In New York, being a liberal didn’t mean putting a target on your back.
When he took the job as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, Stephen Malik knew the publisher was using him. The Tribune had long been a Republican paper in a Democratic town, and he understood the editorial page would always try to preach to its conservative suburban base. Malik was brought in to answer charges from city readers (and supporters of the current governor) that the news division had a right-wing bias as well. Malik’s liberal credentials gave the Trib some cover. And of course, Malik knew, his presence provided them with a convenient fall guy if things ever went wrong.
Beginning in June, boy had they.
The frayed end that unraveled it all was a story on an anti-cloning protest in front of the Dirksen Federal Building. The protesters – or more accurately, advocates – were expressing their support for the Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act. Written by a young and promising reporter named Scott Harmon, the article estimated the size of the crowd at around 150, and described in detail the signs and the banners they carried: STOP THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL. MAN CAN CLONE A BODY BUT ONLY GOD CAN CLONE A SOUL. CLONING = SIN. Harmon also quoted a small group of counter-protesters. “These people are just afraid of progress,” said one, identified as Cameron Straub. “They’re ignorant.” Another young man, a Naperville resident named Denny Dreyfus, claimed to be a clone himself, as well as a Catholic: “I feel like [the protesters] are denying me my humanity,” he said. “It’s like they’re telling me I’m not human. That I’m an affront to God.”
A freelance writer living in Wrigleyville took an interest in the second quote. His name was also Denny Dreyfus, and he began working on a feature story about this clone who shared his name. He thought he could sell it to Chicago magazine, for which he’d written several articles in the past.
There was a problem, however. He couldn’t locate the other Denny Dreyfus. Not in Naperville or anywhere else in Illinois. He tried looking for Cameron Straub, thinking the two might be friends. He couldn’t find anyone by that name at all.
When an e-mail query from Dreyfus the writer arrived at Stephen Malik’s desk, he felt ice against his spine. He remembered that story. He remembered looking at an early draft of it and wondering how it got past the Metro editor in the shape it was in. It hadn’t a single quote from pro-cloning counter-protestors. There must have been at least some of them making noise at a protest that size. Word came back that Harmon had interviewed several but didn’t think the quotes were that strong. “I don’t care,” Malik said. “Get the other point of view in there somehow.” The next version had the quotes from Denny Dreyfus and Cameron Straub.
Dreyfus wanted to see Harmon’s notes on that story. With twenty years in the business, Malik was certain he knew what would happen next.
Dreyfus’s story ran in the Chicago Reader and included a dozen or more cheap shots at Malik’s expense from anonymous discontents in the Tribune newsroom, each accusing him of trying to undermine the objectivity of his reporters by injecting news stories with his own political and personal agendas. By that time, Scott Harmon had been fired for fabricating quotes, but that had only made him disgruntled, and he spoke on the record with Dreyfus. “I felt pressured to get certain points of view, certain liberal points of view, in my stories,” Harmon said. “Malik never complained if the conservative side wasn’t represented.”
Others suggested to the Reader (anonymously, of course) that Malik’s aggressive attempts to create “diversity” by hiring reporters without a solid background in journalism had forced unqualified people into prominent assignments at the paper. The implication (the way Malik read it) was that the Harmon incident was an example of this, even though Scott Harmon was a white kid with a degree in film, the son of a wealthy advertiser, in fact, whose hiring had been imposed upon Malik from higher up. In fact, Malik was proud of many new writers he’d managed to lure into the ranks.
Sally Barwick was an example. Bright. Hardworking. African-American. Her prose was efficient and almost entirely free of cliche. If there was anything he would change about her, it would be her insistence on working the police beat. As a matter of philosophy Malik didn’t think any reporter, especially one with such promise, should stay in the same department for more than twelve months at a time. Sally, however, a former private eye, had convinced him of her passion for cops and crime scenes and courtrooms. Also, as a matter of smart management, Malik believed in keeping his best writers happy.
He had heard about her hobby. There had been snickers about it in editorial meetings practically since the day she was hired, and Dreyfus even made a snide allusion to it in his Reader story, although he didn’t mention her name. Malik thought it was ridiculous. Tens of millions of people played Shadow World, and yet there was still this crazy stigma attached to it. The Tribune had done countless stories about the phenomenon, and he remembered one citing studies in which one in five people who said they weren’t gamers actually were, and more than half of those who admitted to playing lied about how much time they spent inside the game. If it didn’t affect her work (and as far as he could tell, it never had), then why the hell should he care what she did in her spare time? They had a sportswriter who was a snake handler; that was a lot weirder than playing some video game.
“You wanted to see me, Stephen?” Barwick asked.
Malik waved her into his office and motioned for her to shut the door.
“What’s going on?”
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up. I don’t know how long I’m going to be at this paper.”
“You’re quitting?”
Malik knew her shock was feigned – Barwick was aware of newsroom politics. She heard the talk in the hallways and across the street at the Billy Goat and from gossipy colleagues at other papers. He appreciated the gesture, though. “Not exactly.”
“They’re forcing you out? Over this Dreyfus bullshit?”
His head drifted unconvincingly to the left and right. “Not yet. I might even survive this one, but I’ve learned something from it. Next year it will be something else. And the year after that, there’ll be another ‘Dreyfus affair.’ One of them will have my number on it. They won’t back me up indefinitely.”
Sally sat in a green chair with upholstery that felt more like scratchy carpet. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I’ll back you all the way.”
“I know,” he said, not smiling where another man might. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. One day, they might ask you to choose sides. When they do that, I want you to look after yourself.”
“Not a chance,” Barwick said. “I owe my career to you. If you hadn’t put me on the murder beat, I’d still be transcribing obits over the phone.”
“Just trust me on this. Save your job. This is a good paper. I’ll land on my feet somewhere. And wherever that is, if you’re interested, you’ll have a job. No matter what. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe it’ll be a city with even more sicko murders than this one.”
“One can hope,” she said darkly.
“But the rest of this crap doesn’t have anything to do with you. And I don’t want it to. That’s an order, or whatever.”
“An order, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, maybe it won’t come to that.”
“Maybe not,” he allowed. “Things change. Before it all comes down, maybe you’ll break open the Wicker Man case and win a Pulitzer. Make me look good.” He didn’t smile this time, either.
She left without making any promises. Malik tapped his computer keyboard to retrieve a dozen e-mails, all received while Barwick was sitting in his office. She could be a lot of things in this business, he thought to himself, a columnist or an editor. When she first came to the Tribune she said she wanted to be a journalist because she liked having an audience but hated crowds. That made Malik laugh. She could be anything she wanted to be.
He wondered what kind of person she was in the game.