Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Schaeffer looked at his reporter in disbelief. “Jesus, you wanna give Marshall a Medal of Honor? You’re making him sound like a fucking hero.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Pace said. “I was thinking of him more as a father so desperate to protect a child he was willing to risk his career to carry it off.”

“We’re not talking about an innocent here, you know,” Schaeffer said.

“That was Clay’s point, too. But nobody’s ever gonna prove it.”

Schaeffer shrugged. “I think it will come out when Davis and Greenwood go to trial.”

“They’ll probably plead out.”

Schaeffer shrugged again. “So?” he said. “What does it matter? It’s moot now. I only mentioned it to keep in front of your guilt-ridden eyes the fact that the dedicated daddy you’re defending wasn’t exactly the Albert Schweitzer of the political jungle.”

Pace nodded. “I know all that intellectually,” he said. “What I can’t escape is that we smeared the reputation of a man who, it turns out, was only trying to protect a developmentally disabled child. And the pressure our stories exerted could have, could have, contributed to his premature death.” Pace looked Schaeffer straight in the eye, and his voice developed a hard edge. “I don’t understand why that doesn’t bother you a little bit.”

Schaeffer broke the eye contact first. “It bothers me, Steve,” he said softly. “It bothers the hell out of me.”

He scooped more ice into each of their glasses and lifted the bottle of Black Jack again. Pace capped his glass with his hand palm down, a signal he’d had enough.

“Please,” Schaeffer said quietly.

Pace withdrew his hand, and the editor poured. The combination of old ice, new ice, old melt and new sour mash filled the glass to the brim.

Schaeffer did the same for himself, then sat back heavily in his chair. He slouched, so his back was at an angle to the seat and the chair back. His legs were extended straight out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He had his hands folded in his lap, and his face was slack. Pace could see him thinking, collecting thoughts he wanted to put into words.

“I stand by what I said before. I don’t feel guilty, I refuse to feel guilty,” Schaeffer said glumly. “More than anything, I hate Harold Marshall right at this moment. It isn’t that I hate him for what he did. I hate him for what he made me do. By refusing to answer the questions that desperately needed answers, he forced my hand. He forced me to accept things that weren’t true. He backed me into a corner.”

Pace considered that for a moment and nodded. “Could you—or I—have responded differently?” he asked.

Schaeffer shook his head slowly, and he sat there shaking his head for a long time.

“That’s what bothers me so much, Steve,” he said finally. “I think about what we did, what we wrote, the decisions I made, the instructions I gave, and I can’t pinpoint the moment I made the misjudgment, or, in fact, if I made a misjudgment at all.” He shook his head once more, decisively, and sat up straight, reaching for his glass. “I don’t think I’m deceiving myself. I don’t think I’m lying to myself. I think, with the little time I’ve had to consider it, if I were confronted again with the same sets of circumstances that confronted me in April and May and June, I would make the same decisions.”

“Do you think they were the wrong decisions?” Pace asked.

Schaeffer nodded. “Some of them, yes, obviously.”

“And yet you’d make them again?”

“Probably.”

“Even though they were wrong?”

“We had no reason at the time to think they were wrong.”

Pace took a long pull at his glass and sighed deeply. “How,” he asked, “are we ever supposed to know?”

Schaeffer shrugged. “We have our training, our professional experience, our experienced judgment. They’re supposed to guide us.”

“And when they guide us wrong? Then what do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Avery Schaeffer said. “I really don’t.”

They sat there in the Glory Room and talked until midnight, the conversation getting more theoretical, more esoteric, as the hour got later and the volume of Black Jack consumption grew. Schaeffer finally ordered his reporter to go home—by taxi—and get some sleep. Schaeffer told him not to worry about Sharon Marshall. He would take care of that situation. He didn’t know how, exactly, but it was his problem, and he would deal.

Schaeffer sat in the Glory Room, alone, for several more hours. He had nothing more to drink. He spent most of the time gazing at the awards surrounding him, caressing them with memories, as he struggled to recall how he’d made the decisions then, on each of those stories, about what to write and how to cast it. He remembered most of it. And in the remembering, he realized some of those earlier decisions had been as difficult and as chancy as those he’d made this time.

Where had the process gone wrong?

The question swam in and out of his consciousness like a poltergeist, inflicting fear and anxiety and misgiving, and then disappearing, leaving behind the certainty that the apprehension was a bad dream. But it came back in waves, like nausea. The question pounded at him, relentlessly, for more hours than he knew were passing. He realized suddenly the sky was growing brighter, dawn was approaching. Another workday was upon him.

And for the first time in Avery Schaeffer’s professional career, a newsroom wasn’t where he wanted to be.

The sun was up fully when Schaeffer let himself back into the Chronicle Building after scouting up breakfast and coffee. The early security man, who had come on duty since Schaeffer left the building, was obviously surprised to see the editor at that hour.

“You’re in early, Mr. S.,” he said, his expression quizzical as he noticed the unshaven face and the rumpled suit.

“Actually, this is the end of a late night, Pete,” Schaeffer replied amicably. He walked into a waiting elevator and listened as the doors closed on the security guard’s response.

He rode alone to the tenth floor, got off and strode into the newsroom. It was so strange, he thought, to see it empty. It was not the way he wanted to remember it.

He let himself into his office and activated the personal computer on the credenza behind his desk. He had gone over and over the words he would write in the signed editorial the following day. The Chronicle had never run a signed editorial in its history, as far as he knew. This one would be different. It had to be. His fingers moved across the keyboard, and the words he formed in his mind re-formed on the gray screen before him:

“This is an apology.

“It is a personal apology from me, not an apology for the Washington Chronicle , nor for anyone else on the staff.

“It is an apology, overdue but heartfelt, to the late Sen. Harold Marshall, R-Ohio, and to a young woman I met recently. It is possible that terrible wrongs have been done. It is possible that Harold Marshall, for all his infamous hostility, venality, and questionable judgment, might have been innocent of some of the crimes suggested by this newspaper. I know now that Harold Marshall, for all his secrecy about things we badgered him to make public, for all his defiance in the face of accusations about his role in the Converse conspiracy, likely played no role in murder. It is even possible that his so-called crimes were limited to the lack of wisdom he exhibited in sending two aides to plead Converse’s case prematurely before investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board. Misjudgment is no crime; indeed, if it were, we would all be in jail.