Читать книгу The Paris Herald - James Oliver Goldsborough - Страница 6

He walked off the train and out of the Gare d’Austerlitz and looked over Paris for the second time. The first time, six months before at the Gare du Nord, it looked brighter. There was nothing bright about the Gare d’Austerlitz, old and dark, tucked into a gloomy corner of the city, barges lined up on the Seine with their loads of coal and gravel, ugly buildings on the far side, probably warehouses. The first time had been for just a few hours, changing stations on his way from Berlin to Barcelona. He had no idea how long it would be this time. Wayne said there might be a job at the Herald and how long he stayed would depend on that. First he had to find Wayne.

Paris had never attracted him. He’d gone to Berlin for a year and then to Barcelona to start an export business with an old college pal. Six months in Barcelona had been more fun than profitable and when his friend returned to the States, Archer knew he was next. Then came the letter from Wayne. He’d have to write his parents for money to get home anyway and could just as well write from Paris as Barcelona. Now the task was to find a phone, call the Herald, ask for Wayne Murray and get the lay of the land. Wayne would give him a place to stay, set up an interview, and Archer would find out how much longer his little European adventure would last.

He bought a token for the telephone, dialed the Herald, and was passed to the editor’s office where a woman’s voice informed him that Wayne Murray was on a month’s vacation, probably somewhere in Greece. It was a moment before he thought to explain his situation. His name was Rupert Archer. He had worked with Wayne in the States and come to Paris because Wayne said there might be a job. After a pause, the woman, who spoke with a New England accent, said he could come by the newspaper at two o’clock when Mr. Stein would be back. Cross the Seine to Bastille and catch the Metro to George V. “Make sure you take the train direction Neuilly,” she said. “When you leave the train walk down the Champs Elysées to the rue de Berri and turn left. We’re at twenty-one.”

He saved a franc by walking, stopping for a sandwich along the way. Why not see more of Paris than its tunnels since he might not be around long. At Concorde he looked up at the Arch of Triumph, great granite block towering over the wide avenue. He walked under the chestnut trees for shade and was so fixed on seeing everything that he almost missed the rue de Berri, insignificant side street two-thirds up the hill. From the corner he spied the word HERALD jutting out over the sidewalk in vertical letters across from another smaller sign: HOTEL CALIFORNIA. Slice of America in Paris.

Inside, someone waiting by a rickety elevator directed him to the second floor, first door on the left. He climbed the stairs, pushed through an old door and entered an empty office, actually three small offices stretching toward the street and the Hotel California. The only eyes to greet him were those of a large bronze owl maybe five feet high, perched on a filing cabinet in the second office and staring at him with suspicion. He examined the surroundings: old wooden desks, old wooden chairs, old wooden coat racks, old wooden station clock ticking away, metal files, typewriters, owl. No names anywhere. He opened a newspaper. It was 1:40. He sat down to read and to wait.

If there was a job, did he want it? Could he do it? Not that Mr. Stein would offer it since he was totally unqualified, but what if he did? He’d worked on three newspapers in the States but done nothing in Europe but write a bad play about the Berlin Wall and sell a few Spanish rugs and pots to Sears. It hardly qualified him for a job on the Paris Herald, elite newspaper for Americans abroad.

He’d been woolgathering, exchanging stares with the owl, hadn’t read a word and not heard her come in. He stood and looked into the face of a slim young blonde, dowdy, mussed, even sloppy, no makeup, a girl more attractive than she cared to show. “You’re early, but I understand. I’m Connie Marshall. Please sit down.”

She took her place, looked up, started to say something and stopped, smiled at him, and set to her work. He read the newspaper. He’d gotten out of touch: Things not going well in Vietnam. Trouble at home. When he looked again it was 2:15.

He was restless. “Do you mind if I ask about the owl?”

“Minerva, goddess of wisdom, transferred wisdom to the owl, her favorite bird,” she said, mechanically, continuing to type.

“I see.”

She looked up, saw he wasn’t satisfied. “James Gordon Bennett, Jr., brought the owl with him from New York in 1887. Owls were his fetish…that owl has a history.”

Definite New England accent, he decided. Good worker. No schmoozer. She leveled her sensible gaze on him. “I don’t understand what’s keeping Mr. Stein. He’s not one for long lunches.”

On cue, a mostly bald, natty, square-jawed gent in horn-rims came in and stood a moment staring at Archer.

“This young man is Rupert Archer,” said Connie Marshall, “a friend of Wayne Murray’s. He’s come in to see you about a job.”

