The Henderson Equation (46 page)

"Mmm, smells good," the Ambassador's girl friend said,
apparently relieved to have found a topic of conversation. Nick watched the
Ambassador's hand slip down to caress a well-rounded buttock, caught his wink
when he saw Nick watching.

"Soup's on," Swopes announced. None of the guests
moved. It was considered gauche to be first in line. The slightly tipsy dowager
came toward him. Nick braced himself, looking across the room at Myra, who
winked playfully. Knowing what was to come, he tried to turn away, but she had
already grabbed his lower arm.

"And how is Mr. Brezhnev's man in Washington?"
she said, lisping. Once the reigning Washington hostess, she had been
systematically destroyed as a media figure by the shift in the
Chronicle's
coverage, when the Lifestyle section replaced the old Society columns. Charlie
had always suspected that she, along with others, had paid the reporters for
her coverage, if not in cash, in other ways: lavish gifts, trips abroad. It
could never be proved.

"We'll freeze the bitches out," he had said,
actually compiling a blacklist. "If I see the names of these cunts in our
paper, I'll fire the lot of you," he had shouted at a meeting in his
office with the two Society reporters, long gone now, as they sat, guilt-ridden
and pale. He had written down a series of names which he had forced them to
memorize on the spot. He had wondered if they would make an issue out of it
with the Newspaper Guild, but it had all blown over. Occasionally he had let
their names slip in. They were, after all, a bit of nostalgia and one couldn't
avoid, for example, Mrs. Hoffritz's massive contributions to the Kennedy Center
and whatever worthy causes were the current fad. Besides, she represented a
kind of caricature that added spice to the Washington scene.

"I'm no longer working for Brezhnev. Mao has made me a
better offer, Mrs. Hoffritz."

"There are lots of real Americans out there, just
waiting for a chance to get you," she said. A remembered phrase echoed in
his mind, suddenly solving the identity of the writer of one of his persistent
hate letters. He felt a strange kinship with her. Fryer of my gut, he chuckled.

"So it's you," he said mysteriously, knowing she
would never understand. Inviting her might be one of Myra's private jokes, he
thought.

"Your dress is lovely, Mrs. Hoffritz," he said,
winking at Swopes, who led her away to the buffet table.

"She owns half the real estate in town," Richard
Melton said behind them. "In my day, all you had to do was knock Stalin
and down would come a ten-thousand-dollar check for your campaign."

"I always wondered what you fellows did with that
dough," Nick said.

"Don't knock campaign funds, Nick. It kept a lot of us
in groceries."

"I know."

"Standard practice in the industry."

The buffet line had begun to form. Outside the din was
increasing. He felt the bulk of Gunderstein's copy in his pocket. He searched
for Myra. She was talking to Henderson, the two of them alone now. Mrs.
Henderson glared at them from the buffet line. He felt no pity for the poor
woman, wallowing in her humiliations and misconceptions, caught in the web of
her husband's imagery. It was, after all, a comfortable misconception, since
she could excuse her husband's infidelity if it was necessary for the cause.
Perhaps she too had made that sacrifice herself. He heard Myra's familiar
laughter. Starting toward them, he stopped, noted how banal it appeared, the
two of them together, confident of their power. They seemed so innocent, two
children at play.

"Ummm, delicious," the Ambassador's girl friend
squealed as he spooned tiny chunks of scrambled eggs into her mouth. Beside
her, Biff Larson in his tight-fitting leather jacket bent down and held his
mouth open for a proffered bit of egg.

"Down his greedy gullet," the Iranian Ambassador
said, smiling. "Double the price of the next piece."

"The Middle Eastern mentality at work," the
Secretary of the Treasury said with mock sarcasm.

"Oh, you mean oil," the Ambassador's girl friend
shrieked, proud of her knowledge of current events.

"You should let her negotiate with us," Biff
Larson said.

"She drives a hard bargain," the Ambassador said,
winking to Nick, who was listening idly to their chatter.

"I'll bet," the Secretary of the Treasury said,
also turning to Nick. The Ambassador held a hand near his mouth and whispered
in Nick's ear.

"She has an absolutely exquisite body," he
whispered.

The Secretary of the Treasury, who had imagined what the
remark might have been, said: "Bribing the press again, Mr.
Ambassador?"

"It is an old Middle Eastern tradition."

"Bribing the press?"

"No. In my country we are the press." He turned
to his girl friend and blew her a kiss.

"You're not giving things away again?" Melissa
Haversham said. The Chief Justice, who had been talking to her, watched her
hips move as she walked toward him.

"I'll take them both," the Secretary of the
Treasury aid. "Just wrap them up and deliver them to my home."

"In an unmarked brown wrapper," the Ambassador's
girl friend said, apparently confused by their repartee, feeling the need not
to be considered dumb.

