The Knowland Retribution (7 page)

After two years in the mountains of the southwest, Leonard Martin packed everything he needed into the evangelical SUV and began his journey to Boston.

New York

In the grand scheme
of the newspaper business, the common run of those who write obituaries comprises youngsters on an anxious path to better things, and played-out pros with more past than future. There are, of course, exceptions. For many years, the
New York Times's
obituary page framed the work of Robert McG. Thomas, considered by many to be the newspaper's finest writer. After he died, others searched vainly for his magic, Isobel Gitlin among them.

She stood out in the paper's notorious garden of strivers—aggressive, obsessive, persistent young weeds growing with graceless gusto to the light. She'd been hired out of graduate school, where she studied Western Classics, not journalism, pretty much at her leisure, and wrote a column in the campus paper, popularly referred to as
3S
but officially called “
Sex and the Serious Scholar.”
When she first heard of Christopher Hopman, Isobel had put four uneventful years into the
Times
and acquired a faint reputation for cheerful detachment.

Isobel seemed genuinely pleased with every assignment. She never badgered her editors for work on better stories. The ones she did get, while varied, were always local and rarely involved significant news. Whatever she worked on—Brooklyn sewer problems, Manhattan zoning battles, crack run amok in the Jersey suburbs—didn't really have to be published. If it struck someone as interesting and fit the space plan for the day, it might pop up in the back somewhere, to Isobel's delight. Most of the time she gladly researched stories for fellow reporters. Her self-regard was not tethered to the byline, and this was what set her dramatically, eerily, apart. She often wondered, if only for a moment, if it was her evident self-confidence or easygoing style that made certain editors feel uncomfortable. She was “sent to Siberia” after the firing of an aged, embittered elephant, Phil Ross, a reporter who had enjoyed decades of high status before his banishment to the bowels of the obit page. Sent there by editors not even born when he filed his first byline story in the
Times,
Ross, in his anger, apparently bet a colleague fifty bucks he could populate the obituary page, time after time, with feature items on the deaths of mediocre, second-rate athletes: a shortstop who, in an otherwise undistinguished career, drove in the tie run in the eighth inning of a World Series game in
the 1940s; an Irish lightweight, little more than a club fighter, who fought thirty-eight times, winning thirty-two without ever boxing for the championship. A month after praising the Irishman, he snuck in a small obit for a woman he claimed was “the finest athlete” ever to attend the all-female Vassar College. Shortly after that, he got caught when, in a fit of reckless exuberance, he tried to lead one edition with an obituary for someone he dubbed “Mr. Shuffleboard.”

When permanently assigned to obits, Isobel understood that someone had succeeded in getting her out of sight, or out of hearing. That did not diminish her sense that this lateral demotion was a fine thing:
a chance to do serious, worthwhile work, the work of Robert McG. Thomas.

The
New York Times
is the world's newspaper of record and also a key asset in a very large media conglomerate of nearly twenty newspapers, more than a half-dozen television stations, and a couple of radio stations; it is a publicly-owned company sensitive to all the demands and requirements attendant upon high profile corporate identity. Of those at the paper who knew Isobel, some claimed that she was hired and retained only because she was Fijian—a white girl, but nevertheless a real honest-to-goodness Fijian. Her mother was a porcelain-skinned French nurse who struck that island's fabled shores on a long-awaited vacation and never went back to Mother France. She soon met Isobel's father, an Oxford-accented British Jew with South Pacific business interests that had moved him, some time before, to become a local citizen. Thus was Isobel born on Fiji's soil, beneath its hopeful, sky-blue flag, soon to speak its three great tongues, plus English and Parisian French besides.

Her father named her Isabel. Her mother pronounced it Eee-so-bel, and so they spelled it Isobel. She was five foot four in stocking feet, and although unable to ignore a half-dozen unwelcome pounds, on a good day Isobel could admit that she probably looked as good as a thirty-year-old woman should. She did not confuse herself with the flat-bellied, hard-assed, high-titted beauties infesting the
Times
. But after a drink and a glimpse in a flattering mirror she could be confident any man worth coming across might think her attractive. Isobel's jet-black hair was cut to the shoulders. It complemented her creamy skin and small, hazel eyes. Her nose was thin but good, her cheekbones high like her mother's, and her chin very much English. Isobel dressed less carefully than most. She liked loose woolen suits in bright, clear colors. She wore rimless drugstore glasses for reading, which meant that she looked through them most of the time. She once heard a sympathetic colleague describe her appearance as “studious.” Isobel did not know if that was to the good.

