by Warren Adler
“I can’t stand it,” he said, pacing the thick-carpeted floor. A man in a pinstripe suit poked his head out of the office.
“Dr. Hansen is waiting for you. First office off the right.” He pointed showing the way.
“Dr. Hansen?” Charlie seemed puzzled.
“Yes,” the main said. “He asked me to inform him when you arrived.”
Charlie glanced at Nick, mystified, then followed the man’s directions, finding what was presumably Dr. Hansen in the little office. Nick had followed him. The doctor was red-haired, sweating, pools of perspiration staining the armpits of his seersucker suit.
“I would like to see you alone, Mr. Pell,” he said.
“This is Nick Gold. My closest friend.”
“Please, Mr. Pell. Alone.”
“I’ll wait outside,” Nick said, stepping out of the room and closing the door discreetly behind him. He walked outside and lit a cigarette. It felt good to hear Charlie refer to him as his closest friend. When he finished his cigarette, he punched the butt out in the box of sand near the door. The doctor, still sweating, rushed past him and walked quickly down the street.
In the corridor, Charlie, his face chalky, leaned against the wall. Nick noted that his hands were shaking.
“What the hell happened?” Nick asked. He wondered if Charlie were about to faint. It took him a while to get himself under control.
“He killed her, Nick, the old man killed her,” he said hoarsely.
“You’re not serious?”
“There’s good evidence. The doctor took a blood sample and analyzed it himself. Definitely an overdose and knowing the condition of my mother, he knew that she would not administer it herself. He saw the empty pill bottle.”
“My God.”
“He didn’t confront the old man. He was waiting for me. I told him I appreciated that. The son of a bitch.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I gave him a check for five thousand dollars.”
It was a burden not easily shared, Nick thought, confused by the knowledge, since it also made him a conspirator in a crime. This is the ultimate test of friendship, he thought, feeling a sense of his own selfishness. Charlie had given him another piece of his private hell. And Nick accepted it proudly.
“Will that be the end of it?” Nick asked as if to verbally validate his participation.
“For the doctor, perhaps,” Charlie whispered. “For me, never.”
The funeral had been arranged for the next morning, making it necessary for Charlie to stay over, a step to be feared since it meant bedding down in his old room in that tainted house.
“You don’t have to stay,” Charlie protested. “It’s not your problem.”
“Of course I’ll stay.” What is friendship for? he wanted to add, but checked himself.
Nick called the office. Margaret’s voice on the other end was cold.
“Who gives a shit?” she said.
“He needs me,” he said lamely.
“Who gives a shit?” she repeated, slamming the phone. It had not disturbed him, an expected response. With almost a whole day and night to get through while waiting for the burial, Charlie and he walked through the town in the hot sun. Charlie talked about his life.
His mother had apparently cracked early, since his life as a child and later as a teen-ager was tied to the subterfuge of keeping her condition hidden from neighbors and friends. Early on, his father had made him a reluctant partner in his martyrdom.
“You can’t believe what living with that was.” He shook his head. “It’s left me injured, Nick, and scared to death that her condition was congenital.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nick argued.
“I’ve studied it. It runs in families.”
“I doubt that,” Nick protested.
“I have less doubt as time goes on. The inclination does run in families, although experts can’t agree on whether it’s prompted by the fear of the propensity or the propensity itself.”
“If you think you’re going to be sick, you’ll get sick,” Nick scolded.
“Exactly. Myra buys it. She won’t have kids. Had her tubes tied. I can’t really blame her, although it galls the shit out of me.” He shrugged. “Who the hell wants kids, anyway?” He spat on the curb. “That would give the old man a laugh.”
“Doesn’t he know?” Nick asked.
“No.”
Later they had eaten silently in a restaurant. Charlie’s father looked haggard, lost. When he had gone to bed, Charlie and Nick sat together on the back stoop watching the fireflies. The noise of the crickets was soothing, stirring memories for Nick of quiet times in the yard of his father’s house. His own childhood was a happy time. Having emptied himself of a measure of his pain, Charlie began to dwell on his life in Washington.
“Washington is like the head of a pin. Everyone crowding to get on it. People slide on and off. The place stinks with ambition and intrigue. When I first went down there, I thought: Gee, I’ll stand back and observe this crazy play and tell people about it. Actually it’s not that simple. You wind up being a player, the playwright and the audience all at the same time. I hadn’t realized it until I took over the Chronicle. At first I thought I was watching and listening to them. Then I discovered that they’re all watching and listening to us, the media. We’re where it’s happening. It’s frightening. I keep thinking that someday I’ll wake up and find the Chronicle the only newspaper left in Washington, the fucking capital of the U.S.A. The handwriting is on the wall, Nick. We’ve just bought out our only morning competition and the unions will eventually squeeze out the afternoon papers. And then”—he paused and lit a cigarette—“and then they’ll all be listening to me, watching me.”
“I’d say that makes you a pretty important fellow,” Nick joshed.
“I’m not without ambition, kid. But I never aspired to be God.”
“It’s everybody’s fantasy,” Nick said. “Think of all those people kissing your ass.”
“I’ll admit that at first I used to revel in the obeisance. Everybody throwing their guts at you, pawing you for favors.”
Nick saw flashes of his friend’s face in the brief light of the fireflies.
“But when it finally occurs to you that you really have a kind of superhuman hold over these people, the ass-kissing becomes offensive, ugly. You begin to develop a kind of moral armor. Everything you do gets measured against this standard that you’ve set for yourself. The power of it becomes a hot potato. If you don’t hold it in just the right way for just the right amount of time, it begins to burn your fingers.”
“You have to learn to handle it, I guess,” Nick said, feeling compelled to say something. “Otherwise you’ll bleed to death.”
“You’ve got no one to learn from, Nick. You’re playing God, remember? You make the rules. Who lives? Who dies? Who gets theirs today? Who gets smiled upon? Who gets pissed upon? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?”
“Do you always know?”
“You never know. You can only guess, trust your instincts, your judgments. Whip your people to gather facts. Then you begin to question your motives. Am I being fair? Am I being honest? Am I doing good? At that point you’re feeling like a goddamned hypocrite because you know that inside, deep inside, you’re asking yourself: Is this a story? How will it play? Will people read it? Will it get attention?”
“At least it keeps you from being too self-righteous.”
“It also keeps you on your toes. I swear, Nick, I never sleep. I’m always guarding the damned gate. I’m scared to death to let a single wayward word creep in without my knowledge. Right now I’m going out of my skull wondering what’s happening.”
“You make it sound as if the Chronicle were printing the Gospel, that every word were coming directly from Mount Sinai.”
“I used to be skeptical too, Nick. What the hell? We were just one paper in one city. But America is the center of the world and Washington is the cent
er of America and in this dead center the words of the Chronicle are, in a way, a kind of Gospel. And who sits in the eye of the storm, right in the deadest of the dead center, deciding the information that goes into the minds of the people who move America, which is the center of the world?”
The sound of crickets grew louder, the air heavier, the fireflies more intense. The question hung in the air.
Nick searched the darkness for the outlines of Charlie’s face, envisioning its anguish.
“You actually begin to think of yourself as the keeper of the Holy Grail, an avenging angel with the power to decide who shall live and who shall die.” Charlie’s voice cracked briefly, then recovered. “It’s a monster and no single man can control it, Nick. I’m frightened to death at what it could become. And I’m not sure if I can hack it myself.”
Charlie’s words came rushing through the heavy air like gas escaping from a fallen balloon. Was it self-pity? Nick wondered.
“Why me?” Charlie said. He seemed angry now. “That bitch.” He appeared to be having a dialogue with himself. “It was pure random selection.”
“You’ve lost me,” Nick said.
“Myra. She’s made me the sacrificial lamb.” His voice rose.
“I’ll never let her get her teeth in it, never.” It was suddenly beyond Nick’s comprehension, this sudden attack on Myra. It was the measure of his friendship that he accepted this view without question. Later it had become somewhat of an affliction, seeing Myra through Charlie’s eyes.
Charlie remained silent for a long time, then Nick felt a grip on his arm, tight and urgent.
“There’s got to be someone I can trust, kid. I need you with me, Nick.”
“I’m here, pal.” Nick laid his hand over his friend’s. “Old Nick is here.” What was there left to say?
In the morning, Charlie’s mother was buried in a grassy knoll of a small cemetery at the edge of town. Mr. Pell, a yellowing apparition in the bright morning light, stood beside the open grave, his head bowed. Dry-eyed, Charlie watched the coffin descend into the ground, the quiet of the morning shattered by the hollow sound of the first clumps of earth hitting its lid.
13
A disaster intruded in mid-morning, refocusing the routine of the entire paper. A crazed gunman had sprayed bullets indiscriminately in a crowded bus, killing or maiming nearly twenty people, all black.
Despite the horror of the event, Nick welcomed the intrusion. The Henderson matter was becoming corrosive to his concentration.
Ben Madison, as animated as a fledgling reporter, had sprinted into the glass office, the bulletin clutched in his large fist.
“It’s a donnybrook,” he cried, the term itself a casualty of chronology. Nick looked at the bulletin, envisioning at once the layout of the front page.
“Get photographers down there pronto,” Nick said, rising from his chair, the new excitement a mounting release.
“I’ve got the bases covered, Nick.”
Nick nodded. There was no need to be redundant. Madison was a professional; covering the bases meant reporters at the scene, the death list, the eyewitness accounts, the visits to relatives, the inevitable story of fate intervening, lives saved or lost by a whim of fortune. There was little to tax the ethical sense, no moral mountains to traverse. Just the facts embellished with irony, fleshed out by details, a buffet of horror to fascinate the greediest palate. It was the kind of disaster story that newspapermen cut their eyeteeth on. He had covered stories like it at the News: subway wrecks, fires, explosions, airplanes colliding with skyscrapers. It was the measure of a newspaperman’s maturity, this recording of life’s major horrors, brutal memories to be relived over drinks in the coolness of a paneled taproom on a lazy summer afternoon.
Ben Madison had come in again, flushed from the release of his inner spring, which had catapulted him to rare physical action. He showed Nick the yellow UPI bulletin.
“It’s like a war,” Nick said. Madison rubbed his large hands in mock glee.
“Now we can stop bullshitting around,” Madison said. Nick, feeling his elation, slapped him on the back.
“Now you can do some newspapering for a change,” Nick said sarcastically.
Activity in the city room accelerated. People moved quickly like characters in a stepped-up movie film. Sounds of voices and typewriters rose in decibels. The budget meeting would be greatly curtailed, the available space gobbled up by the tragedy.
He saw Myra hurrying toward him, her face tight. She advanced stiff-legged, the perpetual sweater neatly arranged like a cape on her shoulders.
“My God, it’s horrible,” she said, sitting primly in a chair. It was a revelation of her lack of journalistic poise. She was merely a spectator now, hopelessly inexperienced.
“We’ve put a lot of staff to work. May cost us some overtime.”
“I’m sure you’ll do what’s best.”
He watched her light a cigarette, using his Lucite lighter.
“You really don’t get the feel of a newspaper except from here,” she said, looking out into the busy, crowded room.
“Yes,” he said, riffling papers on his desk, hoping she would feel her redundancy.
She remained silent for a while, puffing deeply, blowing smoke through her nostrils. “Have you thought over what we talked about this morning?” she said quietly. He knew she was searching for relevancy.
“This morning seems an age,” he said. “As you can see, we’ve suddenly got other fish to fry.”
“I know, Nick,” she said. Her presence in the room was an annoyance. Busying himself with a pencil, he made notes on a piece of copy paper.
“Stock called me,” she said suddenly.
“That son of a bitch.” He refused to look up from his papers.
“Are you really planning to kill his column?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that’s wise?”
“What do you mean, wise?”
“Well, you know, he’s black.”
“That’s his problem.”
“He could be irritating.”
“Not to me.”
She puffed again. Feeling her eyes watching him, he looked up. Surely she could sense his annoyance.
“I’m sorry, Myra. These stories have made the day somewhat less than routine.”
“I know, Nick. I’m sorry.” She punched out her cigarette, then, almost as if it were an afterthought, she said, “Come up later. We’ll have a drink and talk it over.”
“I’ll try, Myra.”
“Do try, Nick,” she said emphatically. There was no mistaking her message. It was an order. She turned and walked out of his office, through the bustling city room, a stranger. Hardly anyone took notice.
The budget meeting had an air of excitement as the editors quickly reeled off the plans for their space allocation. He listened, fighting for concentration. Myra had unnerved him again.
“Let me see the British party story,” he asked Margaret pointedly.
“Yes, Jennie will bring it up.” He felt the edge of her sarcasm.
“Good.”
“Have they identified the race of the bus killer?” he asked Madison.
“White,” Madison replied.
“Oh my God,” someone said.
“Do you think there will be riots?”
“We’ve got three men covering Police Headquarters,” Madison said. “It’s still too early to tell.”
The meeting passed quickly. There were too many variables to make fixed decisions possible. When he returned to his office, Miss Baumgartner followed him in, her face pinched.
“The Mayor called. He seemed anxious.”
“Get him for me.”
Thoughts of Henderson were crowded out by new anxieties. The possibility of riot was a real fear in this city, balanced tremulously on the brink of ghetto frustration. The intercom buzzed. He nodded to Miss Baumgartner and punched the blinking hold button.
“It’s a bitch, Nick,” the Mayor said.
Nick could picture his black face and the fringe of white hair that gave him a sagelike dignity.
“How does it look?”
“It’s quiet now. But I’m worried about the way the TV boys may play it. I’ve already alerted the police who are watching for any signs of agitation. Treat it gently, Nick. You know this city; the slightest inflammation . . .” His voice trailed off.
“We’ll watch it, Howard,” Nick said.
“Do you know anything about the killer yet?” the Mayor probed.
“Not a thing. The reporters are out. What’s your information?”
“White. About thirty-eight. Dressed in work clothes. Carried a shotgun, which he calmly reloaded time after time, spraying the shot into the passengers. It was horrible, Nick. Horrible.”
“Let’s stay in touch, Howard,” Nick said, feeling the rising hysteria in the Mayor’s voice. He knew what the man was pleading. Go easy! Pull the punch! Was the motivation of the killer racially based? Would the emotion of learning feed the emotion of hatred in the reporter, inflame his words? Would the anger of the photographer embellish the horror? He must keep himself steady, alert to all nuances, cool, analytical, objective. In his mind, he sorted images of the front page, rejecting each in turn, waiting for the results to be in. He pushed the buttons of Madison’s extension, seeing him turn almost at the moment of the ring, watching him through the glass.
“Let me see everything that comes in. Tell Nichols to show me all the pictures on both stories.”
Within himself, he could feel the elation of command again, the challenge of his carefully honed skills, the meaning of his editorship. This was the part he loved best, he knew, quintessential newspapering. He felt released, relaxed. Looking up, seeing Jennie, he felt a smile form, hardly remembering what she might have come about.
“You wanted to see my copy,” she said, anger bubbling, her lips pressed tightly together. He could tell by the way she held herself, taut, stiff, that she might have lashed out in temper if they were alone.
“What the hell is eating you?”
“She said you wanted to see my copy. Did you have to make a point of it like that? We could have handled it as always. She seemed to enjoy making a special point of telling me that she hadn’t the authority to edit the British party copy.”
