Prophet (5 page)

“No, Max, don’t—” cried the old man.

But Max did, grabbing the young man by his hair. “See how it feels, sucker!” He flung him into the crowd, where several people fell like bowling pins.

MEL KEPT HIS
camera on the whole scene, capturing the grappling bodies, the flying KEEP ABORTION LEGAL signs, and the whipping American flags. There was no telling who was on which side or who was winning, but it was exciting footage, no question about that.

JOHN COULDN’T SAY
a word, so Ali jumped in. “Leslie? Leslie, are you still with us?”

Leslie’s voice came from off-camera somewhere as the camera captured the first police arriving on the scene. “Yes, Ali and John, we’re a safe distance away now and as you can see, the police are intervening, so this should clear up quite soon.”

“Do you have any idea what started this?” Ali asked.

John knew; he never would have asked that question.

Leslie answered, “Well, uh . . . you may have seen that man in the background, the one yelling at the crowd . . .”

“Yes, and I think our viewers did.”

“Well, he was obviously anti-abortion, and as we all know, that’s one of the hot issues in this campaign, and I think there was a pretty
strong disagreement back there.”

“Thirty seconds. Close it,” came Rush’s voice in their earpieces.

Ali closed with, “Well, hang in there, Leslie, and we’ll get more from you tonight at 7. Be careful.”

“Oh, I’ll be here, on the scene.”

John was happy enough to tell Camera Two, “And that’s NewsSix at Five Thirty. Stay tuned for the
CBS Evening News,
and we’ll see you again at 7 o’clock.”

“Good night,” said Ali.

Theme music. Wide shot of studio. Credits. The anchors engage in unheard small talk with the weather and sports announcers, gathering and shuffling their scripts. Commercials.

“MEL,” SAID TINA
Lewis, “you hear me?”

“Yeah, you’re still coming in,” Mel’s voice came back. It sounded a little high with excitement.

“Keep the picture steady now. Keep rolling. We’ll use some of this at 7.”

“Okay.”

Tina and Rush watched the live camera monitor as Mel zoomed in on the police grabbing the old man and his black friend and muscling them out of the crowd. The old man’s feet weren’t even touching the ground.

THE OLD MAN
was scolding his friend even as the police dragged them along. “Max, you shouldn’t have done that!”

Max was fuming, sweating, too angry to speak. He could only curse the old man, curse the crowd, struggle against the four cops it took to contain him.

“All right, take it easy,” said a cop, brandishing his nightstick.

The old man chided his friend. “Max, now you cooperate! You can’t afford to make things worse!”

Max came to his senses and calmed down with unnatural quickness. “Sorry, officer. Didn’t mean no trouble.”

“You’re gonna clear out of here now or we’ll haul you in, got it?”

“Oh, we’ll leave, right away,” said the old man.

“Yeah, we outa here.”

On the outskirts of the plaza the police let them go, and they hurried away, thankful for freedom.

As for the two strangers who’d thrown those first punches, they were nowhere to be seen.

MARTIN DEVIN WAS
all smiles when he reported back to the governor. “You should have seen it!”

“Did it get on the air?”

“We’ll know in a minute. But that cameraman was really scrambling to cover it.”

“Okay, we’ll play on that.”

THE STUDIO CAMERAS
were off, the show was over. Ali and John removed their earpieces and lapel mikes. The news set was cut off from the outside now, a small, empty, plywood box of a place.

“Poor Leslie,” said Ali. “That was supposed to be an easy assignment.”

John didn’t even hear her as he grabbed the desk phone. “Rush? Rush? Could you get me Rush please?” He slammed the phone down. Apparently Rush wasn’t available.

Ali looked him over for just a moment. “What’s the matter?”

John glared at her, not meaning to. But right now glaring was all he could do. “Aw . . . that . . . stupid story . . .” He grabbed his script and left the desk, muttering to himself more than answering her question. “Of all the things we could’ve put on the air we had to put that on . . . and now we’re gonna see it over and over ’til they wear it out . . .”

John circled behind the stud-and-plywood backdrop of the news set and immediately into the newsroom, a large, gray-carpeted, open floor partitioned into small cubicles, each with a desk, a telephone, and a computer monitor, where reporters, producers, editors, and anchors worked at gathering, sifting, condensing, cutting, and pasting together each day’s news.

So where was Rush? Where was anybody responsible for this?

The room was relatively quiet at just a little after 6 o’clock. The Five Thirty was finished, and half the personnel had gone home. The Seven O’clock producer, Pete Woodman, had already chosen the material that would run, and now his five people, sitting here and there around the room, were putting the finishing touches on the show, updating the script, tailoring the videos, reslotting and prioritizing the stories.

Oh, there was Rush, at his desk in the corner, having a hurried, impromptu script conference with Pete Woodman. It had to be about this latest development. Brother. This thing had so much momentum it was going to be unstoppable.

“Leslie’s there right now,” Rush was saying, “and Mel got footage of the scuffle if you want it. It’s great stuff . . . looks really good.”

Pete was perusing his script for the Seven O’clock, scanning it with the point of his pen. “Now I take it she’s getting the governor’s speech. I’ve got that slotted near the top.”

Rush checked his watch. “He was scheduled to start about a quarter after. He wanted to get on the Seven O’clock, I know that.” He looked up. “Hi, John. Good show.”

“Hello . . .”

Rush went right back to his discussion with Pete. “So Leslie ought to be feeding that in any minute.”

“Good. Bill’s expecting it.” So the Seven O’clock would feature highlights from the governor’s speech. No doubt Leslie and Mel were feeding it back via microwave to Bill in the editing room. Bill, the fastest editor around, was recording it on tape this very moment and would then work with one of the newswriters to find the most poignant eye- and ear-catching clips to paste together for a feature on the Seven O’clock. And if he really wanted to catch the eyes and ears of the viewers, what better footage than—

“So let Bill have that scuffle footage,” Pete said. “That would really give a sense of the . . .”

“Yeah,” Rush completed the thought, “the heat of the issues, the feistiness of the campaign. That’ll fit right in with the governor’s kickoff.”

“And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about,” John cut in.

“Yeah?”

“That footage, Rush. I . . . I just don’t know about that.”

Rush, not much more than a kid with a floppy blond forelock, had great strengths as a producer. He could put together a tight, gripping newscast, he could draw a story out of a vacuum, he could inventively defy time in making deadlines. But one thing he could not do was fathom, much less endure, the petty misgivings and foot-draggings of the station’s “talent.”

“What’s the problem with it?” Rush was being polite, not interested.

John stumbled trying to come up with an answer. “Well . . . it’s violent, it’s . . . well, I think it’s tasteless.”

“I think it happened,” Rush answered curtly. “It happened, and we were there, and that makes it news. You tell me any other station in this market that had an opportunity like that fall right into its lap.”

Okay
, John thought.
My spine’s as stiff as the next guy’s.
“I would say the brawl was an opportunity, yes. But that religious nut in the background, you went after him, didn’t you? You wanted him in the background.”

Rush threw up his barrier right then and there, his hands raised. “Okay, okay . . . Discussion ended . . . No comment. If you have a problem with it, talk to Tina. I took my orders from her. I liked the whole idea, I still do, and I’d do it again, but for this one, talk to Tina. Your problem’s with her.”