Manhattan Nocturne Read Online Free PDF Page B

method for deciding when to buy a newspaper—he listened for the sound of rich people screaming. The owner of the paper at the time, a real-estate man, was getting killed as the tide of Japanese dollars receded from New York. He wanted out and had started to turn off the money; it got so bad that every night a clerk went around collecting spare pencils off reporters’ desks to reuse the next day. With no warning, Hobbs had presented
himself like a phantasm; the offer was very, very low, but it was in cash—not a convolution of debt instruments and stock transfers. The real-estate man huffed that he was concerned about the public good; never would he sell out a great New York institution to such a scoundrel—everyone knew what kind of shocking trash Hobbs printed in his London papers. By contrast, the real-estate man was a statue in the park, and for a time he enjoyed this new version of himself and was seen on television and at symposia at the Columbia University School of Journalism describing the size and beauty of his ethical convictions. Three weeks later he took Hobbs’s deal and was gone. Hobbs came in, clashed brutally with the unions, and threatened to close the paper. This seemed impossible, considering he had just bought the paper, but then observers pointed out that the newspaper building was prime East Side real estate; in an up market, the building might be worth nearly the entire price of the paper. This scared the unions. The mayor made entreaties, but Hobbs seemed disinterested. He stayed in London while his deputies negotiated, and in the end, the unions caved. Hobbs cut costs, bought the drivers a new fleet of trucks, and then hit the next upturn in the economy.
    Now the paper was fattening Hobbs’s holding company, providing cash for him to add other properties; or maybe it wasn’t, and he was just carrying it in order to bludgeon the politicians as necessary. Either way his genius had again been confirmed. I watched him with a kind of zoological curiosity as he muttered something wetly at a slender young thing who could not have been wearing underpants under her dress as she passed fetchingly in front of him; then the great soft wattle beneath the immense chin—a cow udder of flesh, really—shook in merriment at his own witticism, and above his bright green eyes the thick eyebrows went up and down a second time, as if connected to a string, while pieces of masticated herring frothed momentarily on the ledge of his lip before being wiped away by the same swollen tongue. The mouth then reflexively opened again, just in time to receive another shiny herring being pressed home.

    A fiftyish woman with a perfect helmet of hair smiled at me. “Porter Wren, is it?” she said in a fake British accent as the piano sounded dreamily from the balcony above us.
    â€œYes.”
    She took my arm. “You must come have a word with—he’s quite eager to meet—”
    She conveyed me toward the clot of executives surrounding the Australian’s sofa. He was so heavy that he couldn’t stand for long periods. One could only imagine tailored undershirts, the twenty-eight-inch neck. Expanses of soft flesh rubbing against themselves. Ankles wide as coffee cans. I was handed off to a young man with a lemon-sucking expression, and he said, “Yes, yes, of course, yes …” and he stitched me through the people around the man and pressed me forward so that I found myself looking down at the monstrosity of silk, the immense fingers.
    â€œSir, Mr. Porter Wren, sir, who writes the column …”
    His eyes rolled upward in my direction obligatorily, and he opened the large wetted mouth in something close to an aah-hmm, nodded twice vaguely, as if exhausted by his own disinterest, then flicked his view back toward some other entertainment. Here was a man rich and powerful enough that he no longer needed to speak. I beat my brains out working for him. But