It was almost 9:00 P.M. when we arrived in Kingston. I figured my best bet would be a cheap hotel near the bus station. When the desk clerk asked where I was from, I said Toronto. He gave me a room with a nice bathtub and a clean bed, where I had another good night’s sleep.

Early the next morning I went back to the bus station and bought a ticket for the first bus to Watertown. The bus rolled south, past the greenribbed shores of Lake Ontario. We stopped briefly on the U.S. side after we crossed the border into New York State, and I had to show my driver’s license. But if anyone was looking for me, the news hadn’t reached this remote border crossing.

I went shopping for another change of clothes in Watertown and bought the most penitent costume I could find—a gray business suit, a white shirt, a modest tie—and took a taxi to the airport. I caught the 1:05 P.M. flight to La Guardia and was in New York an hour later. I didn’t call ahead to tell Weiss I was coming. What was the point? He could start screaming at me when I got there.

41

41

The New York Mirror Building had a look of magisterial shabbiness that afternoon, like an old stately home whose heirs could no longer pay the upkeep but couldn’t bear to sell it. The brass fixtures in the lobby downstairs, once polished daily to a bright shine, were dull and worn. The doormen in their blue uniforms, who for generations had welcomed visitors to the building, had been replaced by rent-a-guards from Wackenhut. I flashed my identification card for one of the security guards; he barely looked at it. He was making little more than the minimum wage: what did he care who walked into the Mirror?

Even the elevator looked ragged. Graffiti had been etched onto the wood and metal—not clever jokes about Ed Weiss or Lynn Frenzel, but ordinary vulgarity on the order of “Denise sucks dick.” I pushed the button for the seventh floor. As the doors closed and I rode up toward the newsroom, I had a clammy feeling, like what you get when a fever is coming on. I hated what I was about to do. The doors opened onto that immense map of the world and all those clocks, recording the local time in all the bureaus of the Mirror I would never see again.