The Henderson Equation (5 page)

After the first week he hardened his stance, perfected the
technique of the brush-off. Then one day a little Italian with a running nose
walked into the anteroom. The city desk sent Nick out for the interview. Mucus
was leaking onto the man's lip and his dark eyes kept darting from side to
side. He was petrified with fright. In heavily accented English he explained
that he had a fruit store on Twenty-first Street that had just been burned
down. The man's fingers were encrusted with grime, chapped into frozen stumps
from long cold mornings handling fruit.

"They burna my store because I see dem payoffa da
cops."

"Who?"

"Da bookie." He looked at Nick as if wary of his
youth.

"They take my fruita, too. I see dem taka da money
froma da bookie, den dey taka da fruita."

"Who?"

"Da cops." The little man continued. "I
tella dem, 'Taka da appla, or oranga. That'sa okay.' Buta dey taka away da
bushela full. I say, 'Looka, I donna wanna no troubla.' Buta dey laugha. I say,
'Looka, you getta money froma da bookie, so paya me something. I gotta twelva
kids.' Dey laugha. Luigi's justa dumb wop. I foola dem. I writa down da badge
numbera. Here." He dipped his shattered hand into a tattered pocket of his
stained pants and pulled out a scrap of brown paper bag. Nick smoothed the
paper on his knees, looking at the long line of primitive numbers. He felt the
man's frustration, his outrage.

"I say, 'You stopa taka da fruita or I tella.' One big
cop, he coma and smasha da melons witha da club. I bega dem on da life of da
virgin to stopa. Dey coma every day for a week and breaka upa da fruita."
Nick felt the man's anger and his craving for justice. "I writa down da
badge numbera," the little man repeated proudly. "Then dey burna me
down."

"Why haven't you gone to the precinct to talk to the
Captain?"

The Italian looked at him and snarled, "You
crazy?" Nick felt foolish. He looked at the scrap of brown paper on his
knees, finding a special meaning for himself, the power to redress a wrong.
Perhaps this explained his compulsion to be a journalist; his belief in the
power of the word, the inked word that brought truth and forced justice.

"You sit there," he told the little Italian,
surprised at the authority of his command. He walked back into the city room,
and sitting down at a typewriter desk, slid the pulpy paper in the roller. The
lead had etched itself into his mind fully composed before his fingers reached
the keys.

"The promise of America died on the pyre of Luigi
Petrucci's fruit store last night," the story began. Nick pondered the
grey words, then ripped the paper out of the typewriter. Would they laugh at
his passion? He put another paper in the typewriter, remembering the discipline
of the newspaper's style.

"An immigrant Italian fruit merchant today accused the
police of burning down his store.

"In an allegation, stemming from his observation of
police pay-offs by bookmakers, Luigi Petrucci, whose store is located at 231
West 21st Street, claimed that he was threatened repeatedly by the police when
he attempted to protect his produce from their greed." Nick knew
greed
was heavy, unacceptable, but he let it stand.

The story went on to mention the list of badge numbers and
alluded to Luigi's fear of further reprisals. When he had finished, Nick put
the story under the nose of Baldwin, one of the deskmen, who chuckled as he
read it, then tossed it over to O'Hara. After a quick glance, O'Hara squinted
over his glasses. Nick slouched on the copy bench, watching him, his arms
folded belligerently over his chest. Deny that's news, he said to himself
angrily. He heard O'Hara scream for a copy boy and watched the story make its
way toward McCarthy's desk. Nick had slugged the story
"Gold-Corruption" in the upper left-hand corner.

"Gold!" he heard McCarthy's voice boom. Something
in its timbre frightened him; his stance of anger softened like ice melting in
a midsummer sun. With a pounding heart he made his way to McCarthy's desk.

"Gold?" McCarthy looked at him as a butcher might
observe a fly on a hindquarter.

"Yessir."

"You wrote this shit?"

"Yessir." Only it's not shit, he wanted to say,
but couldn't find the courage, his throat constricting.

"You believe the guinea?"

"Yessir," Nick whispered.

McCarthy pondered the story a moment.

"The dumb wop," he said. Nick remembered Luigi's
words. McCarthy reached for the phone at his side and dialed a number.

"Hello, you old bastard," he hissed into the
phone, watching Nick as he spoke. He paused, absorbing a voice at the other end
of the line. "Meet me at Shanley's. Yeah, about eleven." He hung up
and pointed a finger at Gold. "You, too."

