The Henderson Equation (32 page)

"I'll let you know tomorrow," he repeated.

"Really, Nick," Phelps said. His pipe had gone
out again. "It should be told." He planted himself directly in front
of Nick. "Hell, it might even restore my faith in editors."

"I hope not, Robert," Nick said. "We'll
think we're doing something wrong."

He noted a look of disappointment on Martha's face. Did he
really need the night to sleep on it? Or was he afraid to show them too much
flexibility? To them it was an important story, to him a gauntlet to be thrown,
a move, perhaps, to change his life. He walked toward the door, turning to nod
a farewell, ignoring the intimidating innocent face of Martha Gates.
Gunderstein remained impassive. The red circles around his pimples, the measure
of his contained anger, were gone now, but he continued to pick at them,
contemplatively. Phelps followed him out the door, waiting with him for the
elevator.

"I hope you don't think I was out of line," he
said. "I know you might think that it's a little late in the game to get
religion. But I've begun to think like those kids. Nick, we've got no right to
employ selective censorship."

"We do it every day," Nick said wearily.
"We're only people, Phelps. Only people."

"But we have an obligation, Nick."

"To whom?"

"To our readers. To the truth."

He looked at the compact man, the pipe held high near his
chin with delicate fingers, effeminate in their grace. "You're about to
make me sick, Phelps," Nick said, thankful that the elevator arrived. He
stepped into it and turned in time to see Phelps' face, pale and confused. He
deserved it, Nick thought to himself. Why was he showing off, flaunting his
suddenly discovered sense of ethics in front of these intense, beady-eyed young
people, this tribe of avenging angels?

In the street a breeze was rising. Cold air whipped his
heated cheeks as he walked homeward on the deserted sidewalks. His mind, like
his head, felt heavy, sluggish. It's the male menopause, he told himself,
finding humor in it, remembering the column on health that was the
Chronicle
's
regular feature. He had remembered, the symptoms: depression, temporary loss of
virility, insecurity, loneliness, anxiety, the feeling of unfulfillment,
indecisiveness, the haunting specter of life's ending just around the corner.
He must be in its terminal stage, he thought.

Shivering, he tucked his chin in his upturned collar,
searching for warmth. He was drowning in self-pity, missing Charlie. How could
Charlie have kept things from him? He, Nick, who had tucked away the most
damning secret of Charlie's life. Unless Phelps was lying. But even Myra had
alluded to it. Had Charlie confided in Myra, whom he supposedly despised?

He had missed something and only now he felt its loss
bitterly. Retracing the memory, he looked for clues among the ashes. He had by
then become the acknowledged honcho, Charlie's man, number two in the hierarchy
of what the
Chronicle
had become. The competing paper had been humbled
badly and was in decline, its vaunted number one position finally surrendered
as the
Chronicle
surged ahead. Power, like an old whore, had been passed
along to new hands, new faces, new lusts.

He was not surprised when the young President made a
beeline for Charlie, whose acquaintance had been casual up to the nomination.
Then after the Inauguration they had become buddies Charlie hopped around to
the White House and all those vacation places, a regular member of the club
that followed the President around the world in those days.

Not that Charlie had been totally captured. From time to
time the
Chronicle
would deliberately mount a critical attack.

"Just to keep the mick honest," Charlie had said.
Nick had seen him pick up the phone and actually preview an editorial in
advance, enjoying the banter and posturing as Nick had cringed. He had heard
only one end of the conversation. Later he was regretful that they had never
been taped, but that was in the days when wit was in vogue. It was the time of
Camelot, and Charlie had his special rights as one of the Knights of the Round
Table.

The bantering was sometimes an embarrassment. After all,
the man at the other end of the phone was the President of the United States
and the language used was definitely inappropriate to the station. But it was
sop to one's vanity to tell the President to take a flying fuck for himself,
which Nick had heard with his own ears.

