Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Three

Martin drove downtown and parked on Broadway near the Plaza, as usual, and headed, he thought, for the Times-Union. But instead of turning up Beaver Street, he walked south on Broadway, all the way to Madison Avenue. He turned up Madison, realizing then that he was bound for Spanish George’s bar. He had no urge to drink and certainly no reason to confront either George or any of his customers, especially at this hour. George, notorious in the city’s South End, ran a bar and flophouse in Shanks’s old three-story livery stable. He had come to America from Spain to build the Barge Canal and stayed on to establish an empire in the dregs, where winos paid to collapse on his cots after they had all but croaked on his wine.

The sour air assaulted Martin as he stepped inside the bar, but he understood the impulse that was on him and did not retreat. His will seemed unfettered, yet somehow suspended. He knew he was obeying something other than will and that it might, or might not, reveal its purpose. In the years when this came as a regular impulse, he often found himself sitting in churches, standing in front of grocery stores, or riding trolleys, waiting for revelation. But the trolley often reached the end of the line and took him back to his starting point without producing an encounter, and he would resume the previous path of his day, feeling duped by useless caprice. Yet the encounters which did prove meaningful, or even prophetic of disaster or good fortune, were of such weight that he could not help but follow the impulse once he recognized it for what it was. He came to believe that the useless journeys did not arise from the same source as those with genuine meaning, but were rather his misreadings of his own mood, his own imagination, a duping of self with counterfeit expectations. Five such fruitless trips in four days after his debauch made him aware his gift had fled. Now, as he gagged on the wine-pukish rancidity of George’s, on the dead-rat stink and the vile-body decay that entered your system with every breath, he was certain that the impulse was the same as it had always been, whether true or false; and what he was doing was giving his mystical renewal a chance to prove itself. He ordered a bottle of beer and when George was looking elsewhere he wiped its neck clean with his handkerchief and drank from the bottle.

“I don’t see you too much,” George said to him.

George was, as usual, wearing his filthy sombrero and his six-gun in the embroidered leather holster, and looked very like a Mexican bandido. The gun, presumably, was not loaded, or so the police had ordered. But any wino aggressive on muscatel could not be so sure of that, and so George, by force of costume alone, maintained order on his premises.

“That’s true, George,” Martin said. “I keep pretty busy uptown. Not much on this edge of things lately.”

“I see you writing in the paper.”

“Still at it. Right you are.”

“You never write me a story any more.”

“I’ve done you, George, again and again. You’ve ceased to be newsy. If you decide to renovate the premises and put in a bridal suite, then maybe I’ll work up a story.”

“No money in that stuff.”

“You’re probably right. Honeymooners are bum spenders. But business is good, I suppose?”

“Always lousy. You like a sandwich? Fry an egg for you?”

“I just had breakfast, thanks. The beer is fine.”

“Okay,” George said, and he pushed Martin’s dollar back to him.

Martin sensed a presence then and looked toward the door to see a tall, shambling man in a suit coat of brown twill, collar up, lighting a cigarette as he moved toward the bar. Despite what the years had done to the man, Martin instantly recognized Francis Phelan, Billy’s father, and he knew his own presence here had a purpose. Forced confluence of Martin and the Phelans: Billy and Chick, now Francis, and yet more than that. The McCalls were part of it. And Martin’s father, too, in his bed of senility; and Melissa, in town in the old man’s play. A labyrinth.

“Francis,” said Martin, and Francis turned and squinted through half-waking eyes, pitiable visage. Martin vividly remembered the original: Franny Phelan: Albany’s best-known ball player in his time. And he remembered too the dreadful day in 1901 when the scabs and the militia were trying to drive a single trolley through a mob on Broadway in front of Union Station, and Franny, in front of the Railroad YMCA, hurling a smooth round stone like a fast ball, and laying open the skull of the scab conductor. The militia fired wildly into the crowd as other stones flew, and in retaliation for the dead scab, two men who had nothing to do with the violence, a businessman and a shopper, were shot dead. And Franny became a fugitive, his exile proving to be the compost for his talent. He fled west, using an alias, and got a job in Dayton playing pro ball. When he came home again to live, he returned to life on the road every summer for years, the last three as a big leaguer with Washington. Franny Phelan, a razzmatazz third baseman, maestro of the hidden ball trick.