He had interpreted McCarthy's reaction as vindication.
Walking back to the anteroom, he gripped Luigi's arm.

"You got lots of balls, Luigi," Nick told him.
"We're going to do right by you."

The little man stood up, smiling.

"I know I comma to da righta place. You a gooda
boy." He took Nick's hand. For a moment, Nick thought he was going to kiss
it. Instead he held it awkwardly in his rough hands and shook it, tears welling
in his eyes. Nick watched as he walked off, bowlegged in his baggy pants.

Later, in Shanley's, over their first beer, Nick told
Charlie what had happened.

"You are unquestionably the dumbest asshole I have
ever met," Charlie had exploded. "Do you really believe that he'll
allow that story to see the light of print?"

Nick looked at his watch. The Bulldog would roll in less
than half an hour.

"Yes," he said, firmly but hesitantly. Charlie
drained his beer glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "Now,
dummy. Lesson one. That telephone was a direct line to the Police Chief.
McCarthy is hooked in by private wire. Lesson two. Police corruption is a
purely political matter. We don't go after the cops unless there is good
political return for the paper. Lesson three. All, well almost all, New York cops are on the take. It's a way of life. It's hardly news in itself. Not to our
readers."

McCarthy sat with the Police Chief at a table in the
corner, their heads bowed together in intense conversation.

"I can't believe it," Nick said, looking at his
watch. "You've got to be kidding. Paying off the police is corruption,
pure, unvarnished, raw corruption. I can understand screening the news, but
things like police corruption, Charlie, are just too blatant to suppress. I
mean we're supposed to be the little man's friend."

"Jesus, don't lay that shit on me," Charlie said,
motioning to the bartender for a refill. They both watched as the bartender
pulled the tab lever and the amber brew foamed in the glasses. He jerked a
thumb in the direction of McCarthy.

"Does that little scene look like an adversary
relationship?" Charlie asked.

Nick watched the two men drinking together. Occasionally
one of them would explode in laughter. His optimism waned.

"We didn't attack the whole force. Only the corruption
of a few."

"The whole thing is corrupt, from top to bottom,"
Charlie said, downing his beer in a huge gulp.

"But we're the press, Charlie. We can keep them honest
by telling the truth."

"The truth? What the hell is that?"

"The truth is"--Nick hesitated--"the
truth." He pouted.

"The truth is whatever McCarthy decides."

"But he's only one man."

"He decides," Charlie said emphatically.
"Don't assume that his truth is the same as yours."

"But in this case," Nick protested, "it's a
clear-cut case of police persecution. The man was injured by the people paid to
protect him."

"So?"

"It demands to be told. If you don't tell it, they'll
continue to repeat the same damned thing."

"Who gives a shit about one lousy little
greaseball?"

"I do, damn it."

"Stop bleeding all over the bar."

Nick felt his anger rising. Charlie seemed to sense it and
softened.

"Try to see it from McCarthy's point of view,"
Charlie said. "He could run the story and embarrass the shit out of the
Police Department. But he's a lot smarter than that. He'll just file it away,
use it as collateral. Trade-off for a closer relationship with the Chief. Think
of all the story leads we'll get, the inside dope. This damned rag comes out
every day. Every damned day. What's one poor little guy against that? It's a
trade-off."

"It's blackmail," Nick said. "And it's
wrong."

"As for your Italian friend," Charlie said,
brightening, "the Chief will bust the asses of those cops. But not for the
reasons you think. They were stupid."

A nightside reporter came in for a quick shot. He carried
the Bulldog under his arm. Nick slid it out from the crook in the man's arm and
thumbed through it hurriedly, tearing the freshly inked pages in the process.

"Confirmed?" Charlie asked gently. Nick pushed
the mangled paper toward the reporter.

"Confirmed," he nodded. "It just compounds
the felony. It makes us all a part of it, accomplices."

"I suppose you're right there. But you'd better harden
yourself, old buddy. You'll bleed to death early in this game if you let your
sense of justice get in the way of your good sense."

"Never," Nick said quietly, holding down his
agitation. "I hope to hell I never get like him." He jerked a thumb
toward McCarthy.

"Don't be so hard on him," Charlie said after a
long pause.

"God forbid it should ever happen to me," Nick
said.

"Or me," Charlie whispered. "Just because I
understand how it works doesn't mean I believe in it."

