After six years of Reagan and almost as many in publishing, Russell thought of himself-though he was alone in this perception-as a fairly jaded character. But when this manuscript came across his desk he knew it was one of the books he'd been waiting to publish. It seemed to him a shameful characteristic of the era that the liberal press lacked all con- viction while the yahoos were full of passionate insensitivity. For two years the author had followed the story of the secret war in Nicaragua from El Salvador to Israel to Cuba to Washington to Managua to Little Havana. He'd talked to gunrunners and drug runners, contras and Sandinistas, slept in jungles and had his life threatened, and Russell seemed to be the only one who was terribly interested. For weeks he'd been trying to get the big papers and magazines to pick up some of the more sensational revelations. He'd sent galleys to national-affairs editors, followed up with phone calls, and lunched every contact he had, this last one an alleged friend, an editor at a so-called newsweekly.

Righting his tilted chair, he fired off three darts at the opposite wall, missing Elliott Abrams, three points, assistant secretary of state, but catching Oliver North right on the chin, for five points, with the third dart. Various politicians, book reviewers and indignitaries served time on the dartboard when their behavior earned Russell's disapproval.

On the facing wall were photographs of friends, family and heroes: snapshots of Corrine, his mother and father; a framed, already yellowing page from the Sunday New York Times, the review of Jeff's book; a poster of the Karsh portrait of Hemingway circa The Old Man and the Sea; a photograph of bearded, bleary John Berryman, chin and cigarette in hand; another of Keith Richards, onstage with tongue out, dripping toxic sweat; a publicity still of Jack Nicholson, signed "To Russ, who gives good book-Jack," souvenir of a movie tie-in edition; as well as the usual author photos and book posters.

The phone trilled-neither a ring nor a buzz but a kind of exotic birdcall.

"Incoming," Donna called out. "Victor Propp."

Russell glanced wistfully at the First World War German infantry helmet on his desk, a trophy his grandfather had picked up in the Argonne Forest in 1918, shortly before losing half of his eyesight to mustard gas.

Punching in the speaker phone, he said, "Victor, how goes life and literature?"

"Life is short and brutish, Russell. Full of S and F, et cetera. Literature-truly endless."

Russell took the latter to mean that the book wasn't finished, hardly a surprise. Victor had been working on it for about twenty years, the deadline for delivery receding gradually into a semi-mythical future. In this unfinished condition it, and its author, had become a local literary legend, the locale in this case being a literary/academic republic encompassing patches of Cambridge, New Haven and Manhattan's Upper West Side.

"Did you see that piece on Roth in the TransAtlantic? A very snide reference to me-'unlike those rococo goldsmiths who worry the surfaces of their bibelot sentences...

Russell decided he just might need the helmet. "Victor, I don't necessarily read that as a reference to you."

"Russell, my dear boy, every literary intellectual in America scans that sentence and says, 'For "rococo goldsmiths," read "Victor Propp."

"Not to worry, Victor. There are only three or four literary intellectuals left in the whole goddamn country." It wasn't that Victor didn't have his detractors; just that he nicely illustrated Delmore Schwartz's maxim that even paranoids have enemies.

"Despite your considerable intelligence, Russell, you are remarkably naive. Do you suppose it has anything to do with coming from the Midwest? Not that it's an unattractive quality. It's very American. The thing about real Americans ..."

Russell looked at his watch as Victor started sermonizing about the land of the freaks and home of the slaves. Eleven-forty. He wet his finger with saliva and polished the crystal. Scanning a report on his desk, he was pleased to discover that Scavengers and Birds of Prey, a selected edition of the Audubon plates, was going into another printing. He had guessed correctly that the fiercer birds would be popular in the current climate. He tuned in on a rising interrogatory note in the great man's voice, though Victor's questions were usually rhetorical.

"... doesn't he? That is to say, Jeff has this very granitic, Yankee quality in his prose which I quite like, the natural thing that Salinger had to work at so obsessively, being a Jew-believe me, I know. But I wonder how to account for all the press on his book?"

Russell tried to remember if he'd ever told Victor that Corrine once had lunch with Salinger, but decided to leave well enough alone.

"I like Jeff's prose quite a bit, its wonderful loopy vitality, but I'm wondering if we shouldn't be working on getting me more press at this point in my career."

"Victor, you don't have a book, number one, and number two, you don't exactly write for the People magazine crowd. Don't worry about this shit. Remember what Bob Dylan said, 'He's got everything he needs, he's an artist, he don't look back.' "

Victor probably was an artist, one of the few in Russell's wide and arty acquaintance, but he didn't seem to have anything he needed and he was constantly looking back, down, around-as if in a maze or a conspiracy. Not trusting the evidence of his senses, he wasn't about to take reality for granted.

