O’Donnell wrote a book chronicling the resurrection of the New York Cosa Nostra, personified in the form of John Gotti. The book sold almost a million copies and was made into a film starring James Caan. When I was a teenager back in Bend, I bought a tattered copy at a used bookstore. It sat on my shelf like a trophy. And now, years later, in the wake of Gotti’s death, O’Donnell was exploring the new wave of organized crime-the men fighting over the crumbs of an empire, trying to create their own dynasties in the wake of Gotti’s Rome.
Due to public outcries, even the mayor had acknowledged it with hyperbolic platitudes, calling the unrest an ugly river of bile trying to flow up out of the sewers and erode the peace of the last decade. I wrote that quote down.
Following Gotti’s death, mob activity in NewYork had all but vanished. But recently bodies had been turning up, each punched with more holes than a drug addict’s memoir. Talking heads got worked up on Fox News, warning us that the sleeping giant had awakened. A man was shot dead outside a famous Chinese restaurant. A fire broke out at a tailor shop in the meatpacking district. There were murders so ghastly the papers tripped over themselves to see who could color it in the purplest prose.
The two men assumed to have picked up the slack were Jimmy “The Brute” Saviano and Michael DiForio. While I’m all in favor of creepy nicknames, “The Brute” seemed a little too overt for my tastes. Too in-your-face. Like a guy nicknaming himself “Killer” in the hopes it would make up for the fact that one of his testicles hadn’t descended.
The Saviano family had started out small. More like a crew with a couple dozen loyal thugs who knew their chance to pocket six figures was only possible through the noble profession of cracking heads. Guys more loyal to the amenities of the lifestyle than to Puzo’s Omerta.
But once Gotti’s crew folded, his men searched for a new start, another strand of crooked DNA. Most shifted allegiances, promising obedience to Saviano.
The other family, the one that seemed to be instigating this 21st-century war, was led by Michael “Four Corners” DiForio, who’d inherited the mantel from his father, Michael, who’d inherited it from his father, Michael. Clearly originality wasn’t what put the family on the map.
In my opinion, the nickname “Four Corners” was much more effective than “The Brute.” It referred to DiForio’s preferred disposal of his enemies, via the act of literally cutting him-and sometimes her-limb from limb and sending them to the four corners of the earth. Obviously nobody had informed DiForio that the earth was round. After all, it really is the thought that counts.
I knew I had to cut my teeth before getting close to stories of that caliber. Yet in the back of my mind I hoped Jack might have heard some good things, come across my clips from Bend. Maybe he’d need help with research, someone to make a few phone calls, pick up his dry cleaning, whatever.
Wallace called me into his office on a Thursday, and I was pretty sure he could see my heart beating through my shirt. The thin smile on his lips meant he surely had a hard-hitting story for me. Something from the top of the pile. Uncovering some deep-rooted corruption that helped the common good. I had no sense of entitlement and wasn’t driven by ego or narcissism. I just wanted to be the best damn reporter the world had ever seen.
My chin dropped when he handed me a white index card. A name, telephone number and address were scribbled on the front. Without looking up Wallace said, “I need an obituary for tomorrow’s paper. I want to see copy by five o’clock.”
I stood there for a moment, scanning his face for sarcasm. Maybe Wallace had a sense of humor. Nope, nothing.
“All right,” I said, pulling out a notepad and pen. “Who’s…ahem…Arthur Shatzky?”
Wallace scratched his beard. “Arthur Shatzky is-was, I should say-a classics professor at Harvard until he retired about fifteen years ago.” Wallace looked at me, tented his fingers and breathed into them. “Write something nice, Henry. Jack O’Donnell was an old student of Arthur’s.”
I wrote down the info, my heart slowly sinking. Not exactly front-page material.
“And Jack didn’t want to take the story?” I asked. Wallace laughed.
“Jack O’Donnell is a national treasure. He writes what he wants, when he wants. He hasn’t written an obituary in forty years.” Wallace stood up, clamped his hand on my shoulder, squeezed it gently. “Everyone’s got to start somewhere, Henry.”
I offered a weak smile and returned to my desk, making an effort not to drag my heels. Paulina shot me a quick glance that didn’t go unnoticed.
“So what’d Mayor McCheese want?” she asked.
I sat down, said, “Gave me an assignment.”
Paulina’s eyes perked up. I sensed jealousy and shook my head. “Don’t get worked up. He’s got me writing an obituary for one of O’Donnell’s old professors.”
Paulina sniffed, then blew her nose into a tissue that she let float to the floor.
“Been here one week, you’re already writing for O’Donnell.” She seemed more than a little peeved. “You get a few stories syndicated out of some Podunk paper in Bumblefuck, Ohio…”
“Oregon.”
“Same place. I’ve been syndicated around the world, Hank. And Jack’s barely said two words to me in ten years.” She took a sip of black coffee. “And now they have a flavor of the month who probably gets carded at the movie theater.”
I held it in. Kill them with kindness. “It’s just an obit. I’m not writing it ‘for’ Jack.” Paulina let out an exasperated sigh, turned back to her computer. She spoke without bothering to look at me.
“They’ll be saddling up and riding you, Henry. Oh, yes, they will. But that bronco’s gonna buck like you wouldn’t believe. So keep that golden-boy trophy nice and polished, otherwise they’re gonna pawn it and sell it to the next kid who walks through the door and can spell right.”
If I wanted to make a career out of writing obituaries, I was off to the right start. Two weeks later and the
