Chapter1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

Joseph Corbin's office looked like a time capsule in the middle of Tops, Inc. The rest of the fifteenth floor had gone through several design motifs in the last ten years—from thirties retro white plastic and chrome to brick walls and Giottoesque murals of famous scenes in journalism (Addison and Steele at work, Nixon's last press conference, the death of JFK, Jr.). But Corbin hated change; no matter what the interior design people said, he believed that black and white pinstripe curtains and grey vinyl furniture represented a classic sensibility that could never go out of style. The design people sometimes asked if they could at least paint his white walls a color, but Corbin always said "No, I don't like visual over–stimulation." Even his carpet, once burgundy, had faded over time to a slightly rosy grey, the same color as the sky on this rainy morning in Washington.

Sitting on a swivel chair, superimposed on all that greyness, Rose Merriman gave off a technicolor sheen, like Dorothy first stepping out of Kansas. Her feet were ruddy brown, her sandals vivid red, her skirt a rich olive green which set off her light yellow shirt and damp yellow hair. Leaning forward on the facing couch, scanning her from toe to head, he thought "She is so more than just a good–looking woman. She's opportunity itself."

"So what do you think?" he asked. "You want the story?"

She smiled doubtfully, not trusting Corbin, not sure what he was really after. She opened up the dossier he'd given her and leafed through the contents: AP releases, address lists, photos of protestors, a Times interview with Jenny Lemke—National Chairperson of the Fetal Rights League.

"You're exactly the right one," he said.

"Come on, Joseph! I'm a photographer. You're asking me to write."

"I've read your latest book and you're a fine writer."

"What you 'read' was a picture book."

"A picture book with copy." He stretched his long brown fingers around his knees and cracked his knuckles. "Why do you want to hide behind your camera, behind another writer? Why not do the pictures and the words?"

She laughed. "I'm always happy to work with talented writers."

"Never jealous of the exposure?"

"Never!"

He sat calmly, smiling at her, thinking how beautiful she was. She made him nervous. As a rule he never dated white women. He looked down on black men who did—it was so O.J., so obvious.

"Come on Joseph," she said softly, "why are you asking me to do this?"

A slow smile spread across his face. "Because I need a different consciousness at work here. Most of our writers are—actually the magazine is—known for being sort of liberal and very cocky and male."

"Do tell."

"You know that. Of course you know that. I want a woman, that's a non–negotiable. I wrote down a few names. They probably had thirteen abortions between them. Jenny Lemke would smell them coming a mile away. Really, Rose, I might as well send in Patricia Ireland."

"It would make about as much sense as sending in me."

"No, no, you're special. You have that Catholic schoolgirl air about you."

"I'm pro–choice."

"Sure you are, but you can humanize these people. I know you can."

She looked at the pile of photographs in her lap."Oh, I'm not sure that's true, Joseph."

"Come on." Corbin crossed his legs and folded his arms. "This is just an appearance thing. You have to look right and sound right and ask the right questions in the right way. It's not that I expect you to like any of these people, not really. You know how to tell a story and you're good with human beings, which is more than I can say for a lot of reporters. I can't believe you're going out with an immature little shit like Stannie Colfax, but that's your own business."

She let the remark go. "Which reminds me," she said. "Stannie's in Florida. I was going to take some time off and go down tomorrow, or Monday at the latest. But I know you'd probably want me at that march next week—what day is it?"

"Tuesday."

"So I couldn't be there."

"It's a huge event."

"Well, I know that."

"Doesn't it interest you to see how the anti–choice people handle standing eye to eye with the very women they've terrorized all these years?"

"Actually, it does. I was thinking of going anyway, until Stannie asked—"

"Rose, the number on the yellow ledger there, that's Jenny Lemke at home. At least call her. Try to and interested, like you're on the fence. See if it stirs up something. You'll find the phone number for the Fetal Rights League in there, too."

She sat still for a minute, considering, and then spoke slowly. "I could call her. I'm not really eager for this, though. It's an issue I'm not comfortable with."

Corbin narrowed his black eyes. Maybe Rose had aborted a baby or two of her own. Maybe she'd aborted Stan Colfax's baby.

"No reporter is ever objective," he said.

"Objectivity's not the problem, Joseph. It's sympathy. I do like to sympathize with the people I photograph, but I really don't understand these people. Especially the women. It's like they're out there demanding to be slaves again, like they're not comfortable with having control of their own bodies. And look at this picture—this woman here with her little boy. He's holding a huge, gory picture of an aborted fetus. And he's smiling up at her. Isn't that a kind of child abuse, Joseph? I mean, what kind of person would involve a child in this—"

Joseph bent forward and studied the photograph. "The woman's wearing a lace cap. She's probably Mennonite or Amish or something. But Rose … " For a moment his cheek was next to hers. "I've got plenty of demographic information on the pro–life movement, but until you get in there and talk to these people, you won't really be able to satisfy your curiosity about them." He pointed to another face in the same photo, a small woman with short brown hair and an angular face. "Actually that's Jenny, right there. She's an intelligent woman. I don't think you'll hate her once you meet her. But I have an insider telling me she may have some kind of relationship with the Womb Bomber." He sat back.