"What I'm saying, Russell, is that I think we ought to work on raising my visibility."

"Let's have lunch and talk about it..." Russell found an opening in his datebook ten days away and was able to hang up just a few minutes later.

Donna slouched in with the mail, her haircut reminiscent of a Punic War-era Roman helmet. Clad in black spandex, wearing an "Eat the Rich" button, Donna was a token punk here in a landscape of tartan and tweed. She had a streetwise sense of humor and a hard-boiled telephone manner, which usefully intimidated importunate authors and agents and infuriated Russell's colleagues. She occasionally irritated even her admiring boss with third-hand anarchist posturing. Punk was already a historical fashion, a reified sensibility-the safety pin through the earlobe only slightly less dated than love beads, and now even love beads seemed on the verge of a comeback. Russell was sometimes tempted to tell her the whole scene was middle-aged by the time he arrived in Manhattan about a hundred years before, in 1980, tell her the meaning and origin of epater la bourgeoisie. But nothing very interesting had come along in the way of a counterculture since then, unless you counted a recent infestation of titled Europeans, and having Donna around made him feel in touch with the tonsorial practices and the music around St. Mark's Place.

"What do the rich taste like, do you suppose," he asked her.

"Huh?" Donna stopped in the doorway of the office to consider the question. She shrugged, a chronic gesture. "The ladies taste like tuna fish, I guess. The gentlemen taste kind of like baked brie."

"Jesus. You're a very nasty person. Forget I asked."

"I'm going to lunch," she said.

"I'll warn Donald Trump."

Before his own lunch Russell called his broker, a hustler at Corrine's firm named Duane Peters.

"Got some new sophisticated financial instruments you might be interested in," Duane said. "A very hot new commodities futures index."

"Tell me about it," Russell said. He liked the idiom of the financial world, the evocative techno-poetry of the arcane slang. Sophisticated instruments. Mezzanine financing. Takeover vehicles... Lately it seemed almost as interesting as the more familiar dialect of lit crit. In college he had scorned the econ majors who lined up for the bank recruiters senior year, and only a few years before now he had been horrified to learn that two-thirds of a graduating Yale class had interviewed for a slot at one of the big investment banks. He had cited this statistic over a dozen dinner tables to illustrate vague theses about the Zeitgeist and had commissioned a book called The New Gilded Age, an anthology of jeremiads by economists and sociologists decrying the greed and selfishness of the eighties. At that time he began to read the financial publications. And then, rather like a research chemist experimentally injecting himself with the virus he has isolated, he began investing small amounts. With his encouragement, Corrine had started as a broker after quitting her good-girl job at Sotheby's-after a stressful year and a half at Columbia Law School-and his new hobby had gradually become more and more interesting. It seemed so easy. He was winning on paper, though his total capital amounted to only a few thousand.

"... buy stock on margin and then cover the stock with futures, the ideal being to hedge and bet so you're covered either way, cowboy. If the stock goes up you make money. If the stock goes down you make money. So whatever happens, you win."

Is that possible? Russell wondered. Duane's explanation sounded too good to be true; it sounded, in fact, like a free lunch. But he didn't have the ante to play this particular game. Russell wished he could give Corrine his business, but his hunches and tips made her crazy.

Two doors down from Russell's office, Washington Lee received a call from the receptionist announcing a visitor. There was nothing on his calendar, and unscheduled visitors struck fear into Washington's heart. He feared a certain wronged husband in particular, discarded girlfriends and rejected authors in general. His occasional inability to remember absolutely every detail of an evening's activities tended to sharpen his fear of the unknown caller. Two years before he had received an advance to write a critical biography of Frantz Fanon, which was still in the outline stage, and while he didn't really expect the publisher to send thugs over to collect the manuscript, this small festering patch of guilt only added to his sense of having dodged the bullet when another day ended without a major confrontation. The name that his assistant gave him now had a faint echo, but all these Muslim names sounded sort of familiar. Everybody had a story to tell, and if they were black they eventually sent the story to Washington.

"Say who?"

There was a mumbled conference at the other end of the line. "Rasheed Jamal, the author," the receptionist explained.

Washington's hope went south. All in all, he would rather get a surprise visit from the FBI. Three stacks of unread, unsolicited manuscripts towered in the far corner of his office, Rasheed Jamal's possibly among them. Or else he had thoughtfully brought his precious manuscript with him, hand-delivery, the true story of his life ... a thousand single-spaced pages complete with crabbed corrections that would make them both millions and reveal the true killers of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was possible, too, that Washington had already read the book and turned it down. Authors who came to argue their merits in person were the worst.

