“I loved you, too, Eric. That made it so hard. I always thought we would get married in the end. That was the thing. I knew you’d slept with other women. And you knew I’d slept with other men, even if you didn’t know about Arthur. But I just assumed someday we’d find a way back to each other—get married and have children. I thought we were almost there when we made love again, that time before you left for China. Arthur seemed so distant then. And you were so strong, and you wanted me, and I loved you.”

“Is that why you never married anyone else? Because you thought we’d get married someday?”

“Yes. Partly that. I don’t know, partly that. And I liked my secret life.”

At the door, as I was leaving, Annie asked me a last question. “What are you going to do about Arthur?” Her voice was stronger now; she was looking directly at me. “You have to do something, if he was murdered. You can’t do nothing. You have to write an article, or tell the CIA, or file a lawsuit, or something.”

“I know,” I answered. “But this is so much more complicated than you realize. That’s why you can’t tell anyone about it. You could hurt me and other people if you say even a word. But I promise you: I’ll do something about Arthur.”

34

34

The Mirror continued to operate normally, despite the trauma that surrounded Arthur’s death. That was one of the likable things about newspapers: they published every day, so they had to pull up their socks and get on with it. We produced a special commemorative section about Arthur in our Sunday magazine, with excerpts from some of his famous stories and pictures of him in Vietnam and Lebanon, wearing safari suits and looking cool. And that was the end of it. The janitors cleaned out Arthur’s beautiful office and packed all the photographs and testimonials in a box and sent them home to Mara.

I figured that the best therapy for me would be to get back to work, too. I told Bob Marcus I wanted to do a long explanatory piece on the China communications contract, pulling together the reporting I had done while I was in Beijing. That was fine with Marcus. Everything was fine with him. He was in permanent management mode these days, sending out a stream of memos about readership surveys and high-impact stories and diversity workshops and circulation penetration. The office grapevine had picked up the rumor that I would be going to New York soon as deputy foreign editor, so everybody was being extra nice to me—especially Noel Rosengarten, who still hadn’t left. The TV deal in Minneapolis had fallen through, and there was a rumor that he might be axed.