"'Relationship?' What does that mean?"

"Take it however you want."

"So are these people that far out there, Joseph? Are they into violence?"

"The Fetal Rights League opposes violence. Formally, at least. So far they prefer to work through the courts. But you talk to them and you sense a lot of frustration with the government, even the mainstream pro–life movement. The mainstream has changed its tactics in the last few years, going for incremental steps rather than trying to overturn Roe v. Wade."

"Parental notification, bans on partial–birth abortion, that kind of thing."

"Right, but the courts haven't always cooperated."

"So the Fetal Rights League is losing patience."

"Possibly. These people feel very marginalized. The most recent polls show Americans not liking abortion, but not wanting to make it illegal, either. There's a very widespread dislike for the pro–life movement. It's too religious and pushy. Too white—excuse the expression. And it has some ugly heroes. Which brings us to our boy, the Womb Bomber, the biggest nut of all. You could do a lot of good Rose, if you got in there and investigated this. When you're talking about a mass murderer out there and on the loose—"

"You mean out there and dead. Remember Rochester? "

"Nobody knows for sure what happened in Rochester."

"The government seems pretty sure. NPR did a story on it just the other night. 'Profile of a Terrorist.'"

"They identified one of the Rochester victims as this anti–social, pro–life type with a history of mental illness, and so they ruled it a suicide bombing. But they never made a decent case that he'd done the other clinics. Hell, they couldn't prove he'd bombed that one. The whole thing was circumstantial. That's why you don't even know his name."

She smiled. "His name was Ward Kimbley. He ran a Radio Shack in Grandville, Michigan, which is why he seemed out of his element in Rochester, New York. And the kind of bomb they found there—built into a transistor radio—it was the same used in two other bombings, wasn't it? But after Rochester, no more."

"Yeah. But in January of this year somebody did a clinic in Miami. And then two weeks ago, a letter came to the Times. They didn't print it, they turned it over to the FBI. But there's a handwritten copy in the back of that file there, on yellow ledger paper."

Rose found the sheet and pulled it out slowly, scanning it. Her eyes jumped to the end of each line.

I have saved the unborn in many states. I have avenged the unborn in New York. You beleive I am dead, but I have arose to avenge the inocent. I have avenged in Miami. I am the promised deliveror of the unborn and I am coming for the media next, because the media are they who lie to the American poeple, and who tells them its ok to kill babes who are not out from the womb yet, because little babes are not presious unto the Lord God until they are born. Wo to thee, movie stars and tv entertanors, beware lest thou tell more lies to the American people, for behold I shall strike as a rod of ligtning, I shall visit thee as worst than ten plegues. I am the angel of death who comes to take thy one firstborn away so you will let Gods suffering chirdren go forth from the womb to a promised land of air and life, across the red sea into there inheritence forever.

She looked up. "Where did you get this letter?"

"A friend gave it to me."

"A friend from the FBI?"

"Who could lose his job, maybe go to prison. So we won't speak of it outside this room unless I decide it's time."

"And why do they think the letter might be legitimate? Not just a hoax? Isn't a bit over the top—almost like a parody?"

"They don't know for sure, but his spelling is pretty recognizable. They have other letters from him, dating back twenty years or so."

Rose stared at the sheet of paper. "Movie stars and entertainers."

"The guy's out there alive somewhere."

"That's very frightening."

"Yeah. And also very newsworthy." He leaned in close, knowing he almost had her. "You understand, don't you? If we uncover something significant about the Womb Bomber, who can say what good the story might do? It could save lives. I'm sure that's important to you. I want you to do this semi–undercover—I want you to go in as a friend, not as a journalist. But take your camera. Tell them you're doing another book."

She squinted at him. "And why, exactly, do you seem to consider to me the one person capable of doing it? What are you really after, Joseph?"

He hesitated. "What have you heard about me? That I'm sort of a scumbag? That I'm just one pubic hair shy of a Clarence Thomas?"

"Yes. In those very words, actually."

"You've been talking to your boyfriend, who doesn't know squat about anything, including you, I bet. But the story interests you, doesn't it?"

She thought for a moment and then, in a careful voice, said, "Yes."

"Then forget about me. Forget I have anything to do with it. Just take it."

She pointed her finger at him. "OK. But if I screw up, Joseph, the blame lies with you. And I don't want anybody else to know I'm working on it. Do you swear you won't say anything?"

