The Henderson Equation (4 page)

"My God, you're a slob," Nick said. "Albeit
a rich one." Gunderstein smiled shyly. He was almost too boyish to be
taken seriously, although he had proven his lethalness. An army of hard-eyed
men quaked when his name was mentioned. Some rotted in jail and cursed him.

"It's this Henderson-CIA thing, Mr. Gold. I know I've
got something here worth telling." He stood above Nick's desk nervously
picking at his pimples.

"If you've got the goods, then why not two
sources?"

"I think my one source is enough to start the ball
rolling."

"You know spooks that talk. The chances are there is
no documentation. They're specialists. They burn evidence. You can't destroy a
man on hearsay." He paused. "And there will not be any tapes."

"My man was Henderson's tie with CIA when Henderson was an NSA colonel on special recall duty in Viet Nam. He swears that Henderson was the man responsible for engineering Diem's assassination, on direct orders
from the White House."

"It's still a single source."

"But compelling," Gunderstein added quickly.

"It's not the first time it's been alleged. But
they've always denied that. Three presidents have denied it. Hunt admitted
forging documents indicating that Kennedy had ordered it. That should be enough
to finish that allegation," Nick said.

"That's the way they operate. Things are never as they
appear. There would have been no document. Hunt could have been trying to
authenticate what he knew to be true--that Kennedy did order Diem's death. You
know how they would do it--leave themselves plausible denial."

"So there would be no proof."

"If there was, why would Hunt try to create it? Even
the Pentagon Papers were vague on the point."

"Then how are you expected to find your sources?
Especially if there are no documents, no tapes."

Gunderstein smiled shyly at the reference. "There have
got to be others around to corroborate it."

"What you're asking is that we go fishing. Harold,
you're a bloodthirsty bastard."

"There's lots of circumstantial evidence,"
Gunderstein said, ignoring the implication, "and Kennedy was assassinated
three weeks later."

"Christ, Gunderstein, your implications give me the
creeps."

"Well, you've got to admit it does give the story some
added flavor."

"Pure fantasy. Mythmaking. And with just one
source--irresponsible," Nick said.

"If you'd just let me run a story speculating..."

"You know I can't do that," Nick said. Then he
thought a moment, his interest rising. "Will your"--he
smiled--"your connection, allow us to quote him?"

"No."

"Why?"

"He's scared. It's the paranoia of the business."

"Won't he point you to other sources?"

"He has, even to Henderson himself. They clam up or
simply deny everything." Gunderstein fidgeted. "Look, Mr. Gold. I'll
write the story delicately. Once they see it in print it'll flush them
out."

Nick watched the young man coolly. He made it all sound so
simple. But hadn't it all happened just that way before?

"You see, the CIA..." Gunderstein began.

"CIA, CIA," Nick exploded. "I get sick of
hearing about it!" Gunderstein ignored the outburst, his brown eyes
glistening. Was it Gunderstein he was angry about, his youth, his sureness?

"Good Lord, Harold," Nick continued, calming,
"we've attacked that agency for years. We've beaten it over the head. Do
you believe we should do away with the damned thing altogether?" Was he
overreacting? Worse, did Gunderstein think he was overreacting?

"I don't think my private opinions have any bearing on
the matter. It's a story."

Nick stood up, hoping somehow that the act of rising would
signal an element of intimidation. The young man continued to pick at his
pimples and eye him suspiciously, he thought.

"I decide that," Nick said.

"I know that, Mr. Gold."

Nick sat down again. His gaze roamed over the desk
searching for his cigarettes. Without offering one to Gunderstein, he lit up
and inhaled deeply, remembering suddenly the first time he had seen Gunderstein.
When was it? Five, six years ago. Gunderstein had been a news aide--that damned
euphemism for copy boy! Hadn't he worn glasses then, deepening the impression
of self-possession, an inert mind? He looked up. The thin abstracted face had
fleshed out slightly. Somebody had said he had bought contact lenses. He had
always been losing his glasses. When the President had resigned he had become a
kind of folk hero. His first stories had broken the scandal wide open. Even the
success of the book, the story of corruption and cover-up in the highest place
in the government, had left him outwardly unchanged despite his sudden wealth.

"Nothing fazes Gunderstein," Madison had said
once. "If a horse pissed on his head, he'd simply flick away the moisture
and continue what he was doing."

"I'm sorry, kid," Nick said. "It's just that
the source is still too flimsy." Or was it that he couldn't find in
himself the same visceral hatred that he had felt toward the President? That,
after all, was a labor of love. But this! Henderson was "their boy."

