by Zev Chafets
“I’ve got him, Gordon,” he said, putting down the receiver. “He’s hot to trot.”
That night, Flanagan showed up at dinner with two hookers he introduced as university students. Henderson, turning up the charm, entertained the women, whose English was rudimentary, with racy stories of his own college-boy exploits at Yale. Flanagan took the party back to his large, empty apartment and left Henderson alone with the hookers. He spent the night on Gordon’s couch, his long legs draped over the edge.
The next afternoon, Flanagan called the CIA man. “You decadent bastard, what did you do to those chicks?” he said in a tone of locker-room jocularity. Henderson asked if he was free for dinner again that night.
In three weeks, Paul Arthur Henderson became a prisoner of his own sex drive. Flanagan supplied him with an unending stream of single women, sister combos and even, on one occasion, a trio. The girls were always introduced as showgirls, secretaries or students; Henderson never guessed that they were actually being financed out of the Trib’s entertainment budget. He had a key to Flanagan’s apartment, and Flanagan took to spending most of his time at Gordon’s flat.
“I’ll tell you something, kid,” he said one afternoon, after Henderson called to smugly announce that he had ‘just scored again.’ “If these dip-shits do start a war, we ain’t gonna win it. They don’t know the difference between kenahbee juice and Kool-Aid. I don’t think our intelligence operation is ready to take on the inscrutable East.”
“Not to mention the devious Irish,” Gordon said.
Flanagan laughed happily. “It won’t be long now,” he predicted. “Henderson is a little leery of being blackmailed, which is what they teach these dumbbells in the CIA. So I’m gonna throw him a fastball right down the middle. I’m gonna ask him for help, guy to guy. Nothing in writing, you understand, just some guidance, a little professional courtesy. Perspective on the American effort to save democracy in Chinatown. If I get some string, I can unravel the whole thing.”
It sounded to Gordon like a good plan. He was rooting for Flanagan, and took a vicarious interest in the story, but he wasn’t truly involved. At twenty-two, he was still thrilled just to be working for the Tribune, drinking at the bar of the Hotel Continental with the other hacks, being accepted into the fraternity of foreign correspondents. Although he wouldn’t have wanted Flanagan to know it, he didn’t honestly care if there was going to be a war or not.
One day, coming out of a briefing by an embassy political officer, a secretary Gordon had occasionally dated caught him by the coat sleeve. Her name was Andi Moore, and she had been in Saigon for less than six months. She and Gordon had slept together a couple of times in a comradely way, but they were far from serious about each other. She was having an affair with a married American colonel stationed at the embassy, and she used Gordon as a stand-in when he couldn’t get away from his wife.
“William,” she said in a soft, serious voice, “there’s someone I want to introduce you to. Can you come to dinner tonight?”
“Sure, Andi, who is it?”
“Top secret,” she said, and winked.
That night Gordon arrived with a bottle of wine and some flowers. He didn’t usually bring Andi gifts, but he was hoping that her surprise guest would turn out to be a good-looking woman, and he wanted to make an impression. He was disappointed to find her alone and the table set for two.
“Last-minute cancellation,” she said. “But the person I wanted you to meet left you a present. I think you’ll like it.”
She went to a desk drawer, unlocked it, and pulled out a large manila envelope. “This is for you,” she said, although there was no name on the package. “But you can have it only on one condition. You’ve got to promise me that nobody will ever know how you got it.”
“Sure,” he said.
“No, not ‘sure.’ Say, ‘I swear to God that nobody will ever know how I got this envelope.’ ”
Wryly, with his hand over his heart, Gordon recited the pledge. “What’s in it?” he asked.
“Let’s have dinner first,” she said. “I made spaghetti with a white sauce. The wine will go great with it. Then you can go home and open your present.”
They ate the spaghetti, drank the wine and made love with impersonal passion to the strains of Johnny Mathis. Gordon forgot about the package; during his time in Saigon he had often been given “gifts” of this sort by diplomats; usually they turned out to be thinly disguised publicity efforts. Andi had to remind him to take the envelope with him when he left her place about eleven.
