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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