"I'm in conference," Washington proposed. "Probably won't be available for the rest of the day."

"I'll tell him."

Now he would have to cower in his office until the coast was clear. If the siege lasted past lunch, he could slip up the internal staircase to the ninth floor and take the elevator down to the street.

"I'm not in," he shouted out to his assistant. "You see anybody heading this way with a manuscript under his arm, tell him Mr. Lee has moved to Zimbabwe."

He was on the phone talking to an agent when a fat bearded man in a sweatsuit announced from the doorway that no white bitch was going to tell him where he couldn't go.

"I just wanted to see what color you were," the speaker said, a scowl deranging his chipmunk features. He clutched a manuscript box out in front of his huge belly, holding it like a shield as he advanced into the office. Experiencing a rapid liquefaction of his internal organs, Washington attempted to appear cool.

"What's your problem, Jack?"

"My problem is I'm a black artist. I'm, like, twice removed from this American fascist racist so-called culture. And I'm trying to create an Afro-American literature which the white man does not want to know about and the white establishment wants to suppress." Washington's assistant had disappeared. He could only hope she was fetching some serious help.

"What's this got to do with me, bro'?"

The author reached into the half-zipped front of his sweatshirt, pulled out and unfolded a limp, ragged piece of paper and recited, without consulting the text: " 'Dear Mr. Jamal, thank you for letting us see your manuscript. I'm sorry to say that the editorial board has concluded that we cannot publish your work at this time. We wish you luck in finding another publisher. Sincerely, Washington Lee.' What kind of fucking letter is that? Sincerely? I show you my life's fucking work, the true story of the Black Experience in Babylon exile, and that's all the answer I get? And what's this 'we' shit? I sent my book to one man, dude called Washington Lee I heard was a brother, not the house nigger on some editorial board."

"Maybe I could take another look at it," Washington said, playing for time. He had no idea if he'd read it to begin with. He looked at hundreds of manuscripts a year, and sometimes looking was all he had time for. Being one of only two black adult trade book editors in New York, he was expected to be an advocate for his ostensible community, which, in his experience, wrote no better as a rule than any other group. Washington was as willing and eager as any man could possibly be to discover the next Invisible Man, but being black and writing a book didn't necessarily make you Ralph Ellison.

Not a moment too soon, security arrived: two uniformed, deracinated white men who stood sheepishly in the doorway.

"Get this fucking maniac out of here," Washington suggested.

"Don't you touch me," the author screamed.

The security men hung back, helpless in the face of what they took to be an internecine dispute. Only when the enraged author hurled himself across Washington's desk did they intervene. Rasheed Jamal threw one of the guards to the floor and was wrestling with the other, larger one when Washington said, "Freeze, motherfucker." He pointed a shiny gray Walther automatic at the fat man's belly.

The security guards, recovering themselves, seemed uncertain of their own role in relation to the firearm, till Washington said, "What've I got to do, carry him out my own fucking self?" Each seizing an arm, the security men pulled Rasheed Jamal to the door, then turned sideways to extract him from the office.

"You ain't no black man," he screamed at Washington.

"And you ain't no writer," Washington responded, having finally remembered reading several chapters of the thousand-page-plus novel that lay in two boxes on his desk. It was only through the exercise of enormous willpower that he restrained himself from pulling the trigger until the so-called author was gone. "And haul your garbage out with you," he shouted, knocking the boxes to the floor. Shaken, he aimed the gun at his own mouth and treated himself to several tranquilizing squirts of vodka.

lost our lease said the sign in a window down the block from the office. Lot of those signs popping up lately. On the walk back from lunch with an agent, Russell paused for a moment in front of the window to examine the sale carpets, cheery kilims, a jaded Hariz. Russell's office was located in one of those interstitial regions of the city which until recently had been nameless. It was between Gramercy Park and Chelsea, south of midtown but not properly downtown-an area of century-old eight- and ten-story office and warehouse buildings given over largely to light industry, the Oriental carpet trade and downmarket photographers. The Carpet District, he called it, but lately the rug traders had been folding up their tents. Fashion and the kind of money that traveled light-hip retail and restaurants-had found the area and named it the Flatiron District, after its most famous building. Lunch had certainly become easier. Two years before he had had to get into a taxi to find food that wouldn't offend literary agents. Now they were willing to come down to check out the latest Piedmontese trattoria they'd read about in the Times. The Corbin, Dern Building stood in the middle of its block, on real estate that had quadrupled in value since Russell had been hired, a parking lot on one side and a small brownstone on the other. The publishing house occupied the top four of nine floors. The century-old structure had been copied from a nearby McKim, Mead & White building, and had been occupied since the twenties by the trade publishing firm of Corbin, Dern and Company. For writers and readers and reviewers, Corbin, Dern was a resonant dactyl, an invocation of the muses, a top-shelf cultural brand name.

