The Thomas Berryman Number

I sit under a gold four-sided clock hanging at the center of a huge two-hundred-foot-by-one-hundred-and-fifty-foot city room. I doubt that anything other than the people inside the room has changed since the 1930s.

At noon, only one other typewriter was going in the whole place. Most of the writers and editors would come in around one or one-thirty.

At one exactly, I called my editor, Lewis Rosten, to let him know I was at my desk if he wanted to touch and see me.

Moments later, the diminutive Mississippian appeared, unsmiling, in front of my desk.

Lewis reminds me of Truman Capote either having gone straight, or never having gone at all. He was wearing striped suspenders, a polka-dot bow tie, Harry Truman eyeglasses.

“A beard!” he drawled thickly. “That’s

exactly

what you didn’t need.” He slipped away, back in the direction of his own office. “Come,” he called.

I went down to his office and he was already on the phone to our executive editor, Moses Reed.

Rosten’s office is cluttered with old newspapers and assorted antebellum memorabilia; it looks like the parlor of a Margaret Mitchell devotee. I sat down, noticing a new, or at least uncovered, sign over his desk.

What the Good Lord

lets happen,

I’m not afraid to

print in my paper.

—Mr. Charles A. Davis

That sign, notwithstanding Mr. Davis, was vintage Lewis Rosten.

“Ochs is back,” he was saying over the phone. He turned to catch me perusing a 1921

Citizen.

“Moses wants to know what you’ve turned up?”

“A lot of things.” I smiled.

“A lot of things,” he told Reed. “Yeah, don’t I know it,” he added. I winced.

Lewis hung up the phone and banged out a sentence on his old battered Royal. “The quick brown fox. You and me and Reed. The Honorable Francis Marion Parker. Arnold. Michael Cooder. Up on seven in twenty minutes,” he said. “Big strategy session. What have you got? Anything new?”

I took out the photograph of Thomas Berryman. “I have this.”

Lewis held the picture about three inches under his nose and eyeglasses. “Hmmm … Mr. Thomas Berryman, I presume.”

I nodded and stayed with my 1921 paper.

“I’d like to get some copies of this. What I’d like to do is run it around to all the hotels later. Look at these, will you.”

He handed me a telephone toll call check. Also some kind of credit card check through American Express.

The credit card slip showed that Thomas J. Berryman had charged seven flights on Amex number 041-220-160-1-100AX since January 1.

His flights had been to Port Antonio, Jamaica; Port-au-Prince; Amarillo, Texas; Caneel Bay; and London. None of the flights were to anywhere near Nashville.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

The phone check showed one call made to the Walter Scott Hotel in Nashville on June 9th.

“This is pretty interesting. He called here at least.”

Rosten didn’t comment. He was collecting paperwork for the big meeting.

“From the looks of that credit card thing, the man lives pretty damn well.” He finally spoke. “What do people up there think he does?”

“Some people seem to think he works as a lawyer. Not too many people know him.”

Rosten put the photograph up to his face again. “I s’pose he could be a lawyer, though?”

“No, Lewis … He’s a killer.”

Rosten rocked back and forth in his own swivel chair, smiling, puffing on his pipe. “Now this,” he said like some Old South storyteller, “is what we used to call a barnburner.”

“Barnburner’s for basketball,” I grinned. “You never went to a basketball game in your life.”

“No,” Rosten smiled wider. “But I heard a lot about them.”

He stood up, and we started our walk to the executive editor’s office. Calmly puffing his pipe, picking motes and strings off his white shirt, Lewis reminded me to try to be politic.

Moses Reed is what people of a certain age around Tennessee, men and women, would call “a man’s man.”

He’s tall, always well-dressed, with wavy black hair just hinting at gray. He may have played football somewhere or other—Princeton, I’d heard somewhere—and though under six feet tall, he’s considerably broader than I am. He appears to come from money.

His office looks like a wealthy man’s dining room. Only some photographs of famous men (Ernest Hemingway kicking a can up a solitary road … Churchill smoking a cigar in a high-rimmed bathtub … Bobby Kennedy playing football) spoil the dining room effect.

There is no desk in the office; and no typewriter.

There are antique chairs with embroidered seats. Plus an oblong mahogany table for tea. And a Sheffield tea service.

It’s difficult to imagine Reed as a ragamuffin growing up in Birmingham, Alabama—which he was.

Seven of us sat at the highly polished table. A work session. Everyone in crisply starched shirttails except me.

Francis Parker, the conservative

Citizen

publisher—peevish, but a fair man, I’d heard; Reed, transplanted Georgetown journalist, the executive editor; Arnold Beckton, the managing editor; Rosten, metropolitan editor; two other up-and-coming editors; and Ochs Jones, shooting star of the moment.