“Sonny Stein,” said the man, holding out his hand. “Come on back.”

That was easy enough, thought Archer, walking past the owl toward the rear office, simple, plate glass windows on two sides, one of them looking across a low roof to other Herald offices, the other across the street to second-floor rooms in the Hotel California. Stein sat down. Archer handed him his résumé, sat down and waited.

He hadn’t known what to expect at the Herald but certainly not this. The building was dilapidated, the elevator a rickety cage, the furniture ancient and encrusted. Though it had not been a conscious thought as he sat waiting, he supposed Mr. Sonny Stein would be a suave and elegant product of the best Ivy League schools, Lippmannesque, no doubt chosen from the cream of the Eastern newspaper establishment for what had to be the plummiest newspaper job in the world. He half expected the conversation to start off in French and that his inability to speak it, let alone his ignorance of copyediting and the elite New York newspaper world from which Sonny Stein sprang, would immediately disqualify him from any hope of employment.

“So you’re a Californian, eh? Like Wayne Murray.”

“Wayne’s from Arizona. We worked together in Phoenix. He was on the copy desk. I was a reporter.”

“How’s your French?”

Archer shrugged. “Imperfect.”

Stein smiled for the first time. “I came here three years ago and still can’t pronounce the name of the street where I live. I carry a card to show the cabbies.”

Archer wondered if he might have a chance.

“I see you’ve worked in San Francisco, Honolulu, and Phoenix – never for very long. What’s up, Rupert – wanderlust?”

“Laid off in San Francisco at the merger. Honolulu – can’t really explain it. Kind of claustrophobia sets in out there. People call themselves mainland rejects. Lot of them are. A year was enough.”

“Phoenix?”

Archer had been fired in Phoenix but wasn’t going to mention that. “Phoenix…right. I was there when Kennedy was killed. Kind of lost it, I think.”

Stein looked back at the résumé, single-page, single-spaced, slightly crumpled from living in a suitcase. The last eighteen months were not included. Waiting, Archer felt embarrassed. His career couldn’t possibly be impressive to a guy from the New York Herald Tribune who could pick up the phone to New York and have the pick of the litter. On the other hand, Wayne Murray from Gila Bend was hardly a member of the journalistic elite. Stein had a quiet, easy, almost shy way about him, probably a good man to work for, a pro not a maniac. Still, the way he kept his eyes on the résumé was telling him this was not a match made in heaven. Stein could see he had no copy desk experience. Archer had never even written a headline.

“You ever worked on a news desk, Rupert?”

“I’ve always been a reporter.”

“Reporters we don’t need. We do need a copy desk man – badly. We’re getting two feet of copy a day on Vietnam alone, keeps two guys busy.”

Stein fell quiet awhile, reflecting. Archer heard the outer door open and a man’s voice. Finally Stein laid it down, leaned back in the swivel chair, and put his feet up on the desk. Behind him, across the street in the hotel, Archer saw a woman holding back the tulle sheers and staring at him. His eyes went to Caesar. Thumb up or down?

“You know, ordinarily I’d tell you the usual: We’ll file your résumé and let you know. But I’m going to level with you. We need somebody now. The guy you’d be replacing was a linotypist from Pittsburgh – a linotypist! That’s how desperate I was. Why not, I thought: a guy who sets type ought to be able to edit it. Disaster. Everything had to be redone. Let him go two weeks ago. Now I’ve got two guys on vacation – European law, have to give them their six weeks. Wayne’s somewhere in Greece and Joe Marder, the news editor, is back in Canada. What I’m saying is that I’m ready to put you out there tonight. You’ve got four years daily newspaper experience even if it’s not editing. You must have picked something up. The guys will help you. Don’t tell them I said this, but it’s not that hard. Telling a story by cutting and pasting. And with Joe gone for a while – I have to tell you, Joe is a bear – it’ll be easier. You up for it?”

Caesar’s thumb was up.

Am I up for it? The equivalent of twenty bucks in my pocket, no place to stay, not enough money to get back to the States, and he wonders if I’m up for it.

“Show me the way to the newsroom, Mr. Stein.”

“Call me Sonny.” He called into the next office. “Al – you there?”

Archer turned to see a man come in from the owl’s office, probably in his late thirties, more horn-rims, receding brown hair slicked back, open angular face, slightly skullish, no smile lines, intense. Stein handed him the résumé. “This is Rupert Archer. He’ll start his three weeks tonight. Four to midnight. Hour for lunch. Hundred a week, bumped to $110 if he survives Joe Marder. Many don’t.”

