by Warren Adler
He knew in advance the object of his search. The reference to the personal side of Pelligrino’s life was obvious. Nick’s assignment was to come up with a record of philandering. It was not a question of whether or not Pelligrino was a philanderer—that was assumed—but to forestall any libel suit by proving the obvious. After all, didn’t Italians in general like to fuck a lot and weren’t Italians in positions of power certainly going to take advantage of the situation? He had already learned that confirming a stereotyped image was the best way to make a story believable. A rapist was always unshaven and beady-eyed; killers had slick black hair; blacks shuffled; girls who shook their fannies when they walked were great in bed.
By the time he reached Pelligrino’s City Hall office he had the bit tightly clenched in his teeth. A man’s office, like his home, often told more about the man than his own guarded speech. Pelligrino’s outer office was filled, floor to ceiling, with pictures of Pelligrino; shifty eyes peering into the lens with Pelligrino the dominant constant. Nick spent a good deal of time looking at the pictures, stalling, as if he were waiting for someone, observing the comings and goings. There were three girls in the office, all carefully coiffured, with straight stocking seams and cool, efficient demeanors, reflective of Pelligrino’s passion for dignity. One of the women was too matronly to be a possibility, but the other two could be considered prime suspects. After all, what was safer than fooling around with one’s secretary? He fantasized about each of them, differentiated by their desk nameplates as Miss Simon and Miss Aquilino. Miss Simon was a big-breasted Jewish blonde with a well-girdled torso and long manicured nails that grew out of bony, thin white hands. Miss Aquilino was thin and dark, compact. Which one was he screwing? Both! Surely a man like Pelligrino would not deprive himself. A picture of Pelligrino and his family flashed before him, intruding on the image. He had six children. Nick had counted them with care since the caption had not given a figure. Noting the date of the clipping, he calculated that the children now ranged in age from six to twenty-five. The oldest would be older than both of the secretaries.
When he had finished his observations of Pelligrino’s office, Nick walked down the City Hall corridors to the press room, a high-ceilinged pigpen of a place lined with small desks and old-fashioned, battered typewriters. He found Wiley Patton, the News’ City Hall reporter, slumped over his typewriter in a deep snooze. Wiley was a man in his sixties, an old hand. Like all old-time reporters, he was conscious of his own legend and was treated with awesome respect by the younger reporters. The City Hall beat was his domain and the three reporters that McCarthy had assigned to the Pelligrino story were carefully briefed on how Patton was to be handled.
“Patton knows everything that goes on down there. They trust him. He’ll buck like hell when he hears what we’re doing. That’ll be one big act for your benefit, for mine, for the politicians. Let him do his act. He knows what he’s doing,” McCarthy had lectured. It seemed to Nick a classic study in deviousness.
“He’s got to appear to be on their side,” McCarthy had continued. “A double agent.” The old man smiled at the reference.
Nick shook Patton lightly, watching him stir as his eyes flickered open.
“Shit,” he said, not recognizing Nick, although he had been introduced in the city room. Shaking himself awake, he reached for a half-smoked cigar in his overfilled ashtray and relit it. Nick introduced himself. Patton sneered. Nick explained what he was doing.
“The bastards,” Patton said. “So the old man’s got a hard-on for the wop.”
“Surely it’s not that simple.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“Why?”
Patton looked contemptuously at Nick, his lips already stained with the juice of the soggy cigar.
“Why does Carter make liver pills?” he said cryptically.
Other reporters began to straggle into the press room. Patton nodded at each greeting, indicating through contemptuous facial expressions his opinion of each reporter.
“That’s Hillary of the fucking Mirror,” Patton said, just loud enough to be heard over the sound of a single typewriter now being beaten in a corner of the room. Hillary, a tall, bloodless man, looked over his glasses and stuck up his middle finger.
“We outcirculate the son of a bitch,” Patton said, returning Hillary’s salute. Nick could sense the warm rivalry, perhaps friendship between the two.