"Keep digging," he added.

Gunderstein shrugged. "I know that the story is
responsible. I feel it."

"I'm just not convinced. Not yet." There! He had
left the door open. Gunderstein turned and moved away. He could feel his discouragement.

"Harold," he called before Gunderstein's hand
reached the door handle. Gunderstein turned. "What do you think of Henderson?" Nick asked gently. Henderson's square features came into focus in his
mind.

"I like him," the young man stammered. Perhaps it
was the intonation. He recalled a similar phrase from a buried time; a sliver
of memory. Nick watched him shut the door and walk toward his desk, a trifle
hunched. His eye caught Madison turning instinctively, reading Gunderstein's
face. Scowling, he turned and went back to his work.

Nick puffed deeply on the cigarette and punched it out
half-smoked in the ashtray. For a moment he looked down at the mangled butt,
the tobacco oozing like sawdust from a stuffed toy. It was the sawdust on the
floor of Shanley's on East Forty-first Street, across from the New York
News
building, that gave the errant, half-remembered phrase another human
environment.

"I like him," McCarthy had said, the shot glass
dribbling brown Scotch as he brought it to his thin lips and tossed it between
bad teeth, down the greedy Irish gullet. They had watched, Charlie and Nick, in
a darkened corner of the bar, as the red-faced Police Chief and their managing
editor parleyed in a kind of tribal ritual, a bottle of Scotch between them on
the table, pouring out shots in turn and tossing them back into their throats,
like medicine. Occasionally a roar of laughter punctuated their whispered
conversation. It was nearly three A.M. Most of the regulars had already
departed, and the bartender, his apron tucked beneath his armpits in the
old-fashioned way, was stained with the day's leavings. Even now in the
recollection Nick could smell the beeriness--the malt had soaked into the
wooden bar--and feel the tension as they looked into the dissipating foam
floating on the tops of the amber fluid.

He had still been wearing his G.I. shorts, the kind with
three buttons in front and the baggy ass. And he wore the ruptured duck on his
lapel. Charlie had promised, in that bone-chilling hopelessness of a Bastogne night, to help land Nick a job on the
News,
where he had worked for three
years before the war. Promises made in the face of death and cold were not
taken lightly by young men in those days.

For months Charlie had regaled Nick with stories of the
News,
known then as a scandal sheet. Hell, page 3 was a cornucopia of what passed for
pornography in those days. Remember the trial of Errol Flynn, the horny son of
a bitch? Throughout the muddy hegira through France, the
News
subscription had followed Charlie. Most of the time it arrived torn and when
winter came it was sometimes too frozen to unfold. Charlie always looked at the
by-lines first.

"Harry Gerritty, that son-of-a-bitch 4F. They've made
the cocksucker a rewrite man. I'll kick his ass when I see him." It was
only then, after he had reeled off the by-lines, carefully explaining the cast
of characters, that he would begin to study the stories.

"They write tight. Listen to this.... It's
beautiful," and he would read off a story as if it might have been a poem.

Occasionally when they were lucky to find a warm billet
with a crackling fire in a miraculously spared French farmhouse, Charlie would
talk with feeling about the people at the
News
. They could hear the boom
of artillery in the distance.

"Imagine a paper run by a bunch of drunken Irishmen.
It was as if they were all deliberately trying to ape those characters in the
Hecht-MacArthur play. Some of them still wore hats in the office. Hats! Like in
the movies. With press cards in their hatbands. And they still had spittoons
around the city room, filled with real spit. And the managing editor, Francis
X. McCarthy ... you couldn't take a shit in New York without him knowing about
it. Once Legs Diamond had him kidnapped because he had been pressing the mob
too hard. It was said to be the only time in history that a gangster had taken
something personally that appeared in print. Old Francis X. had questioned
Legs' courage. It was back in the thirties and the story goes that Francis X.
told him to take a flying shit for himself, right there in captivity, in the
face of being planted in cement boots. They'd lay the undesirables in a cement
tub and throw them in the East River. Now that's what I call a
newspaperman."

It seemed natural for Nick to have gravitated toward
Charlie in the "repo depo." Weren't they both newspapermen? Nick had
been editor of the Ohio University paper and a stringer for the Athens
Gazette
.

"If we don't die tomorrow, I'll get you a job on the
News,
kid. So don't get your ass shot off." It was a gift from God to have found
Charlie, Nick remembered thinking, and he was determined to keep alive in the
meat grinder of the war. And, equally important, to help keep Charlie alive.
Charlie was America's worst soldier, surely too tall and clumsy to survive.
Nick was always reaching for his shoulder, pulling him down in a fire fight.

