Deadline (2 page)

On a far more common level, I can tell you that none of these acts of literary tightrope walking occurred in
Deadline.
Maybe I was wrong but I was never in doubt. The book came to life in a few hours and I broke its back that first morning. I quickly saw where it needed to go and what had to happen. I had little to lose—I still thought of it as a time-killer, an amusement to relieve my anxiety over
Denver.
I knew it would crap out against the big blank wall, probably by the weekend, so I could have my way with it for now.

I devised the plot from a clip file I kept, newspaper and magazine stories I had found interesting. I sat at my desk and began to deal out these articles like a poker player. I was attracted to items with no obvious links to the others—since this was for my own entertainment, I could make the long reach and take the big risk and the consequences would be a few wasted hours. I had a
Christian Science Monitor
wire story on the Amish. I clipped it out because people who cling to tradition in the midst of unrelenting “progress” interest me. I had a feature article from
Dance
magazine, of all places, on the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall. It was mainly a profile of Russ Markert, the man who created, recruited and trained this celebrated dance group. I don’t remember if I laughed as I shoved the Rockettes and the Amish into the same little pile. What the hell, I was having fun.

I had a
Rocky Mountain News
piece about a young woman who had been killed by an unknown assailant. The woman herself was never identified and was buried in an unmarked potter’s field grave. Other bits of business filtered in. The Patty Hearst kidnapping was still a hot topic. Student radicals hadn’t yet been relegated to history. Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers would play into it. And I knew I’d need some FBI people, who in their opposite extremes would represent good and evil.

Now I needed a hero, a man of the press to tap in to that hot fuel and drive the book.

Enter Dalton Walker, a guy I still think of as a close personal friend. Walker would be, first of all, a strong writer with all the national awards to back him up. Nothing impresses certain people in management as much as awards. I remember the day Bob Jackson visited the
Post.
Bob had taken the picture of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald and had won a Pulitzer for that millisecond of glory. The story was laughingly told that a
Post
editor almost broke a leg chasing him down the hall to offer him a job, without first finding out if he knew a Brownie from a box lunch (he did, by the way, but he never blended in, and his
Post
tenure was brief). Like Jackson in real life, my fictional reporter had won the Pulitzer. To newspaper people, this is the equivalent of ascending the steps to the throne and sitting at the right hand of God. He is loved by management but secretly resented by the rank and file. His presence pisses them off mightily, and he becomes, of necessity, a loner. Walker would be so good that he could write his own ticket at the newspaper. He would do only the assignments that interested him. He’d be frequently on the outs with the city editor and would not be afraid to jump the bones of the bigger brass if he felt strongly about a point of contention. In other words, everything I’d like to be.

There was still something lacking somewhere. I looked again at the clippings about the unknown woman in potter’s field and it sparked a memory of a much older case, similar, yet strikingly different. A few years earlier I had been struggling to make a living as a freelance magazine writer. I read the instructional books of one Max Gunther, a highly successful nonfiction writer whose work in the
Saturday Evening Post
and other periodicals I had admired. In one of his books (I’m going by memory here) Gunther had told a story that he had carried around for years and now knew he would never write. In the early 1940s, a circus tent had caught fire and some people had died. A small girl was among the victims, but her remains were never identified or claimed. The story haunted him. Who would bring a kid to the circus and not show up to identify her?

I opened my file of newspaper clippings and the answer stared up at me. There was an article about the FBI hunt for Katherine Ann Power, last of the fugitives from that 1970 Boston bank robbery. The FBI couldn’t find her and they never did, until she came in under her own steam in 1993.

Kathy Power walked into the room, touched me on the shoulder and said I’m your gal. I’ll play the role of Joanne Sayers.

What did I know about Katherine Ann Power? I had no way of knowing what her life was like, where she was hiding or what kind of person she might be. From nothing more than her situation Joanne Sayers grew, providing the counter-drive that carried the book to a finish in forty-two workdays.

Bang, it was done.

