by Warren Adler
“You’re all in it together,” Allison said with rising bitterness, his tongue heavier, his articulation difficult. “You can shit on anyone you choose to—or choose not to.”
“Well, then why did you come to us?” Nick asked. He could feel the man’s frustration.
“Because I wanted to shit on Henderson.”
“That’s obvious.”
“Gunderstein believes me,” Allison said thickly. “Don’t you, Gunderstein?”
Gunderstein flushed, his pimples reddening. Nick became aware, at that moment, of the secret of Gunderstein’s skill, the ability to inspire confidence in a source, a method beyond mere tenacity. There were no heroes, no villains, only people trapped in circumstances. Gunderstein began at that point. Everyone was credible. They had reasons for their actions. The lie was simply a tool for survival. Gunderstein took no moral positions. He was simply a vessel for their justifications.
“Yes, I do,” Gunderstein answered.
“If you have that much confidence in his story, why couldn’t you persuade him to be quoted?” he asked Gunderstein.
“They’ll kill me,” Allison said, terrified.
“The man’s paranoid,” Nick said.
“I know,” Gunderstein said. “But that doesn’t make the story any less valid.” They were talking as if Allison didn’t exist.
“At this point it’s simply gossip. I admit its fascination, but that’s all it is—gossip.”
“It’s the truth,” Allison persisted. He got up unsteadily and poured more whiskey in his glass.
“I thought perhaps,” Gunderstein said quietly to Nick, “that I would write the piece obliquely without using Henderson’s name. There’s got to be somebody out there who knows something.”
“You want to go fishing?”
“In a way, yes. But we do that all the time.”
Nick thought for a moment. Gunderstein was correct, of course. When they suspected a big fish they poked their lines into the water, carefully baited. It was hardly a subtle ploy since the fish, considering the scope of the line, could hardly fail to smell the bait. Once the Chronicle implied that it was out for a big fish, all the little fish and all the big fish’s enemies would crowd the bait, waiting for the chance to get in a good chomp. This mask of self-righteousness was beginning to smother him. You are conspiring, you hypocrite, Nick chastised himself. He felt suddenly irritated, grabbed a glass from a shelf, and wiping out the dust with his hand, poured himself a drink.
“You realize,” Nick said, addressing himself to Allison, now fading swiftly into a drunken stupor, “that Henderson, if we are to believe your story, didn’t actually do anything wrong in the sense that it was not part and parcel of American policy at the time. Obviously, he was following orders, doing what was considered an acceptable, though clandestine, act of American foreign policy.” Nick felt that his explanation was convoluted, but even through his descending stupor Allison seemed to catch the subtlety.
“Who says different? Hesh a fuggin hypocrite, that’s all. And he may be the fuggin President of the whole keboodle. That’s wash wrong.” He tried to stand up, then fell backward against the wall where he continued to find support, his head lolling on his shoulder.
“I better get him into a cab,” Gunderstein said. He picked up the phone and asked the desk clerk to call a cab. When he had hung up, Gunderstein reached into an opened pretzel box that suddenly materialized from behind an end table and offered it to Nick, who declined.
“If there is any weight to the story, and I think there is,” Gunderstein said, abstractedly biting into a pretzel, “it will surface sooner or later.”
“Not necessarily, Harold,” Nick said. It takes a visceral hatred, a commitment, he thought. If that element had been missing, they might never have gone after the President.
He had long ago assimilated his rationalization. It had ceased to nag him by then. It was a virtue that his life within the vortex of the storm, the press of the avalanche of events, could sublimate a galling episode with uncommon speed. But now it came rushing back to the front of his consciousness, and it was an indication of Gunderstein’s sensitivity that he had deftly steered clear of the memory.
They had by then burrowed in, deeply, to the point where the Chronicle’s revelations were more than just an irritation to the White House. Other papers were beginning to join the fray, but Gunderstein’s skill and singlemindedness kept him steps ahead of the so-called competition. They had spread the bait on the waters like oil and the bigger fish were making their first tentative forays toward the hook. When a week went by without a new revelation, both he and Myra had become edgy.
“We can’t stop now,” she had said. By then it had become a passion. “We owe it to the American people.” It had added to the complexity that they were now responding to high-blown patriotic platitudes, and believing them. All except Gunderstein, whose pursuit, as always, was devoid of moral overtones. The story was all.
But for him and Myra there was added motivation, a visceral hatred that went far beyond the bounds of political opposition. Something in the man, then the sitting President, was able to inflame them, inspiring indignation and contempt. Perhaps it was his aloofness. A closed personality, he was difficult to know. There was also a transparency in his machinations. You could always see the works in motion, gears clicking, motors humming, and it was puzzling to understand how the bulk of the American people were so easily manipulated by them. Perhaps that was at the heart of it, since it had rendered them almost powerless in their influence, leaving them with the feeling that maybe they had been wrong all along—until Gunderstein had come to them with the idea of the cover-up and they had given him carte blanche to pursue it. Gunderstein had merely thrown the match on the already dry tinder.
“I’ve found the unimpeachable source,” Gunderstein told him. He had come into the office, his hair plastered down by perspiration, circles reddening around his pimples.
“In the nick of time, Harold. There’s gloom and doom on all fronts.” Aside from the mere scent of blood, there were ancillary reasons for the story’s further development. Circulation was rising swiftly now. Advertising lineage was up. And the editorial staff had been gripped by an infectious esprit de corps, a kind of David against Goliath syndrome, a rather endurable newspaperman’s fantasy, easily stimulated.
“He’s offered me two choices,” Gunderstein said.
“The hard way and the easy way.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s the trade-off?”
“In this case only two things. Anonymity and money.”
“Mendacity is everywhere,” Nick said, resisting the temptation to ask the man’s name.
“What he means by anonymity is a total blackout. From everyone, including you and Mrs. Pell,” Gunderstein said.
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said that money probably posed the lesser of the two problems.”
“At least you’ve invested us with some morality, Harold.”
Gunderstein ignored the sarcasm. “He’s absolutely germinal to the story, knows the inside, dates, people, places.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Sounds like it might be the President himself.”
“In my opinion, he probably knows more than the President,” Gunderstein said.
“And the money?”
“He wants a quarter of a million in cash.”
Nick felt his throat tighten, stifling what might have been a hysterical laugh.
“Now that’s what I call squeeze.” In his mind, he had already rejected the offer outright. The Chronicle was, after all, a public company. As a practical matter, it would be difficult to bury that kind of money. Besides, to extend the knowledge beyond Gunderstein, Myra, himself, and the source, would create special dangers. You couldn’t pass that kind of money without calling in the comptroller, the company money man.
“He thinks it’s a bargain,�
�� Gunderstein said calmly. “He says that if we tried to get the story without his help it might cost four, five times more in time, personnel, running down false leads.”
“A real businessman, this guy,” Nick said. “Couldn’t you come up with someone else less crassly motivated? Revenge, jealousy, patriotism, ethics, morality, the need for expiation, confession, simple hatred?”
“A source is a source.”
“Do me a favor, Gunderstein. Go home and take a cold shower. We’d blow our credibility sky high. I’d be putting the Chronicle’s image right on the line.” He could think of a thousand reasons for rejection. “It’s simply not the rules of the game,” he said finally.
“Rules?”
“You can’t become what you’re trying to expose.”
“Our business is to tell the story, Mr. Gold. That’s our only reason for being.”
“So you believe we should pay for it?”
“Yes.”
“Get the information any way you can?”
“Yes.”
“Torture. Blackmail. Are they also legitimate tactics?”
Gunderstein became thoughtful. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Inflicting physical pain is not in my frame of reference,” he said quietly. “I suppose, though, you might use some form of mental torture, and fear of exposure poses a kind of blackmail on a self-perceived victim.”
He was exasperating.
“On second thought a shower might be hardly useful. What you need is to get laid, Gunderstein. Laid and parlayed.”
But the idea had lingered. He remembered tossing around in his bed, sleepless, challenging Gunderstein in a nightmare of imagined conversations. Actually, they had always winked at the little bribe, the bought lunch or drink, or, on occasion, even women, a traditional inducement, although it was an offense of first-class proportions for anyone on the staff to accept any form of payola. Charlie had made it a religion, rigidly enforced, and he had carried it beyond the pale of human frailty. Not a lunch, not a drink, not the slightest hint of gratuity. Nick, too, was merciless in the enforcement; rigid, unbending. It rankled him to know that the columnists were out of his reach, although he had some recourse, but hardly the same control as he could exercise over his own staff. Perhaps that was why his first reaction to Gunderstein’s proposal was negative. And yet, he had paid for information in his career. It was a standard practice on the News. One simply put the payola on one’s expense account, suitably buried but not without prior approval of McCarthy.
“Lay a few bucks on the bastard,” McCarthy would howl when all else had failed.
But a quarter of a million! By morning, Nick had concluded that it wasn’t ethics at all, purely the size of the money, that had prompted his irritation. It was, as Gunderstein had testified when confronted with torture, outside the realm of his experience. Myra’s reaction was far more phlegmatic. He had been careful to outline the parameters without the injection of personal opinion, in content as well as nuance.
“What was your reaction, Nick?” she had asked coyly.
“I rejected it outright,” he answered quickly, refusing to admit his second thoughts. They were sitting in her pleasant breakfast room with the sun shining through the high windows, throwing shimmering glints on the garden sculptures. She quietly sipped her coffee.
“It would be a shame if he gets away with it because of our timidity,” she said.
“You have to weigh that against the possibility of our finding other sources and, of course, our own vulnerability.”
“We’ve gone this far,” she mused, “it seems a shame.”
“And then there is the possibility that the information will be worthless, a case of entrapment. We’ve been assuming that Gunderstein is certain that the man is guilty, that a cover-up has indeed been perpetrated. He could be dead wrong.”
“Do you think he is?”
“That’s the hell of it, Myra. I believe in Gunderstein’s assessment. I believe that we’ll get our money’s worth.” It was, he knew, a Pandora’s box of possibilities.
“If the man is guilty, the people have a right to know.”
“I don’t deny that.”
“We can’t allow this country to be raped, Nick,” she said. He could see in her eyes the same firmness that had moved her father.
“Assuming his guilt.”
“I believe he is guilty, absolutely.”
There it was, he thought, the prejudgment so necessary for commitment. “It’ll cost us a quarter of a million.”
“That’s the least of the problem,” she said confidently. “I have private resources. It needn’t be a company matter.”
Once the mechanics of the payoff had been worked out, the story had begun to unfold swiftly, the bottle-neck broken. Gunderstein had been right. The source provided the promised value and whatever guilt Nick might have felt became submerged in the euphoria of the victory, the greater good. It seemed poetic logic for the memory to surface at this moment.
But Gunderstein, ever the technician, saw only the story as an end in itself. He would hardly understand what was going on now, in Nick’s mind, the wider implications, the hatching conspiracy, the rationalizations filtering through their prismatic screenings. What did Gunderstein understand about the duel under way between him and Myra, in which Henderson was merely a chess piece? What did he care about Henderson or moral right? It was absurd. Henderson was, like all the rest, a political prostitute. He would commit any crime if he felt it would get him one more vote, providing the moral stigma remained in the closet. There were no considerations of good and evil in this scenario, only power, raw and unrefined. Gunderstein got up and maneuvered Allison toward the door. The man looked at Nick as he passed, tried to speak, then shook his head and moved unsteadily on Gunderstein’s arm.
