The Henderson Equation

First Chapter Preview

See complete details about The Henderson Equation including immediate purchase options.

The power of the press to manipulate and persuade comes under the microscope in this tense exploration of the media.

Staring into the vast city room, as it subsided now from the last flurry of deadlines, Nick Gold savored a moment of comparative tranquility. Deskmen and reporters, lifting weary eyes from copy paper, might have assessed his mood as one of self-imposed hypnosis, a kind of daydreaming. News aides turned their eyes away self-consciously, as though fearing their own curious gazes would be an intrusion on the executive editor.

But while Nick’s open eyes gazed into the cavernous room, the ninety-one clearly visible desks and typewriters, the clusters of nerve centers through which information had passed from brain to typewriter, from paper pile to paper pile, paragraph by paragraph, through each penciled checkpoint, the image was not registering. The mechanism of his mind was simply idling, lulled by the comforting vibrations of the big presses as they inked the awesome discharge of a Washington day, the distilled essence of a thousand minds.

Cordovan brogues planted at either side of his typewriter table, hands clasped as a cradle for his peppered head, tie loose but still plumb in its buttoned-downed place, Nick kept at bay any irritant wisp of thought that might intrude on his self-imposed tranquility.

His adrenaline would not recharge him until the completed street edition, the freshly inked "practice" sheet, was slapped smartly on his desk by one of the news aides.

The slap of the Chronicle falling on his Lucite desk top, like a slap on the butt, jarred him out of his stupor. His long legs unhitched from over the typewriter and curled under the desk as he opened the first section, smudging the ink with his fingers. He covered the headlines with a single glance, as his short-fused temper was immediately ignited by a single word. He pressed a buzzer and waited for the gruff mumble of Prescott, the copy editor.

"Remove balk, Harry, as in ‘Russians Balk,’ lower right, beneath the crease."

"Nit-picking. Balk is exactly right."

"It’s an old baseball term, Harry. Not precise."

"How about bark?" Nick could detect the professional irritation. Copy editors traditionally overreacted to their own myth. They fought over words like male lions over their mates. Nick’s temper fuse sputtered. Tread lightly, he told himself. Don’t take it out on Harry.

"Give it a try, Harry," Nick said, ending the argument. He peered through the glass and across the room at Prescott, who turned to glare back. Nick smiled and waved, softening the jab. His eye roamed the rest of the page, searching for blips, like a trained cyclops soaking up the neatly inked Times Roman. It was a second look. He had already seen the proofs of page 1, the smudged lines, the silky feel, the still unfamiliar odor of the new newspaper technology. The craft unions had fought its coming for years. They had taunted him with strike threats and slowdowns, sick calls and deliberate fuck-ups.

"I’m no goddamned union negotiator," he had told Myra. "I’m a newspaperman."

"You’re the executive editor," she had said gently, the veneer of layered softness carefully masking the hard flint beneath.

"And you’re the boss."

"Your job is to get the paper on the street. Mine is to turn a profit. Neither of us has it all roses."

"But they’re being unreasonable."

"Look at it from their point of view. They see technology as the enemy, robbing them of their livelihoods. They see computers taking over."

It was hypocrisy not to accept new discoveries, Nick had thought. It was morally indefensible, if vaguely romantic, like Myra’s simplistic view of the Chronicle’s mission.

He had listened with rising impatience as she outlined her "views" after Charlie’s death, as if in his ten years as Charlie’s honcho he hadn’t understood. He didn’t mind her borrowing the rather naive idea, only the way she stated it; it came out so pedantic and self-serving. Charlie had never expressed it with such self-consciousness. But Charlie had died, his brains soaked with booze, anger, and madness.

"Objectivity must be our first priority," Myra had told him then. "The unvarnished truth. That was my father’s only consideration. That’s the way Dad wanted it and that’s the way Charlie built it." He had listened with impatience. Deference was the proper attitude of a new widow. But the look of triumph in her eyes was clearly visible. Nick had said nothing, his hand white-knuckled as it held the Scotch glass.

"I need you, Nick," she had said finally. "I know they’re all laughing at me." Her father, and then Charlie, had stood between her and the Chronicle. Now they were gone.

She had stood up, a sweater thrown lightly around her frail shoulders, practicing humility, he had thought. She was too clever to make changes now, too shrewd. And his view of her was still colored by Charlie’s disintegrating mind, the calibration awry. Charlie, toward the end, had seen her as a monstrous enemy, greedy to wrest the Chronicle from his hands. And despite the obviousness of Charlie’s paranoia, Nick had enlisted in his cause. Was it out of simple friendship, loyalty? Or was Nick, too, secretly covetous of the Chronicle? Toward the end she had had Charlie institutionalized, straitjacketed. Nick’s last view of him was of a broken, mindless man, hungering for death. Had she known that when she brought him home? Near all those trophy guns. Charlie’s death was, Nick knew, his own loss far more than hers.

She did not turn from the window.

"Charlie needs you now more than ever," she had said, invoking the name unfairly, since she knew he could never refuse Charlie anything.

"Charlie’s dead," he had answered. She turned from the window to face him.

"And I’m alive," she said. In that moment, he glimpsed the hardness beneath the pose of humility, the chip of granite off the old block. In the way she stood, good athletic legs planted squarely, jaw jutted, the image of her father’s portrait in the eighth-floor boardroom, Nick could glimpse both her determination and her frustration. But now no one stood between her and her rightful legacy. Surely, he thought, she had dreamed of standing one day in that spot. Charlie had simply been the means, the conduit, and Charlie had cracked, the victim of genetic poisoning, or so he himself believed.