Diversity, an ongoing enterprise and a major cultural force at the
Times
, is not an inordinately difficult pursuit for that institution. Droves of Latinos, African Americans, Euros, Asians, and diverse others, representing the wide world's groups and classes, constantly besiege the paper for jobs. Yet some at the
Times
contend that management is never satisfied. They hold that its Human Resources barons (hardly newspaper people themselves) hunger unreasonably for the still-under-represented. Pacific Islanders were always at a premium. Thus, a female Fijian (white or not) crossing the HR horizon appeared as glory incarnate, a pearl very much above price. That Isobel suffered, on frequent occasion, from a vexing stutter added to her luster. The
Times
chose to classify it as a disability. After her first long interview, Isobel Gitlin e-mailed her parents that she had much to be cheerful about. The following day the
Times
offered her employment.

Isobel Gitlin wrote Christopher Hopman's obituary. Although the news section of the paper carried a prominent story about the killing, her obit's high point was the cause and manner of death: great man gunned down on golf course by high-powered rifle, no trace of physical evidence, no suspect, no hint of motive. She researched his life as a captain of industry, arts patron, and philanthropist. It was well documented and easily discovered through standard sources. Amid a generation of senior corporate executives that blossomed in the Reagan years, Hopman excelled as a driver of corporate expansion wielding leveraged debt as his weapon of choice. He didn't
run
companies. He bought and sold them. His business was rerigging, repainting, rewrapping them for sale. As Isobel studied Hopman's history she identified only one exposed mistake: his acquisition of controlling interest in a Houston-based holding company that included among its assets Knowland & Sons—the company most thought had precipitated the great southeastern E. coli disaster three years earlier. She highlighted that point in her notes and included it as a subordinate clause in a lengthy sentence somewhere in the middle of the piece.

“There are only two places in the paper,” an editor told her once, “where you'll find absolute certainty: Sports and Obituaries. You make sure you get the score right.” She took that more seriously than he could have hoped.

New York

Nathan Stein was angry.
He hated whatever he did not understand, and now he felt that a good deal of gobbledy-gook had been shoved in his face, possibly to make him feel small, trapped, mocked, morose.

“Agar? What the hell's ‘agar'?” he demanded, “and this ‘sorba whatever, something MacConkey'? And what the fuck is ‘smack'? I thought it was some kind of heroin. What the hell kind of equipment is that?” He'd liked this Hindu woman, or whatever the hell she was, at first glance. She was pretty as a picture: dark and sharp featured, with little green stones in her ears and a nice yellow, silky thing hanging off her shoulder. He thought she was supposed to have a dot in the middle of her forehead, but no matter. She looked like a lovely doll and stood a good six inches shorter than him, a difference he enjoyed infrequently. She'd been standing there for half an hour before she had a chance to say a word.

“Sorbitol, Mr. Stein,” she replied in a lilting, chimelike voice. “It's called a sorbitol-MacConkey agar. That is S-M-A-C, or smack, if you will. As noted in the report before you, the agar itself is made up of agar-agar. It's—”

“Agar-agar?” he exploded. “Give me a break! And smack is a goddamn illegal drug. Christ, Tom!” he whined, exasperated, appealing to the man on his left. “This sounds like Abbott and fucking Costello. Agar's on first and agar's on second.”

Big Irish Tom Maloney shifted position wearily, it seemed to Dr. Ganga Roy, perhaps in an effort to keep his suit jacket from getting stuck beneath his ample backside. She was almost as bemused by her odd little class as she was by her remarkable classroom.

The main section of Nathan Stein's office, where they were meeting today, was twenty-five feet wide and eighteen feet deep. Its windows looked from the fifty-third floor over Manhattan north of the Battery. Stein's battleship of a desk occupied the southeast corner of the room, and the light behind him lasted all morning long. He set it up that way purposely. The light was so bright behind him it hid his facial expression from anyone sitting in any of the four leather chairs that lined up to face him across the desk. Ten feet behind them, in the middle of the room, was a brass-fitted glass conference table surrounded by a dozen very different, very expensive chairs. Beneath that grouping a large red Bactrian rug, perhaps a hundred feet square, bespoke the anguished labor of a thousand tiny fingers. At the far end of the office were a black leather sofa, two huge chairs, and a massive sleek black-wood coffee table. Two doors, set off to the right of that furniture, led to Stein's private bathroom and bedroom, so Dr. Roy supposed, completing his home away from all his other homes.