The man, whom Stein, oddly, had not introduced, led him to the next office. “Al Lodge, managing editor.” He held out his hand. “Sit down.” Connie Marshall walked through to Stein’s office, closing the door behind her.

Lodge looked up as a woman came in. “Helen Lodge, features editor,” he said.

Archer introduced himself and looked into the face of an attractive late-thirtyish woman, long auburn hair piled in loops on her head, cigarette in hand. “Also Al’s wife,” she said. “He doesn’t like to admit it.”

“Rupert is starting tonight,” said Lodge.

“Good luck,” she said. “Be happy Joe’s gone. Let’s hope we still have a newspaper when he’s back. Al, my page will be a little late tonight. I want to get Tom’s review of Man of La Mancha in.” She left.

“What did she mean about there still being a newspaper when Joe’s back?”

Lodge lit a cigarette. “You’ve heard about the New York newspaper strike?”

“Uh…”

“New York Herald Tribune owns us. If it closes – that’s the rumor – we’ve got a problem. But that’s not your concern. You’ve been to Paris before?”

“I don’t know Paris.”

“Probably don’t know the Herald either,” he said, swiveling around to look up at the owl on the cabinet behind him. “James Gordon Bennett, Jr., brought that bird with him from New York in 1887. Loved owls, lived here thirty years right around the corner on the Champs Elysées. Buried in Passy Cemetery.” He continued staring at the bird. “This newspaper is the second oldest in Paris – survived two world wars, survived Hitler, survived the New York Times opening a Paris edition, so far has survived de Gaulle and may even survive the New York newspaper strike.”

He turned back to Archer, trying a smile, which didn’t work well on the tight skin of his face. “Some of the guys on the desk – you’ll meet them tonight – have been here through a lot of it. Some of them – like you, like me, like Sonny – didn’t know a thing about Paris when they got here. Others are as permanent as the owl, never go back to the States, can’t go back, if you get what I mean. When you come here you don’t know if it’s for three weeks or forever.”

That’s how it started. When Joe Marder returned it was instantly clear what a break it was that he’d been away. Unlike Lodge and Stein, who had some tolerance for human error, Marder was a perfectionist insulted to have a neophyte on his desk. The job consisted of constructing a flowing news story from a half dozen thick wire agency reports, some of them, like those from Vietnam, filed daily in a dozen versions from a dozen reporters in several languages. Two people in particular helped him: Frank Draper, whose voice was so loud you thought he was deaf, which he wasn’t; and Dennis Klein, a small man with a knifelike face and a friendly manner. By the time Marder returned, Archer had some idea what he was doing.

“We’ll probably keep you around for a while,” Marder told him one night. “Shows how hard up we are. Don’t like reporters on my desk. Make lousy editors.”

It was a strange cast of characters and after a month Archer still only knew about half of them. At the Berri Bar, the next-door café where the staff congregated nightly between editions, he usually drank with Klein, who’d come to Europe to write a book about the Nazi occupation of Paris and couldn’t stand the thought of going to Germany to finish it. Draper was a loud, intimidating man who’d fought with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Byron Hallsberg, the red-bearded, chain-smoking, Viking-like sports editor who’d gone to Hungary during the ’56 uprising, seemed slightly crazy, rosy lips smiling through the bushy red beard as he expounded nightly on the decline of Western civilization. Dick LePoint, who wore a permanent bandage on his left hand, apparently from a war wound, came down each night with his girlfriend, Suzy de Granville, an elegant blonde half his age who worked in the Herald’s library. According to Klein, they’d been mutually attracted by their French names.

Wayne still wasn’t back, but another ex-Phoenix hand, Steve Fleming, was there, owing his job, like Archer, to a letter from Wayne. Fleming came down at 10:30 to flirt over pinball games with Gretchen Kilic, a short, bountiful girl with dancers’ legs and miniskirts who worked in the library with Suzy. Molly Fleming, Steve’s pretty and monumentally naïve wife whom Archer remembered from Phoenix, often came by to pick up Steve when he was off at 10:30. For some reason Molly seemed to like Gretchen, who, according to Klein, who said it with some envy, was fucking her husband.