"You're the Prez, kid. I'm only an ink-stained,
free-loading, drunken newspaperman, which outpisses by two yards any
thickheaded Boston Irishman with a roll of lace curtain up his gazoo."

With the relationship, the importance of the
Chronicle
soared. After all, if Charlie and the President were such close buddies, what
appeared in the
Chronicle
was now the bellwether of American policy.
What Nick did not know until later was what Charlie had screened out--or how it
had affected him.

The news of the Dallas bullet came to them while they
munched sandwiches in Charlie's office. The ring of the telephone, its special
urgent timbre suggestive of intruding pain, was still a terrifying memory. The
blood drained from Charlie's face.

"My God," he had finally uttered, swallowing with
difficulty. "My God." A kind of paralysis seemed to grip him. Nick
took the telephone from the desk where it had fallen. "My God,"
Charlie kept repeating.

"The President has been shot." It was Ben
Madison's voice. He had been a White House reporter then, in the President's
party.

Nick could remember in detail his own reaction, his mind
crowding out the horror of it, working toward the practicalities of covering
what was certainly the biggest story of his lifetime. He was already cataloging
assignments, watching through the glass as the city room stirred with the first
news rattling over the wires.

"He'll never make it," Ben said. "They blew
his head off."

"Who?"

"God knows."

He saw Charlie, still pale, remove the remains of the
mashed sandwich from his mouth, his eyes misting with tears.

"The bastards," he shouted. It came as a primal
scream, the anguish of his own life spilling out.

"Who do you think did it, Ben?" Nick asked.

"We'll probably never really know," Ben answered.
Nick pressed for more details, holding the telephone up for them to see,
signaling the desperate need for a rewrite man. Then the call was rerouted,
while the editors gathered quickly in the old conference room where the budget
meetings were held and Nick mapped out the coverage, assigning a troop of
reporters to the story. Later, when he had come back to his office, Charlie had
regained his composure with the help of a brandy bottle. They called for a
television set and helplessly watched the details of succession, the trip home,
the bloodied widow watching the passing of power on the airplane.

"He knew they would get him," Charlie said, his
tongue thickening with booze and grief. "He told me they would get him.
They would take their revenge. Retribution! He was clairvoyant. He knew it. He
said no protection would matter. They would find a way, no matter what."

"Who?" Nick said, distracted, listening with half
an ear, humoring his friend.

"They," Charlie answered cryptically.

He seemed on the border of hysteria, but late into the
evening, with the presses grinding relentlessly and most of the exhausted staff
in heavy pursuit of information, Charlie dozed off on the couch in the
conference room.

At one point, well into the early morning hours, Nick
looked up from Charlie's desk, where he had been working, into Myra's pale
face. It was odd to see her in the city room at all. Seeing her reminded him
how effectively she had been cut out of the life of the
Chronicle
.

Nick sensed her annoyance at seeing him at Charlie's desk
and felt compelled to offer apologies.

"He took it very badly, Myra," he said, standing
up. "He's resting." He pointed in the direction of the conference
room.

He was sure she was holding back her anger, having expected
to be offering solace to a grief-stricken husband in this rare moment of
potential reconciliation. It was no secret that their marriage had become a
nightmare. But she was protective of her dignity, as always, and sitting on a
chair, reached into her purse for a cigarette. She lit it carefully,
ceremoniously.

"I'll wait," she said quietly, looking off into
the city room. He could feel her envy.

She was, after all, a victim of Mr. Parker's medieval view
of the world, the right of blood to property succession, the role of woman as
helper to man, the paternalism of ownership. When his will had been probated,
it was revealed that he had given one-third of the paper to his employees, in
proportion to their service and responsibility within the newspaper hierarchy.
Charlie had not been included. In the old man's he controlled the paper through
marriage, and marriage was inviolate, ending only in death. It did, however,
produce progeny, and progeny inherited property. Blood succeeded. He had taken
his genetic snobbery to the grave.

