“‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’” he began, and the buzz of voices suddenly died away. The mourners fumbled in their prayer books for the Order for the Burial of the Dead. Who knew Arthur Bowman was an Episcopalian? That was another of his secrets. I looked over my shoulder at the congregation. All the people I cared about in the world seemed to be gathered under the dome of the church. Several rows back was Annie Baron, my exgirlfriend, already dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief. When she saw me, she tried to smile, but a tear rolled down her cheek. She arched that long neck away from me and, in the same motion, swept a few strands of hair back from her forehead. She was an actress, even in her grief. The rector continued his intonation: “‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.’”

There was an overwhelming silence. It was my turn to speak. The rector nodded to me, and I rose and walked to the lectern. I had dressed soberly for the funeral—in a blue suit, white shirt and blue tie—but I suspect I still looked like a California kid: skinny, just under six feet tall, sandy brown hair combed over the top of my head. I was thirty-seven years old; I didn’t yet look damaged or unhealthy enough to be a reporter.

I had expected that I would feel nervous about speaking before so many famous people, but I felt a perfect, unworldly calm. A part of me was still back in China, kneeling over Arthur’s broken body, wiping the blood from his mouth as he gasped for words and breath before he died. The ringing in my ears was the ambulance siren on Chang’an, the Boulevard of Eternal Peace, sent by the men who had murdered him.

Philip Sellinger looked up at me expectantly. There was an odd sparkle in the publisher’s eyes. His best friend had died, but his newspaper survived. I cleared my throat. For that moment I stood on the bridge of this ship of the dead, which was carrying all of us—Arthur and me and our hundreds of colleagues—into our vision of the afterlife. We journalists were the last believers in the god of history. We were its secret priesthood, and though we liked to pretend otherwise, we really did think we were better than ordinary people. We struggled to maintain a divine impartiality, but so often, as in Arthur’s case, we got corrupted somewhere along the journey—caught up in the events we tried to cover.