Circles of Time (3 page)

“Damn, I'm happy. Getting a Martin Rilke was what this European operation needed.”

Martin swallowed some scotch. “What's a ‘Martin Rilke' exactly?”

“Hell, don't hide under a bushel basket with me. A Martin Rilke is the best damn reporter I know.” He downed his gin cocktail and signaled the barman for a refill. “You have carte blanche over here, Marty, and I'm willing to put that in writing before I go back to New York. I'll only say one thing. I like balance. Know what I mean? Editors in the States are tired of grim news from this part of the world. They had a bellyful of it during the war, and all the brouhaha of Versailles, and Wilson and the League. Harding got elected on his return-to-normalcy crap, and that's the mood of the country right now. They want to know what's going on over here, of course, but not just the downright depressing stuff. Balance, Marty. Folks would like to read about Paris cafés, and what women will be wearing in the fall.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You have a reputation for hard news, so naturally I expect pieces from you on what's taking place in Germany and Italy and—well, hell, you know what I mean. But get your staffs to bear down on the lighter side, and beef up the photo departments, and the sports desk. A lot of American tourists will be coming over, so expand the travel-information coverage—the best hotels for the money, the best restaurants, the places that shouldn't be missed.”

What Kingsford expected came as no surprise to Martin. INA's potpourri approach to news was the secret of its success, and he didn't have to handle any of it personally, just make sure that the various desk editors sent out their quotas of light and frothy material. Becoming head of the bureau gave him the freedom to go where he wanted, when he wanted, without having to convince anyone that his reason for going justified the expenses involved. It would be a heady new experience after seven years as a reporter on four different papers and two wire services. The chief now. The guy who called the shots.

After his third drink he began to feel euphoric, and when the party broke up he readily agreed to Kingsford's suggestion that they “tie one on” at a Soho night spot. Martin, unlike so many men he knew, did not consider heavy drinking to be a primary qualification for a career in journalism, but what the hell …

D
ORA IS A HARPY
had been crudely painted on the wall of a building in Old Compton Street. It was not a graphic insult to a woman, but a nose-thumbing at the Defense of the Realm Act, passed in 1914 and still very much in effect. One of its numerous provisions had to do with the hours of sale of alcoholic beverages—which is to say that pubs closed early, and after-hours drinking was against the law. A large policeman walked slowly down the street with his hands folded behind his back, ignoring the graffiti utterly.

“Stop a minute,” Kingsford said to the taxi driver. “I know the joint is around here someplace.”

The driver spat out of the window. “They move about a bit, guv'nor, 'ere today and gone tomor'er as it were. Coppers keep 'em on the run. If you don't mind me suggestin', I knows of a club over in Gerrard Street that ain't been raided yet.”

“Okay.” He sat back with a sigh. “Christ, it's as damn silly as Prohibition. All this fuss to keep a few people from having a drink after ten-thirty at night. All it does is increase man's urge to sin.”

There were a lot of people seeking to fulfill that urge. Rolls-Royces and Daimlers were parked along both sides of Gerrard Street, their chauffeurs standing in a huddle, smoking cigarettes and talking. Inside the small, nondescript building that had once been a rooming house was a press of people, most of them in evening clothes—the men in tails or dinner jackets; the women in long dresses, glittering with jewelry. Tobacco smoke hung in a blue haze, drifting from room to room like mist. Four tuxedoed black men stood on a narrow platform in the largest of the rooms playing jazz on cornet, trombone, bass, and drums. There was dancing—a swaying movement of bodies jammed in a tiny cleared area between small tables. The heat and the noise were a palpable force.

Martin and Kingsford elbowed and pushed their way through the crowd to the bar where three men in white mess jackets were serving the drinks. They ordered martini cocktails.

“More like Paris than London,” Kingsford said, shouting to be heard over the noise. “Except in Paris they put ice in the gin.”

A young woman, her breasts barely covered by the plunging neckline of her thin silk dress, stepped close and asked him to light her cigarette. Kingsford lit it with a solid gold lighter and watched her hips as she swayed back into the crowd.

“Flappers. That's a story angle, Martin. The new sexual morality. The ease of the postwar lay. Flaming youth in the fleshpots of London and Paris. Sex sells these days. But nothing tawdry, you understand.”

The music became louder, the smoke denser, and the number of people in the club began to increase as the theaters along Shaftesbury Avenue began to let out. It was nearly impossible to find room enough to bend an elbow.

“Let's go,” Kingsford bellowed. “To hell with this place.”

The girl in the silk dress, who had returned to Kingsford half a dozen times for lights, put an arm about his waist as he shoved his way from the bar. He didn't object. When they got out to the street, he helped her into a taxi and held the door open for Martin.

“We'll go to the Savoy. Maybe she can line up a friend.”

“I'm out on my feet and I've got a big day tomorrow.”

Kingsford shrugged. “Suit yourself. I never tell a man how to spend his evenings.” He held out his hand. “Put it there, kiddo. You're tops in my book. I'll be leaving for Southampton first thing in the morning. When I get back to New York I'll send you that data I was talking about. Go over it. Let me know what you think.”

And then he was gone, the taxi rattling off toward Charing Cross Road.

“God, what an evening,” Martin said under his breath. It was starting to rain. There were taxis lined up nose to tail halfway down the block, but he ignored them, turned up his coat collar, and started walking.

