It was from the executive editor. At first she didn’t recognize it as him. SANGER was his sign-on. He was, after all, just a person with a last name, like any of them. Though he was hired so long ago, only his last name was used. Did they even have computers then? Today, new hires had their first name’s initial automatically attached to their last name. Vera was HASTINGSV.

Mitch pushed n and o, then enter. Vera would have put her head in her hands. Mitch remained upright.

He suppressed a burp. So he was aware he was not alone. She balked at this. He had seemed so unaware of the Room. She watched him reach for a can of Diet Coke that had to be warm by now. He was taking a sip—

Whoa. Adam was walking toward Mitch’s desk. So was Martina, from a huddle of assistant National editors in another part of the Room. Adam’s and Martina’s faces looked inanimate. Their cheeks seemed stuffed with sawdust.

It was almost eight. Mitch didn’t turn his head; perhaps he didn’t see them. Yet his peripheral vision had to have them. He was unwilling to let anyone read his face or movements. All of Mitch would, when Adam and Martina arrived at his desk, be organized into rebuffing their disapproval. This aging, corpulent man would display this detachment with more virtuosity than any emotive dancer she’d ever admired. She saw something else. In the Room, in full sight, people like Mitch had perfected hiding the most revealing details not only in their writing but also of their own lives. It was what dance had trained out of her. She had been taught to divulge.

8.   ICARUS ALSO FLEW

A whore named Baby said the pilot was a woman. Baby had been working a corner no one else worked, by the boathouse, behind the Watergate. She told Vera she’d seen men cut the pilot out of a tree and put her in an ambulance. Trying to get Baby to remember anything about the ambulance didn’t work. Vera went to the Amoco at the on-ramp for more than once, sat with Baby, smoked with Baby, hoped with Baby that the same ambulance would come to get another patient. It didn’t.