Chapter 2
"I have an appointment for an interview. My name is Benton."
The girl checked a notebook, found his name, and nodded her head. "Yeah. Here you are. You're on time but you'll have to wait. Old Scrooge has got somebody in his office right now."
Jim nodded, walked to a chair, and lit a cigarette before he sat down. The chairs were uncomfortable. He took several nervous puffs on his cigarette and let his eyes wander around the room. Deeper into the office, beyond the guard post of the receptionist's desk, were eight more desks. Beside each desk there was a typewriter on a stand. Five of the desks were occupied. All five of the occupiers were men. And they seemed to be quite an assortment. There was the young, smoothly-shorn Ivy Leaguer with narrow tie, crew haircut, and cuffless pants. There was the old timer who needed a shave, and whose clothes were so badly wrinkled even Goodwill would not have accepted them as a donation. The other three men fell somewhere between those two extremes. One of them looked for all the world like a bookkeeper who had wandered into the wrong office and had been hired by mistake.
Jim let his eyes travel on. Lining the walls of the room were head-high filing cabinets. Occasionally one of the men would rise from his desk, go to the files, rummage through them, and return with or without whatever it was he'd been seeking in the first place. The floor of the office was littered with papers and carbons and soggy coffee containers.
Somehow it wasn't quite the way Jim had pictured a newspaper office. There were no copy boys scurrying about, no reporters shouting, "Hold the presses." Everyone in sight was working all right, but that seemed to be the limit of it. They were all busy, yet no one really seemed to be doing anything.
Out of the corner of his eye Jim caught the movement of the receptionist's hand as she waved to him. He rose to his feet and went back to her. She'd just taken a cigarette out and he quickly produced his lighter.
"Thanks," she said after the first puff.
"It's all right. Where do I go?"
"Oh, you don't go in yet," she told him. "You've only been here five minutes. Wait until you've been here a couple of hours. Then get restless."
"Does everyone have to wait a couple of hours?" Jim asked.
"It all depends," she told him. "If you were a big shot you could go right in. But you ain't a big shot, are you?"
"Nope."
"You here looking for a job?" Jim nodded.
"Take a little advice. Find some place else to work."
"What's wrong with this place?"
"Nuthin'. If you don't mind working for peanuts. And it's lousy work, too."
She opened the top drawer of her desk and removed a copy of the newspaper.
"This is the kind of trash we print," she told him, showing him the screaming headline and the gory picture of a corpse lying in the gutter.
"I know," he said.
She shrugged. "Well, if you like this kind of stuff it's your own business. Actually, the work isn't so bad. I get the worst of it up here. You ought to see some of the creeps who walk in through that door. I tell you, it's enough to make your skin crawl the way they look at you. And the phone calls! You have no idea. Some of the nuts scream and holler and curse. Some others call up just because they like to talk dirty to a girl on the phone. The things they say. You wouldn't believe it if I told you. And every once in a while I'll get some special nut who spends all his time telling me I'll roast in hell because of this filthy, lying newspaper. Those are the worst ones of all. Sometimes they really scare me."
Jim waited until she was finished, then said, "If it's that bad why do you go on working here?"
The question caught her by surprise and she gaped open-mouthed for a moment. "That's a good question. Yes sir, that's a good question. I guess only a psychiatrist could answer that one. I really hate the job but I've been here five years already."
"Do they know I'm here, back there?" Jim asked, nodding his head toward the door behind the rail marked PRIVATE.
She shook her head. "Conklin's got somebody in his office and doesn't want to be disturbed."
Just then the door opened. At the sound Jim and the receptionist both turned to look. Two men came out. One was a short, balding, ruddy-faced man in his shirt sleeves. The other was a big, beefy character who looked like he used to play football. The second man wore a rumpled blue gabardine suit. The collar of his shirt showed a ring of grime and the knot of the tie was askew. He walked with a heavy tread, his body rolling from side to side. He was an ape, his beefy body bulging against the drape of the suit.
The two men shook hands in the open doorway and the ape came through the gate in the railing. The man in shirt sleeves started to turn back into the private office, saw Jim, and turned back again. He came over to the railing.
"Who're you?" he asked.
"I'm Jim Benton. I have an appointment to ... "
"Oh yeah," the other man interrupted. "You're the guy I got the call about. Come on in."
He turned his back and headed for the office without so much as an offer of a handshake. Jim pushed through the gate and followed him. The private office was no more luxurious than had been the outer office. Piles of papers littered every available flat surface. The walls were lined with more filing cabinets. There were scraps of paper all over the floor and the trash basket was overflowing.
Jim closed the door and walked across the private office to the desk. The man in shirt sleeves, Harry Conklin, waved him to a chair.
"So, you want to work for a newspaper," Conklin said.
"Yes sir, I do."
"You got a degree in journalism, or something like that?"
"No. No, I don't. But ... "
"That's good. I got one of those college kids outside isn't worth the powder it'd take to blow him to hell. Can you type?"
"Yes sir."
"Can you spell?"
"Yes sir."
"Stop with the sir crud, already. Just answer the questions. I don't give a damn how polite you are. A friend asked me to give you a job as a favor for a friend of his. I don't give jobs as favors. It just so happens I can use another hand around this office. If you can do the work you got the job."
Jim nodded.
"You ever read our paper?" Jim nodded again.
"I mean before you found out you might be going to work here."
This time Jim had to shake his head. "What did you think of it?"
"Uh ... it was...."
"It was crud. Let's get that straight between us right now. Nobody around here is fooling himself. We put out a paper full of crud. The gorier and dirtier the stories the more papers we sell. The more papers we sell the more we charge for advertising. We're here to make money, not to keep the public informed or to change public opinion. You ever worked for a newspaper before?"
"No."
"All right. The job pays sixty-five a week. It's five days, nine to five, with no overtime. You get an hour for lunch. If you work out we'll see about more money. Once you've learned which end is up maybe I'll let you try your hand at writing something, but at the beginning you'll be an office boy. You want it?"
Jim was slightly dazed. He'd been sitting in the chair for little more than a minute while Conklin threw words at him.
"We got no fringe benefits here," Conklin said. "No health insurance or any of that crud. And we got no union. I won't have no union in my place. If you want to work for me you don't join no union, understand?"
Jim nodded.
"All right. This is Friday. You come back here at nine o'clock Monday morning and I'll put you to work."
Jim was out of the office before he realized he'd been given the job without ever saying he would take it. The receptionist grinned at his dazed expression.
"He's like a hurricane, ain't he?"
"I'll say. It went so fast I'm not sure what happened."
"Did you get the job?"
"I think so. At least he told me to be here on Monday morning."
"You got the job. I hope you won't be sorry."
"If I don't like it I can always quit."
"Not if he don't want you to, you can't. Imagine going in there and trying to tell that man you want to quit your job."
"It is a frightening thought."
Jim stalled around the receptionist's desk. "Well," he said after a moment, "I guess I'll see you Monday morning. Tell me, what's happening around town? I've got the whole week end to kill and nothing to do."
The girl looked at him carefully, then let the corners of her mouth lift in a small grin. "You mean you're from out of town?"
"No. I was born and bred right here but I've been away for a couple of years and I don't know a soul. It looks like a long, lonesome week end."
"It doesn't have to be," she said. "A good-looking kid like you shouldn't have any trouble finding himself a girl."
"How about you?" Jim asked. "Are you busy this week end?"
"I think you're a little young for me," she said. Jim laughed. "What's so funny?"
"I was just thinking you were a little young for me."
"That sounds like a compliment," the girl said, smiling again. "But at least it's a new approach."
She picked up her pencil and scribbled something on a sheet of paper. Then she tore the paper from the pad and handed it to Jim.
"Here," she said. "Call me at this number after six o'clock. I've got another date but I'm going to break it"