It wasn’t until he got home and opened the envelope that Gordon realized that Andi had given him an extraordinary gift—a set of memos and cables to and from Washington, outlining the new administration’s plan for a major troop buildup. There was a lot of jargon and cablese, but the meaning was unmistakable—Kennedy intended to turn Vietnam into a battlefield.
He showed the cables to Flanagan the next morning. The bureau chief read through them quickly, and then again, slowly. When he was finished he looked at Gordon narrowly. “Where the fuck did you get ahold of this?” he demanded.
“John, I can’t tell you,” he said. “I promised. But I’m pretty sure it’s real. I got it from an inside source.”
“Obviously,” he said. “Fucking Henderson.”
“Listen, it’s your story,” Gordon said quickly. “You’re the chief. Take this stuff and use it. Be my guest.”
Flanagan thought for a long moment; he was tempted. Finally he sighed and shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “You got it, it’s yours. You may stop a war with this shit. And you’re definitely going to get yourself a Pulitzer.” He lifted his glass of Jameson’s, which was half full at ten in the morning. “Gordon, you’re going to be a star,” he said.
The cables served as the basis for a five-part series on the American buildup in Vietnam. Flanagan was wrong about stopping the war, but right about the prize. Gordon got the Pulitzer for international reporting, 1962. He was not yet twenty-three years old.
On the day the prize was announced, Gordon’s mother called from New York and cried on the phone. His father got on the extension in his den and growled, “Nice going, boychik,” which was his version of conferring a knighthood. Cy Malkin sent a long congratulatory cable and invited him to a dinner with the publisher in New York. Gordon heard nothing from his uncle Max.
He went home for the award ceremony, and traveled to Madison, where he was hailed as a conquering hero. He told no one that his scoop had been given to him by a horny embassy secretary. When he said that he had been lucky, people took it for false modesty.
Gordon returned to Vietnam, where he was boycotted by the embassy, which conducted a fruitless investigation into the leak. Andi Moore avoided him. Their only meeting was in the garden of the French ambassador’s residence on Bastille Day. They stood together on the veranda, glasses of cool white wine in their hands, and spoke in a conversational tone. “Why did you do it?” he asked. She smiled. “Just for the heck of it,” she said.
Early in 1964, Flanagan went back to New York, where he was assigned to cover City Hall, which he considered a promotion. Foreign policy bored him, and he loved crooked politics. Malkin offered Gordon the Saigon bureau, but he turned it down, and went to Moscow instead.
Gordon stayed abroad sixteen more years. After Moscow he went back to Vietnam; there was a new set of officials in Saigon, and they treated him more like a celebrity than a pariah. From there he went to Tel Aviv, the first Jew ever assigned to cover Israel for the Trib; to South Africa for two years, and finally to London, where he was stationed until 1980.
In Israel he won his second Pulitzer. During the Yom Kippur War, on the day before the Israeli army launched its counterattack across the Suez Canal, he got a call from a general he had met once or twice but barely knew. The general invited him to his home in Tzahala, a suburb of Tel Aviv. There, over strong coffee and homemade cake, he gave Gordon the operational plans for the next day. “Why me?
” Gordon asked, and the general smiled. “Somebody’s going to have this,” he said, “and it might as well be you. The Tribune is an important newspaper.” For the next two weeks the general kept Gordon one day ahead of the pack, and in the end he had another Pulitzer.
The second prize made him a superstar. He was in demand as a lecturer, wrote a warmly received book on détente and became a well-known face on television talk shows. Viewers saw a broad-shouldered man with a salt-and-pepper beard, thinning black hair and a prominent nose, broken in a pickup basketball game with a group of marine embassy guards in Tel Aviv. For television appearances, Gordon wore a tie and coat; otherwise, he dressed in jeans and a faded corduroy jacket.
In 1980, Gordon returned to the States for good. Not long after, he was profiled by the Atlantic Monthly in an admiring article entitled “William Gordon, Mr. Reporter.” The writer, who was not much older than Gordon had been when he first went to Vietnam, described him as as a profanely wise, cigar-chomping, hard-drinking cynic with a physical resemblance to Abbie Hoffman. This portrait greatly amused Flanagan.
