A Crooked Sixpence Page 2

  The Sunday Sun occupied a strange building, each floor of which was stepped back from the one below, the same general pattern as the Aztec sacrificial pyramid. But there was no obsidian altar on top: this being a rainy climate, thought O’Toole, they tear the victims’ hearts out inside.

  O’Toole walked through a glass doorway. Above the lift was a mural incorporating blacksmiths, winged messengers and philosophers holding opened books. All wore Grecian drapes.

  Underneath was an inscription:

  ‘While the Press is in Chains, No Man is Free’

  A doorman with a fat stomach in a brass-buttoned coat barred O’Toole’s way.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. You want to see someone?’

  ‘I thought I could find my own way,’ said O’Toole, ‘I’m a reader.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, we can’t have people just wandering in like that. I’ll have to ask you to fill this in. Would you give the name of the person you wish to see, and the exact nature of your business?’

  O’Toole filled in Barr’s name and his own. Under Business? he wrote ‘seeking employment’.

  ‘I have an appointment,’ he explained.

  ‘Just a moment, sir, I’ll have Mr. Barr see this,’ said the doorman. He was obviously looking forward to telling O’Toole to leave or be thrown out.

  A boy took the form and got into the lift. O’Toole studied the mural for symbolic meaning: Caxton was doing something to Pericles while the Pilgrim Fathers read all about it.

  The boy came back and beckoned O’Toole into the lift. It stopped at the third floor. O’Toole followed the boy through a door marked ‘Private’ into a vast room. Desks arranged in rows, telephone cords dangling from the ceiling. Three or four men at typewriters looked up hostilely and a bald man turned and smiled at another. They didn’t know O’Toole, and he didn’t know them, but O’Toole thought they had a slight edge because they knew the geography. Love-fifteen. On the other hand, O’Toole could have been anybody, whereas it was quite obvious they were hired hands. Fifteen-all. Australia to serve.

  The boy led O’Toole, concentrating on a glossy job-hunter’s smile, to a smaller office on the other side. A tiny sweet-faced woman received him.

  ‘Mr. O’Toole? I’m Mrs. Wilkins. Mr. Barr is expecting you.’

  She opened a communicating door into a carpeted office. A large desk had a glass top and a bust of Shakespeare. Behind it a middle-aged man, thin, in a brown suit, held out his hand.

  ‘So you’re O’Toole,’ he said. ‘Glad to see you. Sit down.’

  O’Toole adjusted his smile and sat.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mr. O’Toole. I liked your letter. Did you write it yourself?’

  O’Toole’s smile faltered but came back strongly.

  ‘Of course. Writing’s my business, Mr. Barr.’

  Barr liked that. He had the letter in front of him.

  ‘We’re a paper that likes to take chances. Frankly, I thought you were the Fleet Street type the moment I read your letter. Maybe you aren’t. We’ve had a few Australians in the Street and they seemed to know their stuff. Tell me, are you just another hack?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said O’Toole. It sounded weak, and he studied an impulse to start scribbling ideas on Barr’s blotter, showing he had plenty. Barr kept on.

  ‘Mind you, there’s no room here for amateurs. We have a small staff and we want top-notchers, adaptable men who can turn their hands to all the small jobs. No need here for specialists and prima donnas. You with me?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know your local conditions here, of course, but I’ve been just about right through the mill,’ said O’Toole. ‘I’ve even had my by-line drawn in twigs on the gardening page.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Barr. ‘We’ll see if you’ve got what it takes, and we’ll get to know you afterwards. Okay, boy?’

  ‘Okay,’ said O’Toole.

  Barr pressed a button on a large intercommunication box and spoke into the receiver. ‘Tom...? I’ve got this Aussie here. O’Toole. Send him out on something, will you?’

  He motioned O’Toole to the door. ‘Mr. Jacobs is the news editor. He’ll give you an assignment. If you can handle it, I’ll see you again. If not, no hard feelings. Don’t let me down, laddie.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr. Barr,’ said O’Toole.

  One of the men from the newsroom was waiting for him. He was balding, thirtyish, with eyes several sizes smaller than usual for a boyish face. He had a file of assorted papers in his hairy hands.

