The Undaunted

The Editor in Chief

Manhattan, January, 1946

The hallways of a newspaper office were always busy and noisy, but Jack didn't hear any of it. The clacking of typewriters; the shrill peal of the telephones; the shouts as somebody received a tip-off and jammed their hat on their head and their notebook and pencil in their pocket before charging out into the streets, a news hound on the trail of a story; it was all muted compared to the battlefield. Here, the sounds were steady, unpunctuated by mortar explosions or screams or white phosphorus. Nobody dropped down dead beside him or lost their legs or spilled their intestines onto the ground. Everyone was alive and unhurt at the end of each day.

Jack kept the radio in his office turned up so loud that everyone who came in to see him complained about it. But he couldn't tell them why he was afraid of silence. He couldn't tell them how in the moments of silence, screams of the dying filled his ears, explosions, the whistle of German shells, the battery of submachine guns. Jenny would know. She would understand. He could tell her. Except he hadn't a damn clue where she was.

He had gone to see her editor, Vivian, at the Vogue offices, but she was equally mystified.

"I haven't seen Jenny for months," Vivian had said. "Do you want to offer her a job? I'm afraid you'll have to duel it out with me. I'm still hoping she'll return to adorning my pages with her face and figure." Vivian gave Jack her most brilliant, winning smile.

But Jack flinched, knowing how Jenny would feel about being asked to model again after everything she'd done over in Europe.

"She was looking for something more serious," Vivian added, taking off her glasses, her face turning more sober now. "The kind of job I imagine a newspaper like yours would be able to provide."

He knew Vivian was fishing, wanting to know why he'd come looking for Jenny, but he had no intention of telling her. "Can I leave my card? Please ask her to call me if you speak to her."

His card. His fucking card. Like Jenny was a business acquaintance. God, it almost destroyed him handing over that piece of paper to Vivian. At least he knew she'd been in New York, which was something. He also tried to speak to Martha, but she was doing a very good job of avoiding him. Too good. She knew something, and she obviously had no intention of telling him.

So he'd heard nothing more. It was, he supposed, unsurprising, but also as painful as having gas in your lungs, a kind of searing agony that left invisible scars, scars that burned in the middle of the night, that ached in the cold, that stung every time he had to leave the office and return to his home.

"Mr. Delaney?" His secretary, Alice, a sensible woman whose instincts he had grown to trust over the past few months, open the door after a quick tap.

Jack turned from his usual place by the window, staring out at skyscraper spires, bayonets of steel tearing into the sky.

"Yes," he said, pulling his mind into the present, to his role as editor-in-chief of one of New York's biggest daily newspapers, a role his grandfather had gladly handed to him the moment Jack stepped back onto American soil. Yet sometimes he was still out in the field. Some nights it was impossible not to be on alert and he would wake in the dark, thinking for a split second that he had to lead his men out on a raid, before he remembered. Then, inevitably, thoughts of Jenny would intrude and he ached for her with a physical pain that was almost unbearable. He needed her in a primal, visceral way.

He had traded in his army khakis for a well-tailored three-piece suit, yet he knew that part of his life would never be over.

"Sorry to bother you, sir, but this just came in over the wire," Alice was saying. "Addressed to you. I don't recognize the sender's name. Have we put in a new stringer to cover the Nuremberg trials? Apparently, there are pictures too."