He sat back and held up his hands. "I can handle that. I'm here to help. Advice, office space, whatever you need, you've got it."

"I'll have to call Stannie this afternoon. He's going to be disappointed."

"Can't say I feel bad about that." Joseph leaned back again and settled into a corner of the couch. He had the sense that he'd been as calm and subtle and pythic as a cat.

* * *

Rose left alone. She took the elevator to the bottom level of the parking garage, located her old blue Volkswagen next to a Mercedes Benz, and then coiled slowly up to the street. The little Bug roared through the vaulted concrete tunnels. Rose pulled out into the rain with her wipers slamming the bottom of her windshield like two fists coming down on a table. She turned the corner into thick traffic and crept past the very steps where Ernetta had waited just a few days before.

The drive back to Falls Church took an extra 20 minutes in the rain. Heading south down the Beltway, she passed an accident—a diesel truck burning in the northbound lanes, black smoke wheeling into the trees by the road. Cars had slowed for yards on her side just to watch the ambulance pull up and the firemen hose down the wreckage. Strange how some people had such an appetite for mayhem. Charred flesh, crushed metal, screams, tears. Rose had no appetite for it: she stared away until she'd passed.

It was bad enough to watch tragedy from the other side of a tiny glass square—people's lives ripped apart in miniature. She'd seen so many ugly things from the inside of a camera; in Kosovo and Sudan and Sierra Leone and Honduras: hollow–faced orphans, walking skeletons, half–buried corpses rotting in mud. Yet when the camera was down, she always turned away, ashamed and horrified but too weak to make herself really look. If you couldn't change something, if you couldn't relieve suffering, then why wallow in it? Better to stay objective. Better not to sympathize too much.

But she couldn't help herself, not always. Sometimes she had nightmares about the things she'd seen through the camera; sometimes she'd catch one of her own pictures in a magazine or on the Internet—wounded eyes, usually the eyes of some child, staring back at her without mercy. She hadn't seen those eyes the first time, though she'd looked hard at the face in order to balance light and shadow and capture details someone else might miss and even impart some sense of her own style to the composition. Now, looking at that same face on a glossy page, she'd explode in tears; the rest of the day, she'd spend in a fog, driving or shopping.

At the moment what occupied her was the face of that little boy in the photo Joseph had shown her, the innocent little boy carrying that horrible picture. She imagined the mother making or buying or mail–ordering the sign and putting it in her little boy's hands.

And then she thought of the photographer who took the picture within the picture, how he had stepped in some doctor's way in order to place a small, bloody thing (the heart, the very clot and center of a woman's bloody tragedy) at the perfect point on a small glass rectangle. She wondered why he'd been there at all that day, in an abortion clinic with his camera. She felt the same shame for him that she usually felt for herself. To look at terrible suffering without taking on that suffering: this was the detachment required of the journalist, the doctor, the relief worker—but also of the soldier, the interrogator, the murderer. Sometimes that detachment might be exercised in the interest of the greater good. But in the end, didn't it all spring from the same cold place in the heart?

When she reached her house, she tried Stannie's number in Seaborough and got the answering machine with Linda Kate's voice on it:

"Thank you for calling. We're otherwise occupied at the moment, but if you're trying to reach an executive or board member of Colfax, International, please dial our Washington office at . …"

Rose hung up without leaving a message. She'd call later. Right now she needed to think.

* * *

A day later, on a crystal–white shore, a small group of men sat in lawn chairs, smoking cigars. Stannie Colfax slumped half–asleep across from his father and his Uncle Jim the senator, who'd brought along his friend the former Democratic senator, who'd brought along his muscular son, who was a good friend of Stannie's cousin Jimmy Joe, who was at this moment doing something over in the dockhouse: probably finishing off a bottle of Johnny Walker. The two older men, though wearing black speedos, had somehow forgotten to remove their white shoes and socks after the morning's golf game: the subject of conversation had just turned from pars and bogeys to politics.

"I'm sick of the whole damn thing," said Uncle Jim. "I really am. Used to be an honor to be a liberal. Nowadays everybody hates a liberal, but nobody wants a conservative, either, once he opens his big fat mouth. So the guys who win big, they're these fancy boys with great big wads of cash and fancy advertising people, and they 'excel in administration' or some damn thing like that. They have no heart, they have nothing in their chests." He thumped his own large one.

"You've got plenty in your chest," said his brother, Bill Colfax, laughing.

"And plenty of family money, Jim," said the former senator in a gravelly voice that hardly carried over the breeze. "That's why you can afford to follow your conscience. I had to get out of the game. People brought me to the dance and I was expected to dance with them. Case closed."

