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the man all your life."
    Nick watched him standing in the corner of the bar, backlit
by the red and green neon sign--tall, curly hair, short-cropped, big ears, a
high nose with a little indentation near the ridge where the glasses he hated
to wear pinched too tightly, smiling broadly with incredibly even teeth. He
patted Nick on the back with a heavy paw. "You're in, kid."
    "I'm scared to death."
    "You're a reporter, kid. Just do the reporting. Let me
handle the rewrite."
    They walked back across Forty-first Street, past the
loading pier lined with high-backed News trucks. Beyond the pier, Nick
could see huge metal rollers.
    "That's where the rag rolls off the presses. Two
million of them a night."
    They waited for the freight elevator in the musty corridor,
heavy with what were then strange odors. Paper and ink. From that moment it
attached itself forever to the hairs of his nostrils, as if a family of
bacteria had migrated there for permanent settlement.
    In the elevator, Charlie grabbed at Nick's tie, loosened
it, and unbuttoned the collar.
    "I'm just unstiffening you a bit." When he had
mussed Nick's hair slightly, he stood back, an artist surveying the quick dabs
on the canvas.
    "Not perfect, but it will have to do."
    As the elevator door opened into the city room, they got out
and Charlie turned to face him again.
    "One more thing, kid."
    "What?"
    "You're a Kerryman."
    "A what?"
    "A Kerryman."
    "What the hell is that?"
    "A county in Ireland."
    "Kerryman?"
    "No, Kerry. County Kerry, dummy. That's where your
family is from."
    "With a name like Gold? Worse still, my father told me
it used to be Goldberg." Actually, he had had an Irish grandmother on his
maternal side, northern Irish, he recalled, the hated Protestant Orange. He was
an authentic American mishmash, his Semitic father had told him.
    "Tell him it used to be Goldic, Gaelic. Get it?"
He remembered his stomach had turned as he followed Charlie toward the managing
editor's desk, planted imperiously at one end of the city room. His palms had
begun to sweat.
    "Don't worry. He thinks I'm Irish, too. For a High
Episcopalian, that's really grand fraud. I told him my middle name was Xavier,
like his. I didn't know about the Kerry thing till later. Besides, I drink
Irish. That's the ultimate identifying clue."
    Whatever Nick's misgivings, he had followed Charlie's stage
direction to the letter. The thing about Kerry was the clincher. McCarthy spent
the first ten minutes of the interview tracing the history of George Higgins
and his mammoth appetite for the grape, like an old school tie, the memory
warming the older man's heart. From a corner of his eye, Nick could see Charlie
peering over his typewriter, tense with expectation.
    "Kerry, you say." Nick had, as agreed, injected
the subtlety. McCarthy did not notice Nick's bobbing, nervous Adam's apple, or
question the Goldic blarney. But there was one moment of panic as McCarthy
looked into him with pale blue bloodshot eyes, then shifted suddenly beyond his
head to a big wall clock.
    "Boy!" McCarthy boomed and a copy boy came
running obsequiously. He opened a desk drawer and peeked in swiftly, writing a
word on a piece of copy paper and folding it. Nick saw the edge of a scratch
sheet. The boy took the paper and hustled away.
    "Kerry, you say," McCarthy repeated, the pale
eyes turning inward to some embedded memory of the Emerald Isle. He imagined he
could actually hear the hint of a brogue in McCarthy's speech cadence. Beyond
the voice, the tempo in the city room seemed to accelerate. Typewriters clicked
loudly. The cry of "Boy!" echoed in the big room.
    "Never trust another Irishman," McCarthy said.
"They're all black inside." Nick felt his heart palpitate in his
chest.
    "But that's what we must have in this business. Black
Irish, and the Kerryman is the blackest, a cursed lot," McCarthy said, a
heavy scent of booze rushing out with his sudden odd anger. "Stubborn.
Tenacious. Vipers. The lot of 'em. We Corkmen hate them