Once, when the Germans had them surrounded, they had been
sent out on patrol and returned in the dark after being pinned down by a German
patrol.

"Where's Pell?" the Sergeant had hissed when they
made it back to their lines. Nick, who had assumed that Charlie was padding
behind him in the snow, felt his heart jump. "Where the fuck is Charlie
Pell?" It was a confusing time and not uncommon to shoot at the wrong
army.

That had been the worst night of his life. He had cried
like a baby, the tears freezing on his cheeks. But in the morning a tired
Charlie had lumbered back to their lines, falling heavily in the foxhole beside
the miserable, shivering Nick.

"Thought old Charlie got a Jerry bullet up his ass, eh
kid?"

It had been one of his life's rare sweet moments, to see
Charlie's stubbled chin and those glassy grey eyes. He remembered hugging him
without shame and pressing his lips to his freezing cheeks.

"Don't worry, kid. You still got that job
working," Charlie had joked. Even then Nick had sensed the bond between
them, now still strong, beyond the grave.

He had kept his promise as Nick knew he would. Nick had
gone back to Warren, Ohio, for a month to be with his mother and join in the
deathwatch for his father, a doctor in the small town. He had arrived in the
News
city room with a swatch of black crepe still pinned to his lapel, below the
shiny ruptured duck.

"Dad died," he had said.

"Tough stuff, kid."

"I did a lousy thing. I told him I wasn't going to med
school, that I was going to be a newspaperman after all. He gave me his
blessing. I think maybe that's why I hung around."

Charlie had taken him across the street to Shanley's to
coach him on how to handle the interview with McCarthy.

"I went straight to the top. I told him you were with
the Cleveland
News
. Turns out that McCarthy knew Higgins, the
editor."

"Oh, shit."

"Don't worry. I got a rundown on Higgins. Got a good
description. They were drinking buddies. When he asks you about him, just say:
"That man puts away two fifths a day and is the best fucking newspaperman
in Ohio."

"All he has to do is pick up the phone and check me
out."

"He won't. You say it the way I've explained and he'll
think you've known the man all your life."

Nick watched him standing in the corner of the bar, backlit
by the red and green neon sign--tall, curly hair, short-cropped, big ears, a
high nose with a little indentation near the ridge where the glasses he hated
to wear pinched too tightly, smiling broadly with incredibly even teeth. He
patted Nick on the back with a heavy paw. "You're in, kid."

"I'm scared to death."

"You're a reporter, kid. Just do the reporting. Let me
handle the rewrite."

They walked back across Forty-first Street, past the
loading pier lined with high-backed
News
trucks. Beyond the pier, Nick
could see huge metal rollers.

"That's where the rag rolls off the presses. Two
million of them a night."

They waited for the freight elevator in the musty corridor,
heavy with what were then strange odors. Paper and ink. From that moment it
attached itself forever to the hairs of his nostrils, as if a family of
bacteria had migrated there for permanent settlement.

In the elevator, Charlie grabbed at Nick's tie, loosened
it, and unbuttoned the collar.

"I'm just unstiffening you a bit." When he had
mussed Nick's hair slightly, he stood back, an artist surveying the quick dabs
on the canvas.

"Not perfect, but it will have to do."

As the elevator door opened into the city room, they got out
and Charlie turned to face him again.

"One more thing, kid."

"What?"

"You're a Kerryman."

"A what?"

"A Kerryman."

"What the hell is that?"

"A county in Ireland."

"Kerryman?"

"No, Kerry. County Kerry, dummy. That's where your
family is from."

"With a name like Gold? Worse still, my father told me
it used to be Goldberg." Actually, he had had an Irish grandmother on his
maternal side, northern Irish, he recalled, the hated Protestant Orange. He was
an authentic American mishmash, his Semitic father had told him.

"Tell him it used to be Goldic, Gaelic. Get it?"
He remembered his stomach had turned as he followed Charlie toward the managing
editor's desk, planted imperiously at one end of the city room. His palms had
begun to sweat.

"Don't worry. He thinks I'm Irish, too. For a High
Episcopalian, that's really grand fraud. I told him my middle name was Xavier,
like his. I didn't know about the Kerry thing till later. Besides, I drink
Irish. That's the ultimate identifying clue."