Kingsford's loudmouthed crudeness had been wearing, but the man had a touch of genius that would make working for him both exciting and a challenge. It had been impossible to carry on a conversation in the club, but he had heard enough of what Kingsford had been yelling in his ear to be intrigued. Wireless had been the subject, his personal project at the moment. Kingsford envisioned not only the radio-wave transmission of news from the city desks in Paris, Berlin, and Rome to London, and then retransmission from London to New York, but also eventually the dissemination of that news to the million or so people in the States who were tinkering around with crystal sets and headphones. He was prepared to spend a million dollars and had mentioned airily that someday there could be a great deal of money in a wireless-radio network. Martin couldn't see how, but that was Kingsford's problem.

He was soaked to the skin when he reached the apartment. He took off his clothes, put on a robe, and went into the kitchen to scrounge something to eat. There was a vague, tantalizing odor from the kitchen below. The restaurant was closed, but the odors of pollo cacciatore and veal Florentine lingered on. It must have been disconcerting to Jacob, he thought, writing up his reports for the Council on World Hunger while sniffing Marco's luxurious concoctions.

There was nothing in the ice chest except ten bottles of Moët y Chandon and a small pot of caviar, the lid sealed with red wax. He pulled out a bottle, found cheese and smoked sausage in the larder, biscuits in the cupboard, and took it all into the bedroom to eat.

Ivy's lovely face stared at him from the silver frame on the dresser, her lustrous black hair covered by a nurse's cap. She was not smiling, which he regretted, but she had been unused to cameras and had been terribly self-conscious and grave when he had posed her in the light from the window—the window in this very room. March 27, 1917. The date was written on the bottom of the picture. The last afternoon they had ever spent together. He had left for Salonika the next day, booted out of England—in a firm but civil way—for violations of the wartime censorship provision in the Defence of the Realm Act.

D
ORA IS A HARPY.
A lean and wolfish bitch would have been closer to the truth. He hadn't thought it too much of a hardship at the time, as the war was in France and he would be back there when the Middle East assignment was completed. The war was in France, and Ivy would be there, too, and there would be time. Time for her to get a bit of leave and join him in Paris, time to shut out the war for a few days. But there hadn't been any time. Not for them. When he got to Paris in September, they told him she was dead. Killed at a casualty clearing station near Passchendaele. He took a swig of champagne and stared at her face.

Death is a sleep.

T
HE
INA
OFFICES
occupied two floors of a venerable Victorian building near Fleet Street. The rooms had originally housed several firms of tea brokers, and the mahogany walls and brass fixtures reflected a more opulent past. The brass was now green with age and the mahogany paneling cracked from neglect. Long, narrow rooms where men in frock coats once spent their days poring over bills of lading or sampling tea from Darjeeling were now filled with men in shirt sleeves huddled over typewriters, or snatching copy from banks of chattering Teletype machines. The quarters were overcrowded and chaotic. The building being constructed around the corner in Fetter Lane would solve the overcrowding, but the chaos was a problem for the new bureau chief to solve.

It took Martin a week to make sense out of the disorder and to implement his own system and get rid of the deadwood. His predecessor had been a fine newsman but a rotten administrator. Martin gave a dozen key people the sack and sent out feelers to lure replacements from other wire services and several London papers. The bait was money. Scott Kingsford had given him a blank check.

“You're getting it straightened out,” Joe Johnson said one evening, bringing a bottle of scotch into Martin's office. “For seven days he did labor, and, lo, the waters parted.”

“Not much of a Bible scholar, are you, Joe?”

“I never read anything that tries to improve my soul—or my mind, for that matter.” He poured whiskey into two water glasses. “I've got the National League box scores for you, hot off the wire. The Cubs lost to Brooklyn, four to two.”

“To hell with it,” Martin said. He sat back in his chair and swung his feet onto the desk. “Did that piece on D'Annunzio come in from Rome?”

“No, but we got a few hundred words from Talbot in Florence. A Communist labor organizer was gunned down by the Fascists. Pulled from his car on the Via San Georgio at high noon and shot in the head. Mussolini made a statement to the foreign press. He said the man had been paid by Trotsky to bomb a convent. Said they found the bomb in the car, and written instructions in Russian to blow up the nuns. That makes about the tenth murder in Florence in the past two weeks.”

Martin sipped his drink. “Four to two, eh? Who pitched for the Dodgers?”

“Flanagan. Giffrow went for Chicago but got shelled in the sixth. Back-to-back homers. What about the wop shooting?”

“With the red scare and the Palmer raids, there are too many people in the States who'd applaud the shooting of a Communist. We're not doing Mussolini's propaganda for him. Cut the baloney about nuns and Trotsky and pin the story to Kermit's article on the continuing violence in Italy.”

Johnson nodded, and then scowled at his drink. “I didn't mention it before, but I read your book. Small but mighty. You went at the brass hats like a terrier.”

“As an editor, Joe?”

“Oh, cool, crisp prose. Nothing overwrought. Perfect use of understatement and irony. About as clean as a left jab to the jaw. One attack on one afternoon of war. A very clever way of symbolizing the whole bungled mess.”

“Thanks.”

“No thanks required. You asked my opinion—as an editor. If you'd asked me as a friend, I would have said you opened a can of worms. It's a lousy time to take a swipe at the late Great War. Jesus, they're still digging graves, and the mood in some quarters is edgy.”

“Meaning?”

“Raw nerves protecting shaky reputations.” He reached into his pocket and took out a folded piece of paper, which he tossed onto Martin's desk. “A drinking buddy of mine works on
The Times.
That's a copy of a letter that'll be printed in tomorrow's edition. The guns are leveled, Marty, and you're right in the sights.”

Martin took his feet off the desk, reached out, and opened the piece of paper. The letter was signed by Major General Sir Bertram Dundas Sparrowfield, D.S.O., K.C.M.G. (retired). The address was The Willows, Arbury, Hants. He scanned the words: