by Warren Adler
“You’re exaggerating my influence,” Nick said.
“There’s a bond between you two, a kind of male bond that we females can’t penetrate.”
“We’re friends,” Nick protested, as if that might explain things, “but that doesn’t mean . . .”
“Please, Nick,” Myra persisted.
Charlie hung up the phone and came toward them. “Please,” she repeated. Nick was moved by the ferocity of her plea. It occurred to him that she might be over-killing her cause, since Charlie was already half-convinced to make the move in his own mind.
“I’ll do what I can,” Nick said as Charlie moved toward them in long strides, a beer bottle in his hand again.
“Bless you,” Myra said. He felt her sincerity. Often, later, he remembered the single-mindedness of her appeal, its strength. Nature had tricked her. The wrong sex in the wrong time.
“Well, that’s that,” Charlie said smiling. “Old McCarthy’s in a real stew. They’re still calling it a cliff-hanger, although as I see it, Dewey’s dead and Harry’s going to get up in the morning and find that he’s still the top banana.”
“Gold,” a reporter called out, holding out a phone. Nick knew at once it was Margaret.
“What the hell is going on?” Margaret’s voice was angry.
“Dewey’s losing.”
“I don’t mean that. How come you haven’t called? I thought we were going to meet.”
“We are.”
“Thanks for informing me.”
“What are you so mad about?”
“You said you would call.”
“I was working. I was busy. So were you.”
“I expected you to call.”
“Come on, Maggie. Let it go.”
“Every time you get involved with Charlie . . .”
“We’re on assignment.”
She paused, perhaps ashamed to show her insecurity. Was Charlie now an issue between them? Could she be jealous of Charlie?
“I’m sorry, Nick. I’m tired. I think I’ll go straight home.”
She clicked off the phone. He felt an unbearable sense of loss. This is ridiculous, he told himself. Why was Charlie disrupting his life? Who needed Charlie and all his problems?
When Dewey finally emerged it was nearly six A.M. They had dozed, eaten sandwiches, waiting for the finality of events. Nick had already lost interest. He was tired and he missed Margaret. Charlie had fallen asleep on the couch. Myra quietly read a magazine.
Walking into the sporadic clicking of flashbulbs, a sputter now, Dewey proceeded down the corridor toward the elevator, a ravaged man, his eyes glazed, his skin puffy, a smile embedded incongruously under his moustache. He held onto his wife’s arm, two lonely, defeated figures. The reporters remained silent, perhaps out of respect for the terrible finality of defeat. Nick watched as the couple backed into the elevator, small figures dwarfed by the large, beefy, red-faced policeman. As the elevator door closed, Dewey’s eyes flickered behind a beginning mist.
“There goes one busted bag of dreams,” Charlie said.
“Life is full of missed opportunities,” Myra whispered; she looked at Charlie and grasped his arm. “Now let’s go over to the winning side,” she said, smiling sweetly.
12
Nick opened the late morning edition of the Chronicle he had taken from the pile in Myra’s foyer and turned to the editorial section, rereading Bonville’s editorial to assure himself that his remembered dream had not, somehow, breached reality.
Arriving at the Chronicle’s offices, he walked through the half-empty city room, looking for Gunderstein, who apparently hadn’t yet arrived. Then he proceeded toward his glass cage.
Miss Baumgartner followed him in, balancing a cup of steaming coffee. Sitting down at his desk, he felt the weight of his body falling, a hint of his fatigue. Through the glass he watched Madison’s beefy back slowly turn as the man’s clairvoyance responded to Nick’s glance.
“Martha Gates wants to see you,” Miss Baumgartner said.
“Not again,” he said, remembering yesterday’s episode with irritation.
“I think you’d better,” Miss Baumgartner said, investing the matter with rare importance. He nodded and began thumbing through the New York Times, reading the headlines and making mental notes of stories of mutual interest that needed follow-up. The Times gave only two paragraphs, buried in obscurity, to Henderson’s speech. Such comparison was unworthy of the Chronicle, or so he had lectured his staff. After all, it was expected that the Chronicle had always had the beat on the Times, especially in terms of Washington news.
