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It was midnight in Anaheim. There were three other men in the room, and they ignored me while they debated what to do next. They were debating whether I should die.

“Who the fuck is this guy, did you ask yourselves that?” Jim was the youngest of the three, a 38-year-old former CIA assassin. He couldn’t believe his pals were letting me live another minute. He looked at me, hands curling into claws, grey eyes unblinking. He leaned forward out of his chair, and I could feel the hate and fear vibrating in his body.

“The last guy who asked questions like that was carried out of here with shit dribbling down his leg.”

“Hold on.”

It was Tony, the big-shot, a guy with mob connections, and the only one, other than myself, who was wearing a suit.

“Let’s give it a minute,” Tony said. “Jack isn’t going anywhere.”

I’d been scared before, and I knew what to do. When you’re in trouble, don’t show fear. Fear makes your opponent think he’s got an easy mark. I’d used that technique many times in my career as an investigative reporter. I’d talked to Mexican Mafia killers and once been the target of suspicious angry men at a Hell’s Angels party. Yeah, I knew what to do. Keep cool. Nothing bad could happen if you kept cool.

Right. It was midnight in Anaheim, and I was within minutes of death with no one to help. The only one who knew I was there was my city editor, Hal Jocobine (I’ve changed the city editor’s name, for reasons that will become obvious later in this story). He talked a good game but I knew he could do nothing in a situation like this.

“You with the Feds?” Tony asked.

“No, just a reporter, like I said.”

“ATF? State? Local cops?” It was Jim again.

“I told you, no. I’m a reporter, that’s it.”

Tony leaned back in his chair, head falling forward onto his chest, like a judge on the bench, deciding what to do. After a minute, he looked at me, as hard to read as a cop in the middle of an investigation.

“You’re going to call your city editor. You think he’s there now?”

I doubted it. But we were a morning paper, he might be working late.

“Maybe.”

“Call him. Tell him there’s no story here.”

I knew Hal. There was no way he was going to accept that. Our sources had given us good information on this El Kamas organization. They were recruiting mercenaries to fight on the wrong side in African wars, and had a ship full of weapons in the Long Beach harbor, ready to set sail to South America to supply the narco druglords. These were bad guys, and they’d been bad a long time. Jim had assassinated a bigwig in Israel a few years before. Tony had mob connections.And Hank, the big silent one, had beat up leftists for “C” up north. I sent a rare prayer heavenward: “Dear God, please sharpen Hal’s wits when I call.”

The direct line to Hal rang three times, four, five, and I was thinking all the time, how to signal Hal that something was wrong without letting the killers know what I was doing.

“Hal Jacobine.” That high impatient voice, whistling over the wires.

“Hey Hal, it’s Jack.”

“What you got up there?”

“There’s no story here.”

“What do you mean, no story.” I held the phone away from my ear as his voice rose.

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
“There’s gotta be a story!”

“That’s the way the shoe drops.” I was wracking my brain for more clichés. Hal KNEW how much I hated clichés. Come on, Hal, remember!

“I don’t get it,” said Hal. “What’s going on?”

“The story went twenty-three skidoo.”

A long pause.

“You in trouble?” asked Hal. Finally.

“That’s right.”

“Get out of there any way you can. We’ll get those guys.”

“Right. Hold on.”

I looked over at Tony, who looked like a well-dressed boulder in his chair – unmoving, ominous, unreadable.

“Hal’s pissed.”

“Fuck him.” Tony gestured at Hank, who lumbered out of his chair and punched on the speaker phone, then rested his hand not-so-gently on my shoulder. Tony cleared his throat.

“Had a nice chat with your boy here, Mr. Jacobine.”

“So I gathered,” Hal said. “Looks like he’s wasted your time. And mine. Jack, I’m gonna wanta talk to you when you get back here.”

“Don’t be too hard on the kid,” Tony said. “He feels bad enough as it is.” For the first time, Tony smiled at me. If he meant to reassure me, he needed practice.

I was shaken and angry when I got into the car. I’d only had about four hours sleep in the previous week, as I’d chased leads and tips around Southern California, and I’d been living on four or five pots of coffee a day. As I started the long trip back to San Diego, I felt a weird pain in my chest that grew more agonizing with each mile. Somewhere around San Clemente my car started weaving as I began twitching from the pain.

I’m not sure how I found the hospital. There are weird blank spaces in my memory about the next few hours – glimpses of doctors’ and nurses’ faces, lying on a table with wires taped to me. They shot me up with something, and, when I was fully conscious, explained that the coffee and the fear had driven my heart into overload.

Hal was in his little glass-walled office when I finally got to the Union-Tribune about 11 a.m. He didn’t look too excited to see me.

“Hal, we’ve got a great story here. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have it on your desk.” I knew I looked like death: I’d seen myself in a mirror as I left the hospital, and I was pale and drawn with red eyes and rumpled clothes. But I hadn’t bothered to stop at home to freshen up. I was eager to take Hal up on his word and “get those guys.”

Hal shifted in his chair, which creaked under the load. He was short, maybe 5 feet 6 inches, and built like a teddy bear, maybe, if a teddy bear had black hair and cropped it real close on top of his head.He wore short-sleeved starched white shirts and clip-on ties around a double-size neck. I recognized the shifting motion, which went with the distant look Hal got on his face when he was about to do something which Hal thought of as goo djournalism. If anyone else had done it itwould be considered inserting the shaft.

“Those guys gave you a pretty hard time?”

“Yeah. They said I wasn’t leaving that room alive unless I backed off the story.”

