The Henderson Equation (15 page)

"Are you sure this Senator Henderson is the same
man?"

"Positive."

"Then why can't we confirm it?" Nick said,
turning to Gunderstein.

"I've tried. I've badgered the CIA and as many old
Viet Nam hands as I could find."

"They couldn't confirm it," Allison said.
"This operation was strictly outside the chain of command. There wouldn't
be a single document on the subject, not a breath. I'm the only
connection."

"And the Viet Nam commander who led the assassination
team?"

"Long dead. They saw to that early in the game."

"That's the trouble with you spooks. You see some
sordid conspiracy everywhere."

"Monkey sees as monkey does," Allison said, his
tongue heavy now.

"So it can't be confirmed. All we have is your
word," Nick said, wanting to add: And that's not very much. But Allison
was alert to the implication. He was drunk but apparently his mind was still
clear.

"And I suppose you don't put a high premium on
that."

"Now that you mention it." Nick shrugged.

"It wouldn't matter, anyway, Mr. Gold,"
Gunderstein said, "he won't be quoted."

"Why not?"

"It's a lousy life, but the only one I've got. They'll
stop at nothing."

"They?"

"Powerful men stop at nothing. And what could be
sweeter, more tantalizing than revenge? The Kennedy brothers for the Ngu
brothers. Old boozy Carter Allison for handsome Burt Henderson. I know my
equations, Mr. Gold."

"Kennedy was shot exactly three weeks after the Ngu
brothers," Gunderstein said. "He's frightened. And I can't confirm
it. If only you'd let me write the story without using the man's name ... I
think I'd be able to flush out another source."

"I'm telling the truth," Allison said, finishing
the tumbler full of whiskey, quickly replaced by Gunderstein. "Henderson
was an NSA man, a retread, called in just for this purpose. He also had some
knowledge of the language. And he was in Viet Nam during that period. All that
is a cinch to confirm."

Gunderstein nodded.

"Purely circumstantial," Nick said. "You're
accusing the man of engineering an assassination."

"I'm more than accusing. I'm insisting," Allison
said, his face flushing, his eyes narrowing.

"I think this story is like cotton candy. It melts in
the mouth," Nick said. He stood up and began to pace the room, making
detours to avoid knocking down piles of books. "There's simply not enough
to go on. We've no moral right to accept this ... this hearsay. It would
destroy Henderson's career."

"Moral right," Allison sputtered. "You'll
make me ill. If I thought I was getting into the area of moral right, I'd never
have opened my yap. You guys are newspapermen, aren't you? Since when do you
guys deal in moral right? I'm giving you a story. I'm telling you that your hero
Burton Henderson is full of shit, a fraud. All you pinko bleeding hearts. You
think Henderson is all nigger lover, all heart, and you plant kisses on both
his cheeks. It makes me want to vomit."

"We're certainly not a conduit for revenge," Nick
said, sitting down again. He was conscious of having a strong desire to bait
the man, to push him into some vague admission of dark motives. Allison emptied
his glass and looked helplessly at Gunderstein, who turned away in obvious
embarrassment.

"There isn't a shred of hard evidence, Allison,"
Gunderstein said sadly. "I've tracked it everywhere, the CIA, the NSA, old
Nam hands, even Madam Nhu who I reached in Paris. Oh, there's a general
undercurrent of agreement on the CIA's role, but Henderson is not in it. And that's
the story, Allison. You've got to see Mr. Gold's point. He wants another source
of confirmation. You can't really blame him."

The man's bloodshot eyes sought Nick's. Why had he come?
Nick wondered. Was he really hoping that the information would be more
conclusive? Of course he was, he assured himself, dismissing, as Allison had
done, the moral niceties of the situation. He was looking for dirt and he knew
it.

"You're all in it together," Allison said with
rising bitterness, his tongue heavier, his articulation difficult. "You
can shit on anyone you choose to--or choose not to."

"Well, then why did you come to us?" Nick asked.
He could feel the man's frustration.

"Because I wanted to shit on Henderson."

"That's obvious."

"Gunderstein believes me," Allison said thickly.
"Don't you, Gunderstein?"