Such a long time ago. And now Franny is back, the bloom of drink in every pore, the flesh ready to bleed through the sheerest of skin. He puffed his cigarette, dropped the lit match to the floor, inhaled, and then looked searchingly at Martin, who followed the progress of the match, watched its flame slowly burn out on the grease of George’s floor.

“Ah, how are you, Martin?” Francis said.

“I’m well enough, Fran, and how are you keeping yourself?”

“Keeping?” He smiled. “Orange soda, with ice,” he told George.

“What color orange has your money got?” George said.

“Take it here,” said Martin, pushing the dollar back to George. And George then poured Francis a glass of soda over ice, a jelly glass with a ridged rim.

“It’s been years,” Martin said. “Years and years.”

“I guess so,” said Francis. He sipped the soda, once, twice. “Goddamn throat’s burning up.” He raised the glass. “Cheers.”

“To you,” Martin said, raising the bottle, “back in Albany.”

“I only came to vote,” said Francis, smiling.

“To vote?”

“To register. They still pay for that here, don’t they?”

“Ah, yes, of course. I understand. Yes, I believe they do.”

“I did it before. Registered fourteen times one year. Twenty-eight bucks.”

“The price is up to five now. It must’ve been a long while ago you did that.”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember much of anything anymore.”

“How long has it been? Twenty years, it must be.”

“Twenty-two. I do remember that. Nineteen-sixteen.”

“Twenty-two years. You see the family?”

“No, I don’t go through that business.”

“I talked to Chick this morning.”

“Fuck him.”

“Well, I always get along pretty well with him. And he always thought well of you.”

“Fuck ’em all.”

“You don’t see your kids either?”

“No, I don’t see nobody.” He sipped the soda. “You see the boy?”

“Quite often. He’s a first-rate citizen, and good looking, with some of your features. I was with him last night. He bowled two-ninety-nine in a match game.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to see him? I could set that up.”

“No, hell no. None of that old shit. That’s old shit. I’m out of it, Martin. Don’t do nothin’ like that to me.”

“If you say so.”

“Yeah, I do. No percentage in that.”

“You here for a while?”

“No, passing through, that’s all. Get the money and get gone.”

“Very strange development, running into you here. Anything I can do for you, Franny?” Franny, the public name. What a hell of a ball player, gone to hell.

“I could use a pack of smokes.”

“What’s your brand?”

Francis snorted. “Old Golds. Why not?”

Martin pushed a quarter at George and George fished for the cigarettes and bounced them on the bar in front of Francis.

“That’s two I owe you, Martin. What’re you doin’ for yourself?”

“I write for the morning paper, a daily column.”

“A writer like your father.”

“No, not like that. Not anything like that. Just a column.”

“You were always a smart kid. You always wrote something. Your father still alive?”

“Oh yes,” and ancient times rolled back, the years before and after the turn of the century when the Phelans and Daughertys were next-door neighbors and Martin’s mother was alive in her eccentric isolation. Francis was the handyman who fixed whatever went wrong in the Daugherty home, Edward Daugherty cosmically beyond manual labor, Martin a boyish student of Francis’s carpentry skills as he put on the new roof or enlarged the barn to house two carriages instead of one. He was installing a new railing on the back stoop the summer morning Martin’s mother came down that same stoop naked, bound for the carriage barn with her shopping bag. Francis wrapped her in a piece of awning and walked her back into the house, the first indication to anyone except Edward Daugherty that something was distracting her.

Edward Daugherty used Francis as the prototype for the fugitive hero in his play about the trolley strike, The Car Barns, in which heroic Francis, the scab-killer, was immortalized. Legends and destinies worked out over the back fence. Or over a beer and an orange soda.

“He’s in a nursing home now,” Martin said of his father. “Pretty senile, but he has his moments when a good deal of it comes back. Those are the worst times.”

“That’s how it goes,” Francis said.

“For some people.”

“Yeah. Some don’t get that far.”

“I have the feeling I ought to do something for you, Fran,” Martin said. “Something besides a pack of cigarettes and a glass of soda. Why do I feel that?”

“Damned if I know, Martin. Nothing I want out of you.”

“Well, I’m around. I’m in the book, up on Main Street in the North End now. And you can always leave a message at the Times-Union.”

“Okay, Martin, and thanks for that,” and Francis extended his right hand, which was missing two joints on the index finger. He will throw no more baseballs. Martin shook the hand and its stumpy digit.

“Don’t blow any whistles on me, Martin. I don’t need that kind of scene.”