"How much is plenty of money?" said Jim. "I could always use more." He turned his dark eyes on his brother, who looked away, over at Ed Flint flicking a garden hose at the hydrangeas by the balcony steps.

"Don't pressure me," said Bill. "I have a lot of concerns of my own right now."

"I won't pressure you, Billy, but Pete here can tell you, if you want don't want a politician to owe favors to somebody else, you have to buy him yourself."

"I thought he said you could afford to follow your conscience." Bill sneered.

"I do follow it. What I have left of it."

"You're a disgrace," mumbled Bill.

"You think you could do better?"

"I know I could. I'd stick to my morality instead of getting pulled in thirty pieces by every group that comes along waving money—the gays, the blacks, the women's rights, the Indians, the greens."

"Go ahead, stick to your morality," said Jim. "You won't get elected to a damn thing, I'm telling you now. You got to be half liar and half psychotherapist and half plain stupid to get elected as a Democrat in this country."

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which a motorboat passed a hundred yards out in the water and a huge gust of wind blew a piece of green plastic from under the Colfax house. It sailed up in the air like a magic carpet and came down in the tide. Ed Flint left the hydrangeas and walked after it, holding onto his skipper's hat.

"So, Stannie," said the muscular person, "Do you really write in that magazine you … write for?"

Stannie was lost in thought at the moment. He was thinking how he hated Rose for calling yesterday to say she couldn't come, how he hated her so much that he wanted to fly back to Washington right now to see her. He wondered if he could trust her up there by myself. She'd said she was working on something for Joe Corbin but wouldn't say what. Just the name—the very name "Corbin"—made Stannie's fingers itch. He'd hated Corbin ever since he asked for a transfer to the news desk and the bastard turned him down—told the managing editor he was a jerk and a lousy excuse for a journalist. Right now Stannie wanted to pick up a pen and write something cruel. Something beyond cruel. Something to strike shame in the heart of the reader for not hating Joe Corbin.

"Stanley!" said his father.

He jerked up. "What?"

"Answer Brent. He asked you a question."

"Sorry, what?"

"You should have read the last thing he wrote!" said Uncle Jim. "Right up your alley, Brent. All about those sexy Hollywood women. Bet you're looking forward to those love scenes, pal. When you make it big, huh?"

Brent laughed good–naturedly. He had very white teeth. Not even the Gulf sand outshone them.

"Brent's in movies," said Jim. "I told him you might be able to give him a leg up, Stannie. Introduce him to your pals. Like Jamie Lee, huh?"

Bill Colfax cleared his throat. "I'm sorry you read that particular article," he said. "I told him it was insulting to his mother. I don't want him writing anything like that again"

Jim snickered. "Ah Bill, you wuss. You think she reads anything?"

"I'm just getting started in my acting career," said Brent to Stannie, with another brilliant smile. "Your uncle says you know a lot of people in Hollywood."

Stannie yawned and looked down at his knees, which had gone from pink to near black in just a few days. He'd accomplished the one goal of his trip. "A few," he said, trying to sound half–interested.

"Hey," said Jim, "tell us some of the people you know, Stannie—don't you know Mel Gibson or somebody?"

"No, I don't know Mel Gibson." Stannie rested his chin on his palm. "You're just thinking of him because you read somewhere he's Catholic. And we're sort of a Catholic, and you think all Catholics know each other."

"Hey Brent !" Jim clapped his hands. "Mel Gibson's a Catholic! There's your leverage!"

"But I'm not Catholic," said Brent. "I'm an atheist."

Jim raised his bushy eyebrows. "No kidding?"

"I really am."

"Why the hell is that? You're such a nice kid."

"I don't know. Maybe I just don't need religion to be a good person."

Stannie pulled his baseball cap back so that he could see better. He squinted at Brent in the sunlight. "I do have a friend who may be flying up from Miami to see me here. He's a director, he's working on a picture. His name's Tyman Cole."

"Tyman Cole," said Brent, nodding. "I love his work. Very impressive dude."

"I could try to put in a word for you."

"Yeah. That would be great, Stannie, thanks." Brent lifted himself from his chair. "Excuse me, everybody. I think I'll go see what Jimmy Joe's doing in the dockhouse. He's been in there a long time."

Just then a voice called from above, "Stannie? Stannie?"

The men all turned and looked up at Linda Kate on the balcony of the Colfax home. She stood holding on her straw hat with one hand and waving the other hand at her brother.

"Yes," Stannie called back, not enthusiastically.

"There's somebody here from Washington to see you."

"Who?" His mind went to Rose. Maybe she'd changed her plans. "They told me to say it's a surprise."

If Stannie had been standing closer he'd have seen the uncertainty in her face, the worry. Linda Kate was already making plans to go out shopping for the rest of the day. Maybe for the rest of the month.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.