  ‘I’ve got something here that should just suit you, Aussie,’ said Jacobs. ‘I suppose you’ve been everywhere, have you?’

  ‘Lots of places.’

  ‘Cairo, for instance?’

  ‘For a day.’

  ‘Great. You’ll know the background. Just take a butchers at this.’ O’Toole studied the telegram Jacobs gave him.

  SUNDAYSUN LONDON MEET ME 1700 PLANE FROM CAIRO LONDON AIRPORT GOT SOMETHING HOT POLLAK

  ‘Interesting, Mr. Jacobs,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘Tom,’ said Jacobs. ‘You’ve got the picture?’

  ‘One or two questions occur to me,’ said O’Toole. ‘Who’s Pollak?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Jacobs. ‘This came in out of the blue. We have a lot of tipsters trying to sell us stories but I don’t recall ever hearing of Pollak before. However, this cable cost him a couple of nick so Pollak must think he’s got something good, whoever he is.’

  ‘What’s the procedure, exactly, with this sort of thing?’

  ‘Use your nose for news. Meet Pollak and buy him a beer. If he’s got anything, switch to Scotch. If he asks for money, be vague. Don’t promise a definite sum, but indicate there’s plenty here for him, and we’ll get terribly annoyed if he tries to flog his story up and down the Street. Get him into a taxi and back to the office if he shows any signs of offering it all round. If his story is no good tell him to offpiss. Got it?’

  ‘There’s another small point, Tom...’

  ‘Lolly. Never fear, Thomas is near. Write me an IOU for five and I’ll let you have it out of the float.’

  O’Toole scrawled IOU £5 J O’TOOLE on a sheet of copy paper and Jacobs exchanged it for five singles from a tin box, which held a small pile of notes and a bigger pile of paper.

  ‘Only one beer, mind, unless there’s a definite story. Times are hard.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ said O’Toole.

  In the taxi to the airport, he read the telegram again. Pollak is an unusual name for an Egyptian. On the other hand, anything can happen in Cairo.

  Automatically, O’Toole began roughing out in his head a polished-up account of the day’s events for Jenny. Then, painfully, he remembered.

  IV

  ONLY one of the people getting out of the plane could possibly have been named Pollak. He wore a crew-cut, bifocals and thick rubbersoled shoes, like a German trying to pass as an American. He was shepherding a family group through the Customs: the man, pale, unshaven, collarless and worried; the woman a plump young African, soot-black and motherly; a child in arms, obviously theirs.

  ‘Mr. Pollak? I’m O’Toole of the Sunday Sun.’ O’Toole looked round warily for competitors, but saw none.

  ‘Man, thees is a great article,’ said Pollak, with an accent from the Barcelona Berlitz. ‘These people have been through hell. This is Mr. Sweeney and his family.’

  O’Toole nodded.

  ‘What they’ve done to these people will make your blood boil, feller.’

  ‘I want to hear something about it,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘Look, man,’ said Pollak, ‘I’d write this one myself but I’ve got a million things to do. You take over, huh? I’ll leave the money side to you. I often run across an article like this, and if the price is right...okay, feller? You can get me at this address.’ He handed O’Toole a dog-eared card

  HANK POLLACK, IMPORT-EXPORT

  COLOGNE

  LONDON

  farewelled the family and left, his ru
bber soles squeaking on the polished floor.

  O’Toole turned to the dazed father. The woman was staring oyster-eyed round the airline terminal.

  ‘Well, Mr. Sweeney, let me take you into town where we can discuss this in comfort.’

  ‘We have nowhere to go,’ said Sweeney hopelessly. O’Toole took a cheap fibre suitcase from the woman’s hand, and led them to a taxi. Politely, he squeezed into the folding seat, and twisting, told the driver: ‘Sunday Sun, Fleet Street.’

  O’Toole examined a number of conversational openings as the taxi went down the tunnel and turned into Western Avenue.

  ‘Where’ve you come from, Mr. Sweeney?’ It was safe.

  ‘Tanganyika.’

  ‘You’re in trouble?’

  ‘I’m afraid I am. I was given two hours to leave the colony. We were married just an hour or so before we left.’

  ‘They must have taken a dislike to you.’ O’Toole tried to sound genial and sympathetic.

