Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Jimmy
I hadn’t slept.
I'd done the impression of sleep — eyes closed, breath regulated, body still on Nelson's absurdly expensive Belgian sheets — but at three I gave up and lay on my back watching the city throw moving lights across the ceiling.
Nelson stayed up late, making phone calls.
When I asked what he was doing he told me to get back in bed.
When he finally crawled under the sheets beside me he kissed the back of my head and held me from behind.
At six he got up.
I watched him dress from the pillow, because watching Nelson Mackenzie dress for war is the sort of thing you do not interrupt.
A white shirt so crisp it looked structural.
The black suit cut so precisely that a menswear blog had once run a thousand words on the shoulder seam alone.
A tie the color of a bruise. Cufflinks. He did his own knot in four movements without looking down, and when he pulled it tight it sounded like a door locking.
He caught my eye in the mirror.
"Wake up. Always wear something that makes you feel like you're about to win."
"Nelson —"
"Up, Jimmy."
I dressed in the things he handed me — a charcoal blazer, a white shirt I didn't recognize and that fit me too well to be an accident, my own boots.
I tried, twice, to ask him what he'd done last night.
What the phone calls had been about. Who he'd called.
Both times he said eat something, pushed coffee at me, and didn't answer.
In the cab he did not let go of my hand.
He wasn't squeezing it. Nelson was just holding it, palm-down, on the seat between us, the way you hold something you have decided is yours and don't intend to argue about. He watched the streets move past his window and I watched him. The only thing I knew for sure — the only thing I’d been able to confirm during seven hours of insomnia — was that I had never seen him enjoy something this much.
That was what was scaring me.
His mouth was relaxed, and his shoulders had dropped half an inch. The little muscle in his jaw he clenched before broadcasts wasn't clenching. He looked both smug and peaceful, which I didn’t think could be done simultaneously.
"Nelson," I said quietly. "Whatever you're about to do —"
"Mm."
"— please don't blow up your contract for me."
He turned his head. Looked at me the way he'd looked at me across the dressing room couch the night before, when I'd told him I was the liability.
"Jimmy," he said, "I love that you think I'm doing this for you."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The cab took a corner. He faced front again and didn't elaborate.
* * *
The newsroom at seven-forty-five had its morning hum on — interns hauling coffee, a producer doing her sun-salutation stretch by the rundown board, the muted bank of televisions playing four competitors at once.
Nelson cut through it the way an icebreaker cuts through pack ice.
People glanced up. People looked back down.
Two reporters parted around us without a word. Somebody dropped a stack of printouts.
Nelson didn't slow down.
My hand was still in his. We were holding hands across the entire newsroom floor of the Beacon Broadcasting Company at seven-forty-five in the morning and I felt every set of eyes register it on my skin like sunburn.
Nelson wasn't hiding it.
He was announcing it.
The elevator to the executive floor felt like an eternity.
"Nelson. Tell me what you're going to do."
"I'm talking to Bruce."
"That is not a plan. That is a sentence."
He squeezed my hand once and let it go as the doors opened.
* * *
Bruce's outer office had a glass desk, a wall of orchids he did not personally water, and a woman named Maggie who had survived four VPs by being polite, fast, and unreadable. She was halfway through a sip of coffee when we walked in.
Maggie set the cup down very carefully.
"Nelson." She rose. "Bruce is — he's prepping for the nine o'clock. Would you like me to —"
"No."
"I can absolutely fit you in at —"
"Maggie." Nelson gave her the smile he gave to dishonorable politicians. The one that meant this is not personal, get out of my way. "I'm going in. No calls. No interruptions. Whatever's on his calendar — push it."
"Mr. Mackenzie, I really —"
Nelson was already at the door.
I had time to see Maggie's face do a very small, very controlled thing — half thank God it's not me and half I should warn him — and then Nelson pushed Bruce's door open with the heel of his hand and walked into his office. I followed because I didn't know what else to do.
Bruce was at his desk with his phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear and a half-eaten croissant on a paper plate. He looked up.
I have stood on a tarmac in Mogadishu while a man my age explained to me, very calmly, that he intended to die that afternoon. I've watched faces do remarkable things under pressure.
Bruce's face, in the half-second he registered Nelson and then me behind him, did something I hadn't seen before. The blood left it. Then it came back in patches — across the cheekbones, up the throat — like somebody had thrown a switch. His free hand went to his tie.
"I'll — I'll call you back," he said into the phone, and missed the cradle on the first try.
Nelson shut the door behind us. Quietly. The click was the loudest thing in the room.
He turned without looking at me, eyes still on Bruce.
"No calls," he said over his shoulder, in the direction of the door, just loud enough for Maggie to hear it from the other side. "No interruptions of any kind."