It was she who had handpicked Charlie years ago, moved perhaps by the same forces within her that she sometimes seemed to despise, her womanliness. To Charlie, his selection had been at first tantalizing, then burdensome, and finally destructive.

Now Nick sensed danger, as if he had suddenly been caught in a shark’s scent. Watch out, he told himself. He could feel his breath catch as she came toward him.

"It’s my right to be here and I mean to exercise that right," she said firmly, stopping before him, her hazel eyes moist. "We could be one helluva team, Nick. Accept me. Like you and Charlie."

He expelled his breath. The question in his mind was how long she would need him. Was he simply to be gobbled up like some heavy ripe fruit, eaten to its core and digested?

But Nick had known all along that this day would come. He must learn to see her, understand her, stop viewing her from Charlie’s poor vantage point. It was, after all, the price he would have to pay. He must find the key to knowing her, he thought, suddenly anguished again by Charlie’s final betrayal, the gun in the mouth, the splattered remains that stained forever the oak panels in Mr. Parker’s house, the legacy of his madness. He must learn to accept her, he cautioned himself. She was mistress of his present, his future.

"Charlie built the Chronicle out of the strength of my father’s mind," Myra continued, as if she had practiced the words. "Out of abstractions. My father hungered for truth. For him, a banker, the printed word was the ultimate conveyance of truth. The power of the printed word was all. Charlie made it begin to happen."

There is truth in that, Nick thought. And he had helped Charlie to build from that beginning. There was credit due her, too, he reasoned, struggling, as always, to view her objectively rather than through Charlie’s convoluted prism.

Charlie’s first objective had been to make the Chronicle self-sustaining, to take it off old Parker’s dole. That took fantastic skills, business acumen, horse sense.

"Nothing has to change," she said suddenly, rechanneling the direction of her thought, perhaps ashamed of her immodesty, as if she had shown a strip of soft white thigh. "You take care of the newspapering, just like you did for Charlie in the last days of his . . . his illness. I won’t interfere."

"Is that a promise?" he said.

"We’ll be a team," she said quickly, ignoring the question. "Nick, we can make the Chronicle the most important paper in the country."

"I leaned a lot on Charlie," he had said.

"And Charlie on you."

"I suppose."

"Lean on me, then, Nick. I’m a lot stronger than you might think."

He looked at the frail woman, remembering Charlie’s hate. He had watched it grow, had seen its first frail sprouting in the soil of his anger, watched the first buds mature even before Mr. Parker had died, then saw the buds open, multiply, renew, an ugly stalk twisting itself around his friend’s guts.

"God, I hate that woman," Charlie had confided to him as the martinis at lunch grew to three, then four, then beyond the counting. And finally Charlie was teetering on the edge of madness, a twilight world.

Once he had found him in a rat-infested walk-up in the heart of Washington’s black ghetto. Charlie was lying naked on a filthy, stained mattress in a vile, urine-smelling room lit by a bare bulb, a large booze-bloated woman sprawled next to him in her own alcoholic stupor.

"Take a picture, Nick baby. I want to send it to Myra; a Christmas card."

He had taken the picture in his mind, all right; then, disgusted by the stink in his nostrils, inhaled cautiously as he hauled Charlie from the bed, dressed him, and dragged his dazed body to a waiting taxi. It had not been the first time, or the last, that he had played rescue squad for Charlie in that two-year descent.

The scene and Charlie’s words bubbled upward through his memory. From what poisoned stream had come such a deep well of hate, he wondered? Had he missed something about Myra?

"I’m not going anywhere, Myra," Nick said, knowing that he was trapped, like a fly caught in the ink rollers of the great presses.

Her thin hand reached out for his, white and lightly speckled with freckles. Her hair was reddish blonde, but she was letting the grey poke through now, the silver strands somehow belligerent in their glistening validation of age.

Am I surrendering anything? he remembered asking himself as his hand groped out to meet hers, feeling its coolness. He was embarrassed by the sweatiness in his own palms.

"We’ll take it from here," Myra said, grabbing his upper arm as well, squeezing it, then releasing it and walking briskly behind her desk.

"We’ll work it out, Myra." He wondered if his words were symbols of his impotence, the collective pronoun a sign of weakness. Was he fawning? He became suspicious, of his own motives. She was, after all, the boss, he reasoned. He’d simply have to find the strategy to cope with her. If only Charlie’s hate had not warped his view.

"I’ll keep my promise," Myra said, sensing his thoughts. "I’m not going to throw any monkey wrenches into the works. We’ll set policy together. If we have differences we’ll use persuasion on each other. No Horatius at the bridge stuff around here."

"I have only one condition," he said, wondering if he sounded courageous.

"Shoot," she said quickly, the enduring shadow of Charlie falling over her chair.

"It’s got to be just you and me. No layers of executives, in between. No third parties. No bureaucratic bullshit. The always open door."

"Done," she shot back without hesitation. He wondered if she realized what he had meant. It was one thing to have observed the power and influence of the Chronicle from the outside and quite another to see it from the inside. Could he explain to her what it meant to be a sculptor fashioning form from raw clay, a painter, palette in hand before the empty canvas? It was like being God. How long would it take her to find that out? Or did she already know?

• See complete details about The Henderson Equation including immediate purchase options.