Deadline
was published in 1981 as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original. A hardback was published the following year by Gollancz in England. The book was a runner-up for the Edgar award, if that means anything. Some people think it was filmed under the title
Witness
, but that 1985 Harrison Ford movie was wrought by other hands. It must’ve been a good idea whose time had come.

John Dunning

Denver, Colorado

April 1995

W
ALKER THOUGHT OF HIMSELF
as a hardened man. He had seen enough death in his time—riots, executions and later Vietnam—but now, coming suddenly upon death on a busy New Jersey street, he was shocked. On a dirt lot behind a shopping center, a circus tent was on fire. There wasn’t anything to be done. If there were still people inside, they were goners, plain and simple. Still, he pulled the car to the curb and wrenched open the door, taking himself with long strides toward the burning canvas. The first of the fire trucks had arrived, but the tent already had crumbled in around its two main poles. It went up like a sheet of paper, reminding him of those old
Hindenburg
pictures with the people rushing out of the flames looking like ants scurrying away from something they couldn’t quite understand. Rescue units came past; another large pumper came by in a shock wave of sirens. So much death, so much pain, and all in the few moments it took him to stop and cross the street.

It drew him until he could feel the heat on his face and arms. He was a kid again, covering his first fire, with a young man’s fascination for the wailing siren. He had been around the world ten times over, had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and still he was drawn by sirens and smoke.

The tent belonged to one of those tiny traveling circuses, the kind his dad had known when the world was younger—the kind of circus kids used to run away to join. They didn’t have many like that these days. The big tent had held three thousand people, no more, and now many of them lay moaning and writhing on the brown grass at the fringe of the parking lot. Two firemen brushed past, and one of them thrust the head of a stretcher at Walker. “Here, buddy, take this.” Walker gripped the poles and looked at the man on the other end. A sad face by nature, infinitely sadder now over the tiny burden he carried. Walker looked down and saw a small body covered by a sheet. A kid; five, maybe six years old. Some poor little kid, here with his dad to see the circus. Walker wasn’t a crying man, but he wanted to cry for that kid. He looked up as the sad fireman, with a nod of the head, directed him out of the lot to a small circle of rescue vehicles. They laid the stretcher on the ground and almost immediately a coroner came and peeled back the sheet and worked over the kid for a few minutes. It was a little girl, Walker now saw, a lovely child with dark hair and pale, almost milky skin. Her face was unmarked: it was so often smoke or the feet of the mob that did the damage. Her hand hung limply over the edge of the stretcher, the fingers dangling in the mud. Her other hand was folded across her middle, clutching a tiny bear, the kind you win at the booths. The coroner tried to pry the bear loose, then gave up and covered the pale face with the sheet.

Walker picked up the loose hand and folded it across the stretcher. He stood over the little body, feeling helpless and very much alone.

Her face haunted him. Maybe it was a quirk of the trade, but Walker always thought in terms of story. If a thing moved him, he assumed it would move his readers as well. Sometimes you got rid of something by simply letting enough time go by, and sometimes writing about it was easier and faster.

He remembered a story the Des Moines
Register
had done some years before about a fatal car accident. Some reporter had reconstructed the lives of all those kids, right up to the moment when their cars came together in that crossroad. Helluva story. His kind of piece. Driving through the Jersey streets, he thought of the little girl in those terms. Interview some survivors, maybe take them through their day. Not many, just four or five. No, three. Three was perfect. Probably have to interview twenty just to get the ones he wanted. Start tomorrow with the little girl: her father, mother, whoever had brought her to the circus. Make a few calls, see if they would be willing to talk about it. People were funny that way. Sometimes, just when you thought they were about to clam up, something would come out that was so incredible, so great, that it lifted the piece and made it sail.

It all depended on how you asked the questions.

Such arrogance. Walker was on his way to a job interview, with no guarantee that there would even be a newspaper to write for tomorrow. But he would get the job. He always did.

