“Well, be careful, Eric. These people are poison.” He shook his head again. He was making me feel bad for even knowing Cohen. “You know, it’s good you came home when you did. Stay out in the field too long and you get flaky. You stop drawing clear lines. That’s probably why Weiss wants you to become an editor. He wants you to come up to New York and talk about it, by the way, when you have a chance. I told him I thought it was a good idea. You’d get the discipline and seasoning that come from taking responsibility for others.”

“Adulthood,” I said, backing toward the door. “What a concept!” That was the second time someone had told me Weiss wanted me to be an editor. It was obvious that I was in Weiss’s gravitational force, being pulled slowly toward him.

That night, when I got home to my apartment on California Street, I found an unstamped letter waiting in my mailbox. It was printed on plain white paper, but you could see the smile on the page like an invisible watermark.

Dear Eric:

I have to leave unexpectedly today for a week with the Flying Squad, so I must postpone our next career counseling session. In the meantime, I have a piece of information you may find useful.

I believe the record will confirm (if such record can be found) that James Abelard was hospitalized for depression in 1982, and that he is currently taking a rather heavy-duty antidepressant medication. Whether this fact is worth sharing with the reading public, I leave to your discretion.

Your humble servant,

Brother John of Ragusa

My friends and I used to ask ourselves when we were starting out in journalism whether there was anything we wouldn’t do for a story. After we ruled out things that were flagrantly, demonstrably illegal, it was hard for us to come up with things we wouldn’t at least consider. Finally one of my friends asked, “Suppose somebody said you could have a great story, but you would have to eat a shit sandwich to get it.” Most of us said we’d never do it, the idea was disgusting. But eventually one guy asked the essential question: How good was the story? And as we began imagining the great, prize-winning stories that might tempt us, we realized that at some level of temptation every one of us would eat the shit sandwich. That became, in my mind, one of the definitions of who were: we were the people who would do anything to get a story. For many years, I thought it was a measure of how much we loved our profession.