“We better get out of here, Gold,” Patton said suddenly in a whisper. “Too many ears around here.”
Nick followed him through the high-ceilinged old corridors with their dusty light globes, through the ornate entrance of the archaic building. Remembering the sunlight and budded trees of the little park in front of the building, he could place the time in his mind as early spring. Patton walked quickly. He was a wiry man who moved with quick bursts of energy, despite a sallow complexion and a slightly stooped figure. Nick followed him into a dark, half-empty bar, oddly unmarked, except for a weakly expiring neon sign which said “Bar.” The bartender greeted Patton with brotherly interest.
“How’s the boy?”
“Another day, another dollar.”
“Same old shit, eh?”
The place, the greeting, even Patton’s frozen glare of contempt seemed, by then, a repetitive syndrome of the New York newspaper world, a romantic stereotype. Cynicism and contemptuousness were the built-in props of a newspaperman’s self-esteem, a kind of inheritance from more competitive rough-and-tumble newspaper days, before respectability had somehow intruded on the profession, along with the Newspaper Guild and a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. Patton, like McCarthy, was a relic of the spittoon and eyeshade days, now expiring under the onslaught of technology. Even then, despite his nagging feeling of intellectual superiority, Nick felt himself in a historical presence, as if old Patton might be passing him a relay stick.
The bartender poured whiskey into two shot glasses placed on the battered bar. Apparently the assumption of what a person drank was preordained when one was drinking with Patton. He tossed off his drink with a quick flick of his head, eyes tearing, loose jowls around his neck pulsating.
“So they got a hard-on for Pelligrino,” Patton said. “That old WASP cocksucker just can’t stand to see a guinea get ahead in New York.”
“WASP? I thought McCarthy was an Irishman.”
“Not him,” Patton said, “Beardsley calls the shots.”
Beardsley was the publisher. He had seen him only once, a shadowy figure who walked quickly through the city room, an innocuous, smiling man with an easy ingratiating manner.
“But I thought McCarthy . . .”
“That drunken flunkey.” Patton unwrapped a cigar, bit its tip off spat out a lump on the floor, and lit it. “He was one hell of a newspaperman in his day, kid. One helluva newspaperman.” It seemed a genuine tribute, peer to peer.
“Are you saying the only reason that they’d like to see Pelligrino dumped is because he’s Italian?”
Patton watched him, squinting through the fresh cloud of smoke. “That’s part of it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s the power of the press, kid. Muscle flexing is all. Nothing personal.”
“Nothing personal. My God, we’re about to ruin the man’s political career.”
“That’s the way it goes. They’re all the same anyway; a bunch of grafting bullshitters. One’s as bad as another. The guinea’s okay. Beardsley doesn’t want him for mayor is all.”
“You mean, just like that.”
Patton looked at him. He seemed mystified. “Don’t take it so hard, kid. Maybe Beardsley’s wife got up on the wrong side of the bed one day. Maybe he couldn’t get it up and she had a bad breakfast and couldn’t shit and the first thing she sees on the crapper is this guinea’s face in the paper. How do you think you’d feel if all those things had happened to you and the first face you saw was this guinea’s cutting a tape, smiling for the cameras, looking to
beat hell like he was having a good time, and all she could get off was one lousy little crampy fart?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Patton sighed and pointed to his shot glass again, which the bartender quickly filled. “Not so ridiculous as it sounds, kid,” he said. “It’s all a whim. Beardsley can do anything he wants. All he’s got to worry about is the laws of libel. He can chew up anyone he wants.”
“We could refuse.”
“What are you, a fucking Bolshevik? Don’t cry over any of them. Pelligrino’s a filthy little wop. He’d sell his soul to the devil for one more vote and you can buy him for the price of a piece of ass. What the hell?” Patton shrugged, drank off his whiskey, then looked at Nick again and laughed. “Don’t be so fucking self-righteous. Who the hell do you think’s paying the bar bill?”
“Jesus,” Nick said. He had just picked up the shot glass to sip. He put it down again quickly, as if it suddenly had turned to a burning coal.
“You’re kidding me,” Nick said. It was more in the nature of a question.
“I shit you not,” Patton said, but it seemed inconclusive, tentative. It was then beyond Nick’s realm of experience. Watching Patton, his face drained of color in the dark bar, Nick tried to see beyond the patina of cynicism that seemed to screen out all but the darker side of human motivation. It frightened him. Was this the way he would wind up after a lifetime of recording human folly? He felt perspiration begin to roll down his sides as he reached again for his drink and drank it off with the same quick motion as Patton’s. He could feel the older man’s eyes on him, cool and observing; perhaps, watching the drink downed, with renewed respect.
“As to Pelligrino,” Patton said, his voice lowered, “he’s got a trail of droppings from here to Canarsie. Just you tell McCarthy to call his buddies at the Police Department and pull a raid on Uptown Emma’s. She’s the City Hall pimp. Got a Park Avenue place. You’ll get all the dirt you need on Pelligrino. He’s one of the regulars.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” Patton snapped his fingers.
Nick remembered the night at Shanley’s, the big beefy back of the Police Chief, McCarthy’s heavy cough-provoking laughter.
“It’s disgusting,” Nick said. “It makes a mockery of the newspaper business, of the police, of government.”
“Not a mockery, kid, a game. It’s all a game. Either play the game or get the hell out. What did Harry say? If you can’t stand the heat, get the hell out of the kitchen. Now there’s your example, kid.”
Standing there, watching Patton, Nick felt a sudden tinge of nausea. Perhaps it was the whiskey or the heavy acrid smell of the cigar smoke or the stink of human mendacity and self-disgust, but Nick quickly left the bar and began to walk, at first through the park, then detouring, heading uptown on the sidewalk. Somehow his inner agitation and the physical exertion of the swift walk dispelled his nausea. His first impulse at rationalization was disbelief. These things only happened in movies, contrivances to further the plot, exaggerations to hold interest, broad strokes of the brush to make a point. Surely this was not the way it was in real life. He tried to imagine what Beardsley was like, the smiling face, hardly worthy of a second look. Was it possible for one man to wield such power? It was, he told himself, unjust, immoral, patently wrong. And yet, if one were to take Patton’s analysis as gospel, what did it matter? Pelligrino, after all, was just a venal little bastard, a fraud. Or was it simply another prejudgment, inflamed further by Patton’s cynicism? Perhaps Beardsley was acting out of outrage, decency, faith in the democratic process. Patton could be wrong, after all, wrong about Beardsley’s motives, wrong about Pelligrino, wrong about life in general, the old mean drunk. People weren’t all that bad. Besides, perhaps the Pelligrino story was all McCarthy’s idea, an instinctive feel for the jugular of corruption. What did he care about Pelligrino? The people! The poor put-upon minions who lived in this pressure cooker of a city were entitled to honest government. That was their right, their heritage. Bits and pieces of speeches floated in his mind, bands playing, flags waving in the breeze on the public square of Warren, Ohio. Hell, he thought, he had nearly got his ass shot off fighting for that principle. Fuck Patton and all his posturing horseshit, all his meanness, all his sick twaddle. The issue was corruption. If Pelligrino was corrupt, he deserved his fate. Truth will out.
When, finally, Nick recovered his sense of place, he was crossing Third Avenue on Forty-second Street, passing the Horn and Hardart, chugging up the hill to the News building. When he arrived in the city room again, his feet ached. Sweat soaked into his clothes. He walked directly up to McCarthy and gave him the message about Uptown Emma’s, watching as the older man reached for his private phone and dialed the number without hesitation, leering into the mouthpiece. “Good work, kid,” he said.
When Gunderstein returned, Nick poured himself another Scotch and watched the younger man pace the room, his thin body taut, stooped, hands pushed deeply into his pants pockets.