“It’s your life,” Martin said, but even as he said it he was adding silently: but not entirely yours. Life hardly goes by ones.

Martin bought an Armstrong at Jerry’s newsroom, just up from the paper, and then an egg sandwich and coffee to go at Farrell’s lunchroom, three doors down, and with breakfast and horses in hand he crossed Beaver Street, climbed the paintless, gray, footworn, and crooked staircase to the Times-Union city room, and settled in at his desk, a bruised oak antique at which the Albany contemporaries of Mark Twain might have worked. Across the room Joe Leahy, the only other citizen on duty and a squeaker of a kid, was opening mail at the city desk and tending the early phone. The only other life sign was the clacking of the Associated Press and International News Service teletypes, plus the Hearst wire, which carried the words of The Chief: editorials, advisories, exclusive stories on Marion Davies.

Martin never looked at the machine without remembering the night Willie Powers, the night slot man, went to lunch and came back pickled, then failed to notice an advisory that The Chief was changing his front-page editorial on Roosevelt, changing it drastically from soft- to hard-line antipathy, for the following day. Willie failed to notice not only the advisory but also the editorial which followed it, and so the Times-Union the next morning carried The Chief’s qualified praise of F.D.R., while the rest of the Hearst press across the nation carried The Chief’s virulent attack on the president, his ancestors, his wife, his children, his dog.

There is no record of Hearst’s ever having visited the Times-Union city room, but a week later, during a stopover at the Albany station on the Twentieth Century, The Chief received Emory Jones, who presented him with the day’s final edition, an especially handsome, newsy product by local standards. The Chief looked at the paper, then without a word let it fall to the floor of his private compartment, and jumped up and down on it with both feet until Emory fled in terror.

Martin fished up salt, pepper, saccharin, and spoon to garnish his sandwich and coffee and, as he ate, studied the entries in the Armstrong. There in the third at Laurel loomed a hunch, if ever a hunch there was: Charley Horse, seven-to-one on the morning line. He circled it, uncradled the phone receiver and dialed the operator: Madge, lively crone.

“Any messages for me, kiddo?”

“Who’d call you, you old bastard? Wait while I look. Yes, Chick Phelan called. Not that long ago. He didn’t leave a number.”

“You heard from Emory? He coming in?”

“Not a word from him.”

“Then give me a line.”

Martin dialed home and told Mary the news and swore her to secrecy. Then he called Chick’s home. The phone rang but nobody answered. He dialed the home of Emory Jones, the Welsh rarebit, the boss of bosses, editor of editors, a heroic Hearstian for almost as many years as Hearst had owned newspapers, a man who lived and died for the big story, who coveted the Pulitzer Prize he would never win and hooted the boot-lickers and eggsuckers who waltzed off with it year after year. Martin would now bring him the word on the Charlie Boy story, fracture his morning serenity.

Martin remembered the last big Albany story, the night word arrived that a local man wanted for a triple murder in Canada would probably try to return to the U.S. Which border crossing he had in mind was uncertain, so Em Jones studied the map and decided the fellow would cross at Montreal. But on the off chance he would go elsewhere Emory also alerted border police at Niagara Falls, Baudette, Minnesota, and Blaine, Washington, to our man perhaps en route. When the four calls were made Emory sat down at the city desk, lit up a stogie, and propped up his feet to wait for the capture. We got him surrounded, he said.

“Em, that you?”

“Ynnnnnh.”

“I’ve got a bit of news.”

“Ynnnh.”

“Charlie McCall was kidnapped during the night.”

Emory yawned. “You drunken son of a bitch.”

“I’m not drunk, nor have I been, nor will I be.”

“Then you mean it? You mean it?” Emory stood up. Even through the telephone, Martin observed that.

“I just left Patsy and Matt, and Maloney too, all at Patsy’s house, and I pledged in your name we wouldn’t run a story on it.”

“Now I know you’re lying.” Emory sat down.

“Emory, you better get down here. This town is getting ready to turn itself inside out.”

The editor of editors fell silent.

“You really do mean it?”

“Whoever grabbed Charlie meant it, too.”

“But you didn’t tell Patsy that about no story. You wouldn’t say that.”

“I did.”

“You needle-brained meathead. What in the sweet Christ’s name possessed you?”

“My Celtic wisdom.”

“Your Celtic ass is right between your eyes, that’s your wisdom. I’m coming down. And you better figure a way to undo that pledge, for your own sake. And this better be real. Is it real?”

“Em, are your teeth real?”

“Half and half.”

“Then Em, this story is even more real than your teeth.”

Martin found two more Chuck and Charlie horses in the Armstrong, checked his wallet, and lumped all but his last ten on the bunch, across the board, plus a parlay. Never a hunch like this one. He called the bets in to Billy Phelan, the opening move in his effort to bring Billy into the McCall camp, not that Billy would require much persuasion. Billy was a Colonie Streeter, was he not? Grew up three doors up from Patsy and next door to Bindy, knew Charlie Boy all his life. But Billy was an odd duck, a loner, you bet, erratic in a way Martin was not. Billy was self-possessed, even as a boy, but then again he had to be, did he not? Fatherless from age nine, when Francis Phelan left home, left wife, son, and daughter forever, or at least until this morning.

Martin’s problem was similar, but turned inside out: too much father, too much influence, too much fame, too much scandal, but also too much absence as the great man pursued his greatness. And these, my friends, are forces that deprived a young man of self-possession and defined his life as a question mark, unlike Billy Phelan’s forces, which defined his life as an exclamation point.

When his bets were made Martin swallowed the last of his coffee and went to the morgue and pulled all files on the McCalls. They should have had a file cabinet to themselves, given the coverage of their lives through the years, but thieves walked abroad. No clips remained of Patsy’s victory in 1919, or even of the Democratic sweep of the city in 1921. Stories on the 1931 legislative probe into the city’s assessment racket were gone. So were all reports on Patsy’s doing six months for contempt in the baseball-pool scandal.

This was historical revisionism through burglary. Had freelancers looking for yet another magazine piece on the notorious McCalls done the filching? Or was it McCall loyalist reporters, who doubled on the city payroll as sidewalk inspectors? The lightfingering effectively kept past history out of the ready reach of reform-minded newsmen, or others snooping on behalf of uplift: Tom Dewey, the redoubtable D.A., for instance, who was making noises like a governor: Elect me, folks, and I’ll send the McCall bunch swirling down the sinkhole of their own oily unguents.

Joe Leahy saw Martin shuffling through the McCall files and wondered aloud, “What’s up with them?”

“Ahh,” said Martin with theatrical weariness, “a backgrounder on them and the A.L.P Big power move that comes to a head tonight when the enrollment figures come in.”

“The McCalls taking on the reds? Can they really do it?”

“The power of prayer is with them. The bishop’s behind Patsy all the way.”

“You writing something for the first edition?”

“Nothing for the first. When it happens, it happens.”

Martin turned back to the folders and Leahy walked off, a good Catholic boy who loved Franco and hated the reds. Untrustworthy with anything meaningful. Martin leafed through the Charlie Boy file, all innocuous stuff. Promoted to major in the National Guard. Engaged to sweet-faced Patricia Brennan. Initiated into the B.P.O.E. lodge number forty-nine. Named vice-president of the family brewery. Shown visiting Jimmy Braddock in his dressing room in Chicago before the fight with Joe Louis. Shown with his favorite riding horse, a thoroughbred named Macushla, birthday gift from Uncle Patsy of political fame, who keeps horses on a small Virginia farm.

Charlie was pudgy, the face of a smiling marshmallow on the torso of a left tackle. There he stood in his major’s suit, all Sam Browne and no wrinkles. Where are you this minute, Charlie Boy? Tied to a bed? Gun at your brain? How much do they say your life is worth? Have they already killed you?

Martin remembered Charlie’s confirmation, the boy kissing the bishop’s ring; then at the party Bindy gave afterward at the Hampton Hotel, the bishop kissing Bindy’s foot. That was the year the McCalls all but donated the old city almshouse to the Catholic diocese as a site for the new Christian Brothers Academy, the military high school where Charlie would become a cadet captain. Martin’s wife, Maire, now called Mary, a third or maybe fourth cousin to Bindy’s wife, sang “Come Back to Erin” at the confirmation party, accompanied on the piano by Mrs. Dillon, the organist at St. Joseph’s Church, whose son was simple-minded. And Mary, when the bishop congratulated her on her voice and parted her on the hand, felt fully at home in America for the first time since Martin had snatched her away from Ireland.

Martin’s recollection of Charlie Boy on that afternoon was obscured by memories of Bindy and Patsy and Matt, whom he saw yet at a table in a far corner, objects of veneration, Albany’s own Trinity.