All these people, even the ones with exotic names, were Americans. Suzy de Granville was from Altoona, Draper from New York, Hallsberg from Indiana, Gretchen Kilic from Chicago, LePoint from Virginia. The only non-American among the editors was Marder, who was from Toronto. The only Brits were the proofreaders, who worked downstairs next to the composing room. The compositors and press-men were all French, members of the CGT, the Communist labor union. They too congregated in the Berri Bar between editions. The various groups were joined each night by a crush of distributors and vendors arriving in every imaginable kind of vehicle in a cacophony of honking and shouting in the street, to pick up first editions as they came off the presses.

The ground floor office, which handled ads and subscriptions during the day, was taken over by sorters after 10:30, mostly young women who according to Klein worked at night selling more intimate wares down around les Halles, on the rue St.-Denis. “St. Denis,” he said, “my patron saint, the patron saint of all Jews. Ha-ha.”

One vendor came on foot. He was Eddie Jones, a tall, stooped American Negro who Klein said had been in Paris since the war. He wore a yellow sweater bearing the logo PARIS HERALD across his chest. Eddie came in nightly with an empty canvas bag over his shoulder that the girls filled with newspapers before sending him off into the night. He sat off by himself at one of the little formica tables in the dining area. He was, Klein said, unapproachable.

“Has his cognacs, fills up his bag, and starts down the street – summer, winter, rain or shine. He takes fifty papers, hawks them in all the joints where expats go – Crazy Horse, Lido, Calavados, Harry’s, Lipp, Deux Magots, Dome, Select, whatever. You’re there between eleven and one you get your Herald from Eddie. Been doing it for twenty years. Doesn’t talk much.”

“Paper sells for fifteen cents,” Archer said. “That’s seven dollars and fifty cents if he sells them all.”

“Oh, he sells them all. Comes back at twelve-thirty for the second edition and goes out with fifty more.”

“Walking?”

“He gets rides. I hear he’s got some kind of deal with the cabbies. I’ve been in Harry’s when he comes in and seen his bag emptied. Guys are so happy to get the baseball scores they don’t ask for change. Eddie does all right.”

Archer discovered he liked Paris. Not knowing the language or people he hadn’t been sure, hadn’t been attracted to France like he was to Germany and Spain, but he liked the Herald, liked the work and got along well enough. He found a little apartment on rue St.-Dominique close enough to walk to work and set about learning French. It was a break, he saw, not only that Joe Marder was gone when he arrived but that Wayne was gone. Staying with Wayne would have been awkward.

“If you hadn’t written I’d be back in the States by now,” Archer told him when he was back from his six weeks in Greece. “Doing what, I have no idea. Eighteen months away from newspapers probably made me unemployable.”

Wayne Murray was a once-solid man running to chubby; hearty, friendly in a forced way for he was basically a shy guy. He’d been miserable in Phoenix, wrote the Herald in a desperate attempt to escape and was surprised when by return post Sonny Stein offered him a job. “Maybe it made you more employable. More sophisticated.”

“Not in Phoenix.”

“Who’s going back to Phoenix?”

“Hard to understand,” Archer said as they nursed their demibeers, “how a newspaper like this could hire someone like me. For two weeks I didn’t have a clue.”

“Lucky Joe was gone.”

“So why can’t Sonny pick up the phone and hire ten guys from New York?”

“At a hundred bucks a week? Guys with families? He tried it for a while, and you know what happened? They all went across town to the Times, which pays one fifty. I’m going over for a tryout myself next week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Why not? I hate to tell you but one of the reasons you got this job is that this newspaper has no future. Jock Whitney is fed up with the New York unions. No way he’ll give in again and lose more money than he already is – twenty million dollars a year is what I hear. If the Herald Tribune folds why would he hang on to the Paris Herald which loses another three million? And here the unions are communist. Even if Jock wanted to hang on, how do we survive in Paris without New York? When New York closes, we close, that’s how I see it. And the New York Times, which has been in Paris for six years compared to the Herald’s eighty, will own Europe.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

“And maybe not. Anyway, that’s why I’m going over for a tryout. If they need people, I’ll jump. I need the money.”

“Look at you, just back from the Greek islands. How hard up can you be? I’m living on a hundred dollars a week – made more in the States but never lived as well. And what if the Herald survives and the Times folds? It’s not doing so well either, I hear.”

Wayne eyed him warily. “One of the problems…if you must know” – he broke off to swallow some beer – “is that I have a family.”

“What?”

“A boyfriend is what I mean.”

“Ah.”

“Jojo is his name. Not everyone is as cold a fish as you are, Rupert.”