“I know you’re still in there, kid,” he said over drinks at Gallagher’s. “I know you’re still a sensitive SAT at heart.” Gordon laughed. It was a relief to him that Flanagan knew his act, like leaving a spare house key with a reliable neighbor.
Aside from Flanagan, only Max seemed to see through Gordon’s facade. He had visited the old man occasionally during his home leaves, but their relationship remained cool. Gordon realized that efforts to impress his uncle with macho stories from the world’s battlefields had little effect; the old man continued to relate to him as a lightweight, a good talker. Eventually Gordon stopped trying, and confined his chats with his uncle to foreign affairs. Several times the old man had surprised him with his knowledge of Latin American and East Asian politicians. It occurred to Gordon that Max probably had business dealings with some of them, but his reportorial instincts, usually sharp, deserted him when it came to his uncle.
The Tribune rewarded Gordon by making him a columnist and roving international correspondent. After the grind of foreign reporting, the task of turning out two columns a week was light work, and it left him plenty of time for other pursuits. Flanagan was now deputy city editor, and the two old friends spent a lot of time drinking in various haunts downtown. Flanagan had been married, briefly and indignantly, and now lived in misogynistic solitude in a small apartment near Gramercy Square. Gordon was still single, and his name occasionally appeared on lists of the city’s most eligible bachelors. Unlike Flanagan, he loved women, but he had yet to meet one he was certain was good enough for him.
Flanagan’s obsession was New York politics, and he usually contrived to steer their conversations to some municipal scandal or local villain. Venality and corruption fascinated and amused him, and he frequently asked Gordon about his uncle Max. He found it unbelievable that Gordon knew and cared so little about his celebrated uncle. One night at O’Dwyer’s, a pub on Twenty-third Street, Flanagan was holding forth on the subterranean connection between union pension funds and a Bronx ward leader when he was interrupted by a commotion at the door.
Gordon turned and saw a slender young woman, surrounded by three men in business suits, walk through the crowded room to a table in the rear. Several people called her name, and one or two even applauded. Dressed in sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt, she carried herself regally, shoulders thrown back and head high, as if she were trying to peer over an obstacle. Her most striking features were shoulder-length black hair that hung down in wild curls and a powerful hawklike nose. She wasn’t at all beautiful—special-looking was the description that came to mind—but she filled the room with her presence.
“That’s Jupiter Evans,” said Flanagan.
“The actress?”
“How many women you think are named Jupiter Evans? Yeah, the actress. She’s supposed to be a dyke.”
“Too bad. She’s great-looking,” Gordon said.
“Wanna meet her?”
“Why, you know her?”
“I’ve met her a couple of times. She used to go around with Lizzie Taylor. That’s how I know she’s a les. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
Flanagan led the way to the actress’s table. “Miss Evans, I’m John Flanagan, deputy editor of the Tribune,” he said. “I’m a friend of Lizzie’s.”
She nodded and smiled. When she did, her brown eyes flashed and crinkled around the edges, and Gordon noticed little laugh lines. The smile was a friendly gesture of recognition, nothing more, but it stunned and charmed Gordon completely.
“Jesus, I’ve never seen anybody smile like that,” he said without thinking. She turned her head and looked at him full in the face. He blushed.
“Jupiter, this is my protégé, Velvel Gordon,” said Flanagan. “He’s been away a long time and he’s not used to being around women.”
“Have you been in jail, Mr. Gordon?” she asked in an amused voice.
“Jail?” he said.
Flanagan laughed. “Worse, he’s a foreign correspondent,” he told her.
To Gordon’s surprise, she looked at him closely. “Are you William Gordon?”
“That’s me,” he said. “Velvel is sort of a family nickname. It’s Yiddish.”
“No kidding,” she said, but nicely. “I’ve been reading you for years. I’m a major fan.”
“Most people don’t care much about foreign stories,” Gordon observed, and was immediately sorry. The implication that Jupiter Evans was like most people wasn’t flattering, and she picked it up right away.
