That did it. He grabbed the closest thing he could find on his desk—which happened to be a bronze paperweight he’d received as an award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors—and hurled it across the room. “You arrogant prick!” he shouted. He grabbed a framed certificate from Columbia University awarding us the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago and threw it against the far wall, shattering the glass.

This explosion of anger seemed to calm him a little, or perhaps he was just embarrassed to be so out of control. He lowered his head. “You fucker!” he muttered. He picked the battered Pulitzer Prize award off the floor and put it on his desk, then collected the shards of glass and threw them in the waste basket. He gestured for me to sit on one of the couches. He sat in a leather chair.

“All right,” he said. “How did it happen? I want to know.”

The gravity of the situation was sinking in, now that his tantrum was over. He really was firing me. I had betrayed my newspaper. My career was ending, right now, there in this office.

“I’m sorry, Ed. I feel so bad about what happened. Honestly, I want to cry.”

“Don’t. That’s the one thing that would make this worse. Now tell me how this happened.”

I had to think. How had this chain of events and circumstances, now wrapped so tightly around me, actually begun? “There are a lot of ways to answer that, but the serious part began the last time I was in this office, the day I came to see you about Arthur Bowman.”

“So it’s my fault? I made you do it! That is really lame, Truell. You are pathetic!”

“No, it’s not your fault. But you asked how it happened, so I’m trying to tell you. I tried that day to get you to understand that Arthur was in serious trouble—that he was taking money from people he shouldn’t have. But you respected him so much, you didn’t want to hear about it. So I went to other people, who would listen. They were at the CIA. That’s how it started.”

“Remind me what terrible things Arthur had done. I’ve forgotten.”

“Arthur Bowman took money from French intelligence. It probably added up to millions of dollars over the years. That’s how he managed to live so well. He worked for gangsters, who leaned on him to cook stories, which you ran in the Mirror. You remember all those stories he wrote about the China contract? His French friends bought those stories. If Arthur were alive, he’d tell you the same thing.”

“Bullshit! How do you know that?”