The perils of being born, like himself, to a man of such fame and notoriety sent Martin into commiseration with Charlie. Bindy was an eminence, the power on the street. “Celebrated sporting figure” and “a member of the downtown fraternity” was as far as the papers ever went by way of identifying him. Cautious journalism. No one mentioned his direct power over the city’s illegal gambling. No editor would let a writer write it. It was the received wisdom that no one minds the elephant in the parlor if nobody mentions it’s there. Martin’s own decision to tell Patsy there would be no story on the kidnapping: Was that conspiratorial genuflection? No end to the veneration of power, for the news is out: The McCalls hurl thunderbolts when affronted.

The memory of their confrontation with The Albany Sentinel was still fresh. The Sentinel had prospered as an opposition voice to the McCalls in the early days of the machine, but its success was due less to its political point of view than to the gossip it carried. In 1925 the paper dredged up “The Love Nest Tragedy of 1908” involving Edward Daugherty and Melissa Spencer, purporting to have discovered two dozen torchy love letters from the famous playwright to the now beloved star of the silent screen. The letters were crude forgeries and Melissa ignored them. But Edward Daugherty halted their publication with an injunction and a libel suit. Patsy McCall saw to it that the judge in the case was attuned to the local realities, saw to it also that a hand-picked jury gave proper consideration to Patsy’s former Colonie Street neighbor. The Sentinel publicly admitted the forgery and paid nominal libel damages. But it then found its advertisers withdrawing en masse and its tax assessment quintupled. Within a month the ragbag sons of bitches closed up shop and left town, and moral serenity returned to Albany as McCall Democracy won the day.

“Aren’t you a little early this morning?”

Marlene Whiteson, a reporter whose stories were so sugary that you risked diabetic coma if you read them regularly, stood in front of Martin’s desk, inside her unnecessary girdle, oozing even at this hour the desire but not quite the will, never quite the will, to shed those restrictive stays, leap onto the desk, and do a goat dance with him, or with anyone. But Marlene was an illusionist, her sexuality the disappearing rabbit: Now you see it, now you don’t. Reach out to touch and find it gone, back inside her hat. The city room was full of hopefuls, ready to do Marlene, but as far as Martin knew, he himself came closest to trapping the rabbit on a night six years past when both of them worked late and he drove her home, circuitously. Need one explain why he stopped the car, stroked her cheek? She volunteered a small gift of smooch and said into his ear, Oh, Martin, you’re the man I’d like to go to Pago Pago with. Whereupon he reached for her portions, only to be pushed away, while she continued nevertheless with bottomless smooch. Twist my tongue but stroke me never. Oh the anomaly. Coquettes of the world, disband; you have nothing to gain but saliva.

“What goodies do you have for us today?” Martin asked her.

“I have a message for you, as a matter of fact. Did you see this morning’s paper?”

“I was just about to crack it.”

“I have a story in about Melissa Spencer. She sends you greetings and hopes she gets a chance to see you. She also asked about your father.”

“Ah. And is she well?”

“She looks absolutely gorgeous. For forty-nine. She is some sexy dame.”

“How long will she be here?”

“Just a week.”

Martin knew that. He had known for weeks she was starring in the touring production of his father’s great work, The Flaming Corsage, the play Edward Daugherty had written in order to transform his melodramatic scandal with Melissa and her jealous lesbian lover, and the consequent destruction of his career and his wife, into anguished theatrical harmony. He used both Martin’s mother, Katrina, and the young Melissa as models for the two principal women in the play, and, not unnaturally, Melissa, as a young actress, yearned to incarnate the role she had inspired in life.

Now, at forty-nine, no longer disguisable as the pristine Melissa of 1908, she was appearing in the play for the first time, but as the hero’s reclusive, middle-aged wife. The casting, the result of assiduous pursuit of the part by Melissa herself, had the quality of aged perfume about it: yesterday’s scarlet tragedy revived for an audience which no longer remembered this flaming, bygone sin, but for whom the reversal of roles by the famed Melissa was still quaintly scandalous. Melissa had acted in the play for six months on Broadway before taking it on the road, her comeback after a decade of invisibility: one of the most animatedly lovely stars of the silent screen back once more in the American embrace, this time visible, all but palpable, in the flesh.

“She really is interested in seeing you,” Marlene said, opening the morning paper to her interview with Melissa and spreading it on Martin’s desk. “She’s keeping a ticket in your name at the box office, and she wants you to go backstage after the curtain.” Marlene smiled and raised her sexual eyebrow. “You devil,” she said, moving away from Martin’s desk.

