The long flight home was like passing through a dark tunnel. The airline upgraded me to business class as a gesture of sympathy. I sat in the big seat with my eyes closed, thinking about the events of the past few months and how they had converged in Beijing that week. The flight attendants kept offering me drinks, but I didn’t want any softening of the disaster I had set in motion. I wanted it to hurt.

Phil Sellinger was at the airport to meet us, his arm around the grieving widow, Mara Bowman. When she saw the coffin, Mara began to sob, violently, like a woman at an Arab funeral. Sellinger tried to comfort her but it was impossible. She needed to cry. Arthur must have flown overseas a hundred times in his life, to wars and revolutions and earthquakes and massacres, but he had always come back. Someone like that begins to seem immortal. When it finally happens, your defenses are gone. At the back of the crowd, standing apart from Sellinger and the Bowman family, I saw Annie. She was wearing dark glasses. She came up to me and kissed me on the cheek, so softly. We embraced, and I felt her body tremble in my arms.

Reporters were waiting for us, too—mostly local TV reporters who regarded Arthur as a minor Washington celebrity. I held an impromptu press conference just past the customs’ arrival hall. I told the official story.

After the funeral service was over, I stood outside St. John’s Church, shaking hands with mourners as they emerged. It was a spring day, and a soft breeze was blowing across Lafayette Park, filling the air with petals from the dogwood trees and azalea bushes. In the slow march out of the church were friends and colleagues I hadn’t seen in years, people who had been touched in some way by Arthur. Henry Pelt, the news aide on the foreign desk, who’d had to put up with Arthur’s requests and diatribes from overseas for so many years; Chuck Marsh, the technician in the communications center who had received Arthur’s telexes from a score of war zones; Erin Shaw, the dictationist who transcribed stories from Arthur when he was in some remote place and there was no other way to get his copy into the paper.

The Washington bureau emerged in a cluster. Bob Marcus made a little speech when he saw me, about how bravely I had represented the paper. Susan Geekas said the president had promised her, personally, that he would be at the funeral and she didn’t understand why he hadn’t come. George Dirk gave me a hug and didn’t say a word.