The Henderson Equation (16 page)

"Lay a few bucks on the bastard," McCarthy would
howl when all else had failed.

But a quarter of a million! By morning, Nick had concluded
that it wasn't ethics at all, purely the size of the money, that had prompted
his irritation. It was, as Gunderstein had testified when confronted with
torture, outside the realm of his experience. Myra's reaction was far more
phlegmatic. He had been careful to outline the parameters without the injection
of personal opinion, in content as well as nuance.

"What was your reaction, Nick?" she had asked
coyly.

"I rejected it outright," he answered quickly,
refusing to admit his second thoughts. They were sitting in her pleasant
breakfast room with the sun shining through the high windows, throwing
shimmering glints on the garden sculptures. She quietly sipped her coffee.

"It would be a shame if he gets away with it because
of our timidity," she said.

"You have to weigh that against the possibility of our
finding other sources and, of course, our own vulnerability."

"We've gone this far," she mused, "it seems
a shame."

"And then there is the possibility that the
information will be worthless, a case of entrapment. We've been assuming that
Gunderstein is certain that the man is guilty, that a cover-up has indeed been
perpetrated. He could be dead wrong."

"Do you think he is?"

"That's the hell of it, Myra. I believe in
Gunderstein's assessment. I believe that we'll get our money's worth." It
was, he knew, a Pandora's box of possibilities.

"If the man is guilty, the people have a right to
know."

"I don't deny that."

"We can't allow this country to be raped, Nick,"
she said. He could see in her eyes the same firmness that had moved her father.

"Assuming his guilt."

"I believe he is guilty, absolutely."

There it was, he thought, the prejudgment so necessary for
commitment. "It'll cost us a quarter of a million."

"That's the least of the problem," she said
confidently. "I have private resources. It needn't be a company
matter."

Once the mechanics of the payoff had been worked out, the
story had begun to unfold swiftly, the bottle-neck broken. Gunderstein had been
right. The source provided the promised value and whatever guilt Nick might
have felt became submerged in the euphoria of the victory, the greater good. It
seemed poetic logic for the memory to surface at this moment.

But Gunderstein, ever the technician, saw only the story as
an end in itself. He would hardly understand what was going on now, in Nick's
mind, the wider implications, the hatching conspiracy, the rationalizations
filtering through their prismatic screenings. What did Gunderstein understand
about the duel under way between him and Myra, in which Henderson was merely a
chess piece? What did he care about Henderson or moral right? It was absurd.
Henderson was, like all the rest, a political prostitute. He would commit any
crime if he felt it would get him one more vote, providing the moral stigma
remained in the closet. There were no considerations of good and evil in this
scenario, only power, raw and unrefined. Gunderstein got up and maneuvered
Allison toward the door. The man looked at Nick as he passed, tried to speak,
then shook his head and moved unsteadily on Gunderstein's arm.

When they had gone Nick settled onto the couch and sipped
his drink. Despite its sloppiness, Gunderstein's living room had its own
lived-in pattern, a mirror perhaps of the younger man's cluttered mind. It was
not unlike his and Charlie's old bachelor apartment, a private stronghold,
pugnacious in its maleness. It, too, was cluttered with books, although the
bits and pieces of unfinished food never reached the level of being part of the
decor. It seemed natural for Gunderstein's environment to stimulate recall, as
if the ground had been gone over before in another life, which it had. The
issue, like the others, was similar.

"It was like starting out at the finish line and
retracing the track to make sure the race was rigged correctly," he had
told Charlie during that time with Pelligrino.

"A good simile, Nick."

"Under those terms everyone is vulnerable."

"That's right."

"Somebody gets up in the morning. Throws a dart into a
board imprinted with the name of some public figure, in this case the President
of the City Council, and the game begins. Let's fuck Pelligrino."

"More or less correct."

"It's hideous."

"Do you give one shit about Pelligrino?"

"That's not the point."

McCarthy had gathered three reporters around his desk that
morning, his heavy eyes a red network of veins, a map of yesterday's bout with
barleycorn. "We're going to run this investigation on three levels. The
political, the money angle, and the personal. The objective here is to get a
well-rounded picture of this snake."