After lunch Russell stopped in on Washington, who was conducting business in his habitual fashion, leaning back in his ergonomic Italian chair, stretched full length, cowboy boots on the edge of his desk, hands clasped behind his head. He put Russell in mind of a big cat, speed and claws concealed beneath a tropical manner. You seldom saw him run or pounce, but in the dry seasons he brought back prey. Just when it seemed there was no choice but to fire him for some radical breach of decorum, he dragged in a best-seller or one of his obscure Eastern European novelists suddenly won the Nobel Prize.

Waving to Washington's assistant, Russell did not wait for permission to clump in and lie down on the couch; unconsciously he mimicked his friend's position, picking up a copy of the Post from the coffee table. Homeless MAN attacked by giant CAT. He glanced up at Washington, then turned to page three, where he learned that a leopard or possibly a cheetah was terrorizing the Lower East Side, mauling winos and other street people.

"Yeah, man, let me get back to you."

Lee's manner was always furtive, as if engaged in clandestine business or tryst-making. Russell wondered whether Washington really wanted to get rid of this phone call or just didn't want him to hear it.

"Yo, it's my man Russ."

"I gotta get some heat on this Nicaragua book."

"You talk to Harold?"

"I thought he was already behind me." Washington had occupied the office next to Harold Stone's for a year before Russell had come along. They were contemporaries, though Washington had been moving up the ladder while Russell was still in graduate school. Being the only senior editor who fully qualified as a member of a minority group, and fluent in several important languages, Washington was virtually fearless. "I have tenure," he told Russell one night over many drinks. A Harvard scholarship man like Harold, he'd grown up in Harlem, like almost no one else in the publishing industry, and the few people who had the power to fire him felt just terrible about it.

"Two things you got to remember about Harold," Washington said now. "First, he used to be a big liberal. Got that? Look at the people he hangs out with now, socialites and neo-con economists, leveraged-buyout dudes. You think they're jamming about Marcuse and Malcolm X at dinner? Social justice and third-world revolutions are definitely not what is happening. Not on Park or Madison, anyway. Nobody wants to change the world anymore. They just want to own it. Harold's no dummy. All that stuff he did in the sixties, it was chic and it paid. Revolution was good business."

"Easy to say now."

"Doesn't make it any less true. Second, don't assume he wants your books to succeed."

This had occurred to Russell. But it was also important not to take Washington absolutely at face value. Though he almost always intended to be on Russell's team, he was a man of facets and intrigues so complex they were not always comprehensible even to himself. A good editor, Washington would have been an even better double agent.

"The world is divided into three kinds of people as far as this shit is concerned," Washington said, on a roll. "There's the good people like you, who are surprised and indignant that, whoa, hey, stop the presses, the government's up to no good. There are the people like me, who aren't surprised at all. Who already fucking knew. Then there's the majority, and they don't want to know about it, Jack." Washington pointed his Walther at Russell, who opened his mouth for a squirt. "By the way-how do you know the brother who was at your party the other night?"

"What brother?"

"How many were there, man?"

"I didn't notice."

"Jesus." Washington had seen other examples of Russell's obliviousness to his environment, though this seemed extreme. But he was not necessarily sorry in this case. He had been to grade school with the dude, and it had disconcerted him to encounter him there, among the white folks, in Russell's apartment. He did not necessarily like the idea of Russell's knowing about his other life in the old neighborhood, so he let it slide. Some shit don't mix.

Distasteful as it was, Russell felt he owed it to his author to grovel. That was the only chance he had to light a fire under this book. He had to go to the great Harold Stone, who was believed by some to have invented publishing, who taught the alphabet to Gutenberg, whose blessing called forth glowing reviews, serious essays, Guggenheim fellowships. Who was there when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and whatever. Doubt and shame? Doubt and pain? Or doubt and hate? Next rhyme was "fate." If anybody could wire it, Harold could.

Russell padded down the ancient hall carpet to the editor in chief's corner office. For three years he had been right next door to his mentor in a narrow cubicle. But when he had finally been promoted and a bigger office had become available a few months back, Russell had moved a hundred feet away. It was something like leaving home for college. Suddenly he felt awkward when he encountered Harold in the men's room; he would clear his throat, hold his dick and stare at the eye-level tiles. He wasn't sure how this had come about, whether he only imagined a change. But today he realized he hadn't spoken to Harold in almost a week.

