Stoney’s served wine in juice glasses. At three-fifteen, Jonathan and Mabel were the only customers. Strasser put two stacks of DVDs on their table.

“This is the Sissy report,” he said.

He was muscular, a rarity among White House staffers. Was he broad-shouldered? She wondered what the suit jacket was doing to her impression of him. Most likely exaggerating it. That was the point of it.

“I Googled you,” he said. “You were a reporter before you married Don.”

He was drinking tap water. She’d ordered Coca-Cola.

“Right, that’s right,” she got out.

“Don doesn’t give things like this to the paper?”

This again.

“No,” she said. “Sometimes, yes. Yes.”

“It’s newsworthy.”

“Have you ever been a reporter?”

“Not a possibility.” He looked slightly—yes—offended. “But my wife—my wife is. For a Tokyo newspaper.”

A Japanese wife. Mabel—large eyes and plush lips—would never appeal to Jonathan Strasser. She went slack. The afternoon stretched ahead. There was little for it.

“Why doesn’t Don give,” Strasser said, “something, something of this magnitude—the paper, the paper he works for, doesn’t get it? I guess I don’t. I don’t get it.”

“He wants to save it for the book. To make it, you know, revelatory.”

“And they let him? I mean, the paper does?”

“They don’t like it. But he’s Don Grady, so”—she shrugged—“he can.” A plenitude of boredom began its dinging. She would always be asked to speak of Don Grady. She was the dwarf satellite of Don Grady. She would never not fuck Don Grady.

“He controls what we hear.”

“Um. Not really. Look. What is it the other paper is missing? I mean, why, or what, do you want me to—like you said earlier—write about? Just, just, why?”

“Because the other paper believes everything the administration tells them.”

The consensus. Common knowledge. She swam in it. “And?”

“And because it describes Media Exploitation Component Services, and the guy who runs their information technology. That’s one thing. One thing he does. By far the least important thing he does.”

The bartender had put her cola on the Formica station, and the waitress was picking it up.

“You know—hold on,” she said. “Hold on, Jonathan, if you could.”

She got up and walked toward the waitress with her cola on a tray. “Restroom?” she asked. She knew where it was. But Strasser didn’t know that. Then, closer in, near the girl’s ear, she whispered, “Could you get me a larger glass, less ice, and a shot or two of vodka?” The waitress didn’t even nod, just put up her eyebrows and turned around. Mabel returned to the table in time to realize she should have gone to the restroom.

“It can’t really be called that,” she said, flustered, hoping to cover with impatience. She added disbelief. “What did you say? ‘Media Exploitation Services’?”