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By Root 9646 0

school, do it every day, and knew something of the same fear now, and found himself crying once more, all alone in his room, all alone and the night turning into a lighter blue, and the dawn coming up, exhausted beyond belief, fucking wondering why he was there and trying to decide that he had a responsibility above all business shenanigans and everything else to report as best he could. "I owe that to whatever I am," he said, "whether a journalist or an entrepreneur, whatever I am. I may never wind up being anything, but I owe it to myself to build my integrity," and he had an inspiration then that all the people who were respected in all the worlds he had gone through, respected for their integrity, had maybe not all been born with it, not every last one, but built it, job by job and night by separate night, until he got up, at last, and dressed and went out to the corner of University and Center Street in Orem and stood there with a pad and a pencil in his hand, looking at the heavy early traffic going by at the biggest intersection in town in the early morning, all the factory workers' cars going to Geneva Steel, out there slipping and sliding on the snow-slick, wide, wide streets and he would look down to his notebook and check whether the writing had been legible. He realized that if he was going to take accurate notes at the execution, he might not have a second to remove his glance from the scene, and so he had to learn to separate his hand from his eye, and do it without ever referring to the pad, and to himself he said, "For the first time, Schiller, you can't fictionalize, you can't make it up, you can't embroider."

Then he went back to the motel and spent the first part of the morning calling up Murdoch and the Enquirer and NBC and told everybody the word was no. He would not deal, he would not sell. Instead, he would give it away. After the execution, he would release his private eyewitness account to all the media at once. Nobody in the bidding liked it. The Enquirer griped and groaned, and NBC made it clear what they would do. He could hear the sound of the hunting horn. Only Murdoch was a gentleman. "Appreciate your calling," he said.

Chapter 28

T.G.I.F.

As Mikal came into the visiting room on Friday morning, Gary said, "Schiller doesn't want me to see your friend. It jeopardizes his exclusivity. I ought to fire him, and I would, but it's too late to find somebody else." When Mikal did not reply, Gary said, "What I could do is revoke his invitation to the execution."

Mikal was planning to leave Salt Lake that evening to spend Saturday and Sunday with Bessie. Gary, however, asked him to stay another day. "I haven't told this to anybody," he now told Mikal, "but I'm not so sure how Monday morning is going to be." He looked through the glass at Mikal. "Maybe that's why I need Schiller. He'll be there recording it for history, so I'll keep cool." He shook his head.

"I didn't mean for it to become such a big thing. I thought maybe there would be a few articles." Put his hand up, and Mikal pressed his on the other side, and they touched but for the quarter inch of glass between.

Back in Salt Lake, Mikal met with Richard Giauque for the last time and told him he had decided not to intervene. After he said goodbye, Giauque made a phone call to Amsterdam who said he was aware of what it must have cost Mikal to come to that point, and hung up. There was not much doubt in Amsterdam's mind that the decision was final. Giauque had astute judgment. He would not have passed on such a message if there had been any chance of Mikal's changing his mind.

By Friday morning, with the execution not seventy-two hours away, Earl Dorius knew a number of legal actions were going to be filed.

Law was always, to some degree, a game, and that was one good reason, Earl had long ago decided, to keep its processes slow and orderly. It helped to tone down the sporting and competitive aspects.

Now, however, they had all gotten to the point where they were calculating the hours needed to file each action and counteraction.

The