he had lost control of himself… but these John Smiths, these goddamned ambitious kids, these self-important children and their visions of “revealing,” “uncovering,” “exposing” scandals… For what? Civic good? Oh, give me a break! They’re self-centered, that’s all. Juvenile egotists! If they’re so determined to create trouble, to lay bare evil, even if it means libeling people, why can’t they stick with the government? With officeholders? With politicians? With government bureaucrats? They can’t sue! Technically they can—but as a practical matter, they can’t. There they are, yours for the kill! Aren’t they enough for you, you asinine little brats! You mosquitoes! You who live to sting and suck blood and then fly away and hover and wait for the next poor slob feeding at the public trough to turn his bare ass so you can dive-bomb and sting again and suck some more blood! Isn’t that enough for you? Do you have to choose people like Sergei Korolyov who do selfless public good—and probably have enough lawyers on retainer to tie up and humiliate the Miami Herald until it loses all credibility and slinks off into the yellow ooze?
“Now, John,” said Ed, struggling to get his composure back. “Have you thought about the… the… dimensions of such a story, should you write it?”
“How do you mean, sir?”
Ed was speechless again. He did know exactly what he meant, but he had no idea how to say it. How could you look a young reporter in the eye and say, “Kid, don’t you understand? We don’t want any such great stories. Journalism? Don’t you get it? There’s journalism, and there’s the bottom line. And if you don’t mind moving aside for a moment, we have to at least take note of the bottom line here. We’re sorry, but you can’t be Woodward and Bernstein just now. And, incidentally, kindly note that they went after people who couldn’t sue. Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, but he couldn’t sue. They could say he fucked ducks in Rock Creek Park, and he couldn’t sue.”
Struggling, struggling, Ed finally regained the power of speech. “What I mean is, in a case like this, you have to proceed very methodically…” He paused, because he was mainly buying time. He really didn’t know what he meant now.
“Methodically? How do you mean, sir?” said John Smith.
Ed slogged on. “Well… here you’re not dealing with Mayor Cruz or Governor Slate or the Tallahassee Round Ring. You get some leeway with political stories and politicians… politicians…” He studiously avoided the term sue. He didn’t want John Smith to think of that as an operative word here. “You can speculate about a politician and even if you get it wrong, there aren’t likely to be any terrible repercussions, because that’s all part of the game in politics, at least in this country. But when you have a private citizen like Korolyov, with no record of anything like this…”
“Sir, as I understand it, Korolyov is like a lot of the so-called oligarchs who come here. He’s well educated, he’s cultivated, he’s charming, he’s great looking, he knows English, French, and German, and that’s in addition to Russian, of course. He knows art history—I mean, I gather he really knows it—and he knows the art market, but he’s a criminal, Mr. Topping. A lot of them are criminals, and they’ll get the worst thugs in the world, Russian thugs, to work for them if they have to, and they’re just incredibly brutal. I could tell you some stories.”
Ed stared at John Smith again. He kept waiting for him to molt into something else entirely, a hawk, a scorpion, a Delta Commando, a stingray. But all this had come out of the mouth of the same face… of a mere boy with perfect manners and perfect posture. And the blush. When he saw the way Ed was staring at him, the boy did it again. He blushed a deep scarlet.
::::::Jesus:::::: Ed Topping said to himself. ::::::This kid is a classic… People have such a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, don’t they, all these daring types who “break” stories and “uncover” corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a “scoop.” Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success… Yeah—and in real life they’re about as colorful as John Smith here. If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into