“An operational person. A creative person. But this guy, from what I’ve picked up, he looks up to the graybeards—some people call them Knights of Malta.”

Purple bookers, iron majors, invisibles, operators, graybeards, Knights of Malta were pirouetting and skywalking across her smut and pearled brain. She’d wanted love, the engulfing kind. Instead, it was Ludlum and Paterson and airport Bantam books; she could see that spry little rooster on the spine.

“Anyway,” Strasser was saying. “I don’t know his name. The Sissy report doesn’t give it. Except there’s something, a little, small window. In one part of the updates, there’s a series of e-mails, and in one of them, no, it may be two—you have to check this—he’s called ‘the Chair.’”

“What does this have to do with the other paper?”

“They don’t care about this guy. But they should.”

“And Don didn’t either.” Now she was impatient. Her glass was empty.

She heard someone hit a nail into the wall. The bartender was gone. Waitress was too. Something banged again.

“You’ve been drinking Coke—and vodka,” he said. He looked amused. But maybe like one of her sons. She stared at him.

“I have,” she said, her expression uncharitable, maybe hostile. Yes, she felt mean. “So this guy—he screwed you over, didn’t he?” she said. She knew this tale. The origin of all leakage: wounded pride, the career sidelined.

“Never met him.”

“You don’t need to, not in this town.”

“Do you and Don talk? At all?” He murmured this—a little sadly, she thought.

Mabel, annoyed, said rather loudly, “What do you think?”

Strasser was as still as a stick. She looked around. Waitress had vanished. But no, there was the bartender. He waved.

Mabel signaled back. She wanted another. What did she expect? Agricultural subsidies—that’s what Strasser was skipping proud about that night in her hallway.

“Can you hang on? Don’t lose that thought,” Mabel said, getting up and going to the bar as the bartender moved in their direction. He had an apron on and was clicking the channel changer; he muted the television and turned her way.

“You believe this shit?” He shook his head.

“Can I have one of your rum-and-Cokes?” That took her back. She used to come here before she married Don and order these with a gang of reporters who had wanted to change the world and didn’t work at the paper anymore.

“I mean, they put the White House under surveillance,” the bartender said. “The president called the head of the CIA a marionette. Some general said something to the effect that he would talk to the puppet master.”

Mabel tilted her head. “What?”

“It’s unreal. Just when you think you’ve heard it all.”