“I’m in a bad mood. I have this feeling I’m about to be fired. A human offering to appease the god of rising newsprint prices. You’d be in a bad mood, too, if you thought you were about to be fired.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody ever gets fired at the Mirror.”

“That was in the old days, Eric. Things have changed. I had a very negative performance review last year. First time, ever. They’re building a paper trail. They’re going to get me. It’s obvious. If you weren’t such an ass-kisser, you would have noticed how the paper is changing.”

“Fuck you, Dirk.”

“I’m sorry.” He was instantly apologetic when he saw that he had wounded me. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m really sorry.” That was another thing about Dirk. Although he adopted the tough-guy style, he was basically a pussycat. A sort of Cowardly Lion of an investigative reporter. I decided to let it slide.

“What about Abelard?” I said. “We need to divide up the reporting.”

“I’ll talk to his enemies. You talk to his friends. How’s that?”

“Come on, Dirk! Get serious. How about this: You do Abelard’s finances—campaign contributions, financial disclosure forms, trips, honoraria, all that stuff. I’ll do his personal life—who he is, what he believes, marriage, kids. And we’ll split his legislative record. You do the domestic side, I’ll do foreign. He used to be vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. How’s that sound?”

“Fine, fine,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Eric. But you sound like an editor.”

11

11

What surprised me most about Washington was how little it was. I had become accustomed over the previous decade to capitals built on an overwhelming scale: to Hong Kong, so dense with people that they had to build skyscrapers up the sides of mountains to house them all; to Paris, built over the centuries to intimidate France and the world with its power and beauty; to Beirut, which even after ten years of civil war still had the raw power of a teeming, towering city. Washington, by comparison, was a toy town. It was a low-slung city of ornamental boxes, all essentially the same when you stripped away the stone pediments and Ionic columns, all fixed at the same height. No wonder our political culture was so uniform: it was spawned in this small city, in identical rooms in identical buildings.