Nick felt the closeness to his friend.

"So you burn as well," he said.

"Yes, I burn too, kid."

When the Police Chief had lumbered off, his heavy, beefy
face red with drink and the banked fires of humiliation, McCarthy turned
watery, glazed eyes to them. He scowled as if suffering a twinge from a passing
pain in his midsection. His lips rearranged themselves into a thin smile. It
seemed a signal for Nick to come closer. Charlie followed and they sat down at
the table.

"I like the man," McCarthy said, his lips like
those of an elephant's trunk squirming toward the edge of the shot glass. The
phrase seemed a hurled curse at his own frailty, as if his own humanness was
something to be endured. Nick remembered that they had sat at the table for a
long time saying nothing, until McCarthy's head, sodden with drink, finally
dropped forward on the table.

Nick felt the rolled paper in his fingers. He had stripped
the shattered cigarette in the ashtray and balled the paper into a dry
spitball, as they had been taught to do in basic training. Flinging the little
ball into his wastebasket, he mentally swung back into the habit of his day. A
news aide put a pile of wire copy on his desk, the first trickle of dispatches
from overseas, early stuff coming in from topsy-turvy time zones. He nodded
toward the young man, neat and slim in a white starched shirt. He looked over
Foster Tompkins' copy filed from India, Calcutta, the ultimate chaos of urbia,
a city choking on its own human sewage.

India was back in the news again: a
hot spot, inner restlessness increasing, guerrilla activity in embryo, turmoil
with Pakistan. He read the dispatch with special care. It told of an interview
with the guerrilla commander in a tiny, fly-infested restaurant, in the
anonymous teem of the Calcutta netherworld. A picture focused in his mind as he
read. The man, Tompkins, was a fine writer, the imagery accurate, the sentences
workmanlike and cadenced. If only the writing throughout the paper were
consistently good. A misplaced metaphor, after all these years, still jabbed
him a painful blow. A dangling participle made his belly positively acidic.
Words! Sometimes he felt he was being pounded by their avalanche, trapped in a
dark comer with rocks of words clunking around him, imprisoning him like the
man from "The Cask of Amontillado." Sometimes he felt helpless,
impotent, a carpenter with a toothless saw, a clawless hammer.

Oddly, it was only when he read the good writing, subtle
rhythms that controlled the flow like canal locks, that the pedestrian
sentences of the others revealed their pallor. He read the Tompkins piece and
punched the extension for Phillips, the World editor. The response was hoarse,
indifferent. Busy editors hated telephones intruding on concentration.

"I thought Tompkins in fine form," Nick said.

"Class tells," Phillips replied. "I just
read the piece."

Nick began to think about tomorrow's paper, the beginning.
Conception!

At three they would all bring in the budget line, the
assistant managing editors, one for each department, World, Metro, Sports,
Business, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Photo. It was then that they thrashed out
the priorities, budgets in hand, with the day's allocation of news, feeding on
each other, ladling out the soup of the day, to be poured into the
Chronicle
vat.

It was the moment of his day when suspense began, absorbing
his thoughts. He was already beginning to cast about for news priorities,
building the front page in his mind from the grab bag of hard possibilities. It
came to him almost by instinct, a built-in sensor embedded in his journalist
brain. He had long ago ceased to bend with the weight of the responsibility.
Years of trusting his judgment had made a friend of it, a confidant, and when
it was activated, it cast aside all extraneous elements.

As he worked he was conscious of the impending impact of
his product. Millions of eyes were watching, waiting, all over the world. In
foreign, as well as domestic minds, friends and adversaries alike, the
Chronicle
's
words were weighed, the sentences dissected, the subtleties and nuances
pondered, little cells of intelligence microscopically analyzed. The
Chronicle,
along with the
Times,
revealed the cutting edge of America's direction in that one pinpoint of time. The idea of it no longer left him
humbled, awestruck. Somehow his mind had merged with the ink, a private
knowledge. He wouldn't have dared to express it but he had often thought of it
as a measure of immortality, his stamp on future generations, the yet unborn
who would see it as enlarged pieces of microfilm in the world's archives. Often
he would rail against his own flaws, the hodgepodge of personal emotions that
threatened his judgment, the frailties that could be corrosive, perhaps the
very same concerns that had ultimately destroyed Charlie. The telephone rang,
recalling him.