She'd stood and been ignored for the past twenty minutes, sunlight behind her, an easel at her side. Because she was standing, and because of the easel, where she stood became the head of the table. Tom Maloney faced her from his least favorite chair, the unforgiving mahogany number that forced his body into an awkward forward lean. He was stuck with it because Nathan had chosen the velvet to his right.

Nathan Stein was a genius at making things as difficult as possible. Today he was at the top of his game, and no wonder. The Knowland business had just hit the fan.

Not twenty-four hours ago, when Tom first called Dr. Ganga Roy, he'd modestly introduced himself as Senior Vice President and Director of Mergers and Acquisitions. “Which is,” he said, “when you come right down to it, just a lot of words.” He'd heard from a research director he knew that Dr. Roy was quite good and “quite tiny,” and hoped that the latter might have a soothing effect—that Napoleonfucking Stein, as he was known to so many at Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills Securities, might find her smallness pleasing. This morning Tom had personally helped her set up the flip-chart easel she'd brought. He buzzed around her cheerfully until the others tromped in, none of them extending even the courtesy of a glance her way, and then Tom too acted as if she wasn't there. She might have been the cleaning woman patiently waiting to make some slight move without causing notice. And so she stood for twenty minutes as the others argued, Tom took his seat, and the spectacle progressed.

She gathered that the big black man, the one Tom told her was Wesley Pitts, had incurred Mr. Stein's disfavor. The matter had something to do with Houston. “Did you talk to Pat Grath
yourself
?” Mr. Stein was asking as they entered. Pitts said he'd talked to Grath and Billy MacNeal too. Now they were sitting, and she chose not to. Tom Maloney's chubby, English-looking cheeks seemed to sag as he followed the conversation. Pitts said, “They're all scared shitless. They've got hundreds of millions at stake.” Now Stein snarled most unbecomingly. “Tell me again,” he demanded.

Pitts's eyes were large and round, fraught with more than information—bulging with urgency, fighting an anxious tension. “Pat got a call from the plant manager in Tennessee. His name is Ochs.” Pitts's extraordinarily large hands fumbled through a tiny notepad. “Floyd Ochs. One of his foremen, a guy named Wayne Korman, told him to shut down his line. He, Korman, said something about the readings being incomplete. Stuff was getting by untested. He said they'd been shipping out beef with E. coli bacteria since yesterday. He wanted to clean the whole operation, scrap the meat supply, and get new cattle before they started again. It seems they've been running around the clock. Ochs mentioned ‘operator fatigue' to Grath. Anyway, Ochs told Korman not to do a fucking thing. He told him to take no action. He told him to wait for instructions. Then he called Grath. Grath told Billy Mac and Billy's shit turned to water. The IPO—that's all he thinks about. That's when Pat called me. And that's it, Nathan. That's all I've got.”

“And what about Hopman?”

“I called Hopman myself,” said Tom Maloney. “He wants to hear what we have to say and that's why we are sitting here now. That's why we need to do this now. We need to get a handle on the scope of this problem.”

Silence at last settled into the room. They all looked at Nathan Stein and waited.

“Shit, Maloney!” he suddenly squawked in the strained, unpleasant voice of a student who understands nothing and blames that on the book. “Fucking sonofabitch!”

It surprised Dr. Roy only a little that they'd paid no attention to her, despite her doll-like beauty, despite her unconventional costume and easel. She was, she knew, a kind of servant—however well compensated. What amazed her was how freely these people talked in front of the help. She would certainly have excused her half-deaf Polish cleaning woman to ensure privacy for a sensitive phone conversation or a visit with friends. Where she came from, one accorded servants the very real respect due to those positioned to do one harm. Mid-level managers, research directors, whom she'd met by the many hundreds, did not behave this way. Now she knew those at the top were no different. Even faculty meetings were more discreet.

Now, Stein was looking at her, seeing her in his mind, she sensed, as the only one in the room not yet immersed in the troubles of Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills Securities. “Sorry about all that,” he said, attempting a gracious smile, “and you are Dr. Roy. Am I right?”

