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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: