“You should go back home. Come to the Washington bureau for a while. Learn the ropes. Then you ought to go to New York and become an editor. They need you.”

“Who says?” The last thing I wanted to do at that point was become an editor. It sounded too much like a real job.

“Ed Weiss,” he answered. He had lit a cigarette and was drawing the smoke back into his nostrils. I sensed that night, really for the first time, that my career was being shaped by forces over which I had only limited control.

II: WASHINGTON (JANUARY–MARCH 1996)

II

WASHINGTON

JANUARY–MARCH 1996

9

9

I returned home the next year, to take a reporting job in the Mirror’s Washington bureau. It was a summons. Ed Weiss phoned me one day in Paris to say that the Moscow bureau would be opening up soon. “You can have it if you want it,” he said, “but I hope you won’t. You shouldn’t stay overseas any longer. You’ve done that. You’d do fine in Moscow, but so what? We need you in Washington. Come home and do great things.” And so I did. Weiss could have told me to open a new bureau in Seward, Alaska, and I would have done it.

I was more than ready to leave Paris. It had become a lonely existence. My American colleagues envied me, and my French sources were scared of me. Journalists are essentially parasites. They insert themselves into the life of a community and draw nourishment from it. But I’d lost my camouflage in Paris. I had become radioactive. That was evident to me the day I paid a call on Ali Aziz. He was cold and distant, and it was clear he’d paid a dear price, at last, for the favor I’d done him years before in Beirut. “You should leave France,” he said, and he was right.

My new position in Washington was “special projects reporter.” It turned out that meant I could do pretty much as I wanted, so long as I kept busy. The Washington bureau chief, Bob Marcus, was deferential. He sensed that I had been anointed in some mysterious way he didn’t understand, and that his own career interests would be enhanced if he maintained a good relationship with me. I made it easy for him: my first project was a series about a slumlord in Baltimore who had purchased a magnificent villa on the French Riviera with his loot. I’d heard about him back in Paris, so I basically arrived with the story in my pocket. Marcus thought I was a genius.