  ‘The bishop put the authorities up to it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said O’Toole, puzzled. ‘Religious trouble?’

  ‘I suppose you could say that. I am a Catholic priest.’

  O’Toole glanced at the child asleep in its mother’s arms and then rapidly swivelled his gaze out of the cab window. The pub signs of Hammersmith flashed by, reminding him that no newspaper he had ever worked for would print a line which might offend the breweries or the Catholic Church, or both.

  ‘I won’t distress you by asking a lot of questions, Mr. Sweeney. Let’s wait until we get back to the office before we go into this, shall we?’

  ‘Look, Mr. Towel,’ said Sweeney, ‘I’m in desperate trouble. My wife and I have no money and nowhere to go. Don’t play with us, I beg you.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ said O’Toole. ‘Perhaps we can do something for you. No one can harm you here.’

  ‘I fervently trust not,’ said Sweeney.

  They swayed through the rest of the trip in silence. The doorman scowled as O’Toole led the family into the Sun office. Perhaps he thought O’Toole had brought his relatives to get jobs, too.

  O’Toole showed the family into the waiting-room partitioned off a corner of the main newsroom, and reported to Jacobs.

  ‘Which one is Pollak?’ asked Jacobs.

  ‘None of them, Tom. Pollak was on the plane and he handed them over to me. I’m afraid this is a pretty sticky story.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jacobs. ‘What’s the lead?’

  ‘The man is a Catholic priest, and it seems he had an affair with this girl in Tanganyika and was kicked out of the place as a result.’

  ‘How much does he want?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pollak.’

  ‘He didn’t say. He gave me his address and hinted he had plenty more stories where this one came from.’

  ‘The crafty sod. We can fix him up later. How much does the priest want?’

  ‘You mean, there’s something in this for the paper?’

  Jacobs grinned. ‘The rain pounded down on my corrugated iron church as the priest and the man wrestled within me. Meanwhile, the gorillas howled through the jungle. Personally, I love it, but we’ll see what Barr thinks.’

  Jacobs went and returned a minute later with a beaming Barr. ‘This is a great story, O’Toole,’ said Barr. ‘No good for the Irish edition but first-class for the Midlands. Is he broke?’

  ‘I imagine so, Mr. Barr. His luggage is pretty poor and I don’t suppose he’s got a job to go to.’

  ‘Fine. Handle him carefully. Offer him two-fifty, signed and sealed and no punches pulled. Go to three hundred if he pushes, and not a penny more. He probably thinks he can come over here and ask the earth...’

  Jacobs nodded in knowledgeable agreement at the priest’s presumed rapacity.

  ‘I haven’t mentioned money to him at all yet,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Barr. ‘Talk to him, give me a couple of slips of the story and we’ll decide finally in the morning.’

  O’Toole found a notebook and pencil and went back to the priest. The wife had started to unpack and turn the waiting-room into a home.

  ‘Mr. Sweeney, I may be able to make you a financial offer,’ said O’Toole. ‘But first, I’d like you to tell me the whole story. I’m just working in the dark until I know exactly what happened.’

  Sweeney looked despairingly at his wife. There was no response.

  ‘I went out to Tanganyika as a missionary, Mr. Towel. As you may know, we’re ordained before we undertake that sort of work.’

  ‘You mean you’re a proper, regular priest?

  ‘There’s only one kind of priest, Mr. Towel. I have never had a parish, but I am ordained, certainly. Well, it was during my teaching work that I met Ada...’

  O’Toole left the family in the waiting-room and found a typewriter. He had never handled a story of this kind before and, automatically, decided that it should be presented as straight news, in view of the number of people it would annoy.

  A Catholic priest and his African wife have been expelled from the Tanganyika protectorate because, the priest alleges, of pressure on the Government by the local Catholic bishop.

  The priest, Fr Francis Sweeney, claims that Government interference in a religious dispute violates the fundamental principles of British administration. He...