Surely some editor, like himself, had had to make the decision to treat the Henderson speech routinely. At the Times, too, decisions had to be made on assignments, layout, pictures, relationships of stories to one another, the myriad of daily details. He could almost sense the exact pitch of Sulzberger’s temper by the way in which the stories were treated. Objectivity! He snickered at the word, recalling old Mr. Parker’s obsession.
Looking up, he saw Henry Landau wave, then squinted to observe the time on the large clock in the city room. The editorial conference would soon convene. He dreaded facing Bonville and his pouting bitterness, surely primed by a night of brooding. When he turned, Martha Gates was already seated, her long blonde hair unruly and lustreless. Her eyes were puffy and she sucked nervously on a cigarette.
“What’s with you?” he asked impatiently, deliberately indifferent, keeping her at a distance.
He watched her hands shake as she handed him some copy. It was badly typed, he noted. He read it quickly.
“Christ,” Nick exclaimed, “her husband has blown his brains out.” He had not heard the story, which he might have picked up on the radio while he was shaving if he had followed his normal habits that morning.
“Look, Mr. Gold,” Martha Gates said, her voice cracking, holding back hysteria. “I followed careful procedures. I made the inquiries. I spoke to Mrs. Ryan. She was very indignant. I could see the trail of denial. I spoke to Mr. Kee and his girl friend. I spoke to the hotel in Puerto Rico. I spoke to the White House Chief of Staff.” He watched her thin throat constrict.
“Take it easy, Martha,” Nick urged. He handed her his coffee which she held in her shaking hands. She lifted it to her lips, spilling a few drops on her dress.
“I even talked to Mr. Ryan. He sounded very calm. As you can see he’s an associate professor of history at American University. He sounded calm, very pleasant actually. He said he had reimbursed Mr. Kee for the tickets and the hotel bill for himself and his wife. He told me it had never meant to be paid for them, that it was merely an easy way to handle the bookkeeping. He said there was absolutely no conflict of interest and, after all, his wife was only a personal assistant to the First Lady, not a career person, and wouldn’t we please not use the story since it was all a misunderstanding.” She paused, emptied the coffee cup, and relit her cigarette, her fingers shaking, barely able to find the cylinder’s tip. “Then I got a call from a psychiatrist, a Dr. Petersen, who said that Professor Ryan could simply not take the kind of pressure he was being submitted to and would I please not run the story. I told him that wasn’t my decision; I was merely tracking down a lead. He asked me where I got the lead and I told him I couldn’t tell him. Then I asked the doctor what Professor Ryan was suffering from and he wouldn’t tell me. Before he hung up he said to me that I would have to face the responsibility for the consequences if the story ran.” Her shoulders began to shake. “I feel responsible, Mr. Gold. I feel it was my hand on the trigger.”
Nick felt his stomach knot as he looked at the emotionally decimated girl. Quickly walking around his desk, he lifted her to her feet, leading her unsteady body into the inner conference room, shielding her from the city room eyes. He could see Miss Baumgartner watching them. In the conference room, Martha collapsed in uncontrolled tears. Miss Baumgartner knocked lightly and brought in a box of Kleenex. Looking up at the harlequined face, the girl smiled briefl
y through her tears and reached into the tissue box. Nick hated watching women cry. It seemed such a biological contradiction to those who pushed the myth of sexual equality. Because he did not cry, he always felt stronger, superior, in the presence of hysteria. After a while the girl tried to speak, but convulsive sobs clogged her windpipe.
“Calm down,” he said firmly. The Ryan suicide was hardly uncommon, easy to fathom. Fear of exposure, the cracked façade, the unmasked guilt. You could never tell where the mud would splatter, where the bullets would ricochet. Like a doctor to whom death was commonplace, he had long ago steeled himself against such pain. He had helped many a young reporter pass this Rubicon.
“How was I to know he was a sick man?” she said finally, her convulsions ebbing.
“Would it have mattered if you had known?” Nick asked gently.
She looked momentarily confused, her eyes darting about the room. Finally they settled on Nick again. “I guess not,” she said.
