“And on that day,” Kate added, “an angel gets his wings.”

It soon became understood that the three of us would spend our lunch hours together. In good weather, we picked up sandwiches from the cart in the lobby and took them down to a park bench overlooking the Potomac. Kate, a proto-Goth who spent her evenings creating “media collages,” felt that it was her duty to bring me up to speed on five years’ worth of office gossip. Brian, who played keyboard in a punk-jazz fusion band, did his best to inject a note of moderation.

“You’re giving the new guy the wrong idea about this place,” Brian said, toward the end of my second week. “You’re making it sound like some sort of French bedroom farce. You know, with slamming doors and people running around in their knickers. It’s not like that.”

“It’s not? Hey, New Guy? Am I giving you the wrong impression?”

“I find your candor refreshing,” I said.

“I know, I’m adorable. And did you notice that guy we passed in the elevator? With his glasses on a green cord? That’s Allan Stracker. He’s been having a sidebar with Eve Taunton for three years. She still thinks he’s going to leave his wife.”

“Allan writes a column for the Alexandria Gazette,” Brian added, judiciously. “On public zoning concerns.”

“Having a sidebar?” I asked.

Brian raised his eyebrows at me. “In office parlance, it refers to the enjoyment of certain intimacies outside the confines of marriage. The derivation is obscure, but it appears to date to an incident in which a certain managing editor’s passionate addresses were interrupted by the sudden arrival of his wife. His explanation, we’re told, was that he was merely researching a sidebar for Healthy Lifestyles. His wife’s response is not recorded.”

This is how people talked at LifeSpan. If you asked someone where the coffee filters were kept, the answer was likely to touch on the role of the coffee cherry in Ethiopian religious ceremonies.

“What about you, New Guy?” said Kate, crumpling up an empty bag of potato chips. “Any dirty details we need to know? Is there a string of broken hearts trailing back to Greenwich Village?”

“There was somebody in New York before I moved down here, but she—I got a letter.”

“We’ve all gotten those letters,” Brian said. “I keep a file.”

“Too bad Jane Rossmire isn’t here anymore,” Kate said. “She had a thing for anguished writer types. You’d have liked her. You could have been all dark and brooding together.”

“I’m not dark and brooding.”

“My mistake.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Jane Rossmire. Isn’t she the one who left? Didn’t I fill her job? Something to do with Thaddeus Whozits?”

Brian and Kate exchanged a look. “Thaddeus Palgrave,” Brian said. “LifeSpan’s answer to Heathcliff.”

“What’s the story there? Mr. Albamarle made it sound as if Palgrave had driven her off the premises with a pitchfork or something.”

“Nobody really knows,” Kate said. “I mean, considering we’ve got a building full of researchers, there’s surprisingly little in the way of hard data on Palgrave. And nobody’s seen or heard from Jane in six months. I’ve tried calling. The phone is disconnected.”

“I liked her a lot,” Brian said. “She’d seen the Ramones eight times. I made her a tape of Sham 69.”

“They never should have assigned her to Palgrave,” Kate said.

“I’m not following this,” I said. “What happened? Were they having a sidebar?”

“I don’t think so.” Kate used her straw to poke at a clot of ice in her Diet Coke. “I think he just drove her insane. It happens to everybody who works with him, to some extent.”

“He’s that difficult?”

“Actually, he’s very polite and occasionally quite charming,” Brian said, “but impossible to figure out. He’s been here for more than ten years, but he has no friends. It’s understood that he has a degree from Oxford, which explains his weird, not-quite-English accent, and he did something at the Sorbonne for a while.”

“Which accounts for the icy hauteur,” Kate said.

“The man simply does not play well with others,” Brian agreed. “Nobody has ever seen him go out for lunch. Not once. He sits at his desk every day eating a tuna and avocado pita pocket, with his nose in a book.”

“Maybe he’s just—”

“Shy?” Kate gave a snort. “Is that what you were about to say, New Guy? No, Thaddeus Palgrave is not shy. He holds himself apart. He looks down his aquiline nose at the hoi polloi. Has he given you one of his off-the-cuff Latin witticisms yet?”

“No, I haven’t even met the man.”

Kate glanced at her watch. “Well, the moment is at hand. We have a paste-up at four o’clock. He’ll be there.” She stood up and brushed some crumbs off her lap.

“What’s a paste-up?”

“Just before a book goes to press, we have a meeting to review the galleys. All the pages get pinned up on the walls so everyone can take a last look.”

“It’s really just an excuse to open a bottle of wine on a Friday,” Brian added. “Everyone stands around patting themselves on the back for a job well done.”

“Everyone except Palgrave,” said Kate.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “Everyone except Palgrave.”

AT four o’clock I trailed into the corner conference room behind George Wegner, a thirty-year man who had started his career on the Russia desk of NewsBeat. More than a hundred layout pages were pinned to the cork walls, and as Brian had suggested, the air was heavy with selfcongratulation. Wegner spent twenty minutes earnestly telling me about the brief “bill of fare” sections he had written near the front of each chapter, teasing the contents and laying out the themes to come. “If it’s done right,” he told me, “the reader won’t even be aware of it. But it’s vital to the structure of the chapter. It gets the reader’s mind pointed in the proper direction. So, for instance, in the chapter just before Missionary Ridge, it was important to—”

“Bluff and genial? Can you possibly be serious, Mr. Wegner?”

The voice caught me off guard. I turned to find Thaddeus Palgrave hovering at Wegner’s elbow, an expression of amused contempt playing over his features. I had never seen him up close before. He had a high, broad forehead and an underslung jaw, giving his head the appearance of an inverted pyramid. His dark blond hair was flecked with gray, but his face was taut and unlined, making his age hard to figure—no younger than forty-five, I would have guessed. His narrow eyes were dull green and—though he would have objected to the cliché—as cold as ice. Sometimes there’s no other way to say it.

Wegner recovered more quickly than I did. “Thaddeus, I don’t believe you’ve met our newest member of the staff? May I present—”

Palgrave ignored my outstretched hand. “You are excessively fond of the phrase bluff and genial, Mr. Wegner.”

“Excuse me, Thaddeus?”

“In The Deadliest Day, you informed us that Ambrose Burnside was the ‘bluff and genial commander of the right wing of the Army of the Potomac. ’ In Second Manassas, you declared that John Pope, ‘though bluff and genial off the battlefield, had gained a reputation as a determined tactician in the western theater of the war.’ And now, in The Road to Chancellorsville, we learn that General Joseph Hooker, ‘a bluff and genial man, took command of the Second Division of the Third Corps at the start of the Peninsula Campaign.’ ” Palgrave cocked his head toward the galley where the offending phrase appeared. “I could go on.”

Wegner tried to laugh it off, but his ears were reddening. “I’ll have to watch that,” he said. “Still, every writer has his little quirks, wouldn’t you agree?”

“If by that you mean most writers are lazy and inaccurate,” Palgrave said, “then of course I am forced to agree. Or have I misunderstood?”

The room had gone silent. Peter Albamarle, the managing editor, stepped forward to try to save the situation. “I’m afraid I do that sort of thing all the time, Thaddeus,” he said. “I’d be embarrassed to say how many times I’ve used the phrase ‘fell back under a curtain of flying shot and blue smoke.’ No one in my chapters ever makes a strategic retreat. They invariably fall back under a curtain of flying shot and blue smoke. It’s become something of a—”