Whatever Nick's misgivings, he had followed Charlie's stage
direction to the letter. The thing about Kerry was the clincher. McCarthy spent
the first ten minutes of the interview tracing the history of George Higgins
and his mammoth appetite for the grape, like an old school tie, the memory
warming the older man's heart. From a corner of his eye, Nick could see Charlie
peering over his typewriter, tense with expectation.

"Kerry, you say." Nick had, as agreed, injected
the subtlety. McCarthy did not notice Nick's bobbing, nervous Adam's apple, or
question the Goldic blarney. But there was one moment of panic as McCarthy
looked into him with pale blue bloodshot eyes, then shifted suddenly beyond his
head to a big wall clock.

"Boy!" McCarthy boomed and a copy boy came
running obsequiously. He opened a desk drawer and peeked in swiftly, writing a
word on a piece of copy paper and folding it. Nick saw the edge of a scratch
sheet. The boy took the paper and hustled away.

"Kerry, you say," McCarthy repeated, the pale
eyes turning inward to some embedded memory of the Emerald Isle. He imagined he
could actually hear the hint of a brogue in McCarthy's speech cadence. Beyond
the voice, the tempo in the city room seemed to accelerate. Typewriters clicked
loudly. The cry of "Boy!" echoed in the big room.

"Never trust another Irishman," McCarthy said.
"They're all black inside." Nick felt his heart palpitate in his
chest.

"But that's what we must have in this business. Black
Irish, and the Kerryman is the blackest, a cursed lot," McCarthy said, a
heavy scent of booze rushing out with his sudden odd anger. "Stubborn.
Tenacious. Vipers. The lot of 'em. We Corkmen hate them more than the
devil." He paused. "But we need them, as we need the angels, witness
to man's venom." He laughed suddenly, wrote out something on a piece of
paper, then handed it to Nick.

"Bring this up to Personnel," he said, dismissing
him, opening his drawer again to choose the horse for the next race.

"Like falling off a leprechaun's log," Charlie
told him later at Shanley's, clinking glasses in a toast.

But two weeks later he had nearly blown the whole
opportunity; and watching the beefy back of the Police Chief as it moved
heavily in the chair, Nick saw in its bulk the impending termination of his
budding career.

As low man on the totem of general assignment, they had him
writing obits and fillers and interviewing an assortment of characters that
floated into the city room, as if the paper were a court of last resort. Mostly
they were forlorn, defeated remnants of the human chain seeking solace,
vindication, or revenge. Or people who had lost something, a son, a daughter, a
father, a mother, their pride, money; empty souls spewed up along the city
beach. The
News,
a tabloid, written in tight, simple declarative
sentences for the masses, had come to be known as the people's press, the
literature of the little man. It could be digested in one 20-minute ride from
Brooklyn to Manhattan and was the largest circulated paper in the United States.

"There are more of us than them," the city
editor, O'Hara, told Nick not long after he had arrived, pointing to a
New
York Times
lying like a tattered corpse in his wastebasket. As if to
emphasize the lesson, he had spread a penciled cross through "Mr." in
Nick's first obit.

"Even when a man dies, he's no 'mister' in this sheet.
He doesn't get born 'mister' and he doesn't die 'mister.'" The
admonishment seemed to Nick painful at the time, as if a man's dignity were
somehow diminished by this final penciled act.

In two weeks he had seen more human misery walk into the
anteroom, where a red-faced retired fireman acted as receptionist, than he had
seen in the war. There, at least, death arrived with grim certainty. Here it
seemed as though death waited in the wings while some mad manipulator injected
weird forms of agony before a final demise.

"The woman out there knows who murdered Elwood
Johnson," Nick told O'Hara on the first occasion of his being sent to
interview one of these unfortunates.

"Who?"

"Elwood Johnson."

"Colored?"

"Yes."

"Ass," O'Hara hissed. He motioned to Donnelly, a
grey-headed reporter lounging on the copy bench. "Explain it to old wet
ears." Nick repeated the woman's story to Donnelly.

"Colored murders aren't news, kid. We get ten calls a
night on those. Who cares?" Donnelly said sleepily.

"Elwood Johnson must have cared."

"We don't report Harlem murders. What's another dead
shine?"

"You mean we don't report murders?"

"Oh, we're big on murders. We love murders. But
colored murders are hardly news."

"Then what do I tell the woman?"

"Give her a nickel for the subway and tell her to go
back to Harlem." Which he did, but not without shame. He got the same
rebuff on people who wanted to find a missing relative or friend.

"People are always losing each other. It's not news
unless it happens to someone important, a name you know. Like President Truman
searching for a bastard son. We're a newspaper, dummy, not a damned
catalog."