Gunderstein flushed, his pimples reddening. Nick became
aware, at that moment, of the secret of Gunderstein's skill, the ability to
inspire confidence in a source, a method beyond mere tenacity. There were no heroes,
no villains, only people trapped in circumstances. Gunderstein began at that
point. Everyone was credible. They had reasons for their actions. The lie was
simply a tool for survival. Gunderstein took no moral positions. He was simply
a vessel for their justifications.

"Yes, I do," Gunderstein answered.

"If you have that much confidence in his story, why
couldn't you persuade him to be quoted?" he asked Gunderstein.

"They'll kill me," Allison said, terrified.

"The man's paranoid," Nick said.

"I know," Gunderstein said. "But that
doesn't make the story any less valid." They were talking as if Allison
didn't exist.

"At this point it's simply gossip. I admit its
fascination, but that's all it is--gossip."

"It's the truth," Allison persisted. He got up
unsteadily and poured more whiskey in his glass.

"I thought perhaps," Gunderstein said quietly to
Nick, "that I would write the piece obliquely without using Henderson's
name. There's got to be somebody out there who knows something."

"You want to go fishing?"

"In a way, yes. But we do that all the time."

Nick thought for a moment. Gunderstein was correct, of
course. When they suspected a big fish they poked their lines into the water,
carefully baited. It was hardly a subtle ploy since the fish, considering the
scope of the line, could hardly fail to smell the bait. Once the
Chronicle
implied that it was out for a big fish, all the little fish and all the big
fish's enemies would crowd the bait, waiting for the chance to get in a good
chomp. This mask of self-righteousness was beginning to smother him. You are
conspiring, you hypocrite, Nick chastised himself. He felt suddenly irritated,
grabbed a glass from a shelf, and wiping out the dust with his hand, poured
himself a drink.

"You realize," Nick said, addressing himself to
Allison, now fading swiftly into a drunken stupor, "that Henderson, if we
are to believe your story, didn't actually do anything wrong in the sense that
it was not part and parcel of American policy at the time. Obviously, he was
following orders, doing what was considered an acceptable, though clandestine,
act of American foreign policy." Nick felt that his explanation was
convoluted, but even through his descending stupor Allison seemed to catch the
subtlety.

"Who says different? Hesh a fuggin hypocrite, that's
all. And he may be the fuggin President of the whole keboodle. That's wash
wrong." He tried to stand up, then fell backward against the wall where he
continued to find support, his head lolling on his shoulder.

"I better get him into a cab," Gunderstein said.
He picked up the phone and asked the desk clerk to call a cab. When he had hung
up, Gunderstein reached into an opened pretzel box that suddenly materialized
from behind an end table and offered it to Nick, who declined.

"If there is any weight to the story, and I think
there is," Gunderstein said, abstractedly biting into a pretzel, "it
will surface sooner or later."

"Not necessarily, Harold," Nick said. It takes a
visceral hatred, a commitment, he thought. If that element had been missing,
they might never have gone after the President.

He had long ago assimilated his rationalization. It had
ceased to nag him by then. It was a virtue that his life within the vortex of
the storm, the press of the avalanche of events, could sublimate a galling
episode with uncommon speed. But now it came rushing back to the front of his
consciousness, and it was an indication of Gunderstein's sensitivity that he
had deftly steered clear of the memory.

They had by then burrowed in, deeply, to the point where
the
Chronicle
's revelations were more than just an irritation to the
White House. Other papers were beginning to join the fray, but Gunderstein's
skill and singlemindedness kept him steps ahead of the so-called competition.
They had spread the bait on the waters like oil and the bigger fish were making
their first tentative forays toward the hook. When a week went by without a new
revelation, both he and Myra had become edgy.

"We can't stop now," she had said. By then it had
become a passion. "We owe it to the American people." It had added to
the complexity that they were now responding to high-blown patriotic
platitudes, and believing them. All except Gunderstein, whose pursuit, as
always, was devoid of moral overtones. The story was all.

But for him and Myra there was added motivation, a visceral
hatred that went far beyond the bounds of political opposition. Something in
the man, then the sitting President, was able to inflame them, inspiring
indignation and contempt. Perhaps it was his aloofness. A closed personality,
he was difficult to know. There was also a transparency in his machinations.
You could always see the works in motion, gears clicking, motors humming, and
it was puzzling to understand how the bulk of the American people were so easily
manipulated by them. Perhaps that was at the heart of it, since it had rendered
them almost powerless in their influence, leaving them with the feeling that
maybe they had been wrong all along--until Gunderstein had come to them with
the idea of the cover-up and they had given him carte blanche to pursue it.
Gunderstein had merely thrown the match on the already dry tinder.