Martin barely managed a smile for the world champion of sexual fatuity. How surprised she would be at what Melissa could do with the same anatomical gifts as her own. He looked at Melissa’s photo in the paper and saw Marlene was right. Melissa was still beautiful. When time descends, the ego forfends. But Martin could not read her story now. Too distracted to resurrect old shame, old pleasure. But Martin, you will go backstage one night this week, will you not? He conjured the vision of the naked, spread-eagled Melissa and his phone rang. Chick Phelan on the line.

“I saw you go in across the street, Martin. What’d they say?”

“Not much except to confirm what you said.”

“Now they’ve cut off all the phones on the block. I’m in Tony Looby’s store down on Pearl Street.”

Chick, the snoop, grateful to Martin for introducing him to Evelyn Hurley, the love of his life, whom he is incapable of marrying. Chick will reciprocate the favor as long as love lasts.

“They probably don’t want any busybodies monitoring their moves and spreading the word all over town. Anything else going on?”

“People coming in here know something’s up but they don’t know what.”

“Just keep what you know under your hat, Chickie, for Charlie’s sake as well as your own. My guess is they’re afraid for his life. And keep me posted.”

Martin called Walter Bradley, the Albany police chief.

“Walter, I hear the phones are out on Colonie Street.”

“What’s that to me? Call the phone company.”

“We’ve been told, Walter, that something happened to Charlie McCall. I figured you’d know about it.”

“Charlie? I don’t know anything about that at all. I’m sure Patsy’d tell me if something was going on. I talk to Patsy every morning.”

“I talked to him myself just a while ago, Walter. And you say there’s nothing new? No kidnapping for instance?”

“No, no, no, no kidnapping, for chrissake, Martin. No kidnapping, nothing. Nothing at all. Everything’s quiet and let’s keep it that way.”

“You get any other calls about Charlie?”

“No, goddamn it, no. I said nothing’s going on and that’s all there is to it. Now I’m busy, Martin.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Walter.”

In minutes Martin’s phone rang again, Freddie Dunsbach of the United Press.

“Martin, we’ve had a tip Patsy McCall’s nephew was kidnapped.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s so and you know it.”

“Who said I know it?”

“I called Patsy. He denied it and then said to call you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“I thought you could tell me that. Right now we’ve got an eight-hour jump on you, Martin, or are you putting out an extra? You can’t keep a story like this all to yourself.”

“There’s no story, Freddie.”

“You really haven’t heard about it?”

“I’ve heard a wild rumor, but we don’t print rumors.”

“Since when?”

“Blow it out your ass, Fred.” And Martin hung up. The phone rang right back.

“Martin, I’m sorry. That was a joke.”

“I accept your groveling apology. What do you want?”

“Why did Patsy tell me to call you?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe to get rid of you.”

“I think we’re going with the rumor, as an editor’s advisory. Our source is a good one.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“We can’t sit on it.”

“You can if it means Charlie’s life.”

“This is too big. Hell, this is national.”

Martin snorted. Freddie Dunsbach, boy bureau chief. Arrogant yokel.

“It’s all of that. But let me ask you. How long’ve you been in this town?”

“Almost a year.”

“Then you ought to know that if the McCalls are quiet on this thing, and the police are quiet, there’s one hell of a reason. Patsy must’ve sent you to me because I told him I wouldn’t print any rumors. I see the significance escapes you, but Patsy’s concern is obviously for the safety of Charlie, if Charlie has in fact been kidnapped, which is really not provable if nobody admits it.”

“Does he expect us to bury our heads and ignore the story?”

“What Patsy expects is known only to the deity, but I know what I’d expect if I broke this story and Charlie was murdered because of it. Would you know what to expect in a case like that?”

Freddie was silent.

“Freddie, would you?”

“You’re talking about reprisals for reporting the news.”

“You ever hear about the time Bindy McCall beat a man half to death for insulting his wife? What do you suppose he’d do to somebody who caused the death of his only son? The only child in the whole McCall family.”

“You can’t run a news organization on that basis.”

“Maybe you can’t. Maybe a five-minute beat — which is about all you’d get since we’d put it on the I.N.S. wire as soon as the word was out — is worth Charlie’s life. Kidnappers are nasty bastards. You know what happened to Lindbergh’s kid, don’t you? And he was just a baby who couldn’t recognize anybody.”