“I believe him,” Gunderstein said. Instinct again, Nick thought, observing him coolly, appraising the way Gunderstein’s mind groped forward like a caterpillar on clusters of tiny feet.
“That’s not enough,” Nick said. He felt his own ambivalence. By now he had learned that there were no certainties, the prism of truth changed with the direction of the light source. It was all a question of will and interpretation, his will, his interpretation. To Gunderstein, the story was the story, impersonal, a brief photograph from many angles of a single subject.
“Frankly, Harold, without any attributable quotes the story has no weight, becomes pure speculation. The implication that the Diem assassination triggered the Kennedy killing is unsupportable, another mythmaker.”
“That would depend on how I wrote the story.”
“You’d still have to write it with Henderson somewhere up front. In today’s climate even the allegation that he was part of the CIA action would be damning. The accusation that he was actually part of an assassination plot would kill his career off entirely.”
“But it’s the truth.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“You heard Allison.”
“I also saw him: a bitter, frustrated drunk.”
“Would you run the story if I got him to allow himself to be quoted?”
Nick paused. It was time to be cautious. “I wouldn’t want to commit myself.” It’s a lot different with palace favorites, he thought, ideological cousins. “Why is it that these informer types wait for years to surface?”
“They apparently fester until the boil breaks.”
“And all we have to do is stand there with our cups out to catch the pus.” He was revolted by his own image, finishing off the dregs of his drink.
“I know I could write the kind of story that could pass muster. Suppose I left out Henderson’s name?” He would not give up.
“You’re like a damned sea nettle, Harold.”
“We should tell it,” he said, with emphasis on the collective pronoun.
Nick rubbed his chin, the beard bristles rough against the heel of his hand. He felt his energy drained, looked at his wristwatch. It was after midnight. The liquor had hit him quickly, confirming his tiredness, his age, the fallibility of the human body. Rising, he felt the sluggish unlocking of his knees, a brief stiffness, more signals of time’s encroachment.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Nick said, putting his empty glass on one of the Stonehenge piles, drawing his tie tighter, straightening his jacket. He let himself out, leaving the puzzled face of Gunderstein to its angular contemplation.
Outside, the air was chilling, although his head cleared and by prodding his legs along the pavement, he was able to loosen up a bit. For years he had been able to judge his energy by the use of his legs. In youth the early morning movement in the bright, clean, sunlit air always came as a shock, like cold water on a sweaty brow, cool and sweet and powerful. Later he could measure th
e progress of his life, the decline of the tissues, by this yardstick of remembered energy in his legs. Walking now, he could feel the slippage, and by the time he reached Foxhall, less than a quarter of a mile away, he was struggling to catch his breath and perspiring heavily. The security guard, alerted by his step, peeked out the door of the guardhouse and waved as he proceeded uphill to the entrance of the building, a glass palace built on one of Washington’s highest points. When he had purchased the apartment a few years ago, the view with its unobstructed visibility of legendary landmarks seemed somehow a deserved gift to himself.
In his apartment, he moved from the foyer into the living room where floor-to-ceiling windows offered fantastic views of the city at his feet. He stood watching it for a long time, as he had often done, until a small clock chimed one and reminded him again that he was tired. It had been a long day, he thought, smiling to himself, remembering how it had begun. He removed his clothing in the bathroom, slipped into his pajamas which hung on a doorhook, brushed his teeth, then, clothes in hand, tiptoed into the bedroom where a big double bed stood on a raised pedestal. The bedspread was still pulled taut. Jennie had not come in yet.
If there was a brief flash of anxiety it was only, he told himself, based on the level of his expectation; he had assumed she was there. Lying down, he refused to allow his anxiety to proliferate. She had, he imagined, simply joined the party she was covering. Perhaps she had checked with the night desk, who told her that the story was spaced out for the late editions.
He could visualize her, without jealousy, flirting, being pursued, tantalizing, charming, in her special chic, with-it manner, always a delight, except when she groped for expression on the typewriter. There the charm and fluidity sickened and withered.