When they had gone Nick settled onto the couch and sipped his drink. Despite its sloppiness, Gunderstein’s living room had its own lived-in pattern, a mirror perhaps of the younger man’s cluttered mind. It was not unlike his and Charlie’s old bachelor apartment, a private stronghold, pugnacious in its maleness. It, too, was cluttered with books, although the bits and pieces of unfinished food never reached the level of being part of the decor. It seemed natural for Gunderstein’s environment to stimulate recall, as if the ground had been gone over before in another life, which it had. The issue, like the others, was similar.
“It was like starting out at the finish line and retracing the track to make sure the race was rigged correctly,” he had told Charlie during that time with Pelligrino.
“A good simile, Nick.”
“Under those terms everyone is vulnerable.”
“That’s right.”
“Somebody gets up in the morning. Throws a dart into a board imprinted with the name of some public figure, in this case the President of the City Council, and the game begins. Let’s fuck Pelligrino.”
“More or less correct.”
“It’s hideous.”
“Do you give one shit about Pelligrino?”
“That’s not the point.”
McCarthy had gathered three reporters around his desk that morning, his heavy eyes a red network of veins, a map of yesterday’s bout with barleycorn. “We’re going to run this investigation on three levels. The political, the money angle, and the personal. The objective here is to get a well-rounded picture of this snake.”
The question of Pelligrino’s snakery was a prejudgment, not the concern of the reporters. It had simply been decreed. By McCarthy? By people above him in the hierarchy of the News? It was difficult to tell.
“I want this guinea’s ass,” he said, revealing the ferocity of ethnic contempt. The Irish and the Italians in New York were natural enemies, competing for protection of their own territorial imperatives. It was essentially a New York phenomenon; this fierce sense of belonging, chunks of unmelted fat in the myth of the melting pot.
Why did he want his ass? Nick wanted to ask, but held back, afraid
of ridicule. Surely he was missing some important bit of information, some piece of knowledge that would explain why Pelligrino was a target now. His assignment was to learn about Pelligrino’s personal life, to dig beyond the bland façade of political imagery. He had no illusions about what McCarthy wanted and, despite his own questioning, was determined to show his skills. It was from these ingredients that newspaper reputations were made.
Following the traditional journalistic starting points, he read and reread the old clips in the News library, piles of cardboard envelopes filled with the passing events of Pelligrino’s political career. There was Pelligrino’s public life cataloged in faded ink, an acre of strung-together words, descriptions, pronouncements, quotations. Only in the absorption of the mass could one get even a remote hint of the real character of Salvatore Pelligrino. A study of the clips gave him a mental picture of a small man, addicted in later life to well-cut, stylish clothes, a “dandy,” smelling of heavy expensive cologne, with polished fingernails, scrupulously shined expensive shoes, a carefully trimmed moustache, with large brown sad heavy-lidded eyes and teeth still white and able to embellish a warm, broad, thick-lipped smile. But beyond the façade of the overdressed man of dignity, the clips hinted of poverty-inflicted early pain, the immigrant boy hustling for a buck on the streets, the parents who never learned English, propagating with Catholic fervor, creating their huge garlic-smelling brood, all with odd names like those of characters in the Italian movies then in vogue.
It might have been the first time that Nick had used old clips to sketch the picture of a man, an adversary, now, and all these bits and pieces put together by a crowd of indifferent reporters, all watching through their own private lenses, provided a fascinating and, he believed, accurate kaleidoscope of a man’s character. He had not yet learned how the newspaper portrait of any public person fed on itself, was built on the gleanings of an army of observers, each embellishing what the other had observed before, preserved forever in these little cardboard envelopes, the bible of the rewrite desks. By the time he had read them all, he felt he had his quarry well focused, a cosmeticized little man, obsessed with the necessity to appear dignified, hiding behind a carefully constructed façade. And since it had been planted in his mind that the man was a snake, he had sought justification for the characterization. By the time he had read the clipping thoroughly, he imagined that he had found it and was quite ready to slice away at the man.