Dirk had cleaned out his desk by the end of the week; he was starting the next Monday at Mirror Alert’s bureau in Arlington. There was a going-away party for him Friday. Several people, including me, made mushy speeches about what a great guy he was. Dirk saved the day with a wicked speech of his own, denouncing all the people he disliked at the Mirror. He actually called Noel Rosengarten a “turd.”

Despite the commotion in the bureau, I continued working on my New Asia story. I still had some loose ends, starting with the former Chinese communications minister, Wu Jingsheng, who had supposedly received the $15 million payoff. I needed a Chinese speaker to help me make the call—the Mirror having closed its Beijing bureau two years before in a cost-cutting move. Lynn Frenzel in New York volunteered the translating services of a Chinese-American copy aide on the foreign desk. Late one night, we placed a conference call to Mr. Wu’s number and managed to get him on the phone. He confirmed that he was the former communications minister, and that he had three sons living in Hong Kong, but when we began asking him about his contact with French officials, the line went dead.

I tried to reach Jean-Luc Gaspard again. Now, instead of a live human voice answering the phone in Bethesda, there was a recording. I left several messages, but no one ever called me back. I returned to his office with a photographer, who shot the company’s name on the building directory and a view of the office windows from the street.

My last step was to get comment from the French government. One of my old sources in the Quai d’Orsay, Philippe Aurant, was now the chief of staff of the prime minister’s office. He was one of the good guys—the new reformers who had come in after Costa’s resignation. I called him and, with elaborate apologies for dropping a grenade in his lap, summarized the $15 million payoff story. Did the French government have any comment? I wondered.

“You are a very bad boy,” said Philippe. “I thought you had gone home and left us in peace. This is a dirty game, and you should not be playing in it. My official comment is ‘No comment.’ I will discuss this with my chers collègues. We will call you back.”

But the follow-up didn’t come from Philippe; it came from Arthur Bowman. He stopped by my desk the next afternoon as I was finishing the New Asia story. He looked fluffy, as if his wife, Mara, had taken him to a spa for a makeover. His hair was cut fashionably short on the sides, and the gray color, to my eyes, seemed to have darkened a bit.