“And you had something to tell me.” He hated to interrupt the burble. In the past he wouldn’t have. He felt a calibration inside himself shifting. He felt stronger. He felt—what was it—that there wasn’t as much time as he used to think there always was. Yes, he was more than serious. He seemed to have urgency.

She pushed her chair back a little from the table. The lights were too bright, as they always were in the glass conference rooms along the sides of the Room. And it was just after deadline, so he could see the Room emptying, reporters with shoulder bags over their backs moving toward the elevators, the Copy Desk editors beginning their thankless push to edit out ambiguities and blunders.

“Baby saw that night … of the crash—saw who was there,” Vera began. “I hadn’t really thought it through. But she might be able to see the same people coming out of MECS. I need to take her out to the MECS building. She might recognize someone.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said, more absentmindedly than he intended. They had the Sissy report. How important would Baby be now? As soon as he posed it, if only to himself, the question resurrected hot shame—he blushed. Baby—definitely less than reliable in the Room’s way of reckoning, but on this pilot story, proved right independently twice—he of all people shouldn’t dismiss her.

“Is that what you needed to get with me about?” he asked gently, his humility ebbing back.

“Uhm. No.” Now she looked embarrassed.

“Uh-huh.” He gave her a warm smile. She was looking at him as if she wanted him to lean forward. So he did. He waited awhile.

“Gordon Bray is using,” she finally said.

“Junk?” Stanley asked. He’d heard scuttlebutt that the managing editor was a heroin aficionado. He’d dismissed that out of hand.

“Tykes.”

He was surprised and sank back in his chair. His eye registered that the Room had produced a frantic gathering by the desk of the executive editor’s secretary. Someone was actually raising his voice—just who he couldn’t tell from this distance. Nor could he hear a thing. But he could tell from body attitudes and one gesture or two that something unacceptable was going on involving sports reporters and an editor from the Business section.

Gordon Bray patronizing child whores inserted itself back into his thinking; so strange, its appearance in his mind apparently needed to be neutralized by the bickering scene near Adam’s office.

“How do you know this?” He was stern now. Like the heroin, it could be bunk.

“I know because he told me,” she said. “Though not in so many words. And I also know because some older girls came and told me.”

Better than rumor—better than he would have imagined. Yet he tried to look tough to Vera. He tried to think.

“How long?”