This Is What We Do by Tom Hansen

Author:Tom Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2017-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Clive Wallace was hungover. His head throbbed and he squinted down at the glass of water before him, watching two Alka-Seltzer tablets dissolve. He drank the medicine in one gulp. He went to grab his coffee to wash the taste out of his mouth and knocked the cup over. Coffee spilled all over the papers on the desk, notes on a piece he was working on. He grabbed a handful of napkins to try and mop it up, but there was too much and it had run off the edge of the desk and gotten on his pants. He gave up and in a moment of fury hurled the soaked napkin into the trash bin, flinging coffee everywhere. He slumped down in his office chair and closed his eyes. His head was still pounding and the office seemed to be painfully noisy. He rubbed his temples. He looked up and spotted his boss Bertrand Dupuis, making a beeline across the room toward him. Here we go again, Wallace thought, rolling his eyes, another lecture from the moral compass of Western journalism. Wallace prepared himself for the assault. Bertrand arrived at his desk, and stood there for a moment doing nothing but glaring down at him, arms folded across his chest, an unpleasant look on his face. Of course it was about the Claude Dutronc piece. What else? Wallace, as usual, hadn’t been able to resist asking some of Dutronc’s associates questions that weren’t on the script, namely about the rape allegations from a few years back. He remembered it well. A model had come forward and said Dutronc had kept her passport hostage, made her do things. It had seemed so credible at first. She’d said she had proof. And then the model suddenly changed her story, and it faded

from the spotlight. Wallace had been working on something else at the time, but he’d smelled something fishy, a payoff, a cover-up. Bertrand was still talking and Wallace sat there, not really listening, but looking off into space. He noticed a spot of wine on Dupuis’s otherwise clean white shirt. He smiled.

“Clive? Clive! Are you listening?” It snapped him out of his trance, and he stopped smiling.

“Um, right.”

“You have to stop going off-script.”

“I know, Bertrand . . . but . . . what difference does it make? You guys edited it out of the program anyway.”

“This piece was not meant to be an investigation, goddamnit! The man is dead, and you’re asking these sordid questions. You just can’t do that.”

Bertrand continued for another minute, very loudly so the entire office could hear. He covered all the usual issues, his going off-script, his shabby appearance, his boozing, his blog, missing days, his coming in late. Finally, it ended and Wallace began going through the papers on his desk, background information on his new assignment, a piece about the wine crisis in France. Competition from other countries was causing a huge glut in the French wine industry. The Bordeaux region especially was having problems.

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