Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 20

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The ground floor of the Daily Clarion building was reserved for the advertising and circulation departments in order that customers in those cash-paying divisions might be spared the labor of mountain stairs. A private elevator provided easy ascent to the publisher’s office on the second floor. But nobody thought of sparing the legs of a newsman, so the city room, which also was on the second floor, was reached only by a rather steep flight of stairs from a street entrance.

It was not yet seven o’clock when Debs and Jeff arrived in the city room, and the place was as yet untenanted, looking shabby and disordered as usual. Two teletype machines beside one wall clicked a soulless staccato in queer unison, though their messages were different since they each reported a different press service’s budget of news. They had been turned on an hour before when the first printers arrived, and already long curling trails of yellow paper with neat lines of type, all in capitals, festooned the floor about them.

Rows of battered desks, typewriters even more battered, yawning wastebaskets, calendars and maps on the walls, and a PBX box at the head of the stairs constituted other furnishings. The PBX box would be presided over presently by a gum-chewing telephone girl, but now its wires all dangled, save for two, one connected with the city desk, the other with the circulation department below.

Debs switched on the lights above the large central desk and began going over a heap of galley proofs left from the previous day, marking Kill on some and Hold on others, while Jeff glanced at the trailing teletype reports. After a moment he tore the long strips from the machines, and seating himself opposite Debs, began with a brass rule neatly to cut the items one from the other by tearing, sorting them, piling complete stories to one side, and pasting up others which came in separate “takes”; for in addition to being assistant city editor, Jeff also was in charge of the telegraph report.

“Anything big on the wire?” Debs asked.

“No,” said Jeff. “Steel strike looks like a sure thing.”

Debs grunted.

On the wall at the end of the room an electric clock gave a sharp ping. Seven o’clock.

As if at a signal the stairs became noisy with feet and voices. The staff was arriving for work. Debs hardly glanced up as the men passed him and went to their various desks, where some looked over the Sentinel, others began pecking at some unfinished story, and others simply smoked or gossiped.

It was not a staff of which a newspaper could be particularly proud. The Clarion and the Sentinel hated each other to a degree seldom seen even in the journalistic world, which is long on newspaper hatreds. But however furiously they disagreed on every other matter, they agreed perfectly on one thing: they employed the cheapest help they could and kept it as low-salaried as possible. As a natural result both editorial staffs—hardest hit by this dollar-pinching policy—were composed in far more than ordinary measure of incompetents, misfits, and drunks, most of whom could work nowhere else and therefore took jobs in Jericho “for peanuts.”

A big, jovial-seeming man in a rakish hat and loud yellow topcoat stopped at the desk. “What you got for me?” he asked Jeff.

He was Larry Cameron, the sports editor and also the staff’s lustiest lecher. Big, round, and ribald, he was filthy of mouth and mind to a degree bordering upon the supreme, but engaging for all of that. Reputedly he knew every woman in town who was sexually available—within his purlieu of women, that is, which included only primroses somewhat soiled.

Withal, he was a tremendous sentimentalist. Upon the shabby females with whom he lay in the back seats of automobiles or on chigger-swarming grass clumps in cemeteries and on golf courses, he lavished the same sort of soupy admiration found usually in pimply adolescents at their first awkward great loves. Similarly he had high enthusiasms for pork-and-bean prize fighters, bush-league home-run hitters, and star halfbacks on minor college elevens that never won games. A ragged little kid singing for pennies on a street corner moistened his eyes. He was devoted to his friends and would demonstrate his affection by tenderly attributing to them cuckoldry or venereal diseases. Those he disliked he invariably maintained were homosexual.

He liked both Debs and Jeff, and sometimes asked the latter to keep an eye on the sports report in case something broke big enough to warrant making over his page while he drove off into some lovers’ lane with whatever drab excited him at the moment. Always he followed the same routine—building up to asking the favor by ingratiatingly accusing Jeff of contracting syphilis or the like.

Then, “Watch sports for me, will you?” A leer. “I’m going duck hunting.”

An hour or two later, when he came back, Jeff would glance up from his work. “How many ducks did you get, Larry?” he would ask.

“Oh, just the one,” would come the airy reply.

Larry now picked up the heap of telegraph stories Jeff had indicated and gave Jeff a scrutinizing squint.

“You look like you’ve got the crud,” he said genially.

“I am a little tired this morning,” said Jeff.

“You ain’t tired, you’re stale,” said Larry. “I can cure that. Come out with me tonight. You’d be surprised—this town’s full of beds and the beds are just full of women.”

Jeff grinned and shook his head. It was a perennial offer which he perennially refused. Larry took his sheaf of copy and swaggered back to the sports desk in the corner by the wall.

Presently Debs called out, “Canfield!”

Joe Canfield, the police reporter, rose slowly and came to the desk. He was slim, fox-faced, with sandy hair and shifty eyes, in his thirties. Debs often wondered what a psychoanalyst would have made of him. He was not to be trusted, a liar who would have been notable even in a more populous and mendacious center than Jericho. Yet, though his handling of the English language was no more than adequate, he could telephone in a fair story. Moreover, as police reporter he got news from others than the minions of the law—he was a consorter with unsavory characters and had his own scattering of stool pigeons among the petty thieves, prostitutes, and confidence men of the city.

“How about the vice ring story?” Debs asked.

“Nothing to it,” said Canfield. “No ring. Just Earl Draggett and his tavern, the Chesterfield Club, again. Sheriff’s office caught someone smuggling redeye to the tables, contrary to the statutes, so Draggett’s under bail, to be tried next term of the district court. That’s all there is to it. He’s got one strip-tease act. But no pimping. I know the gal.”

“Sure she’s not doing a little hustling on the side?”

“Say, listen, I went back one night and talked to that dame. Bonnie Bonner. She’d just finished her act, naked as a jaybird except for a G-string, and was in her dressing room. When I walked in on her, she was wearing a wrapper, sitting at her make-up table, reading the Bible.”

“Go on!” said Debs incredulously.

“So help me. She belongs to some little off-brand religious sect. Dumb as they come. It says nothing in the Bible, according to her reading, about being a sin to strip naked in public, and she gets two hundred bucks a week for doing it. So she does it. Otherwise she’d be hashing for what she could pick up in tips. She’s married. Husband’s a carpenter. Queer on religion, too. He works in the day and she works at night. They sell religious tracts and do considerable praying and Bible reading together.”

“There’s a story in that.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Canfield.

“Sunday feature—Bible Reading Burlesque Queen. Can it be handled without libel?”

“I reckon.”

“Give me an outline on it. And check the libel business. Okay.”

Canfield lit a cigarette, tilted his hat on the side of his head, and went down the stairs to his beat. On consideration Debs decided against having him write the story about Bonnie Bonner. In the first place Canfield could not write well enough. In the second place it might be safer to have the facts checked by someone more reliable before they were published in the newspaper.

Other men began coming to the desk for assignments. Telephones jangled as the switchboard operator took her place. Reporters hurried in and out, the teletypes maintained their ceaseless clicking, voices were raised in shouts for the copy boy, for someone to hurry up that goddamn story, for somebody to get that phone: a welter of noise and confusion, the normal heartbeat of a newspaper, the inherent excitement that keeps newspapermen at an otherwise somewhat thankless task.

Debs felt a lift, almost happiness, the sense of power and accomplishment he always knew when the Clarion was in full operation, with himself sitting at the throttle, the key figure in its complicated machinery.