It took me a long time to understand Segarra’s function at the News. They called him The Editor, but he was really a pimp and I paid no attention to him.
Perhaps that’s why I didn’t make many friends in Puerto Rico — at least not the kind of friends I might have made — because, as Sanderson very gently explained to me one day, Segarra came from one of the wealthiest and most influential families on the island and his father was a former attorney general. When Nick became editor of the Daily News, the paper made a lot of valuable friends.
I had not given Lotterman credit for this kind of devious thinking, but as time went by I saw that he used Segarra solely as a front man, a sleek, well-oiled figurehead to convince the literate public that the News was not a yanqui mouthpiece, but a fine local institution like rum and sugarballs.
After our first talk, Segarra and I exchanged an average of about thirty words a week. Once in a while he would leave a note in my typewriter, but he made a point of saying as little as possible. In the beginning this suited me well enough, even though Sanderson explained that as long as Segarra had the nix on me I was doomed to social oblivion.
But I had no social ambitions in those days. I had a license to wander. I was a working journalist and I had easy access to anything I needed, including the finest cotillions and the Governor’s house and secret coves where debutantes swam naked at night.
After a while, however, Segarra began to bother me. I had a feeling that I was being cut out of things and that he was the reason for it. When I was not invited to parties that I would not have gone to in the first place, or when I called some government official on the phone and was brushed off by his secretary, I began to feel like a social leper. This wouldn’t have bothered me at all had I felt it was my own doing, but the fact that Segarra was exercising some sinister control over me began to get on my nerves. Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn’t want
At first I was tempted to laugh it off, to give him as hard a time as I could and let him do his worst. But I didn’t, because I was not quite ready to pack up and move on again. I was getting a little too old to make powerful enemies when I held no cards at all, and I had lost some of my old zeal that had led me, in the past, to do what I damn well felt like doing, with the certain knowledge that I could always flee the consequences. I was tired of fleeing, and tired of having no cards. It occurred to me one evening, as I sat by myself in Al’s patio, that a man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. I’d been doing it for ten years and I had a feeling that my reserve was running low.
Segarra and Sanderson were good friends, and, oddly enough, although Segarra considered me a boor, Sanderson went out of his way to be decent. A few weeks after I met him I had to call Adelante about a story I was doing, and I thought I might as well talk to Sanderson as anyone else.
He greeted me like an old buddy, and after giving me all the information I needed, he invited me out to his house for dinner that night. I was so surprised that I accepted without a thought. The tone of his voice made it seem so natural that I should eat dinner at his house that I had already hung up before I realized that it was not natural at all.
After work I took a cab out to his house. When I got there I found Sanderson on his porch with a man and a woman who had just come in from New York. They were on their way to St. Lucia to meet their yacht, which the crew had brought back from Lisbon. A mutual friend had told them to look up Sanderson when they stopped in San Juan and they had taken him completely by surprise.