Jay was packing his trunk when the phone rang. He went into I the kitchen and picked up the receiver. It was the UPI bureau chief, congratulating him. His photograph had run in more papers than any other photo that year, except for the picture of Katzenbach and Wallace. A good candidate for the Pulitzer Prize, he said.
Jay thanked him and hung up the phone. The Pulitzer Prize. That was what Charlie had said three nights ago, and he had recoiled at the words, his heart constricting inside him. Oh no, not for that.
He hated the picture; he wished he never had to look at it again. It was so much like Capa’s famous photo of the Spanish soldier, taken at the point of the bullet’s impact, head thrown back, body reeling with the fatal blow, and on Don Johnson’s face — shock, surprise, wonder — he did not yet understand what had happened to him.
“Oh, damn,” Jay said. He pounded his fist against the cabinet. “Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn!”
Did Capa know the Spanish soldier? Or was he simply an abstraction of death? Don Johnson was no abstraction. Usually when Jay printed a picture after he knew he had captured something dramatic but didn’t know quite what, there was a delicious sense of anticipation. But when he had printed the picture of Don, the pain in his gut was so intense he thought he would double up with it. As the image materialized on the paper, it brought back the moment with its terrible certainty. He had known that Don was dead an instant after he pushed the shutter. He had no idea how he knew it, but he did.
It was when he walked upstairs with the print that Charlie had said, “Pulitzer Prize.” The words had hit him like a blow. The revulsion must have been plain on his face, because it was the first time he had seen Charlie rattled. Charlie took a step backwards, looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, Jay.”
Much later on that terrible day he had held Mary in his arms as she wept. She had written the story dry-eyed, holding her grief in check. He had cried too, unashamedly, the first time since he was a child he had let anyone see him cry. She said, over and over again, “Why? Why? Why did they have to kill him?” and he had no answer for that.
“I saw him. I saw the gun. If I had been just a second faster. A second. Oh, God, why wasn’t I faster? A second faster.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do it, Mary.”
“He had so much ahead of him. He was so talented, so good. That he could be snuffed out by that piece of scum, by that crazy man.”
The man who shot Don was a man who lived alone, who was described by his neighbors as quiet and polite. In his house the police found material from racist groups, hate-filled ravings.
“He had so much ahead of him, Jay. It isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t. But who said life was fair?”
“I keep thinking, did we help it happen? Could that sick, twisted man have read something I wrote and it stuck in his craw? Something Don said? Could I be partly to blame?”
“You know the answer to that.”
She nodded. “I guess I do. It was his battle, he picked it. He knew the risks. Still —”
“He was doing what he had to do. And so were you. And he won, Mary. The council backed down. He beat them.”
“Oh yes, there’s going to be a couple hundred units of housing, and maybe they’ll name one after him. Maybe they’ll even put his name on a plaque. And in ten years, twenty years? People will see his name and wonder who he was. They won’t even remember!”
“At least he died for something. How many people get killed every day for no reason? Step off a curb and get hit by a truck, that’s all she wrote.”
“We killed him, this stupid country of ours. Because we hate so much. We have to get rid of the hate. If we don’t, we’ll never be a decent country. We have to stop it.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s not so easy.”
“He said to me that if the rules were wrong, you had to change them, no matter what the cost. But the cost was too high. Oh, damn it, Jay. If only I had been a second faster, just a second —”
“No, no,” he said, and he held her and they both cried until there were no more tears in them.
“We’re getting out of here, Mary. Two more weeks and we’ll be in New York. I want to get out of here.”
“So do I. Oh, so do I,” she said.
Jay got a beer out of the refrigerator, and he looked around at the familiar surroundings. It seemed like home, in a strange way, this shabby apartment. It had been his first job — his first real job; the Army didn’t count. The paper had given him space, let him take chances and make mistakes, let him grow. He had grown, no question about that. He was a neophyte when he came, good but raw. But now it was time to go. He had probably stayed too long as it was, because it was so comfortable here. And after all those pictures, thousands of them, they would remember him for only one. “Broderick, isn’t he the one that took that picture?” He hated the idea that they would remember him for that picture.
He heard a sound in the living room, and he said, “Sam? That you, Sambo?”
There was no answer, so he pulled out the drawer to find a church key to open the can. He made two holes in the top of the can and then turned around. When he did, he saw Harry Springer standing in the kitchen doorway, five feet away. Harry held a revolver, pointed straight at his chest.
He froze. He looked incredulously at Harry, at the gun. Harry’s face held an expression he could not read. The blue eyes were glittering. Jay thought, at first, it was from drink, but he realized in an instant that it was not from liquor but from pain. Harry was standing perfectly still, and the hand that held the gun did not tremble.
Jay thought with surprising calm, I’m going to die, but still he could not move.
“You had no right,” Harry said, his tone almost conversational. “No right.”
Jay stared at him. His mental processes, it seemed, had slowed to a crawl. He thought he had been standing there for hours, with the gun pointed at him. He said the only thing he could think of to say: “I love her.”
Something moved in Harry’s face, and he raised the gun. Jay instinctively hunched his shoulders and held his hands out in front of him, crying, “No!”
