The Henderson Equation (3 page)

"I'll tell Madison that I've put you on it."

"Will he be angry that I went over his head?"

"I'll square it," he said. She became misty-eyed
with gratefulness. "Just check it out. Don't go ape-shit without checking
with me."

"Thank you again, Mr. Gold," she said,
straightening and going out the door, nearly stumbling over the returning Miss
Baumgartner. He watched her approach, the confident stride, the still trim
figure of the mid-fifty woman whose sense of importance is not subject to
dispute. She wore harlequin glass frames on a beaded security string hanging
from either ear beneath her blue-grey hair. He wondered if she knew how it
dated her, like his own sleeveless undershirts. In her arms she held the heavy
folders of the daily mail.

"The natives are restless today, Mr. Gold," she
said, standing over him, her even, false teeth, too greyish in cast, lined in a
tight smile. It was a quirk, he admitted to himself, a comparatively recent
aberration, to glance through the hate mail. He couldn't quite understand
himself whether it was flagellation, paranoia, or simple curiosity. After years
of ignoring these letters he had chosen to see them as part of his regular
morning fare.

"They're obscene and meaningless," Miss
Baumgartner had protested, "and a waste of time." There was a slight
pedantry in Miss Baumgartner's speech.

"Just curiosity," he had answered. Was it somehow
a way to escape the sense of isolation, the glass cage? Or to confirm a vague
sense of guilt?

He opened the folder and glanced through the heavy pile.
The letters had all been opened and stapled neatly to their envelopes.

"Don't forget lunch with Mrs. Pell," Miss
Baumgartner reminded him.

"Oh?" He looked up at her. Had he forgotten?
"Anyone else coming?"

"She didn't say."

Another blip on the screen. It was not Myra's method to set
a date through secretaries. He let it pass, looking over the letters. He picked
one from the pile and held it out, reading quickly to himself.

"Commie Bastard," read the salutation. "You
fucking Jew Nigger Cunts with your giveaway liberal shit words better keep your
assholes tight. Because we real Americans are just waiting for the chance to
get you. We watch you all the time, you prick-faced Russian spy fuck. And one
night when you least expect, we're gonna get you and strip you and stick a
poker straight up your ass until we fry your gut." It was signed
"Spirit of '76." He chuckled to himself and shook his head. Wouldn't
know if I was doing the job if old Spirit here didn't respond.
"Spirit" was a recurrent correspondent, a regular, always the same
half-printed scrawl on the same blue-lined cheap paper torn out of a child's notebook.
The postmark was always from some different spot in the area, vaguely circular
geographically, as if the correspondent had deliberately devised some special
method of posting. He put it back on the pile and thumbed through the letters
again. He glanced through the first paragraph of another letter, neatly typed.

"Dear Mr. Gold: In the name of Jesus why are you
deliberately wrecking the values of country, patriotism, chastity, simple
goodness. All we read is bleeding heart dribble favoring niggers. May God have mercy
on your soul."

The themes rarely varied. There were piles of postcards,
envelopes of all types and sizes. He estimated about seventy-five in the pile,
calculating that the yearly haul might be four thousand. Once he had assigned a
story on the hate mail of the President. He was careful to urge the
differentiation between simple protest, however angry, and pure hate. He
remembered being disappointed in the totals; the President's was running ten
times heavier than his. Must be doing something wrong, he had told himself.

When he had completed the file--the process lasted less
than ten minutes--he thumbed through his regular mail, became quickly bored,
and looked out into the city room. A finger went up, perceptible only to him,
like a signal in an auction. It was Ben Madison, the Metropolitan editor. Nick
waved him in, convinced that they had devised some odd system of telepathy.
Like with Jennie. He could always tell when Jennie moved through the city room,
however distant from his glass. He could actually feel her presence and,
looking up, he knew in advance that she was somehow there, or had been there,
just brushing past on her way through. Perhaps she had looked toward him
briefly, barely enough to charge the air.

"You were in the city room today," he had always
told her later, when they were alone.

"How did you know?"

"I felt it."

Madison lumbered into the office, a
big man with huge feet and big ham hands. His face seemed larded, the features
thick, but the eyes clear and serious.

"It's Gunderstein. He's pressing away on the CIA
story. He wants to meet on it again today."

"Ben. You know, and I know. Two sources of
confirmation!"

"He says it's unimpeachable."

"That's not enough."

"Just meet with him once more."

"No, Ben."

"He's driving me crazy," Madison said.

"Why can't he just rest on his laurels? What is this
compulsion of his to look under every rock?"

"Just meet with him one more time," Madison urged.

"Not until he can show me two sources." He held
up two fingers. "Two."

"It's one helluva yarn."

"Without two sources, it's fiction as far as I'm
concerned."

It was, of course, intriguing. Not merely that the spooks
were involved in foreign assassinations--that seemed common knowledge--but that
Senator Burton Henderson, the great liberal, front-runner for the presidential
nomination of his party, was involved.

"Not
Henderson
!"
he had exclaimed
when Gunderstein had first broached the story to him a few days ago. "In
the first place he's a liberal, and no one who ever came out of the spook
factory could lay claim to that."

"He was an NSA spook, assigned, attached, or whatever,
to the CIA covert operation in Viet Nam in 1963," Gunderstein had
answered. The reporter was thin with a pale, sickly complexion, marred by
pimples, which further embellished his sloppy appearance.

"My source says that there is reason to believe that Henderson was an essential part of the Diem assassination. It was he who arranged the
rendezvous with the killers after the Ngu brothers were given safe-conduct.
There is also the allegation that the order was given to him directly by the
Kennedy brothers."

"Your source has a great imagination," Nick said.

"I'm convinced it's correct."

"Then confirm it."

"I've been trying."

"Heavy stuff," Nick said. "It would, as the
spooks say, blow Henderson's cover. Maybe destroy him politically."

Gunderstein did not respond. This was not his province. His
interest was never in consequences, Nick knew, only in the story itself.

"I'd say it was worth pursuit, but don't give me copy.
Not now," he had told Gunderstein, dismissing him, watching as his unkempt
figure--the hair long and matted, clothes wrinkled, shoes scruffy--slumped out
of the office.

Watching Madison now, Nick thought of Henderson's name on Myra's list. He rubbed his chin and looked thoughtfully at Madison.

"We've whipped that CIA beast pretty hard," Nick
said.

"It's got a certain fascination, you'll have to
admit."

"They argue that if we push too hard we'll be naked to
our enemies."

"They're probably right," Madison said, revealing
his bias.

"It's their line, Ben. Like a private domino
theory."

Lines, he thought. Everyone had a line.

"It's worth pursuing," Madison said cautiously,
his eyes watery in their wrinkled chicken-skin pouches. "Besides, the
two-source system is tough to pin down in dealing with the CIA. TWO
disconnected informers are almost impossible to find. They protect each other.
And, of course, Henderson emphatically denies any involvement."

"What would you do? His guts are on the line."
That word again, he thought. "A revelation like that will blow his
constituency. Imagine a liberal candidate with a past like that."

"Yeah," Madison said. "Wouldn't it be
lovely?"

"You don't like the man, do you, Ben?"

"I have no feelings one way or the other.
Except"--he paused for a moment, biting his lip--"except that we
should leave his politics aside."

"You mean that we should overlook the fact that he's a
liberal, don't you, Ben?"

"It shouldn't inhibit our pursuit of the story."

"Do you think it has?"

"I didn't say that, Nick."

"Hey, Ben. We've been together too long."

"Well goddamnit, Nick. We went hammer and tongs after
the President. What makes this Henderson any better?"

"We proved our case against the President."

"Well then, let's prove one against this Henderson son-of-a-bitch."

"Because he's a liberal?" Nick asked.

"At least let's not protect him because he is."

"And you actually think this, Ben?" He felt his
temper rise. Was he being baited?

"What's good for the goose..."

Nick watched the older man flush. Perhaps he was
prejudging.

"Okay, Ben, I'll see Gunderstein," he said
reluctantly, his eyes lowering to papers on his desk, an act of dismissal. He
heard Ben's grunt as he rose from the chair, then walked out of the room
without a word. The intercom jiggled on his desk. He pressed a button.

"Delaney," Miss Baumgartner said smoothly.
Delaney was the advertising director, the traditional enemy of the editor. Nick
enjoyed the perpetual slugfest, the dog-and-cat barkings and clawings. Delaney
was exquisitely uninsultable.

"Did you see Carson's review?" Carson was their
movie reviewer, nemesis of the producers, acidic and cantankerous, a roaring
faggot.

"The theater owners are on my back, Nick. It's the
same old story. They threaten to pull their ads out. I have to kiss their
asses. It takes time out of my day. If only Carson could offer praise, just
once."

"He calls it as he sees it," Nick said, smiling.

"Who knows what that queer sees? Nothing is ever good.
That's not being a reviewer. All they want is occasional praise."

"Carson thinks most of their stuff is shit."

"What does Carson know?"

"We need an arbiter of good taste around here,"
Nick said, suppressing a chuckle.

"Nick, you're making me vomit. They dump twenty
million in lineage in our paper. I'm not tampering with editorial policy. Who
gives a shit about the goddamned flicks? I never go. Just tone the fucking fag
down. Read today's review. He called Katharine Hepburn an 'overexploited
palsied mummy, a flickering traffic light with two burnt-out expressions: stop
and go.' I mean Katharine Hepburn. Nothing is sacred anymore."

"You're too crass," Nick baited, waiting for the
predictable explosion.

"Crass? God, how I hate to deal with people who hate
money. How can I ever explain to you that editorial copy is just filler, just
filler? You guys downstairs are the worst hypocrites. What am I supposed to
tell the theater owners?"

"Tell them to pull out and go to the
competition." It was the ultimate red flag.

"Goddamnit, Nick. We've got no competition." It
was a reflex, a Pavlovian response. He could feel Delaney's long sigh hiss
through the line. "It's like talking into a cloud."

"Just tell them I'm an irascible martinet."

"A what?"

"Reading those ads has addled your brains."

"I told them I'd get this kind of shit from you. I
told them."

"Well then, your conscience is clear."

"Bug off," Delaney said, hanging up abruptly.
Nick chuckled. He knew he had satisfied Delaney's strange code of honor. He'd
promised the theater owners he would raise hell, and he had satisfied his
conscience. He could almost hear his response.

"I called the cocksucker. He's a stonewall, a
hard-nosed bastard. Who reads the reviews anyway?"

It was a game they played, a vaudeville routine. It was
always refreshing to think up new scenarios, different variations. Nick also
kept in reserve the ultimate squelcher, to be invoked only when Delaney
threatened to breach the wall, usually around annual budget time, when they
poked into the profit figures.

"All I ask is for cooperation," Delaney would
plead in the boardroom, before Myra and the business brass, the ledger boys.
"Just bend a little bit. Don't throw that integrity dung in my face."
He might have said "shit" if Myra weren't present, a clue to a strict
Catholic up-bringing, if any were needed beyond the aged choirboy look, the
drink-dappled thin Irish skin.

"Christ, Delaney," Nick would reply. "We
bent so hard on cigarettes we lost ourselves up our own tush." Delaney
would turn scarlet. The
Chronicle
had attacked cigarette smoking, and
urged the Congress to ban it from the airwaves. "If we had real integrity,
we wouldn't accept cigarette ads, foisting disease on our readers. I lose sleep
over that one."

"It's perfectly legal," Delaney would mumble with
humility. "Twenty-five million dollars in revenues. Anybody ready to write
that off?" There was silence in the room as lips smiled thinly around the
table. It was, after all, hypocrisy, even though most of them still smoked
cigarettes. But Delaney, the wind kicked out of his sails, would always
retreat.

"Caveat emptor,"
he said to himself, as Delaney's voice clicked off the intercom. The fact was
that the
Chronicle
was the only ball game in town. The afternoon paper
was in serious decline. It was only a question of time before Washington would
be a one-paper town.

Looking into the city room again, he watched Gunderstein
working at his cluttered desk. His book on investigative reporting of
presidential corruption had made him a celebrity. Now the list of authors on
the staff of the
Chronicle
was growing like crabgrass. They must all be
talking in terms of sales figures, grosses, royalty splits, movie rights. He
waved Gunderstein into his office. Gunderstein advanced, shoes unshined, food
stains on his tie.