As we were about to leave Tom-Tom, Rupert pulled me toward him, as if he wanted to confide a last secret before we went our separate ways. “Don’t take all this mumbo jumbo about biological weapons too seriously, old boy. It could impair your judgment.”

“It sounds pretty fucking serious to me,” I said.

“In this, as in all things connected with the secret world, there is a reference point in Venetian history, if you will indulge me. In 1649, the Council of Ten received a proposal from a man named Lunardo Foscolo of Dalmatia, who said he had a doctor friend who could draw liquid from the spleens and pustules of people who had been stricken with the plague, and then distill it. The good doctor, whose name was Michiel Angelo Salamon, proposed to use this ‘quintessence of plague,’ as he called it, to infect the entire Turkish army.

“And what do you suppose the Council of Ten decided? They concluded: What the hell—let’s give it a try! So they authorized a nefarious plot, and the quintessence of plague was transported by ship to the Turkish army camps. And then, as always happens in the real world, the whole thing got bungled, and in the end absolutely nothing came of it.

“So the next time my esteemed colleague Mr. Rubino tries to spin you on the subject of BW, remember that you’re watching a rerun.”

22

22

Advertising revenues at the Mirror had continued to fall in February and March, and Wall Street analysts were projecting that the paper would post a net loss for the first quarter—the first in its history. The stock price tumbled accordingly. Investors were betting that this wasn’t a cyclical downturn from which the newspaper would recover later in the year but something different—the long-term decline of a “mature business” that couldn’t cut its costs fast enough to maintain profitability. Newspapers were like railroads a generation ago, argued the skeptics: a nice business run by nice people who were in love with their product and overly generous with their employees. It was almost as if the stock market were taunting the Mirror’s management to do something radical to improve earnings.

Reporters in the newsroom could see that the paper was drifting toward a crisis. We might not like the business side of newspapering, but we weren’t stupid. We understood that Sellinger was in a squeeze, and that if he didn’t cut some of our jobs, he would lose his. Rumors were circulating that the Mirror’s problems were so serious the paper might be vulnerable to a takeover or even forced into bankruptcy. The Newspaper Guild, eager to take advantage of the general anxiety, had mounted a new recruiting drive in February.