“Are you responsible for the man’s illness?”
“No.”
“Is it not a clear-cut violation of the code of ethics at the White House to accept gifts from anyone who has a political motive?”
“Of course.”
“And is it not true that if Mr. Kee had ingratiated himself in the White House circle it would have meant some political profit for him, however subtle?”
“That was the premise of the story.”
“All you were asking for was confirmation. If you hadn’t found it, do you think we would have run the story?”
“I feel certain that you wouldn’t have.”
“That is an absolute discipline of this newspaper,” Nick said. He sensed his own pomposity. “We do not go about destroying people for the joy of it.” He thought of Henderson, saw a brief flicker in his blue eyes, felt an errant pang of guilt. Would she see through his self-righteousness? “You did not destroy this man. You are not responsible. When people accept public roles, they become public property. They no longer belong to themselves. They are our employees. Who do you think pays their salaries?” He did not wait for her to answer, his impatience accelerating. “Do we pay them to receive gifts from foreign lobbyists with special interests? The ball is in their court, not ours. There should never be anything personal in it.”
“Maybe I’m not hard enough,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t the job for a woman after all. Yesterday I felt so confident.” She blew her nose, its tip reddened, then she wiped away the moisture under her eyes. “The man had a record of depression,” she said. “I called the psychiatrist again when I heard the news. He really laced into me. Said we were all callous, unfeeling rats. He really knew how to stimulate my guilt.”
“Psychiatry’s a lot like the newspaper business. An art, not a science.”
He watched her repair her makeup. She was under control now as she peeked into the mirror of her compact. “Now you go back and rewrite the story.”
“It’s pretty botched up, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is.”
She looked up from the mirror. “You would have run it, wouldn’t you, Mr. Gold?” she asked.
“If it was confirmed.”
“And now?”
“Now the story of the suicide makes the confirmation moot. It would seem to me that the premise of the story is the newspaper investigation triggering the suicide. Only be careful that you don’t go overboard on the original accusation. Let the dead man have his denial.”
“But the wrongdoing is there by implication.”
“Yes, it is. And if the poor devil hadn’t pulled the trigger, it would hardly have made a really important story. Now it has page one possibilities.” She stood up and held out her hand. He took it, feeling a squeeze of gratefulness.
“Thanks, Mr. Gold.” Her narrow cold hands felt fragile. Before she left the room she turned, “I’m afraid I still feel like a shit,” she said. “Hell, I wouldn’t like to have someone poking around with my secrets.”
“Come now, Martha. Surely a pretty girl like you has no dark secrets,” he said stupidly.
She looked puzzled. “Everybody has secrets,” she said as she left the room.
He sat for a moment, looking down at the yellow pad on which he had been doodling. He had been making penmanship swirls, in the prescribed way of the schools of the thirties. Perhaps he was secretly yearning to go back in time again to childhood. That would be one way to escape the present. Professor Ryan had chosen another.
Before he could stand up, Henry Landau came in followed by Bonville, Peterson, and Milton Palmer, the editorial cartoonist. They took their accustomed places around the table, all except Bonville, in whose place Nick had inadvertently sat during his meeting with Martha Gates. He refused to move, conscious of having set up some further imbalance. It was odd the way people staked out territory. Bonville sat on the unaccustomed chair at the other side of the table, looking different from that angle, as if he were experiencing some metabolic change.
“Hear about the Ryan thing?” Landau asked.
“Hear about it? I was just bathed in it,” Nick answered.
“Terrible thing,” Peterson said. “A real tragedy.”
“Might be an idea for an editorial in there somewhere.”
“It would sound self-serving. I don’t think we have to beat our chests,” Bonville said. In his present position at the table, he looked even more hunched, the paleness taking on a yellow cast.
“You’re right, Bonville,” Nick said. He was conscious of smiling broadly, an attempt at placation. He could see that Bonville was still fuming over the emasculation of this morning’s editorial.
“I’ve been reading the Henderson speech,” Bonville said suddenly. Both Peterson and Landau reacted swiftly, their eyes turning toward Nick’s, then downward to their yellow pads.
