The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi Read Free Book Online Page A

shop, only instead of jars of nuts and bolts and piles of cleaning rags, these shelves had a hundred years of newspaper records sitting on them in microfilm canisters. There were a few freestanding rolling ladders, so you could reach the top shelves. Overhead fluorescent lights, but I liked to leave them off. A big room like that feels emptier with the lights on. I had a camping headlamp that I used to comb the stacks. It wasmy claim to fame: other reporters walked into this giant dark room and saw only my roving spotlight, searching for a file. When I sat down at a film reader, I brought a clip light from my desk upstairs and lit up just the area I was working in.
    We all had our thing. My deskmate Vinh found an old wheelchair somewhere in the building and dragged it down here and it was the only chair he’d sit in. He wheeled around in tight circles and smoked cigars while he worked. He wouldn’t answer any questions. You’d say: Are you looking for World Series stats? And he’d just wheel around left or right, puffing away.
    Clockwise means Yes, he told me upstairs. Counterclockwise means No.
    The building’s giant furnace sat in the mechanical room right next door. So there’s the gurgle of the oil tank and the furnace thrums on and then the hot water moving up through all the pipes. I told Angie that when I was little I thought wolves lived in our basement at home and I’d run up the steps two at a time before they could grab me by the heels.
    Then when I was twelve, I said, I read in Tiger Beat that Madonna grew up imagining devils lived in her basement. So she also ran up the stairs two at a time.
    What are you guys, twins? she said.
    Angie started working for the Free Press when she was a teenager. She walked into the mailroom on a Friday afternoon and never went back to school the next Monday morning. It was 1961, when people did stuff like that and got away with it. If I’d set out to impress her, dropping out of j-school and taking the job at the Press was kind of the best thing I could have done. Angie must have been in her late forties somewhere, but I found it hard to know for sure. She really came of age in the newsroom, so she walked and talked a lot like a guy. She wore golf shirts. The year before I met her, she’d gone to this Bulgarian cosmetician in Cumberland Court who tattooed permanent eyeliner onto her eyelids with a shaky hand—the result was a little slurry, like Angie had woken up hungover and puther makeup on too fast. You could say this made it more natural looking.

    I ’d moved from Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan in 1983 up to Nicole Morin in 1985 when the archive door swung open and Angie came belting in. All the overhead fluorescents flickered and shone on at once. She flashed me some jazz hands.
    Welcome to the Information Superhighway, she said. I’m setting you up with Nexis access.
    I had a vague idea of what that meant.
    Necks and asses? I said. Or necks and axes?
    Stop your smart-assery and pull up a chair, Angie said.
    LexisNexis was thought of as the single best resource for filed news of any kind. That’s most of what I knew about it.
    Which table? I said. There were five computers. I pointed between them with an unsure finger.
    Doesn’t matter, Angie said. You can get to it off any computer. Here, at home, wherever. That’s why it’s so good. You just need a subscription and a password.
    I dragged over my desk chair. It was heavier than I thought and the legs squealed and scraped along the floor.
    Like a membership? I said.
    Like a club, Angie said. Okay. She reached around to the back of the computer at the next table and switched it on. The Lexis half is legal docs, she said. The Nexis half is hard news. There was a little hum and a quick text scroll across the screen before it settled into start-up mode and the Windows 3.1 logo came up and held. They’ve got sources all over the world, Angie said. I don’t even know how many sources. Tens of thousands. Records