He walked into the
Tribune,
and into chaos. A guard directed him to the newsroom, and the first person he saw as he opened the door was some gruff-looking bird right out of MacArthur and Hecht, sitting in the slot on city desk and passing copy to a kid. Jesus. It made him want to laugh, but it was an emotional laugh filled with nostalgia. The
Tribune
was in an old building less than an hour out of New York. It was big and cumbersome. The lights were bad and the floor creaked; the desks were wooden antiques and the typewriters were old Royals with all their insides showing. Walker had come in on the tail end of the fire story. People were breaking their asses to get from here to there. Hot copy flowed along the chain of command, and all of it seemed to be funneled through a single rewrite man named Woodford. Walker sat at an empty desk and watched Woodford work. He recognized at once the hustle of an old wire service man. Woodford had surely done time in some AP or UPI bureau in the middle of nowhere, some dead-end place where speed is what counts and you might rewrite fifty little stories in a single eight-hour day. Nobody wrote as fast as old wire service men. Across the room, a young lady called, “Frank, I’ve got another survivor on Two.”

Woodford strapped on his headset and talked to the survivor. While he talked, his fingers kept pounding out finished copy, which was ripped from his machine and sent along the chain to the backshop. Walker looked at the clock. He knew the
Tribune,
an afternoon paper, would be a good forty minutes over deadline now, holding the page open for everything that could be fit in. Walker looked up the chain and saw, standing at the head of the room, a graying man who was probably the editor, Hiram Byrnes, reading each pink dupe as it passed across his desk. Occasionally Byrnes got up and asked somebody a question. The question traveled backward along the entire chain of command, and eventually reached a reporter in the field, who either answered it or hurried away to find another source.

Walker found himself thinking of other newspapers and other breaking stories, and of the dead who were always the unknown elements in those stories. And suddenly the chaos ended. Across town they might still be counting the bodies, but for Hiram Byrnes and his staff of
Tribune
wordsmiths, the day was done. The backshop could hold no longer; the paper was put to bed for another day. Byrnes had seen Walker come in. He motioned Walker back to his office, a private inner sanctum, carpeted, paneled and decorated with journalistic awards. They shook hands. Byrnes said he had read his stuff and liked it.

“We’ve been going crazy around here,” Byrnes said. “Circus tent caught fire about an hour ago.”

Walker didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to start out by being interviewed as witness to a breaking story. Who needed that?

“Well.” Byrnes sat behind the desk and lit a cigar. “I want you to meet our city editor, Joe Kanin. He’ll be in as soon as he gets the loose ends tied up. What do you think of our plant?”

“So far I like it fine.”

But Byrnes was laughing. “Don’t bite your tongue on my account. I bet I know the first thing you thought when you opened that door. Jesus God,
The Front Page.
Tell me the truth.”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

Byrnes was still laughing. “That’s all going to change in another year. We’ll be getting new furniture, and we’re converting to cold type now. I can’t wait to get those old Royals out of here.”

Walker didn’t tell him, but the idea saddened him. He liked the newsroom the way it was, and he had always loved
The Front Page.
The thought of steel filing cabinets and steel desks and computer terminals depressed him.

Byrnes launched into the interview, and it went about as expected. Byrnes talked mainly about the
Tribune,
as though the paper—not Walker—were the interviewee. In a sense, that was true enough. Walker hadn’t exactly been looking for work when Hiram Byrnes called from out of the blue and asked him to come in. Managing editors never asked about him. They knew all they needed to know about Dalton Michael Walker. They knew he had won the Pulitzer at
Newsday
while still in his mid-twenties. If they knew about the dozen-odd newspaper jobs he had had since then, it didn’t seem to bother them, because if the Prize wasn’t enough, he had won the National Book Award five years later for an investigation of labor union corruption. The Book Award was for distinguished achievement in contemporary affairs, the Pulitzer for what was strictly a writer’s piece, his sensitive penetration of a dying woman’s emotions. A woman he thought he would never forget, a woman of rare beauty and courage, a woman he never thought about any more.