Maloney shot to his feet much more limberly than she supposed he could. He ran through her credentials and introduced her to Stein (Vice Chairman of Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills; this man, she was sure, could only have gotten his crown by inheritance), and Pitts (described as the firm's invaluable Vice President for Client Relations
,
whatever that might mean; he was very likely an ex-athlete, almost certainly some kind of salesman
)
. And then there was the only female at the table, Louise Hollingsworth, a tall, stiff-necked, sharp-featured woman, small shouldered and lean, wiry hair unfortunately blonde, not at all flattered by her rich floral scent, black skirt, pink silk blouse, and heels. Maloney described Louise as “our most Senior Analyst, but in reality, much, much more.” Louise rose uncomfortably, unhappily, to shake hands. Even in her midthirties, even under the corporate get-up and ill-advised touches, Dr. Roy pictured a girl spending her best years free of lipstick and casual friends, haunting the stacks of a cozy New England college—Hampshire, Marlboro, maybe Bard—writing very long papers.

Stein got down to business by picking up the report he'd brought with him. He waved the document in the air and made his scrambled, inflamed speech about agar. The fleeting impulse to gallantry was now dead. He'd remembered what he did not understand. He continued:

“Agar's on first and agar's on second. No, agar's on first, smack's on second, crack's on third. It reads like I don't know what.” No one appeared to disagree. “Let me ask you this, Dr. Roy. What's this stuff about ‘Consequential Developments'? I don't know what the hell it means but I don't like the sound of it. Where do you get that from anyway? How do you know what will happen?”

His bratty-student voice rose even higher. “Isn't that a medical conclusion? You're a Ph.D., right? Rockefeller Institute?” He held up the cover of the report and pointed to her name.

“That is correct. I am Ganga Roy, Ph.D.”

“Well, damnit, that's what I mean!” Stein exploded. “What we've got here is just some technical bullshit. Thank you Dr. Roy for your technical report. But all this crap about consequences—am I confused or what? Isn't that a medical thing? A medical kind of judgment? Don't we need a medical expert to make a call like that?” He stared at the Indian woman, eyes expectant, all but asking, “Aren't we one man short here?”

She could not have imagined a more delicious turn to the conversation.

“Oh, I certainly agree. I certainly do.” She flicked an eye toward her new friend Tom, to see whether he was in touch with the joy of the moment. He gave no sign of it. “And most certainly you have the medical opinion upon which you rightly insist. I am also Ganga Roy, MD. I am also a medical doctor, you see. Much like agar-agar, Mr. Stein, you may wish to regard me as doctor-doctor. And, if I may add, with some modesty, I consult for many firms as well as your own, precisely because I am qualified to provide the very thing that you have aptly identified, which is to say, an expert opinion.”

Which was, after all, why Tom Maloney had called her yesterday requesting a “detailed and complete” briefing on the subject of potential problems associated with E. coli contamination in ground beef. Dr. Roy, a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute and professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, consulted with many firms. She billed on a “per day” basis: fifteen hundred dollars for research and reports (plus a thousand more should she appear at a meeting, like this one, to explain her work); five thousand a day for depositions or court appearances. Last year this arrangement brought her eighty thousand in extra income, which included nine thousand in research fees from Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills; several of whose functionaries had, in recent months, asked her to investigate the practices of companies in which Stein, Gelb had taken an interest. She reported that the objects of their interest did or did not pollute, were or were not at risk for regulatory sanction. Something like that, she presumed, drove Tom Maloney's agenda now.

Until yesterday she hadn't heard of Tom Maloney. During their initial chat, he insisted with unexpected force, though never impolitely, that she present the following day. She told him her schedule would not permit. He doubled her rate to offset the inconvenience. She resisted. He persisted. She gave in before he got to the point of indicating the dollar value of those who sought her counsel. She would have guessed that the woman got a million or two; the black man something more than that; the others even more. Her guesses would have been far short of reality. Further, he did not mention the name of the specific firm in which they had taken an interest. He did emphasize that her audience would be unacquainted with the subject matter. This input was unnecessary. Dr. Roy understood that Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills Securities did not, themselves, process meat.

She followed her rebuke to Nathan with a slight, charming smile. That crossed his wires sufficiently to quiet him for a moment. Tom saw his opportunity and slid a hand onto Stein's shoulder.

“Just part of the job,” he thought, “but not
just
part of the job.” Keeping Nathan Stein on an even keel in times of crisis had become Tom Maloney's most important task. It hadn't always been so. Twenty years ago, Tom recalled, Nathan had been just as hard-ass about things, equally as aggressive, maybe more so, and probably meaner than he was now. But it played better in his late twenties than in middle age. Ambition is a garment best worn by the young. Tom knew that just as well as he knew who Nathan Stein was the first time he met him.