Charm City Read Online Free PDF Page B

slipped
into the chair across the table from Feeney's slumped body.
But he didn't acknowledge her, unless one considered a few
muttered lines of Auden a suitable greeting.
    " I sit in one
of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the
clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade ."
    Tess sighed. Richard Burton
couldn't have done it much better, or much drunker. Auden was
a particularly ominous sign, reserved for all-time lows. Only Yeats or
Housman was worse.
    "You're on Charles
Street and the Brass Elephant is hardly a dive, although I
won't debate you on the merits of this particular
decade."
    "All I have is a voice,"
Feeney countered, his voice slipping into a singsong cadence as he
notched up the volume. " To undo the
folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain / Of the sensual
man-in-the-street …"
    "Is that what they did to you
today? A man in the streets?" A minor complaint, one Feeney
could be jollied out of. Tess knew the real folded lie was the
media's never-flagging belief that ordinary people knew
anything about current events. Whenever anything big happened far away,
the editors sent reporters into the street to sample the common sense
of the common man.
    The bartender appeared at the table with her
drink. The ritual was part of the pleasure—his wrist action
with the shaker, the way he poured the martini with a nice bit of
showmanship. Tess took a sip and immediately felt better, stronger,
smarter, ready for Feeney in extremis .
    "So what was today's
question? Something about NATO? NATO is always good for a
man-in-the-street. I remember back in my Star days, when someone in Pigtown thought NATO was an indoor swimming pool
the mayor wanted to build in Patterson Park."
    "You disappoint me,
Tess," Feeney said balefully, gnawing on one of the
toothpicks from the pile in front of him. "You're
as literal minded as my dumb-fuck editors."
    Tess took a second, more generous sip from
her glass, relishing its chill and the tiny tongue of heat behind it.
Truly a lovely drink.
    "It's nice to see you,
too, Feeney."
    "Nice to see me? You
can't even bear to look at me."
    Lost in his own private pity party, Feeney
had spoken an unwitting truth. Tess was avoiding his eyes, squinted
tight from bitterness, and his turned-down smirk. Feeney had always
been gray—gray-blue eyes, gray-blond hair, even a
grayish-pink pallor, only a few shades lighter than the undercooked hot
dogs he bought from the sidewalk vendors outside the courthouse. But
tonight, everything looked a little ashier than usual, as if he
wasn't getting enough oxygen. Against his drained face, the
broken blood vessels on his cheeks were stark blue road maps leading
nowhere. Gin blossoms, the one flower you could count on finding
year-round in sodden Baltimore.
    "What's wrong,
Feeney?"
    "My career is over."
    "You make that announcement once a
month."
    "Yeah, but usually it's
only free-floating paranoia. Tonight, I got the word officially. I
don't belong. Not a team player." The last sentence
came out so slurry it sounded more like "Knotty
template."
    "They couldn't have fired you." The Beacon-Light was a union paper, which made it difficult for them to dismiss
employees, although far from impossible. But Feeney was good, a pro.
They'd have a hard time building a case against him. Unless
he had done it for them, by ignoring an editor's orders.
Insubordination was grounds for immediate termination.
    "Suppose you had written the story
of your life, Tess?" he asked, leaning toward her, his face
so close to hers that she could smell the gin on his breath, along with
the undertones of tobacco. Strange—Feeney had given up
smoking years ago. "The best story you could ever imagine.
Suppose it had everything you could ask for in a story, and everything
had at least two sources? And suppose those goddamn rat bastard
cowardly pointy-head incompetents wouldn't publish
it?"
    "This has something to do with
that basketball rally, doesn't it? The story