The Submission - Amy Waldman [28]
Even as he insisted he wouldn’t comment on hypotheticals, he couldn’t help adding: “There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Muslim. It all depends what kind of Muslim we’re talking about. Islam is a religion of peace, as I’ve said many times. The problem is that some people haven’t gotten that message …” It wasn’t clear whether “some people” referred to the violent Muslims or to people who slandered the peaceful ones.
Alyssa returned to the newsroom between interviews and found herself mobbed by happy editors and ignored by dour reporters. “This story has more legs than the Rockettes!” Chaz, her new editor, crowed, flipping channels and announcing drinks in her honor. She couldn’t quite believe her change in fortune. Two days earlier she had been a Daily News reporter with a radioactive scoop her boss didn’t want to run. Now she was a New York Post reporter whose reporting was the talk of the town, maybe even the country.
Fred, her editor at the News, had blocked the story. She needed a second source, he said, then before she could find one he deployed her to investigate cost overruns on repairs to the George Washington Bridge. His newfound editorial probity irked her—he never asked for a second source, which was why the paper’s reputation had declined during his tenure. Her whiny first source kept calling to ask when the story was coming out. She kept stalling, fearful he would give it to someone else, unsure how to hold him off. She’d already bought him dinner at Balthazar, complete with the seafood tower. That alone was enough to get her expenses flagged. “They’ll pick someone else and then it will be too late,” he kept warning. “You won’t have a story.”
She cajoled, she flattered, all the while thinking, What’s his agenda? She needed motives to test for untruths, vulnerabilities to extract the next nugget. Had he gotten a kickback from another applicant? Did he have a thing against Muslims? Did the chairman shit on him, and he wanted revenge? Or did he relish the drama he would cause? Everyone liked to give history a little twist when they could.
“I’m going to lose the story,” she told Fred. “We’re going to lose it. My source is getting impatient.”
“Manage him,” Fred said. He swallowed his words with the banana he was eating. It sounded like he had said “Massage him.” He went on: “Handling sources is an art.” He made her feel it was her own failure.
When she called her source to stall yet again, he said, “This is ridiculous. I’m going to the Post with it.” No, she thought, I am. She asked Sarah Lubella, an old acquaintance there, to broker a meeting with the paper’s editor.
“I’ve got a great story—I promise,” Alyssa said.
“So why won’t your paper run it?” Sarah asked, miffed at not knowing the story she didn’t have and not having the story she didn’t know.
“They’re scared,” Alyssa said. “Under pressure.”
“But if you do this you can’t go back to the News. Can you handle coming to work for the lowly Post?” Her cracked-leather voice testified to thirty years of overflowing ashtrays in the overcrowded press rooms of a pre-smoke-free New York.
Alyssa had always looked down on the Post, just as she knew the Times reporters looked down on her. But this wasn’t the first time that Fred had screwed her. His newfound caution wasn’t an asset for a tabloid editor, but it was his clubbishness that she couldn’t stand. He and Paul Rubin were friends, she knew. Alyssa had made her way from a depressed river town upstate. She didn’t have those kinds of friends.
It had taken her a long time to get to New York City, which was where she had always imagined herself. During her exile in the wilderness of nowhere America—Brattleboro, Duluth, Syracuse, backwaters too much like her birthplace—she had the strange, horrible sense that things were not going as planned, even though she told everyone they were exactly what she had planned. By the time she got to the Daily News, eleven years and eight rungs