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.”

“That’s what they’re focusing on,” said Strasser, suddenly beside her at the bar. “The story’s developed into a hunt for the origin of the surveillance, the identity of the puppet master, and other important government figures described in colorful code words in the Oval Office conversations. It’s a roman à clef.”

Writing, Adam didn’t give a flip for writing. Being first, that was what he knew. News was fresh. If it wasn’t, it wasn’t news. It was history, the lazy man’s way. He read history, naturally. But when he thought of all the time a historian had to look into an event—it just didn’t impress Adam that a well-funded, highly educated, universally esteemed individual found out something much closer to the truth than a daily newspaperman did. The historian examined a reality about which memoirs had been written, archives opened, stakes lowered. All it took was patience. To Adam, it didn’t matter by the time the adjective “painstaking” was a word of praise. It wouldn’t change policy. It wouldn’t have impact.

When anyone wrote a letter for a prize entry, which he used to do but now delegated, “impact” was the word. The trick was to get the investigative work done early in a year, so there would be observable impact before year’s end. Impact after that—it couldn’t be included in the letter accompanying the work, and so it was good, excellent, in fact, but less excellent than impact during the calendar year. You needed indictments, a congressional hearing, a regulation revision, a protest outside an institution that led to the beginning of talk of reform. He did not speak about this. He would not want to be accused of prize chasing.

But being first, it had meaning. He had stopped examining the assumption. It would have to be enough.