Bruce stood up.
It was a reflex thing. Years of standing up when a powerful person enters your office, the body trying to find an authority that the situation no longer contained. He braced his fingertips on the desk like a man at a podium.
"Nelson. Now — now — this is not —"
"Sit down, Bruce."
"I will not — Nelson, you cannot just — there are processes —"
Nelson didn't say anything. He just stared at him.
I was standing two feet behind his left shoulder and I felt that look even though it wasn't aimed at me. It had no heat in it. It was the temperature of the inside of a refrigerator, and it didn't move.
Bruce's tie hand went up. Down. Up again. He swallowed audibly. His mouth opened, closed. Then his knees did the thing knees do when a body has run out of arguments before the brain has, and he sat. Hard. The chair rolled back an inch.
Nelson did not sit. He stayed standing in the middle of the office with his hands loose at his sides and his chin lifted at the angle he used on Camera One. I watched, from two feet away, the most controlled man in cable news take exactly the amount of time he wanted before he opened his mouth.
"You are a coward, Bruce."
Bruce flinched.
"You are a small, frightened, careful man," Nelson said, in the same conversational register he used to order coffee.
"You've spent many years in this building avoiding a single decision that could be traced back to you, and yesterday afternoon, for reasons I am about to walk you through, you made one. "
"Nelson, I — corporate — Lauren made it very clear —"
"Stop talking."
He stopped.
"You fired Jimmy," Nelson said, "because firing me is more expensive than firing him.
Because you and Lauren and whoever else was in that meeting decided that the cleanest way to manage the optics around your most-watched anchor was to remove the man beside him.
You wrote 'conflict of interest' in the file because it's true enough to survive a deposition, and you left the real reason out because the real reason has a settlement number attached to it.
" He tilted his head a fraction. "You thought you were trimming a problem.
What you were doing — what you were actually doing, Bruce, look at me — was reaching for a leash. "
Bruce’s eyes bulged a little as he yanked on his tie.
"You wanted to remind me whose network this is. And you wanted Jimmy gone so that the next time you and I disagreed in a rundown meeting I would remember what happens to people who matter to me in this building." Nelson's voice stayed perfectly level. "Have I got the gist of it?"
"That is — that is a wild —"
"Yes or no, Bruce."
He didn't answer.
Nelson let the silence work.
I was standing very still beside Nelson, and the thing happening inside me was not one thing.
It was three. It was terror — for Nelson, and hell, of him too.
It was something hot and inappropriate and very specifically located, because watching Nelson Mackenzie take a man apart in a tailored suit was not, it turned out, an experience I had the luxury of being neutral about.
And it was something else underneath both of those, something quieter, that I couldn't name yet and didn't try.
He had walked me through the newsroom holding my hand. Nelson wasn't letting me go.
"Here is what you misjudged," Nelson said, and his voice dropped.
Not louder. Lower. The register he used for things he wanted you to remember.
"You think the leverage in this room is yours because you signed me. You think the anchor chair belongs to the network and the network leases it back to me. Bruce.” Nelson pointed at his chest. “Eyes up here, coward.
The chair belongs to whoever the country tunes in to see, and the country tunes in to see me.
I'm the most-watched anchor in this format in the country.
I have been, for three years, the line item that funds the rest of your prime-time block.
The number on my next contract has multiple commas in it for a reason and you know that reason. "
"Nelson —"
"I'm not finished."
He shut his mouth.
"I've been a very, very good employee of this network," Nelson said.
"I have been pleasant, always on time. I've killed three of your producer hires and you didn't fire me for any of them.
Why? Because you couldn't afford to. I have never once, in thirteen years, made anything in this building personal. "
He paused.
"I'm about to do so now."
Bruce went the color of paper.
"My current contract ends the last Friday of next month," Nelson said.
"Twenty-two business days. You're going to call that woman Lauren, and you're going to tell her that the executive producer of Beacon News Tonight has been retained, with an apology and a raise. If you do that, I will be sitting at my desk at seven tonight and we’ll pretend that your decision to let Jimmy go was a clerical error. If you don't —"
He stopped. Looked at him. Let him fill it in himself.
He couldn't.
"— I will not be renewing," Nelson said gently. "I'll finish out my twenty-two days. And the day after the contract expires, I'll do exactly one interview, with someone of my choosing, in which I will explain — at length, on the record, with documentation — why I left."
Sweat dotted Bruce's upper lip.
"Choose, Bruce."
He sat there for what felt like a very long time. His mouth opened twice without sound. His hand went to the tie and stayed there, fingers working the silk. Finally he took a deep breath and spoke.
"Fine," he choked out.
His voice cracked on it.
Bruce cleared his throat and tried again.
"Then you're fired too, Nelson."