There was an explosion, and Jay closed his eyes, waiting for the pain of the impact. There was a shattering sound two feet from his head. Wood splintered, dishes tumbled; a sharp pain flared near his right ear. He reached up, felt the blood. Then he pulled a splinter from the flesh of his earlobe and looked at it, dumbfounded.
He looked at the door to the kitchen. Harry Springer was gone. There was another explosion, so loud that the house seemed to rock with it. Jay stood still for an instant, not comprehending. Then he ran to the living room. Harry Springer lay crumpled on the floor. Jay walked over and knelt beside him. There was a small red hole in his temple, on the right side. Jay turned him, gently.
Then he saw it. There was a hole the size of a fist in the back of Harry’s head. Part of his head had literally been blown away by a tremendous force.
He thought he heard himself give out a choked cry, but he never knew if he really made a sound when he discovered that pieces of Harry’s brain were leaking into his hands.
He ran into the bathroom and stuck his hands under the water. Time had slowed down again. He watched as the small pieces of reddish gray tissue clung, then moved, finally circled the bowl and disappeared down the drain. He watched them, transfixed.
I should do something, he thought, but still he could not move. He let the water run over his hands until they turned bright red from the cold.
He heard a door slam, footsteps.
“Jay?” It was Sam’s voice. Then silence. “Oh, my God! Jay, where are you?”
Jay walked to the door of the bathroom and leaned against the doorjamb. He looked at Sam, who seemed a long way off. He felt he was moving through deep water, that everything was slow and strange.
“Jay, what happened?”
“It’s Harry Springer.”
“Harry Springer? Mary’s husband?”
Jay nodded.
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t, you didn’t —”
“No. He shot himself.”
“Did you call the police?”
Jay shook his head. He stood, looking at Harry. The ooze from Harry’s head wound was staining the carpet.
Sam walked over to Jay. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I was in the kitchen. He came in. He had the gun pointed at me. He said, ‘You had no right.’”
“Did he shoot at you? What happened in the kitchen? It’s a mess.”
“Yes. No, not at me. He only — he was so close, he couldn’t have missed.”
“But he did.”
“Then he went out to the living room. I heard the shot. I came out and found him. There.”
“Jay, shouldn’t you call the police right away?”
Jay, thought about that. It seemed correct. There must be an answer to Sam’s question.
“I was in the bathroom.” Jay looked at his hands. “His — his — oh, my God, Sam, pieces of his head fell out in my hands!”
His legs suddenly buckled under him, and he would have fallen if Sam had not grabbed him. He clutched at the side of the door, and Sam steadied him.
“Sit down, Jay. You’re shaking all over.”
“Mary,” he said. “How am I going to tell Mary?”
“Stay there. Don’t move. Don’t do anything until the police get here.”
Sam went to the phone and dialed. Jay sat in silence, looking at the body of Harry Springer. The crimson stain on the frayed brown rug was getting larger.
“The landlord is going to be pissed,” Jay said. Then he laughed, and there was a touch of hysteria in his laugh. “The rug, Sam, the fucking rug. I’m worrying about the goddamn rug.”
Sam walked over and put his hand on Jay’s shoulder. “Take it easy, Jay. Let’s wait for the police.”
Later, a police lieutenant questioned him.
“You don’t think he fired at you?”
“No. He must have moved his hand at the last minute. He could have killed me, easy.”
“You didn’t see him fire the fatal shot?”
“No, I was in the kitchen. I ran out and found him.”
‘What did you do then?”
“I, uh, I tried to turn him over, to see if he was still alive.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I could see he was dead. I saw the hole.”
“What did you do next?”
“I went in the bathroom.”
“Why?”
“There was some — stuff — from his head. It got all over my hands.”
To Sam he said, ‘That was when you came in?”
‘Yes.”
“You knew the deceased, Mr. Broderick?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any idea why he might want to kill you? Or himself?”
“Well, he — I know he was turned down for a bank loan.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“Nothing, exactly —”
“Then why would he want to kill you?”
“He —” Jay looked at Sam.
Sam said, ‘He was the husband of one of the reporters at the paper. But they had been separated for nearly a year.”
“I see. Mr. Broderick, was there a relationship between you and the wife of the deceased?”
“She was getting a divorce.”
“You were having sexual relations with her.”
“We were going to be married. Right after the divorce.”
“You were having relations with her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you touch the gun?”
“Did I? No, I didn’t touch it.”
“Was there any kind of altercation between you and Mr. Springer?”
“No. I just saw him standing there with the gun, that’s all.”
“Did you say anything to him?”
“Yes. I did.”
“What did you say?”
“I love her,” Jay said, quietly. “I love her.”
The ambulance came, and the body was lifted onto a stretcher, covered up and taken away. Jay went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, but he heard one of the medics say to the other, “Same old thing. One guy fucking another guy’s wife.”
The policeman said to him, “You weren’t planning on being out of town in the next few days, were you, Mr. Broderick?”
“No. No, I’ll be here.”
Jay sat in the armchair, staring at the crimson stain on the rug.
“Come on, Jay, we’ve got to tell her.”
“Sam, what do I say? What do I say?”
“I’ll come with you.”
“First Don, now this? Sam, how can I tell her this?”
“Come on, Jay.”
“He’s Karen’s father.”
“We’ve got to do it, Jay. It’s getting late.”
“You’re right,” he said, getting up slowly and walking towards the door. “You’re right, it’s getting late.”