A Pure Heart by Rajia Hassib

Author:Rajia Hassib
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

◆ 12 ◆

Are you out of your mind?” Ted whispered the moment he and Mark stepped out of the editor’s office.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“You seriously told her you didn’t want to do that story?”

“I still don’t want to do it.”

“You don’t have a choice, do you?”

They walked together to their adjacent cubicles, Mark entering his, falling on his seat and tossing the sheets of paper he had in his hand on the desk. From his own cubicle, Ted leaned on top of the divider, his head reaching over Mark’s desktop screen as he mouthed his judgment again. “You are out of your mind.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“What’s wrong with the assignment she gave you? I’d trade you for it any day.” Ted kept his voice low and leaned closer to make sure those in the neighboring cubicles didn’t hear them. “She did you a favor. She’s letting you cover a national political scandal, not some petty neighborhood dispute on the Upper East Side like me.”

“I was there to pitch a story, not to be assigned one,” Mark huffed, tossing his pencil on the desk. It slid, hitting his metal paperweight with a clank. The paperweight was a souvenir from Egypt, brass and decorated with carvings of the winged Nut, the ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky. Mark reached over and adjusted it so that Nut was facing him but looking to the side still, as all ancient Egyptian engravings did. They never looked one directly in the eyes, Mark thought.

“You got spoiled, that’s what happened. You know you were lucky to get away with what you did. You know Elinor. She let it slide, but she was bound to respond.”

“I know.” Mark looked down at his keyboard, nodding.

Ted was right. Assigning him a story was an obvious power play, but Elinor could have done much worse. She could have assigned him some crappy report that was bound to be condensed to three hundred words and buried deep in the newspaper’s online edition. Instead, she assigned him a piece on the Christie Bridgegate scandal, which was still today’s hot news, even months after the intentional traffic jams took place. The message was clear: I know you’re a good reporter, but you’re still my good reporter, and you will do as I say. Of course she would feel the need to make a statement after the stunt he pulled: going to Egypt on a so-called vacation, then returning with four written profiles and presenting them to her, pitching stories that did not fall under his jurisdiction as a metro-area political reporter. Elinor had read them, nonetheless. She could have refused to pass them on to his old Middle East editor, reminding him that he was no longer a foreign correspondent and that whatever happened in Egypt was not his professional concern anymore. But she had not. She had shared them with her colleague, who loved the profiles and published them. Nothing Elinor did was spontaneous, no word uncalculated. With the yes she had granted his pieces came a however.

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