The look on Hal’s face became more distant, but for the first time in all the years I’d known him, there seemed to be a crack in the façade, through which I glimpsed a flickering of uneasiness. Or fear.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Hal said. “I don’t think there’s a story here. We can’t document that stuff.”

I argued. I swore I’d dig up anything we needed. But Hal was unmovable. Finally I gave up, leaning back in my chair and just stared at him. Hal nodded.

“Good, that’s that then.” He picked up a familiar-looking slip of paper he’d been fiddling with while we talked. “I’ve been going through the stuff on your desk. Why don’t you follow up on this story instead?”

He handed me the paper. On it was written some contact information a phone number and a name. Davila. A Cuban who was looking for ex-military men to fight abroad.

“You used to be in the military, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you let yourself get recruited by this Davila guy. I promise to print the story, all the gory details. But forget the El Kamas thing.”

I went back to my desk. Sure, I’d do the Davila story. Piece of cake. But first spent the next few hours talking to friends I’d made during the course of my various investigations. There was a soft-spoken grey-haired guy who happened to be head of the Anaheim homicide detectives. He had a well-tanned craggy face and ice-cold eyes and was more-than-intrigued to hear about a CIA assassin working in his city.

Then I made my second call, to a straight-arrow guy who spent his time hunting down bad guys for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He was delighted to get the location of a shipload of illegal weapons. And so on. By the end of the day, I’d also talked to two hard-drinking undercover officers for the Department of Corrections, who went by the code names “Crusader Rabbit” and “Moco Verde” (aka “Green Snot”)

When I hung up the phone, I was satisfied that the wheels had been set in motion, and would grind very fine. It was not the sort of thing I would normally do – journalistic ethics urge caution when sharing confidential information with the authorities – but I had never told the El Kamas people I wouldn’t contact the cops. They’d just assumed I wouldn’t. And besides – and this was the clincher – the El Kamas killers had seriously threatened me.

THEN I went to work on the Davila story. I was finishing it up a week later when my phone rang.

It was Tony, the Mafia lawyer.

“What did you do?” Tony asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t turn around without tripping over an agent.”

“Don’t know anything about it,” I said.

A week after that, the head of Anaheim detectives called me. “Those El Kamas guys bombed their own office and fled. We caught one in Miami. Still looking for the other two.”

Great. They were gone. That’s all I wanted.

Meanwhile, I was having new problems with Hal over the Davila story.

Hal was the sort of editor who thought he could edit anybody. And he did. When he was done, every reporter in the place sounded like Hal Jacobine, which might have been OK if Hal wrote on the level of Dickens or Proust or Virginia Woolf. But Hal’s stuff read like a telegraph message from a bad Hemingway imitator.

??cut If the Union-Tribune had been a theater company with Hal in charge, and Shakespeare had been on the staff and turned in his “to be or not to be” speech, Hal would have read it with an increasingly pained expression, and then his pencil would have started flailing. You remember the speech. It starts out:

HAMLET: To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .

“Pretty archaic language, wouldn’t you say, Willie?” Hal would mutter. “And what’s this ‘consummation’ business? A big word, too big and too sexy for our readers.” Hal would scribble away, and, when he was done, he’d hand “Will Shakespeare” the rewrite with a triumphant smile. “Here, try this!” And this is what Will would read:

HAMLET: I’m trying to decide whether to kill myself. It isn’t easy.

Hal would grin with satisfaction, missing the stunned look on Will’s face. “See? Nice and tight. Tells the story without all the fol-de-rol. Go back and work on the rest of your stuff, keep it tight, just like that. Tight sells.”

Hal had worked this magic on my Davila story. The portrait of the whippet-like Davila, his cruelty and greed, had been reduced to a short businesslike article about the mechanics of illegally recruiting mercenaries, with only a hint that there was anything wrong with it. Tight. Telegraphic.

I went to Chaffin Wallace, the managing editor, a man who’d been a rip-snorting reporter in his day, but who now sat in a big glass-walled office and rocked and rocked in his chair, with a sort of chained smile on his face. Some of the older reporters called him “the caged lion.”

It hadn’t been Wallace’s idea to make Jacobine the city editor, but he was near the end of his career.And the editor-in-chief had wanted Jacobine.

“I don’t fight those battles anymore,” Wallace said.

“I got it,” I said. “But I’m tired of risking my life for stories, only to see them spiked or chopped into wastebasket fodder. I’ve got a wall full of awards for writing, but I don’t think I’ll win another while working under these conditions.”
“Maybe not,” Wallace said, slowly rocking.

“I’d rather have a desk job.”

“Good decision,” he said. “Always room for a good editor. Secure too.”

So I became an editor, like a lot of other reporters did. As time passed, better editors came along, ones who knew how to let good reporters have their head. But I’d already turned to poetry and fiction, and creative writing in schools Sometimes I think about what I might have written, the stories I might have covered, if it hadn’t been for people like Hal, . Other times I say a prayer for Hal, who did the best he could, and left the newspaper much earlier than he wanted, looking like a sad teddy bear as he cleaned out his desk.

But mostlyI think of that hotel room in Anaheim, those three angry men, and the threat of death at midnight. There’s a regret for the stories not written, for the odd back-alley people I’ll never meet, and for the zest that comes with uncovering corruption and exposing it. I do what I canpass on tips to reporters, fingers itching to cover these stories myself.

These days, the only thing I’m doing at midnight is writing poetry– or watching old Clint Eastwood movies like “The Unforgiven.” It’s a film about an ice-cold killer who tries to go straight after he falls in love with a fine woman. But then the woman dies and the ice creeps back into his heart and his trigger finger starts curling . . . anyway, it’s a great movie. It brings back memories.

Copyright 2005 Jack Webb

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