Absent Friends

“Alive, a legend, McCaffery. Dead, a saint. Untouchable.”

Leo narrowed his eyes and stared at neither of them; both of them waited. “The McCaffery story, the fallout, then the reporter dies,” he said to Jesselson. “No one's interested?”

“The story, the fallout? Sure. Spano, the Fund, that lawyer. Lots of money at stake. Blood in the water.”

“So where are the sharks?”

“Later. When things get back to normal. Feeling seems to be this can wait.”

“But Randall? No one's interested in that?”

Jesselson turned to Laura again, his eyes those of a man regretting the bad news he's brought. “No.”

Leo looked at Laura.

“They're wrong,” she said.

“NYPD doesn't seem to agree.”

“NYPD has enough to do.”

Undeniably true. Detectives in surgical masks were clambering over the landfill mountain on Staten Island, spreading out the rubble that came in in buckets, picking through it for body parts and evidence. Uniformed officers stood at concrete barricades at City Hall, at the reservoirs, at tourist sites as they reopened. Cops in every precinct answered a deluge of calls about letters and packages citizens were afraid of.

“You have anything else?” Leo rubbed his enormous jaw. “Or just that the story was too good?”

“A story like this? That he broke? Harry was never—he was never suicidal.” A tough word, but she got it out. “Not since I've known him. Jesus, Leo, not even after what happened.” Like all New Yorkers, Laura waved an arm toward downtown, toward Ground Zero, when she said “what happened”; and like all New Yorkers, Leo knew without question what she meant. Her voice rose, louder and higher. “Leo, he had something else, he was on to something! And we're supposed to believe he jumped off a bridge now? Why would he do that?”

Leo eyed her, picked up the important words. “Something else?”

Laura nodded, told Leo: “He left papers.”

“Randall?”

“No, Leo! The firefighter. McCaffery. Papers no one had seen. Harry was on his way to see them. It's the last thing he told me.”

Yesterday afternoon—yesterday? No, it must have been years ago, centuries, when her heart, now a barren desert, had been a boundless, teeming sea—Laura had been sitting at her desk, polishing her SoHo merchant story, checking her e-mail every fifteen minutes, as always.

It was one of the first things the legendary Harry Randall had noticed about the new kid, Laura Stone: the way she surfaced from the depths of a project to snap at e-mail like a trout at flies. Harry's desk was behind Laura's, a little off to one side. She'd never dared speak to him except, on the day she'd joined the Tribune, to shake his hand and tell him how thrilled she was to be working at the same paper with him. (That, in the five minutes Leo allotted a new reporter to get settled before he started asking where the hell her copy was.)

Toward the end of her second week at the paper, as she was typing a fast e-mail confirmation of a meeting finally agreed to by a reluctant source, a quiet voice in her ear made Laura jump: “You're driving me crazy.”

She spun around, and Harry Randall was leaning over her, cockeyed sardonic grin, blue eyes, shirtsleeves and all.

“I—but—” In her mind Laura had been rehearsing approaches to the great man since the moment she'd started. Now, one hand on the back of her chair, the other on her desk, he was bending to talk to her as though they already knew each other well.

“It's hard,” he said, “for an ancient beached whale such as myself to continue doing as little as possible, in order to avoid disturbing the balance of the universe, in the face of Leo's insistence on introducing a tiger shark such as yourself to disrupt what small tranquillity I've been able to create in this goldfish bowl.” He waved his arm to show her reporters rushing in and out, or creating private tempests at their desks. “But do I complain? No, I do not. I try to go on. At least at first. But more and more, each day, my peace is destroyed, my meditation upon the great nothingness interrupted. And finally, I must speak.”

Laura, realizing her mouth was open, closed it. The only coherent thought she had was: He has freckles.

“Every time you check your e-mail”—he stabbed an accusing finger at Laura's monitor—“your screen flickers, a great wave crashing onto the peaceful beach of my thoughts. And you do this every five minutes.”

“Fifteen,” Laura sputtered.

“Aha! So you admit it, then?”

“I— Of course I do! In case something's come up. In case someone—I'm sorry. I don't mean to disturb you. What if I tilt it?”

“Don't tilt it. Turn it.” Harry pushed Laura's monitor a quarter of an inch with his fingertip. He went back, sat at his own desk, shook his head, came back, and pushed it again. This time, back at his own desk, he nodded happily. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” said Laura. She turned back to her work, and, ignoring the heat in her cheeks, tried to remember what it was she'd been doing.

Fifteen minutes later she checked her e-mail. The only new message was from Harry Randall: HAVE LUNCH WITH ME?

And so yesterday, as always, Laura had clicked on her e-mail every fifteen minutes. Routine; nothing