"Lunchtime," Miss Baumgartner's cheery voice
said, intruding.

Remembering, he wondered what Myra had in mind, his
curiosity whetted again, a tug of uncertainty strained for attention. He got
up, straightened his tie, and smoothed down his hair. He looked at a reflection
of himself in the glass wall. Then, putting on his jacket, he passed through
the door into the city room clamor which the glass room had partially
deflected. As he walked toward the elevators, he caught a glimpse of of Gunderstein,
his head pressed against the telephone, a gangling, ear-flapping bloodhound
absorbed in the scent. Had he been fair with Gunderstein? Annoyed at his own
questioning, he waited briefly for the elevator, nodding to others who waited,
conscious of the nervousness his presence created.

As he waited, he was tempted to push off to the Life-style
section, tucked away down a long corridor in what was once the old building. If
Margaret weren't the editor, he reasoned, a simple excuse might cloud the
transparency: the yearning for Jennie, a brief look at her. Even though
Margaret carefully concealed the ex-wife relationship with an attitude of tough
professionalism, well deserved, he would see her accusing contempt, a brief
flicker in the eyes, an arched brow, an uncommon movement of the head. They had
lived together for nearly ten years, an eternity, which sometimes seemed so
brief. Some mornings he would awake and sense her sleeping beside him in that
curled way, buried beneath the covers. It was not a longing, he conceded, just
a brief memory of an old habit. She had, after all, shared the years of his
youth and their union had produced Charmagne, troubled Chums, misplaced in the
generations.

"Don't call me a hippie, Dad, that's absurd, a decade
old," Chums had said to both of them.

"Well, what do you call it? You've left school. You're
rootless, unmotivated. God knows what garbage you're putting into your system
and, not that it matters, you're worrying your mother and me to death."
She was lying on a bare mattress in a room in a big old San Francisco house, a
commune. "Even this whole scene is passé."

"Not to me," she said.

"There's no logic in it," he argued.

"There is to me. I see no logic in
your
life."

"I'm not being self-righteous, Chums," he said,
softening. There was a twinge of guilt. I was a lousy father, he thought. I
loved a newspaper and old Charlie. But hadn't he once loved her mother? Even
when they had told her she was a child of love it was too late to matter. Chums
knew she was a victim. That was two years ago, the last time he had seen her.
He missed her. They still accused themselves over it, if silently. It lay over
them like a cloud every time their eyes touched. And he saw Margaret daily; at
the three o'clock budget meeting, other places in the office, around town.

Was it poetic justice for Jennie to have fallen from the
sky into the Lifestyle section? It was ludicrous for a mistress to be working
for an ex-wife. Margaret had changed her name back to Domier, proud of the
French heritage, which "Gold" had obscured.

"Shit you say," Jennie had said, showing a
stunned look by the revelation. "Your ex-wife?"

"None other." They were sitting at Sans Souci
having a quiet dinner. He had put his glass down as if he had been overcareful
to choose the right moment.

"You dumb bunny," she said, laughing.
"That's the first thing they tell you. You think it's a secret?"

He didn't really, but he wanted her to hear it directly
from him.

"Am I in for revenge, mental torture? She's bound to
find out about us."

"If I know Margaret she already knows. It was too long
ago to matter. We're actually almost friends again. She'll judge you
professionally, though." He hesitated. He had, after all, been rewriting
her copy before Margaret saw it.

"I'll get better, Nick, you'll see."

"Sure you will."

She pouted. He sensed that she was feeling uneasy about her
dependence on him.

"I don't know what happens to me when I sit down at
the typewriter."

"You'll loosen up. It comes with experience." But
he knew better. Talent could not be taught.

"Teach me," she said, stroking his thigh under
the table.

It was a fair trade. She gave him her youth and he rewrote
her copy.

Now he was holding down temptation, keeping his legs from
moving down the corridor for a brief glimpse of her oval face, a trifle small,
with deep-set dark eyes. Up close, he could see the tiny flecks of yellow in
them. Margaret had not mentioned it once, although he was certain it was the
chief gossip at the
Chronicle,
the old pen in the inkwell routine.

In the elevator, he smiled at the memory of the morning.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he was pulling on his socks, feeling her
watchful eyes, then her fingers groping at the band of his shorts.

"I never have enough of you," she had said,
blatantly groping inward and downward, gently forcing him to erect. His eyes
had turned to the bedside clock.