"I've found the unimpeachable source,"
Gunderstein told him. He had come into the office, his hair plastered down by
perspiration, circles reddening around his pimples.

"In the nick of time, Harold. There's gloom and doom
on all fronts." Aside from the mere scent of blood, there were ancillary
reasons for the story's further development. Circulation was rising swiftly
now. Advertising lineage was up. And the editorial staff had been gripped by an
infectious esprit de corps, a kind of David against Goliath syndrome, a rather
endurable newspaperman's fantasy, easily stimulated.

"He's offered me two choices," Gunderstein said.

"The hard way and the easy way."

"Exactly."

"What's the trade-off?"

"In this case only two things. Anonymity and
money."

"Mendacity is everywhere," Nick said, resisting
the temptation to ask the man's name.

"What he means by anonymity is a total blackout. From
everyone, including you and Mrs. Pell," Gunderstein said.

"And what did you tell him?"

"I said that money probably posed the lesser of the
two problems."

"At least you've invested us with some morality,
Harold."

Gunderstein ignored the sarcasm. "He's absolutely germinal
to the story, knows the inside, dates, people, places."

"How can you be sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Sounds like it might be the President himself."

"In my opinion, he probably knows more than the
President," Gunderstein said.

"And the money?"

"He wants a quarter of a million in cash."

Nick felt his throat tighten, stifling what might have been
a hysterical laugh.

"Now that's what I call squeeze." In his mind, he
had already rejected the offer outright. The
Chronicle
was, after all, a
public company. As a practical matter, it would be difficult to bury that kind
of money. Besides, to extend the knowledge beyond Gunderstein, Myra, himself,
and the source, would create special dangers. You couldn't pass that kind of
money without calling in the comptroller, the company money man.

"He thinks it's a bargain," Gunderstein said
calmly. "He says that if we tried to get the story without his help it
might cost four, five times more in time, personnel, running down false
leads."

"A real businessman, this guy," Nick said.
"Couldn't you come up with someone else less crassly motivated? Revenge,
jealousy, patriotism, ethics, morality, the need for expiation, confession,
simple hatred?"

"A source is a source."

"Do me a favor, Gunderstein. Go home and take a cold
shower. We'd blow our credibility sky high. I'd be putting the
Chronicle
's
image right on the line." He could think of a thousand reasons for
rejection. "It's simply not the rules of the game," he said finally.

"Rules?"

"You can't become what you're trying to expose."

"Our business is to tell the story, Mr. Gold. That's
our only reason for being."

"So you believe we should pay for it?"

"Yes."

"Get the information any way you can?"

"Yes."

"Torture. Blackmail. Are they also legitimate
tactics?"

Gunderstein became thoughtful. He swallowed, his Adam's
apple bobbing.

"Inflicting physical pain is not in my frame of
reference," he said quietly. "I suppose, though, you might use some
form of mental torture, and fear of exposure poses a kind of blackmail on a
self-perceived victim."

He was exasperating.

"On second thought a shower might be hardly useful.
What you need is to get laid, Gunderstein. Laid and parlayed."

But the idea had lingered. He remembered tossing around in
his bed, sleepless, challenging Gunderstein in a nightmare of imagined
conversations. Actually, they had always winked at the little bribe, the bought
lunch or drink, or, on occasion, even women, a traditional inducement, although
it was an offense of first-class proportions for anyone on the staff to accept
any form of payola. Charlie had made it a religion, rigidly enforced, and he
had carried it beyond the pale of human frailty. Not a lunch, not a drink, not
the slightest hint of gratuity. Nick, too, was merciless in the enforcement;
rigid, unbending. It rankled him to know that the columnists were out of his
reach, although he had some recourse, but hardly the same control as he could
exercise over his own staff. Perhaps that was why his first reaction to
Gunderstein's proposal was negative. And yet, he had paid for information in
his career. It was a standard practice on the
News
. One simply put the
payola on one's expense account, suitably buried but not without prior approval
of McCarthy.