Read The Henderson Equation for Free Online Page A

more than the
devil." He paused. "But we need them, as we need the angels, witness
to man's venom." He laughed suddenly, wrote out something on a piece of
paper, then handed it to Nick.
    "Bring this up to Personnel," he said, dismissing
him, opening his drawer again to choose the horse for the next race.
    "Like falling off a leprechaun's log," Charlie
told him later at Shanley's, clinking glasses in a toast.
    But two weeks later he had nearly blown the whole
opportunity; and watching the beefy back of the Police Chief as it moved
heavily in the chair, Nick saw in its bulk the impending termination of his
budding career.
    As low man on the totem of general assignment, they had him
writing obits and fillers and interviewing an assortment of characters that
floated into the city room, as if the paper were a court of last resort. Mostly
they were forlorn, defeated remnants of the human chain seeking solace,
vindication, or revenge. Or people who had lost something, a son, a daughter, a
father, a mother, their pride, money; empty souls spewed up along the city
beach. The News, a tabloid, written in tight, simple declarative
sentences for the masses, had come to be known as the people's press, the
literature of the little man. It could be digested in one 20-minute ride from
Brooklyn to Manhattan and was the largest circulated paper in the United States.
    "There are more of us than them," the city
editor, O'Hara, told Nick not long after he had arrived, pointing to a New
York Times lying like a tattered corpse in his wastebasket. As if to
emphasize the lesson, he had spread a penciled cross through "Mr." in
Nick's first obit.
    "Even when a man dies, he's no 'mister' in this sheet.
He doesn't get born 'mister' and he doesn't die 'mister.'" The
admonishment seemed to Nick painful at the time, as if a man's dignity were
somehow diminished by this final penciled act.
    In two weeks he had seen more human misery walk into the
anteroom, where a red-faced retired fireman acted as receptionist, than he had
seen in the war. There, at least, death arrived with grim certainty. Here it
seemed as though death waited in the wings while some mad manipulator injected
weird forms of agony before a final demise.
    "The woman out there knows who murdered Elwood
Johnson," Nick told O'Hara on the first occasion of his being sent to
interview one of these unfortunates.
    "Who?"
    "Elwood Johnson."
    "Colored?"
    "Yes."
    "Ass," O'Hara hissed. He motioned to Donnelly, a
grey-headed reporter lounging on the copy bench. "Explain it to old wet
ears." Nick repeated the woman's story to Donnelly.
    "Colored murders aren't news, kid. We get ten calls a
night on those. Who cares?" Donnelly said sleepily.
    "Elwood Johnson must have cared."
    "We don't report Harlem murders. What's another dead
shine?"
    "You mean we don't report murders?"
    "Oh, we're big on murders. We love murders. But
colored murders are hardly news."
    "Then what do I tell the woman?"
    "Give her a nickel for the subway and tell her to go
back to Harlem." Which he did, but not without shame. He got the same
rebuff on people who wanted to find a missing relative or friend.
    "People are always losing each other. It's not news
unless it happens to someone important, a name you know. Like President Truman
searching for a bastard son. We're a newspaper, dummy, not a damned
catalog."
    After the first week he hardened his stance, perfected the
technique of the brush-off. Then one day a little Italian with a running nose
walked into the anteroom. The city desk sent Nick out for the interview. Mucus
was leaking onto the man's lip and his dark eyes kept darting from side to
side. He was petrified with fright. In heavily accented English he explained
that he had a fruit store on Twenty-first Street that had just been burned
down. The man's fingers were encrusted with grime, chapped into frozen stumps
from long cold mornings handling fruit.
    "They burna my store because I see dem payoffa da
cops."
    "Who?"
    "Da