"Oh, yeah? Really? You'd like it if I came waving a rejection letter in your face and said, 'Here, I thought I'd do you a favor'? Spare me your next favor."
"Why are you so angry about this?"
"I'm not. I just don't know what else to do," he says. "My stuff down here is mine alone. For no other reason than this dumb workshop is a pleasure for me. I spend my life at a job I hate, in a career I can't stand. I'm forty-one and my girlfriend gets screwed by some guy in her yoga class, by some little Italian kid, and has me pay the legal bills. So-" He waves the rejection letter at her.
She wipes her eyes, but her face is hard.
"So," he goes on, "you can keep your fingers out of my private business. Out of the only stuff I do that isn't a fucking disgrace."
"I'm going upstairs."
"Good." He's losing his nerve. "Good," he repeats louder. "Not upstairs, though. You can fuck off back to the States. I'll pay your ticket."
He joins her in the apartment. She's at the kitchen table, shell-shocked. He takes her suitcase from the cupboard.
"Are you kidding me?" she says.
"You need to pack."
She opens a drawer full of underwear and socks, stares at them, doing nothing for a minute.
As she fills the suitcase, he goes online and buys a ticket for her flight back to Washington, leaving the next day.
"That's three thousand bucks," she exclaims, looking at the computer screen. "Are you insane?"
"Too late. I just paid for it." He phones a hotel and books her a room for that night.
"What about my things?"
"Get them shipped. Look, don't take the flight if you don't want. But then you're paying your own way home."
He calls a taxi and carries her bags outside. He drops them beside her at the curb and goes back in, without a word. His legs tremble on the stairs up. In the apartment, he stands over the toilet, spitting bitter saliva into the bowl until his mouth is dry.
How long before she arrives at the hotel?
If he calls too soon, he'll seem insane. He must appear to have cooled down.
He sits on the cold tiles of the bathroom, his shoulder against the toilet bowl. He rereads the letter from the patent office. It was kind of her. Nothing she has done has touched him like this. And the rejection is usefuclass="underline" it puts an end to all these years of ridiculous daydreams. No inventor, he. That's done with, then. Good.
He waits two nauseating hours.
Has he made his point? The point he's been trying to make? But no, this isn't the point he wanted to make at all.
He picks up his cellphone and finds that she has sent him a text message: "i miss u, can i come for visit?" It was sent hours before, when he was still in the basement and she was still here. He calls her mobile, but there is no answer.
He phones the hotel. The reception desk transfers him to her room. His mouth is parched. He keeps swallowing.
"It's me," he says as the phone is answered. "My point is this. I think we both want." He hesitates. "Don't we? Or am I-"
But he is interrupted. It is a man's voice. It is Paolo.
1977. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME
The paper improved under Milton Berber. It developed pluck and humor, pulled off the occasional scoop, even won a couple of awards-nothing stunning, but still unprecedented in its history.
The newsroom changed, too. In the old days, journalists were referred to as "the boys." Now many of the boys were women. Crude jokes earned fewer snorts of approval, and ethnic slurs did not fly. Milton demanded that ashtrays (and the floor is not an ashtray) be used. The filthy carpeting was changed, made pristine white again. And the cocktail bar in the east wall was replaced with a watercooler; the consequent decline in typos was extraordinary.
Typewriters disappeared next, replaced by video display terminals. Overnight, the newsroom's distinctive clack-clack-bing went silent. The rumbling basement presses hushed, too, with the work outsourced to modernized printing sites around the globe. No longer did vast rolls of newsprint slam into the backside of the building in the late afternoon, jolting any dozing reporter awake. No longer did delivery trucks clog Corso Vittorio at dawn as workmen loaded the papers, copies still warm.
News got cooler, quieter, cleaner.
However, the biggest change was money: the paper started making it. Not a heap, and not every month. But after decades it was profitable.
While other publications snubbed far-flung outposts, the paper targeted them, finding its niche at the fringes of the world, copies turning up on armchairs in the Diamond Dealers Club of Freetown, or at a village newsagent on the island of Gozo, or on a bar stool in Arrowtown, New Zealand. A passerby picked it up, perused a few pages and, as often as not, the paper gained a new devotee. By the early 1980s, daily circulation had neared twenty-five thousand, climbing annually.
With readers around the globe, it was impossible to produce a normal daily-yesterday in Melbourne wasn't yesterday in Guadalajara. So the paper took its own route, trusting reporters and editors to veer from the media pack, with varying success. The trick was to hire welclass="underline" hungry reporters like Lloyd Burko in Paris; nitpicky wordsmiths like Herman Cohen.
The paper also gained a reputation in journalistic circles as a feeder to prestigious U.S. publications, which attracted young hotshots to Rome. Milton trained them, wrung copy from them for a few years, then hoisted them to high-profile positions elsewhere. Those who moved away recalled him with affection and always dropped by the office when transiting through Italy, showing off their expensive jobs, boasting of bylines and babies.
Milton's reputation was enhanced by all this, and various midsize U.S. newspapers tried to lure him away. But he had no intention of leaving-this was the best job of his life.
Elsewhere in the Ott Group, matters were more bleak. The problems began when Boyd was peripherally implicated in the fraudulent bankruptcy of a Midwestern bank. He and eight others avoided criminal charges but were fined $120 million. His reputation was further sullied over a stock-fixing scandal involving several Ott Group employees. Boyd himself had no role in it, but a spate of articles conflated his bank scandal with the stock-fixing case. The ugliest blow came in the mid-1980s, when an Ott Group copper subsidiary was found to have dumped toxins into a rural water source in Zambia, causing scores of birth defects. A South African newspaper printed a ghoulish price list that Ott Group reps had used to compensate villagers: $165 for missing limbs, $40 for missing hands, and a diminishing scale from there, concluding with the curiously exact sum of $3.85 per lost toe. Ott Group headquarters claimed ignorance of this but built the villagers new houses nevertheless.
"COLD WAR OVER, HOT WAR BEGINS"
READER-ORNELLA DE MONTERECCHI
SHE HAS BEEN DREADING TOMORROW EVER SINCE IT HAPPENED the first time.
Ornella sits on the sofa in her living room, the paper on her lap, and picks at her lower lip. A faint ripping comes from the kitchen, where the cleaner, Marta, is tearing sheets of paper towel, which she must place between stacked pots and pans to avoid scuffing the surfaces. This is among the many rules that previous cleaners-and there have been dozens-contravened. Some were dismissed for tardiness. Some for impudence. Some stole, or were suspected of it. Others failed to learn, or didn't care to, or left dust under beds. Marta has worked here for almost two years and, so far, is almost without fault, except that she is Polish, which Ornella views as a demerit. Also, Marta has an inappropriately good figure for a cleaner, though her face is a battlefield of acne, which makes up for it. She has a habit of looking down when confused or scolded, staring at the broom bristles and smiling. This has never struck anyone as defiance; it signals submission. Which is best with this mistress, for Ornella's home is a world where it is not possible to be good.