“My father taught international relations at Yale,” she said, letting him off the hook. “I was raised on it. What’s the capital of Senegal?”
“Senegal? It’s, ah, Dakar,” he said.
“Right. OK, I guess you must be William Gordon,” she smiled.
“Why don’t you join us.” Flanagan said no at the same time Gordon said yes, and everybody laughed.
“Come on, Flanagan, I’ll buy you a drink,” she said, signaling to the waiter. “You too, Velvel.”
“You’ve got to call me William. And I’m buying,” Gordon said. He wanted to get high in a hurry; it was the only way he was going to be able to get up the courage to ask her to come home with him.
Three bourbon boilermakers later, Gordon felt a warm self-confidence based, he was sure, not only on the liquor but on Jupiter’s encouragement. She was frankly flirting with him, making it plain she found him attractive. Thank God, he thought; Flanagan’s gossip was wrong.
“What are you doing after the show?” he asked in what he hoped was a cool, sophisticated tone.
Jupiter laughed and fixed him with a direct, brown-eyed look. “Is that an innocent question?”
“I dunno. Are you an innocent girl?”
“Mr. Gordon,” she said, “don’t you know I’m supposed to be gay?”
He was startled by her directness. “No, I didn’t know that,” he stammered. “Are you?”
“That’s what it says in the papers,” she said. “Do you believe what you read in the papers?”
“I don’t even believe what I write in the papers,” he said. “So, you’re not gay?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. I’m not tonight.”
“Then maybe we ought to take advantage of the timing,” Gordon said.
“Maybe we ought to,” she agreed. “We’ve only got an hour to midnight.”
That was the first time William Gordon made love with Jupiter Evans. In the next three years they went to bed together eight more times. There were single weeks when they had more fights than that.
The fights were always the same. They started out as calm discussions of what she referred to as her “problem,” which, Gordon finally understood after months of pretending, was that she feared and resented men. “I want to love you,” she said. “I’m trying. But I can’t.” Inevitably, Gordon’s efforts at being a sensitive, nurturing male degene
rated into angry accusations and a vow never to see her again. Unable to control what he recognized as a self-destructive obsession, these resolutions usually lasted about two weeks.
Naturally, Gordon discussed the situation with Flanagan. Just as naturally, he was unsympathetic. Since Saigon, his attitude toward women had undergone a slow, negative shift from utilitarian disdain to open hostility.
“The problem with you is that you’re still an SAT at heart,” he said. “You like being Jake Barnes, or Lady Brett or whoever. You want to get laid, find a girl that likes guys—there must be a few of them left.”
“You sound like my father,” Gordon said.
“You told him about this?” asked Flanagan in disbelief.
“ ’Fraid so. Christ, that was a mistake. You have the same fucking categorical tone.”
“Categorical, am I?” said Flanagan. “Does that mean, like, logical, Professor?”
“It means like asshole, asshole,” Gordon said, and changed the topic to the piracy of a group of building contractors who were repairing a municipal bridge with papier-mâché. Jupiter Evans was a problem that even the chief couldn’t solve.
CHAPTER 3
Gordon put down the file and looked at Belzer. “Jesus, Nate,” he said. “Jesus H. Christ. What are we talking about? In dollars?”
“Probably between three and five,” he said. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing you get a Merrill Lynch statement on, you know?”
“Come on, Nate, there’s a hell of a lot more than five million there. Even I can see that.”
Belzer looked amused. “That’s five hundred million, Velvel,” he said. “One half of one billion. You speak Jewish?”
“I can understand a little,” he said. He felt as if his lips were frozen.
“A sach gelt,” said Belzer softly. “A lot of money. That’s what your uncle had—a sach gelt.”
“Why me, Nate?” Gordon asked. His reporter’s training was taking over, trying to organize the chaos in his brain.
“Who else, Velvel? Who else? Ida’s an old woman. Your father’s no spring chicken either. Neither one of them needs the money, and besides, they couldn’t do what’s necessary to get it.”