"So," Leo said, "what was it you wanted to see us about exactly, if I may ask?"
"I want to talk about a newspaper."
"Which one?"
"My own," Ott answered. "I intend to start one. An international English-language newspaper. Based in Rome and sold around the world."
"Oh yeah?" Leo said, leaning forward and releasing his brown knit tie, which he'd been pinning against his chest to cover a missing shirt button. "Pretty interesting," he said, tie swinging like a clock pendulum, revealing a thread blossom where the button had been. "Could work," he said. "Definitely could. Uhm, you looking for people?"
"You two. You'll run it."
Betty wriggled up higher on the banquette. "Why would you start a newspaper?"
"The more I think about it," Leo interrupted, "the more I like it. Nobody's done it right yet. Nobody's making real money out of something like this."
Ott alone was sober when they parted that night. He shook their hands, patted Leo's shoulder, and walked up the Spanish Steps to the Hotel Hassler, where he was staying. Betty and Leo stumbled down Via del Babuino for home.
Leo took her ear and whispered into it. "Was he serious?"
"He always used to be."
But Leo hardly heard. "That's the richest guy I ever got loaded with," he said.
They arrived at their building and dragged themselves up to the fourth floor as if the stairwell banisters were rope. Theirs was a decent-sized apartment for a childless couple, high ceilings and bared wooden rafters, but only one window, which wasn't a bad thing when it came to the hangovers. She made coffee.
Suddenly serious, she said, "Be sweet to me." She touched the point of Leo's cheekbone, where he had missed a patch of stubble-Betty had been noticing it all evening.
A few blocks away, Ott sat on his hotel bed. Perhaps, he thought, I should go no further with this. Perhaps I should leave everything as it was. Perhaps I should not start this paper.
"WORLD'S OLDEST LIAR DIES AT 126"
OBITUARY WRITER-ARTHUR GOPAL
ARTHUR'S CUBICLE USED TO BE NEAR THE WATERCOOLER, BUT the bosses tired of having to chat with him each time they got thirsty. So the watercooler stayed and he was moved. Now his desk is in a distant corner, as far from the locus of power as possible but nearer the cupboard of pens, which is a consolation.
He arrives at work, flops into his rolling chair, and remains still. This persists until inertia and continued employment cease to be mutually tenable, at which point he wriggles off his overcoat, flicks on the computer, and checks the latest news reports.
No one has died. Or, rather, 107 people have in the previous minute, 154,000 in the past day, and 1,078,000 in the past week. But no one who matters. That's good-it has been nine days since his last obit, and he hopes to extend the streak. His overarching goal at the paper is indolence, to publish as infrequently as possible, and to sneak away when no one is looking. He is realizing these professional ambitions spectacularly.
He opens a manila folder so that, if anyone happens past, he can flutter sheets, peer up irascibly, and mutter "Preparedness!" which seems to put most people off. Not all people, sadly.
Clint Oakley appears behind him, and Arthur swivels around in his chair as if twisted by a garrote. "Clint. Hi. Morning. I've been over the wires. Nothing obvious. To me, at least. Not so far." He despises this tendency to justify himself so abjectly to his superiors. He should shut up.
"Didn't you see it?"
"See what?"
"Are you serious?" Clint is a specialist in queries that are at once hectoring and incomprehensible. "Don't you read email? Wake up, faggot." He raps Arthur's monitor as if it were a skull. "Anybody home?" Clint Oakley, Arthur's boss, is a dandruff-raining, baseball-obsessed, sexually resentful Alabamian with a toilet-brush mustache and an inability to maintain eye contact. He is also the culture editor, an ironic posting if considered. "Rectum," he says, apparently meaning Arthur, and struts back to his office.
If history has taught us anything, Arthur muses, it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power. Sadly, the paper has not heeded this truism, because Clint has authority over all special sections, including obituaries. Lately, he has heaped endless chores upon Arthur, ordering him to collate This Day in History, Brain Teasers, Puzzle-Wuzzle, the Daily Ha-Ha, and World Weather, in addition to his regular necrological duties.
Arthur finds the e-mail Clint was referring to. It's from the editor-in-chief, Kathleen Solson, who wants preparedness-that is, an obituary prepared before the subject dies-on Gerda Erzberger. Who on earth is that? He checks the Internet. She turns out to be an Austrian intellectual, once lauded by feminists, then decried by them, then forgotten. Why should the paper care that she's about to die? Well, because Kathleen happens to have read Erzberger's memoirs while at college. And, as Arthur knows, "news" is often a polite way of saying "editor's whim."
Kathleen arrives to discuss the piece.
"I'm working on it right now," he says preemptively.
"On Gerda?"
"Gerda? Do you know her personally?" If the answer is yes, his assignment assumes fresh peril.
"Not well. Met her a couple of times at events."
"Not a friend, then," he suggests hopefully. "How urgent would you say this is?" Which is to say, When's she planning to die?
"Unclear," Kathleen responds. "She's not having treatment."
"Is that good or bad?"
"Well, it's not typically good with cancer. Listen, I'd like us to do this properly for once-give you enough time to get an interview with her, go up there and so on, rather than just working from clips."
"Go up where?"
"She lives outside Geneva. Have the secretaries work out travel arrangements."
Travel means effort and a night away from home. Bleak. And nothing is worse than obit interviews. He must never disclose to his subjects what he's researching because they tend to become distressed. So he claims to be working on "a profile." He draws out the moribund interviewee, confirms the facts he needs, then sits there, pretending to jot notes, stewing in guilt, remarking, "Extraordinary!" and "Did you really?" All the while, he knows how little will make it into print-decades of a person's life condensed into a few paragraphs, with a final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather.
At this disheartening thought, he sneaks out of the office to fetch his daughter. Pickle, who is eight, emerges from the school gate, satchel strap around her throat, arms flat at her sides, potbelly distended, glasses scanning nothing in particular, her untied shoelaces flailing with each step. "Antiques?" he asks, and she slips her hand into his, squeezing it in affirmation. To Via dei Coronari they amble hand in hand. He observes her from above, her tangled black hair, tiny ears, the thick lenses that bend and swell the cobblestones. She babbles softly and snorts with amusement. She is a wonderful nerd, and he hopes this won't change. He'd be distressed if she were cool-it'd be as if his flesh and blood had grown up to be purple.
"Your aspect," he says, "recalls that of a chimpanzee."
She is humming softly and offers no response. After a minute, she says, "And you remind me of an orangutan."
"I can't argue with that. Nope, I cannot argue with that. By the way," he adds, "I have a new one for you: Tina Pachootnik."
"Say it again?"
"Pachootnik. Tina."
She shakes her head. "Impossible to say."