Absent Friends

“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 interesting. Then, midmorning, this, from Harry: Subject Line: WOO-EEE! Text: I'M ONTO SOMETHING, MY LITTLE TIGER SHARK. MCCAFFERY LEFT PAPERS! HOT STUFF. OR SO I'M TOLD. ON MY WAY TO GET A GLIMPSE—MORE LATER. H

What had she done, when she'd read that? Smiled, probably. Seen in her mind the gleam in Harry's eye, the predatory glint he got. (They all got it, people like Harry and Laura, and though others had long said gin had dulled Harry's eyes and the glint was no more, Laura knew that was wrong.) And—oh God, this came back to her now, how was it such small things remained?—she'd hoped, before he'd gone to see his source, the person who was offering him this treasure, that Harry had remembered to shave.

A thunderclap. No; Leo's voice. “McCaffery?”

The glint in Harry's eye, his note on her computer screen, both vanished, and Leo's office swam back into view. The thunder had been a question, so Laura answered it. “Yes.”

“You have these papers?”

“No.”

“You saw them?”

“No.”

“Randall had them?”

“I don't know.”

“What's in them?”

“I don't know. Hot stuff, Harry said.”

“How do you know about them?”

“He e-mailed.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Where'd they come from? Where are they now?”

“I don't know. But I can find them, Leo. So you see—”

He waved a hand, as all gods do to silence mortals.

Leo sat unmoving as a boulder. Laura prayed for Leo's phone to stay silent, for all the reporters typing and talking and buzzing around the coffee machine to be satisfied with their sources and their assignments and not need anything, right now, from Leo.

The boulder finally stirred. “Three days,” a rocky voice rumbled from its depths. “Bring me something that says you're right. No extension, no maybe. Show me there's a story.”