Nick listened to the patter, the relaxed Washington talk.
It represented a kind of special shorthand, understood, like Morse code, by
both the sender and the receiver. On this stage nobody played for the audience,
only for themselves, a tight little group, like the hardcore gamblers of a
floating crap game.

Nick moved out of earshot, leaning against the far wall,
balancing his plate. Outside the noise of the crowd grew louder. He ate by
habit, tasting little, watching Myra circulate again, the Queen Bee offering
herself for impregnation to the workers. He had the impression that she could
feel his eyes on her, a laser beam, energizing her as she made her rounds.
Henderson followed in her wake, the symbolism apt. Jennie completed the train,
looking for a new place to roost now that she had lost him.

Again he felt for the folded copy in his jacket, rubbing
its bulk, sensing the frantic beat of his heart beneath it. Myra was coming
toward him now, a thin benign smile pasted on her lips.

"Are you all right, Nick?" she asked. He quickly
removed his hand from his jacket.

"Fine." He cautioned himself. Was this the
moment?

"There's a time to shut off the motor, Nick." It
sounded like an order.

"Cut him adrift." He found himself saying it,
despite the draining away of courage. But the players were being announced and
the room had suddenly reverberated with the boom of the crowd, a wave of
stamping and vibrations, drowning out intelligible sounds.

"What?" she said. But the noise persisted. He
looked upward, watching the ceiling, waiting for the sound to die down. It
seemed like the recurring dream of the unheard shout, the unreachable grip,
where energy and motion defied real movement. If she had heard, would she have
understood?

"Last call for drinks," Swopes shouted above the
din as the group clustered around the bar.

"Who do you like in the game?" Henderson asked,
casual, unruffled, confident. Behind him Nick could see his wife, stern and
dour, a note of hopeless resolution in her glazed eyes.

"The Skins, of course," the Chief Justice said.
"You can't drink the man's booze and do otherwise."

"Now there's an unbiased judge," Myra said,
laughing, as the group proceeded into the box. He felt a tug on his arm, turned
and saw Jennie.

"It's not who wins or loses, but how you play the
game, right, Nick?" she said, then whispering, "Besides, who gives a
shit?"

It seemed a clue to his own resolve. What did it matter,
after all? Nothing would change. If not Henderson, it would be someone exactly
like him, someone tinsel thin, media-created, able to rationalize the most bestial
act in the name of country, or flag, or ideology, or some other self-conceived
concept of morality.

Someone has got to become the watchdog of the public
conscience, Mr. Parker had said that day, long ago. But who will watch the
watchdog? he asked himself.

He who owns words owns the world, he repeated to himself as
he filed into the box, the Imperial Box. The crowd cheered, a single mindless
plaint from the immensity of the stadium. Each of them surely could feel the
sense of their own specialness, as if the crowd were cheering for each of them.
They, who had the power to control the callous inert crowd mind. In the
antiseptic isolation of his glass cage, he had to imagine the sense of power,
to create it in his brain, but here in this immensity of humanness, he could
see it, feel it, smell it. We have no right to play with their innocence, he
told himself, watching Myra's confident profile, her chin lifted proudly. He
caught another glimpse of Henderson's blue eyes, sparkling with the moisture of
the cold.

Then he felt the urge begin, seeing the distance between
himself and the field, the low railing of the box, easily scaled, as Charlie
might have seen the trigger of the hanging shotgun. Muscles tightened as they
signaled for energy from the brain, but, at that moment the stadium became
quiet, the humanity frozen as one voice rose above the rest in the rendition of
"The Star-Spangled Banner," the ritualized words stilted and
irrelevant.

A wrenching shiver seized him as he viewed the standing
crowd, an amorphous indistinguishable mass, singing with innocent expectation.
He could sense something expiring in this environment, a terminality in himself
as well. Who will be left to watch the watchdogs? he asked again, wondering if
his lips had moved soundlessly. Or will the watchdogs become the guardians, the
threatened? Suddenly Myra's eye caught his, winked, a sign of her benign
possession of him.

As he heard the last echoing strains of the National
Anthem, the resurgence of the crowd's mindless babble, he knew he was misplaced
in space, a straggler in an untracked jungle. He who kept the word must never
leave the glass cage, never feel or touch or taste the humaness that could
corrupt objectivity, destroy perfection.

Sounds of the crowd rang in his ears as he ran from the
box, passing the black waiters who were clearing the imperial buffet. Outside
in the glaring sun he flagged a cab and directed the driver to take him to the
Chronicle
.

The story, the word, in the end, was all, the only meaning.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the sheaf of paper, making mental notes
of an appropriate headline, cursing Gunderstein as he read. The man was
constantly splitting infinitives.