“Oh, shit,” Nick said. He drew long X marks over his penmanship swirls.
With his usual insensitivity, Bonville continued. “He’s come up with a lot of interesting statistics. I think it deserves another push. The program could be lost unless we give it massive backing.”
“We just gave it a big push,” Landau said flatly, obviously taking sides with Nick. So Henry’s in line again, Nick thought, grateful.
“Yes, but you see, the timing is essential. There are attempts on the Hill to keep it pigeonholed, prevent it from reaching the floor, making it a political football,” Bonville argued.
“Henderson’s identification with it makes it implicit. He’s wrapped himself in it like an American flag,” Landau pressed.
“True. But it must be taken out of the political context. We need the kind of universal medical plan that the bill provides. The costs of medical care are going beyond the pale, actually beyond the reach of most people. I know it could have great political benefit to Henderson. But that’s not for us to judge. The bill stands by itself as a monumental piece of legislation and deserves our strongest support.”
Nick felt trapped by Bonville’s logic. His palms began to sweat again. He wondered if Bonville had been approached by Henderson or his people in the last twenty-four hours. “It’s too close on the heels of the last editorial,” Nick said lamely.
“It gives me a hell of an idea for a cartoon,” Milt Palmer said. Since his heart attack, his ears perked up at the subject of health and medicine. He started sketching on his pad.
“But,” Bonville continued, “it’s a subject that we’re apparently all agreed on.”
“I think we should hold fire for a while,” Nick said softly, his voice losing timbre. He could feel the precariousness of his position, not wanting to appear arbitrary. Where was his strength today? “I want to keep the Chronicle politically neutral on the question of Henderson’s political future,” Nick said.
“Why do that?” Palmer said, still sketching. “He’s a hell of a guy.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“That is the point, Nick,” Palmer said, ripping the cartoon off his pad. It showe
d Henderson in traction on a hospital bed. Beside him stood a doctor with his pockets filled with dollars. The caption read: “And for Another Thousand We’ll Take You Out of Traction.”
Peterson chuckled. “Not bad, Milt.”
“Not bad? It’s great. You guys and your fucking understatements.”
“Let’s move it up for next week,” Nick said.
“I’d rather see it run now,” Bonville said. “It would have more impact, more logic, coming on the heels of Henderson’s speech.”
“No,” Nick said, “next week.”
“Why, Nick?” Palmer asked, his moon face benign and innocent, his good nature infectious.
“Gunderstein’s tracking down a story that could be damaging to Henderson.” He was trying to be casual, almost indifferent. He wondered if they could sense his agitation.
“I know,” Bonville said flatly.
“Christ, this place leaks like a sieve,” Nick said petulantly.
“I thought there was nothing to it,” Bonville said.
“Who told you that?” Nick asked sharply.
“Actually, I forget,” Bonville said, squirming.
“You forget?” Nick pressed.
Bonville looked around the room, seeking support, unable to comprehend his sudden defensiveness on a subject that had never been controversial. Only Palmer came to his rescue.
“What the hell difference does it make? We’re all in the same family.” He laughed, then choked it off, apparently confused by the lack of camaraderie, the strange feeling of rising tension.
“Actually it must have been Henderson,” Bonville said, his color becoming greenish as the rising blood mixed with his yellowed complexion. “I spoke to him this morning to get some additional material on the speech.” Pete Peterson coughed nervously. Henry Landau lowered his head as he scribbled on his yellow pad.
Nick became conscious of his fists tightening, the tips of his fingers digging into his palms. If only he could unzip himself from his skin and spend some time in long contemplation of the scene around the table, suspending the minutes in a frozen frame, surveying the image in an unhurried investigation of all the tiny bits of revealed information. Surely there was something here he was missing, some link malformed in the chain of his own understanding of events. Finally, when he had remained silent too long, certain that the others were becoming discomforted, he spoke, a cracked mumble. “Henderson is ubiquitous,” he said, remembering he had used the phrase last night with Jennie. He cleared his throat. “Henderson is ubiquitous,” he said again, sensing the relief in the men around the table that he had not pressed Bonville, who had in his innocence blundered into the minefield.
