Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“Oh, thanks. I trusted you enough to violate the rules of the grand jury a few minutes ago, but you don’t trust me enough to tell me who’s accusing you.”

Pace sketched the story for Helms, using no names, dates, or places. “And that’s all off the record,” the reporter concluded.

“Sad business,” Helm agreed. “How do you know it’s true?”

“The source left copies of medical records. They check out. She showed us the bankbook that backed up the story. It was the McCoy, too.”

“No wonder you’re bummed.”

“It goes a little beyond bummed,” Pace said.

“If it does, you’re being way too hard on yourself,” Helm replied. “Good Christ, what if Marshall wasn’t involved in murder? The guy was the shithole of the year. He lied for Converse, he cheated for Converse, he tried to pervert a federal investigation for Converse. He pulled Chapman Davis out of a slum and turned him into a well-educated political aide so he could turn around and blackmail a basically vulnerable man into doing all sorts of unspeakable things. And then, when the time was right, and conveniently forgetting the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Marshall gave or sold Davis to Greenwood so his good friend could use the guy, too. Oh, Marshall didn’t give the orders to kill, but he knew. He couldn’t have not known. He set this thing up as surely as if he’d bought the guns.”

“But what if he didn’t know?” Pace asked.

“What on earth could possibly lead you to even consider that?”

“His daughter says that as much of a jerk as he became after his wife died and his son went off the deep end, he wasn’t bad enough to take a life or to order someone killed.”

“And you believe that?”

“Why would she lie? She’s not suing us or looking for compensation.”

“How would she know?”

“Who knows a father better than a daughter?”

“Maybe everybody—probably everybody,” Helm said. “Maybe the daughter doesn’t see what she doesn’t want to see.”

Helm heard Pace sigh deeply.

“Steve, this is going to be with you for a long, long time. You’re going to have to learn to live with it. You can live with it while you’re wallowing in a lot of self-pity and doubt, or you can live with it and carry on and grow. I’d suggest the latter.”

They said nothing for five full minutes, each averting his eyes from the other, staring instead into the depths of intimate regret and trying ineffectively to come to terms with it.

Schaeffer sat quietly at his desk, his hands in his lap.

Pace was hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed at an unseen place on the carpet between his feet, while the memory camera behind his eyes played a highlight film of the past thirteen weeks. Over and over, the question ran through his mind: Where did I go wrong?

He didn’t realize he’d asked it out loud. He was startled out of his trance by the sound of Avery Schaeffer’s big fist hitting the top of his desk.

“Goddamn it, Steve, you didn’t go wrong!” Schaeffer said with vehemence. “That young woman came here to make us accept the guilt for her father’s death, and it’s tempting to do that. But the guilt is his own, not ours.”

Pace frowned. A few minutes earlier Schaeffer appeared deeply burdened by the weighty cloak of remorse Sharon Marshall fitted for them; now he rejected any responsibility at all. Pace saw that his lack of understanding exasperated the editor.

“Sharon Marshall would have us believe that our stories—our harassment, if you accept her interpretation of it—put such pressure on her father that he busted an artery and died. Although it’s tempting, and I admit I considered it, I won’t accept that kind of responsibility. We didn’t force him to lie. We didn’t force him to cover up truths that would have exonerated him from criminal culpability. He took on that role for himself for whatever misguided reasons. If it was emotional tension and pressure that killed him, it was of his own making, not ours.”

Pace didn’t want to defend Harold Marshall, but he heard himself doing so. “He was protecting a vulnerable child, Avery!” he argued. “Wouldn’t any parent?”

Schaeffer exhaled a deep breath. He fished in his pants pocket for something and came out with a ring of keys. Selecting a small one, he swiveled to the credenza behind his desk and unlocked the bottom cabinet compartment. When he opened one of the doors, Pace saw there a fully equipped bar, even containing a small icemaker. Schaeffer filled an insulated bucket with tiny cubes, hauled out two glasses and a quart of Jack Daniel’s.

“This your brand?” he asked the reporter.

“It’ll do if you don’t have any good stuff,” Pace joked, wondering how it escaped office gossip that Schaeffer had a bar there.

The editor grabbed the ice bucket and the bottle and told Pace to get the glasses. “If you want water in yours, you’ll have to get it from one of the fountains in the newsroom,” he said as he got up from the desk. “Let’s go sit in the Glory Room, where nobody can watch us get drunk.”

The first drink Schaeffer poured was modest enough. They would get bigger later.

“You know,” he said, putting coasters under the two glasses, “this is only the second time I’ve used that bar. The first time was the night Henry Kissinger came by after hours to talk about our editorial reaction to the opening of relations with China. When was that? God, decades ago.” He dismissed the passage of time with a wave of his hand and went on to other things. “I don’t like having a bar there. I don’t think booze has any place in a newspaper office, old traditions of a bottle in the bottom drawer of every desk notwithstanding. Hell, I’m beginning to wonder if booze has any reasonable place in human life. Cornelia says it never did a damn thing good for anybody, and when I’m into my first wonderful martini of the night, I tend to ignore her. But she’s probably got a point.” He laughed. “It certainly didn’t help your relations with Ken Sachs.”

“That’s healed,” Pace said, quickly enough that he sounded defensive.

Schaeffer nodded. “Obviously,” he said. “I didn’t mean that as a criticism. It was the first example that came to mind. And speaking of Cornelia, I guess I’d better let her know not to hold dinner for me. I’ll be here a while.”

“You don’t have to stay on my account, Avery.”

“I’m not. I’m staying on mine. I want to talk this through. I’m going to call home, and you should do the same so the ladies don’t worry.”

Both telephone conversations were brief.

“My initial reaction to the meeting was abject remorse,” Schaeffer said later. “That makes me angry. I’m not guilty of anything. Neither are you.”

Pace ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t want to be argumentative, Avery,” he said. “It’s probably true that if Marshall had been open about his source of personal funds, if he’d told the world about the son he was trying to protect, the stories about him would have been different. The pressure on him would have been much less. But his effort to protect his son would have been destroyed.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because Jimmy would have been common knowledge, and that would have ended his privacy.”

“Why is that necessarily so?” Schaeffer persisted. “What makes you think the world would beat a path to Boardman, Ohio, to buy gas from a kid with Tourette’s Syndrome?”

Pace shook his head. “I didn’t mean that. But the Washington stories would have been picked up by the wire services, and the wire stories would be in the local Ohio papers. Somebody out there would try to interview Jimmy. And even if they didn’t, the kid can read. If Sharon Marshall’s telling the truth, newspaper stories could have brought back all the lousy shit Jimmy Marshall’s forgotten. And the memories could set him back a dozen years or more. That’s what his father understood. That’s the truth he died to protect.”