“Yeah, there’s something in that.”

“There’s more than you think. We could’ve had an extra out an hour ago with the rumor. But who the hell wins that kind of game?”

“I see, but—”

“Listen, Fred, I don’t run the show here. You talk to Emory when he comes in. He’ll be calling the shots for us and I think I know what he’s going to do, which is nothing at all until there’s a mighty good reason to print something.”

“It’s going to be all over the world in a couple of hours.”

“Not unless you send it.”

“I’ll talk to Emory.”

“You do that.”

Martin dialed Patsy, and the great gravelbox answered, again on the first ring.

“Are you sending people to me for a reason, Patsy?”

“You’ll keep ’em quiet.”

“Hey, this thing is already spreading all over town. Some of these birds don’t give a damn about anything but news. They’ll blow it wide open unless they’re convinced there’s a hell of a good reason not to.”

Silence.

“Call Max at the office in five minutes.”

In five minutes precisely Martin called Max Rosen, law partner to Matt McCall.

“The story is this, Martin,” Max said. “I answered a call here forty-five minutes ago. A man’s voice told me to tell Patsy and Matt they’d picked up their nephew and wanted a quarter of a million ransom, a ridiculous figure. Half an hour ago we had a letter from them, with Charlie’s signature, saying the same thing. They said if we told the police or put out any publicity that they’d kill Charlie. Patsy wants you to inform the rest of the press about this. He won’t talk to anyone but you, and neither will I, nor anyone else in the family. We’re not telling Chief Bradley much of anything, so don’t bother him anymore. I don’t need to tell you what this means, do I, Martin, this confidence in you?”

“No need.”

“When there’s something to be said it will be said to you, provided you can convince the rest of the press to preserve silence.”

“I’ll do what I can, Max. But it’s quite a big world out here. Full of nosy, irresponsible newspapermen.”

“The family knows that.”

“Do they also know I don’t work miracles for a living?”

“I think they presume you do now.”

Emory Jones’s hair was white, with vague, yellowish implications that he might once have been the fair-haired boy of somebody, a mother perhaps, somewhere. He said, whenever the whiteness of his hair arose for discussion, that peabrained reporters who didn’t know the doughnut from the hole had given it to him prematurely. For years he had put up with them, he argued, because he had a basically sacrificial nature. He outlasted almost all of them, he argued further, because he had the forbearance of Jesus Christ in the face of the drooling, foaming, dementia praecox activity that passed for reporting on his one and only newspaper. The noted cry: “That son of a bitch doesn’t know the goddamn doughnut from the goddamn hole!” emanating from editor Jones’s cubicle, meant a short professional life for somebody.

Martin Daugherty placed Emory in this context as he spotted the white hair, saw Emory rumbling across the crooked, paintless, freshly swept wooden floor of the city room. Here he came: pear-shaped, bottom-heavy, sits too much, unhealthy fear of exercise in the man, choler rising, executorially preempted by Martin’s pledge, unspeakably happy at the unfortunate turn of events that had already boiled his creative fluids, which fluids, Martin could see, were percolating irrationally in his eyeballs.

Martin remembered a comparable frenzy in Emory’s past: the period when Legs Diamond had been an Albany celebrity; the most outlandishly sensational running news event in the modern history of Albany. Emory, who whipped his slaves like a galleymaster to ferret out every inch of copy the story could bear, finally triumphed prophetically the night Diamond was acquitted of a kidnapping charge. He oversaw personally the hand-setting of the great fist-sized wooden type he saved for major natural catastrophes, armistices, and The Chief’s sneezes: DIAMOND SLAIN BY ENEMIES; for the rumor had been abroad in Albany for twelve hours, and was indeed current the length of the Eastern seaboard and as far west as Chicago, that Diamond was, on that particular night, truly a terminal target. Emory had the headline made up a full six hours before Diamond was actually shot dead in his bed on Dove Street by a pair of gunmen. It was then used on the extra that sold twenty thousand copies.

Martin had already calculated that the extra that never was on Charlie Boy would have sold even more. When the news on Charlie did break, the coverage would dwarf the Diamond story. There had never been anything like this in Albany’s modern history, and Martin knew Emory Jones also knew this, knew it deeply, far down into the viscous, ink-stinking marrow of his editorial bones.

“Did you undo that goddamn pledge?” were Emory’s first words.

“No.”

“Then get at it.”

“It’s not possible, Emory.”