"Nice pearls," he said to Carlton, Harold's blonde and toothy assistant, who sat importantly erect, guarding the portal to the chief, like a girl sporting a broomstick internally, flush against her spinal column. A year out of Radcliffe, she wore the regulation turtleneck and strand of pearls and believed totally in Harold Stone's divinity. She held up one hand in a traffic-cop gesture while cradling the phone in the other. "I'll tell him, I'm sure he will." When hell freezes over, Russell thought. Harold was notorious for not returning calls, and he had stopped writing letters some years before.

"Is he expecting you," Carlton asked when she'd hung up the phone.

Russell stuck his head inside the office; Harold looked up from a magazine he was reading. "Now he is." He refrained from adding, And do try not to be an officious bitch. Until recently she'd been meek around Russell, but now she projected an aura of self-importance befitting a senior officer in the company. Still, Harold had always valued Russell's enthusiastic lack of tact, an unusual quality in the timid precincts of book publishing.

Years before, Russell had decided Harold looked like a great horned owl (a member of Strigiformes Strigidae, as depicted by Audubon, plate 236), and the resemblance seemed only to increase over time. Looking up, his yellow-brown eyes blinking irritably through horn-rimmed glasses, he simulated something awakened out of a bad sleep in the crotch of a dead maple; he nodded and made a faintly interrogatory sound. His lack of the recommended minimum social graces seemed a matter of principle, as if charm, manners and the other lubricants of interpersonal contact betokened a lack of high seriousness. He seldom looked anyone in the eye, shunned greetings, ignored questions-behavior that his inferiors tended to read as arrogance, admirers as the gangly awkwardness of genius. His manner of dress had been adopted in Cambridge years and never revised, button-down shirts and chinos, a jacket when he had to, seldom a tie.

"Can we talk about the Rappaport book?"

"The Nicaragua thing?" Harold said.

"Yeah. The Secret War," Russell said, irritated that Harold would forget, or affect to forget, the author's name. Harold had encouraged Russell to buy this book.

"I'm still not crazy about the title."

"I'm having trouble getting it out there. "

Harold shrugged. Russell sat down on the edge of the long desk. Though Harold had occupied it for ten years, the office didn't look like it belonged to anyone in particular, which said more about its tenant than the clutter of photos, postcards and memorabilia in adjoining offices said about theirs.

"People aren't reading books anymore," Harold observed, looking out the window, which showed a slice of the Flatiron Building to the west and the Empire State to the north. Russell was reminded of a night several months before when he and Harold had stayed late and polished off a bottle of Armagnac. It was the only time Russell had ever seen his mentor drunk or heard him talk about his marriage, his wife's repeated hospitalizations and suicide threats. And later, when Russell had flattered him shamelessly, Harold had waved it off, saying that he'd been living off his intellectual capital for years, that he felt like the man married young to a ravishing beauty, long sated with her charms, who takes his pleasure from the hungry looks of other men. That, he insisted, was how he felt about most of the books he published. It had all been done. At that time, Harold had seemed to Russell like a stoic hero. Now Russell was beginning to think Harold regretted his candor. From that day on, a certain chilliness had seemed to prevail.

Russell stood up and surveyed the neat spines in the bookshelves, which looked like mere display cases for company product. It was impressive in a way, how Harold stood aloof from his immediate physical environment. Only two photographs adorned the lair; one of Harold and Saul Bellow, some twenty years younger, sitting uncomfortably side by side at a dinner table, Harold thinner, almost gaunt, but otherwise the same; and one of Robert Kennedy, smiling at a frowning Harold, friendly politician's hand on the editor's stiff shoulders. Considering the range of Harold's acquaintance among the famous and distinguished, Russell often wondered what process or lack of it had resulted in the selection of these two photographs to represent Harold's life and career.

"I was hoping you could think of somebody outside the book press who might want to do a news story."

Harold nodded thoughtfully, noncommittally, staring just slightly to the left of Russell's ear.

"It's not as if I think we need to hype this. If we can just get it noticed-"

"What's happening with Propp?" Harold interrupted.

After five years Russell still wasn't sure if these non sequiturs of Harold's were part of a conscious strategy for unsettling interlocutors or an innocent eccentricity.

"He mostly wants to know why I can't get him on the Today show."

"Is he ever going to finish the goddamn book?"

"Hey, give the guy a break. It's only six years overdue."

"Seven."

"Harold, what do I need to get the Rappaport book out there? Take hostages? Shoot the president?"

"When's Jeff going to deliver a manuscript?"

"Whenever he finishes."