Ironically, it was Charlie who made the announcement to the
employees, an occasion of solemn thankfulness, appropriately ending in prayer
and a moment of silence for Mr. Parker. Nick, too, had received his share and
was grateful, although he could feel his friend's anguish. It was a terrible
legacy. Myra owned what she could not have and Charlie had what he could not
own.

"She can fire me, you know," Charlie told him.
"She has the power to do that." He paused. "But the old boy was
pretty shrewd. If she does that the stock reverts to a trust. And the trust can
only be abolished when my children reach their majority."

"But you have no children."

"Sticky, don't you think?"

"Incredible."

"She does, however, retain full control over the stock
in the event of my death. The old boy couldn't hedge all his bets. He assumed
that we would have kids, sons."

"But you said that Myra had had her tubes tied."

"He didn't know that and we wouldn't dare tell him.
But he kept his secret well, too. When the will was finally read, she made a
mad dash to the gynecologist to see if she could get him to untie the goddamned
things. He said it wouldn't help."

"You could always adopt."

"No. Only blood. And she thought only my side of the
family had a screw loose."

"What if you divorced?"

"He didn't miss a trick. In the event of divorce it's
back to the trust. It's rather obscene when you think about it. I really loved
the old boy. I also understand what he was trying to do. The
Chronicle
had become a kind of extension of himself, just as I had, and he wanted it to
be protected as much as possible. Actually, even in death, he still holds the
strings."

"Could she take legal action?"

"I'm sure she considered it. But he had it written by
the best legal brain in the country. Even she knows that it would be too
traumatic for the
Chronicle
. No, kid, she has only one real
alternative."

"What's that?"

"Read Agatha Christie. There are hundreds of
variations of doing away with the old body."

He had chuckled over that. Watching Myra now, waiting
stiffly, Nick could sense her alienation and her bitterness, as her eyes swept
the city room.

"They were very close," she said suddenly,
meaning the assassinated President and Charlie. He had grunted some answer,
feeling her intrusion like a weight. Then, as if her voice in that environment
had thundered an alarm, Charlie was standing in the doorway of the adjoining
conference room, his hair disheveled, eyes glazed, still heavy with torpor.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he asked. His
tongue's heaviness had cleared.

"I thought perhaps you might have needed me," she
said meekly. Nick, embarrassed, started to leave, but the ring of a telephone
held him. He picked it up thankfully, but could not blot out their
conversation.

"Well, I don't," Charlie said. "Go on home.
We're busy."

"Let me help, Charlie," she pleaded.

"You hated him," Charlie said venomously, showing
a cruelty Nick had not seen before.

"That's absurd."

"You jealous bitch," he said, his voice hissing
through clenched teeth.

"There's no reason for this, Charlie. No reason. I'm
your wife. We can help each other."

"I don't need your help."

"Everybody needs help."

"I don't need yours."

Nick could tell by the cadence that this was a well-trodden
path, an endless routine.

"Charlie. Please. Let me in on something.
Please." Nick could see her hands clasped helplessly together, the
cigarette burning precariously low on her fingers. The voice at the other end
of the phone clicked off and he was forced to hang up. A copy boy came in with
a remake of one of their editions. They had been replating through the night,
as new aspects of the story became available. Interrupted by the aide's
arrival, Charlie picked up the paper and looked it over, his mind apparently
cleared now, his sense of command returning.

"So they caught the bastard," he said, ignoring
Myra's presence.

He had missed a good portion of the breaking story while he
was asleep. Now he read greedily.

"I don't believe it," he said. "There's more
to this. Put more people on it. How many people have we got in Dallas?"

"Just Ben. But others are already on their way."

"Good. I want everything you can get on this guy.
There's more here than what we're getting." He picked up a telephone,
began to dial, then looked at Myra.

"Go home," he hissed.

"I belong here," she said defiantly.

Charlie shrugged, continued to talk on the telephone while
Myra turned, her eyes misted, and peered into the city room. She sat down, a
curious apparition, silently watching the turmoil.