Emory moved his cigar in and out of his mouth, an unnerved thumbsucker. He sat down in the wobbly chair alongside Martin’s decrepit desk, blew smoke at Martin, and inquired: “Why in the sacred name of Jesus is it not possible?”

“Because I don’t think you’re interested in being the editor who put the bullet in Charlie McCall’s brain. Or are you?”

Martin’s explanation of the sequence of events forced Emory to recapitulate the future as he had known it all morning. Martin let him stew and then told him: “Emory, you’re the man in charge of this silence, whether you like it or not. You’re the man with the reputation, the journalistic clout. You’re the only one in town who can convince the wire services and whoever’s left among the boys up in the Capitol press room to keep their wires closed on this one for a little while. They’ll do it if you set the ground rules, make yourself chairman of the big secret. Maybe set a time limit. Two days? Four? A week?”

“A week? Are you serious?”

“All right, two days. They’ll do it as a gentleman’s agreement if you explain the dread behind it. You’ll be a genuine hero to the McCalls if you do, and that’s worth money to this newspaper, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Keep your venal sarcasm under your dirty vest.”

“It’s not sarcasm. It’s cynical humanism.”

“Well, hell, I don’t want to murder anybody. At least not Charlie.”

“I knew you’d get the picture.”

“But what will I tell them?”

“Emory, I have faith that you’ll think of something. We both know you’ve got more bullshit than the cattle states.”

“Maybe Dunsbach’s already put it out.”

“Maybe. Then your problem is solved, even if his isn’t. But I doubt it. I was persuasive.”

“Then you do it.”

“I can’t do it, Emory. I’m just a piss-ant columnist, not an omnipotent editor.”

“Willard Maney will go along. He’s an Albanian.”

“And a McCall fancier.”

“And Foley at the News.”

“Another kinsman.”

“But those bastards up at the Capitol. I don’t know them. You know them. You play cards with them when you’re supposed to be out getting under the news.”

“Use my name up there if you like.”

“The wire services can pass the word up there.”

“Exactly. And the boys will very likely follow suit. Despite what you think, they’re a decent bunch. And Emory, it’s really not your responsibility anyway what out-of-town writers do. Then it’s on them, and on their children. And what the hell, even an editor’s advisory like Dunsbach’s talking about wouldn’t be all that bad if they made it clear to their clients that Charlie’s life was at stake. Which is now a rotten fact.”

“That poor bastard. What he must be going through.”

“He may already be gone.”

Martin looked at the clippings on his desk, Charlie’s face staring up from one as he attends a Knights of Columbus party. On almost any given evening when Charlie walked into the K. of C, somebody would make a fool of himself over this gentle young man who might carry a word of good will back to his father and uncles. Life preservation. Money in the bank for those who make their allegiance known. Shake the hand of the boy who shakes the hand of the men who shake the tree from which falls the fruit of our days. Poor sucker, tied to a bed someplace. Will I live through the night? Will they shoot me in the morning? Where is my powerful father? Where are my powerful uncles? Who will save the son when the father is gone? Pray to Jesus, but where is Jesus? Jesus, Charlie, sits at my desk in the person of an equivocating Welsh rarebit who doesn’t understand sons because he never had any. But he understands money and news and power and decency and perhaps such things as these will help save the boy we remember. We are now scheming in our own way, Charlie, to keep you in our life.

“I was putting together a backgrounder on Charlie,” Martin said, breaking the silence. “Is there anything else you want me to do? There’s also that A.L.P business today.”

“The hell with that stuff now.”

“It’s pretty big, you know. Quite a show of power.”

“They’re a handful of reds, that’s all.”

“They’re not reds, Emory. Don’t you fall for that malarkey Probably only two or three are really Communists.”

“They’re pinks, then. What’s the difference?”

“We can discuss this fine point of color another time, but it’s definitely worth a story, and good play, no matter what else happens along with it.”

“Whatever happens I don’t want you on it. You stay on Charlie.”

“Doing what?”

“Find the kidnappers, what the hell else?”

“Find the kidnappers.”

“Check around Broadway. That’s where they hang out.”

“Check around Broadway.”

“And don’t get lost. Call me every hour. Every half-hour.”

“Every half-hour.”

And then Emory Jones, sucking on his stogie, rumbled off and slammed the door of his cubicle, then sat at his desk and picked up the phone to begin spreading the blanket of silence over a story whose magnitude punified even his own recurring glory dreams of news at its colossally tragic best.