  O’Toole looked up and found Barr reading over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m afraid this pissology’s no good to me, boy,’ said Barr. ‘What I want is the warm human drama, the heart-searing problem’—he stepped back and gestured dramatically—‘that is tearing this man’s guts out. I want every detail of his tremendous struggle to master his hunger, the hunger he could not deny because he was a man under his clerical robes. That’s the angle I want. Can you give it to me?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘Fine,’ said Barr. ‘Don’t be too long, there’s a train I can catch in an hour.’

  O’Toole lit a cigarette and strolled unobtrusively to a file of the Sunday Sun displayed in a corner. He studied the paper closely for the first time. The basis of the prose style seemed to be words like LOVE and HATE and IN and OUT in capital letters.

  Some were underlined as well, and here and there was a paragraph entirely in capitals with a black wiggly rule underneath. These were the paragraphs with the most banal ideas, generally concerning emotions the reader was urged to have about the story being told.

  The whole effect was embarrassing to read, bathos swimming in goo topped with whipped clichés. But not all that hard to do. Just hold your nose and jump in.

  Jacobs joined him by the file. ‘Did they have it off behind the altar?’ he leered.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said O’Toole. ‘I didn’t even ask. I thought we left that part of it to the readers’ imaginations.’

  ‘Give this everything you’ve got,’ advised Jacobs. ‘Just let it run. This could be the page one lead on your first job, if you handle it right. The priest and the glamorous chief’s daughter. I love it.’

  ‘Is she the chiefs daughter?’ asked O’Toole.

  ‘They all are,’ said Jacobs. ‘Use your head.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said O’Toole. ‘It just slipped my mind for the moment.’

  ‘Better get started, or Barr will smack,’ advised Jacobs. ‘Don’t forget the gorillas.’

  O’Toole wound a sheet of paper into his typewriter, took a deep breath and began:

  It was the searing, destroying flame of LOVE that scorched the lives of this tragic couple—LOVE and HATE that brought them 6,000 miles from tropical AFRICA to find refuge in BIG-HEARTED BRITAIN.

  He is a Roman Catholic PRIEST, a man bound by the most solemn promises known on EARTH, but still a MAN under his clerical robes.

  SHE is the beautiful daughter of an AFRICAN CHIEF, a girl with thousands of adoring subjects to obey her SLIGHTEST WHIM.

  They fell in love under the purple skies of Africa, while the rain pounded down on his
corrugated iron church and gorillas sent through the steaming jungle the CRY OF NATURE!

  WAGGING TONGUES drove them from their tropical love-nest to face the PITIFUL GLARE of publicity—the SCORNFUL LOOKS which stab these sensitive people to the heart!

  CAN YOU REFUSE THEM THE CHRISTIAN CHARITY FOR WHICH THEY PLEAD?

  This seemed a fair imitation of the style he had just read, perhaps a trifle on the sober side. Still, thought O’Toole, it’s a serious subject.

  He showed his effort to Jacobs, who read it quickly, roaring like a gorilla at the appropriate passage.

  ‘Did you get her measurements?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said O’Toole. ‘Should I have measured her? I thought the story was more in the priest. He’s about average height, I’d say.’

  ‘Always get the measurements,’ said Jacobs. ‘Gives the readers something to slobber over. If they get shy, 37-25-37 is safe for just about anyone except Sabrina or Queen Salote.’

  ‘I’ll get them tomorrow,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘Otherwise it’s fine, I’d say. I like your nose.’

  ‘Nose?’

  ‘The first paragraph.’

  ‘Oh, the lead. I followed the general style of the paper.’

  ‘So I see. I’ll show it to Barr.’

  Jacobs scratched his armpit, gorilla-style, as he went to the editor’s office. Barr was out in a moment, enthusiastic.

  ‘This is the real stuff, boy,’ he said. ‘Anyone else know about them? Was the Pic there, or the People?’

  ‘Not a soul, Mr. Barr, except myself. I collected them straight off the plane.’

  ‘Fine. Take them home and keep them under wraps till the morning, at least, when we can sign them up. Don’t let anybody else get a crack at them. Let me have a thousand words, tomorrow, or fifteen hundred if it’s there. I think you’ve got a natural Fleet Street touch, laddie. Keep up the good work.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr. Barr.’

  Barr returned to his office to get his hat and coat as O’Toole went to his guests. Barr passed him on his way out and glanced distantly at the family, as if they were no business of his.