The question of Pelligrino's snakery was a prejudgment, not
the concern of the reporters. It had simply been decreed. By McCarthy? By
people above him in the hierarchy of the
News?
It was difficult to tell.

"I want this guinea's ass," he said, revealing
the ferocity of ethnic contempt. The Irish and the Italians in New York were
natural enemies, competing for protection of their own territorial imperatives.
It was essentially a New York phenomenon; this fierce sense of belonging,
chunks of unmelted fat in the myth of the melting pot.

Why did he want his ass? Nick wanted to ask, but held back,
afraid of ridicule. Surely he was missing some important bit of information,
some piece of knowledge that would explain why Pelligrino was a target now. His
assignment was to learn about Pelligrino's personal life, to dig beyond the
bland façade of political imagery. He had no illusions about what McCarthy
wanted and, despite his own questioning, was determined to show his skills. It
was from these ingredients that newspaper reputations were made.

Following the traditional journalistic starting points, he
read and reread the old clips in the
News
library, piles of cardboard
envelopes filled with the passing events of Pelligrino's political career.
There was Pelligrino's public life cataloged in faded ink, an acre of
strung-together words, descriptions, pronouncements, quotations. Only in the
absorption of the mass could one get even a remote hint of the real character
of Salvatore Pelligrino. A study of the clips gave him a mental picture of a
small man, addicted in later life to well-cut, stylish clothes, a
"dandy," smelling of heavy expensive cologne, with polished
fingernails, scrupulously shined expensive shoes, a carefully trimmed
moustache, with large brown sad heavy-lidded eyes and teeth still white and
able to embellish a warm, broad, thick-lipped smile. But beyond the façade of
the overdressed man of dignity, the clips hinted of poverty-inflicted early
pain, the immigrant boy hustling for a buck on the streets, the parents who
never learned English, propagating with Catholic fervor, creating their huge
garlic-smelling brood, all with odd names like those of characters in the
Italian movies then in vogue.

It might have been the first time that Nick had used old
clips to sketch the picture of a man, an adversary, now, and all these bits and
pieces put together by a crowd of indifferent reporters, all watching through
their own private lenses, provided a fascinating and, he believed, accurate
kaleidoscope of a man's character. He had not yet learned how the newspaper
portrait of any public person fed on itself, was built on the gleanings of an
army of observers, each embellishing what the other had observed before,
preserved forever in these little cardboard envelopes, the bible of the rewrite
desks. By the time he had read them all, he felt he had his quarry well
focused, a cosmeticized little man, obsessed with the necessity to appear
dignified, hiding behind a carefully constructed façade. And since it had been
planted in his mind that the man was a snake, he had sought justification for
the characterization. By the time he had read the clipping thoroughly, he
imagined that he had found it and was quite ready to slice away at the man.

He knew in advance the object of his search. The reference
to the personal side of Pelligrino's life was obvious. Nick's assignment was to
come up with a record of philandering. It was not a question of whether or not
Pelligrino was a philanderer--that was assumed--but to forestall any libel suit
by proving the obvious. After all, didn't Italians in general like to fuck a
lot and weren't Italians in positions of power certainly going to take
advantage of the situation? He had already learned that confirming a
stereotyped image was the best way to make a story believable. A rapist was
always unshaven and beady-eyed; killers had slick black hair; blacks shuffled;
girls who shook their fannies when they walked were great in bed.

By the time he reached Pelligrino's City Hall office he had
the bit tightly clenched in his teeth. A man's office, like his home, often
told more about the man than his own guarded speech. Pelligrino's outer office
was filled, floor to ceiling, with pictures of Pelligrino; shifty eyes peering
into the lens with Pelligrino the dominant constant. Nick spent a good deal of
time looking at the pictures, stalling, as if he were waiting for someone,
observing the comings and goings. There were three girls in the office, all
carefully coiffured, with straight stocking seams and cool, efficient
demeanors, reflective of Pelligrino's passion for dignity. One of the women was
too matronly to be a possibility, but the other two could be considered prime
suspects. After all, what was safer than fooling around with one's secretary?
He fantasized about each of them, differentiated by their desk nameplates as
Miss Simon and Miss Aquilino. Miss Simon was a big-breasted Jewish blonde with
a well-girdled torso and long manicured nails that grew out of bony, thin white
hands. Miss Aquilino was thin and dark, compact. Which one was he screwing?
Both! Surely a man like Pelligrino would not deprive himself. A picture of
Pelligrino and his family flashed before him, intruding on the image. He had
six children. Nick had counted them with care since the caption had not given a
figure. Noting the date of the clipping, he calculated that the children now
ranged in age from six to twenty-five. The oldest would be older than both of
the secretaries.

