The Henderson Equation Read online

  “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.

  “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 a
sking 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.

  3

  “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.”