"There's time," she said. He had stood up, socks
tight to his knees, playfully escaping as she snapped the band. She had slid
her legs over the side and held him in the vise of her naked thighs. Then he
had not wanted to escape as she reached for the hem of his shorts and pulled
them downward, gentle hands caressing him, the sense of time fading as he let
her feel him, kiss the small of his back. Finally, he had turned toward her,
swelling as her lips soft and greedy gave him pleasure, teased him with
sensation. He had looked down at her dark hair, the face turned slightly
upward, pale in the white early morning light. She groaned lightly, the sound
titillating, goading the passion. His hands tightened on her head, as he moved
her away and, bending, kissed her moist lips deeply, tongues joining.

He had remained standing as she had angled her pelvis
toward him, positioning her lissome body to receive his manhood, which plunged
into her as he shifted his weight, watching as the hard organ plunged into her
lightly haired softness, exquisitely tender and wanton. The chronology of their
lives narrowed, youth returning like a rose blooming in Indian summer. He had
wanted to show gratitude for this gift of joy. Consciously, he prolonged the
joining, watching her eyelids flutter with pleasure, as her body squirmed
joyfully, spitted on his hard flesh. Was it the knowledge of his age that made
it so exquisite, made each time with her better than before? He had lived for
three decades before she was born and she was three years older than Chums. Had
it ever been this good with Margaret?

When he finally came, it seemed deeper, a thunder inside
him, an aliveness that made all the spendings of his youth seem wasteful,
casual. It was as if each time would be his last, a hint of death in the air,
assailing him with its unescapable promise of mortality.

"My God, if only I could express what it means to
me," he had told her.

"Believe me, my darling. I got the message."

It was new to him, the lingering over brief pleasures in
the middle of the newspapering day, the conscious mulling over of relationships
beyond the orbit of the
Chronicle
. Rarely had other passions competed
with his involvement with the paper. Was his power of concentration corroding
under the joy of it?

The elevator door slid smoothly open on the eighth floor,
the act drawing him swiftly back to his concern over just what, if anything, Myra was up to with her list of candidates. He was certain it would emerge sooner or
later. He moved into the heavily carpeted floor, a cliché of executive
imperialism. There were constellations of chromium--lamps, trims, desk
legs--primary color abstractions which hung on carpeted walls like clear, sure-sighted
eyes. Even the model of the new building, now built, still displayed in a glass
case and shown so proudly by Myra, had prompted a kind of mental nausea. It was
purely a difference of taste, although even the
Chronicle
's resident
architectural tastemaker had laid in some tender knocks. He had called the
corridor leading to Myra's office the Appian Way, and her office itself
"subtly intimidating, suffering perhaps from a slight, ever so slight,
case of sanctum sanctorumitis." She had been outwardly amused, or so it
had seemed to him at the time.

He winked at the two tall female secretaries who framed the
double-doored entrance to Myra's office suite. Bookends, he thought, as he
brushed past them, their coolness and efficiency bristling in the air.

It was strictly an illusion, a decorator's fantasy,
inspired by Myra's own effort to show the authority of ownership. It was he,
Nick, who ran the
Chronicle
while Myra played at the abstraction of
running it, knowing that her real power was only by veto, which, so far, she
had dared not exercise. She sensed, it seemed, that her ability had been
stunted by her father's stubborn belief that the art of newspapering was better
left to the male mind.

Myra was sitting at the round table
near the window, slats of sun spearing the yellow napkins planted stiffly in
sparkling glasses. He seemed to have walked into the middle of a private
amusement, catching the end of a girlish laugh. Myra, still smiling, turned to
him as he came toward the table. In a corner near the bookcases a tall man
effortlessly posed in a vested pinstripe grey suit, a rounded glass in his
hand, the large sky-blue dots in his deep olive tie an obvious clue to his
conscious sartorial image since the color was a perfect match to the eyes. It
was a faintly familiar tableau, like a Vermeer with the people in modern dress.
It was Senator Burt Henderson.

Nick dreaded the inevitable small talk that would mask the
essence of the intercourse to come, a kind of ritual fencing, so finely honed
in the Washington ether. There is a growing effluvia in this place, Nick
thought, consciously holding the lid on the jack-in-the-box anger that had
plagued him all morning. It was the discovery of the guest that galled him
most, the irregularity of Myra's not having announced him in advance.