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.