When he had finished his observations of Pelligrino's
office, Nick walked down the City Hall corridors to the press room, a
high-ceilinged pigpen of a place lined with small desks and old-fashioned,
battered typewriters. He found Wiley Patton, the
News'
City Hall
reporter, slumped over his typewriter in a deep snooze. Wiley was a man in his
sixties, an old hand. Like all old-time reporters, he was conscious of his own
legend and was treated with awesome respect by the younger reporters. The City
Hall beat was his domain and the three reporters that McCarthy had assigned to
the Pelligrino story were carefully briefed on how Patton was to be handled.

"Patton knows everything that goes on down there. They
trust him. He'll buck like hell when he hears what we're doing. That'll be one
big act for your benefit, for mine, for the politicians. Let him do his act. He
knows what he's doing," McCarthy had lectured. It seemed to Nick a classic
study in deviousness.

"He's got to appear to be on their side,"
McCarthy had continued. "A double agent." The old man smiled at the
reference.

Nick shook Patton lightly, watching him stir as his eyes
flickered open.

"Shit," he said, not recognizing Nick, although
he had been introduced in the city room. Shaking himself awake, he reached for
a half-smoked cigar in his overfilled ashtray and relit it. Nick introduced
himself. Patton sneered. Nick explained what he was doing.

"The bastards," Patton said. "So the old
man's got a hard-on for the wop."

"Surely it's not that simple."

"The hell it isn't."

"Why?"

Patton looked contemptuously at Nick, his lips already
stained with the juice of the soggy cigar.

"Why does Carter make liver pills?" he said
cryptically.

Other reporters began to straggle into the press room. Patton
nodded at each greeting, indicating through contemptuous facial expressions his
opinion of each reporter.

"That's Hillary of the fucking
Mirror,"
Patton said, just loud enough to be heard over the sound of a single typewriter
now being beaten in a corner of the room. Hillary, a tall, bloodless man,
looked over his glasses and stuck up his middle finger.

"We outcirculate the son of a bitch," Patton
said, returning Hillary's salute. Nick could sense the warm rivalry, perhaps
friendship between the two.

"We better get out of here, Gold," Patton said
suddenly in a whisper. "Too many ears around here."

Nick followed him through the high-ceilinged old corridors
with their dusty light globes, through the ornate entrance of the archaic
building. Remembering the sunlight and budded trees of the little park in front
of the building, he could place the time in his mind as early spring. Patton
walked quickly. He was a wiry man who moved with quick bursts of energy,
despite a sallow complexion and a slightly stooped figure. Nick followed him
into a dark, half-empty bar, oddly unmarked, except for a weakly expiring neon
sign which said "Bar." The bartender greeted Patton with brotherly
interest.

"How's the boy?"

"Another day, another dollar."

"Same old shit, eh?"

The place, the greeting, even Patton's frozen glare of
contempt seemed, by then, a repetitive syndrome of the New York newspaper
world, a romantic stereotype. Cynicism and contemptuousness were the built-in
props of a newspaperman's self-esteem, a kind of inheritance from more
competitive rough-and-tumble newspaper days, before respectability had somehow
intruded on the profession, along with the Newspaper Guild and a master's
degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. Patton, like McCarthy, was a
relic of the spittoon and eyeshade days, now expiring under the onslaught of
technology. Even then, despite his nagging feeling of intellectual superiority,
Nick felt himself in a historical presence, as if old Patton might be passing
him a relay stick.