THE PHONE RINGS IN THE LIVING ROOM. HE KNOWS WHO IT IS, SO he puts on his coat, summons Schopenhauer, and leads the dog outside for a walk.
Oliver is a lanky man, not quite thirty but already hunched, his head dangling forward as if from a coat hook rather than mounted upon a spine. An oily blond fringe curtains his blemished forehead and pale blue eyes, while a turnip nose bobs between strands of hair as he walks. His lips bear nibbled indents, and his chin wavers as he mumbles to his dog. He gazes fixedly down the line of the leash, witnessing the world from Schopenhauer's vantage point-life at sniff level.
A scent catches the basset hound's attention and he jumps toward a urine-drizzled tussock of grass. He pulls this way, wrenches that, braiding Oliver into ever more intricate tangles. "I'm beginning to think," Oliver says, "that the leash is here largely for irony."
Their walks take them all around the city. To the Botanical Gardens on the slopes of the Janiculum. To the Valle dei Cani in Villa Borghese. To the parched turf of the Circus Maximus, where tourists trudge the ancient chariot circuit, chugging bottled water. On the hottest days, Oliver and Schopenhauer cross the Tiber, making for the shaded alleys of Trastevere. Or they stroll up Via Giulia, whose resolutely tall buildings stand up to the sun. Or they saunter through the Protestant Cemetery in Testaccio, where Oliver's grandfather is buried.
The headstone is an uninspiring affair-"Cyrus Ott. Born 1899. Died 1960"-so Oliver proceeds to more diverting tombs, reading under his breath the inscribed names: "Gertrude Parsons Marcella… Lieutenant Colonel Harris Arthur McCormack… Wolfgang Rappaport. Dead at age four." He tells the dog, "Michael James Lamont Hosgood died at fifteen. That's him, beside his mother. But she died twenty years later in Kent. She must have asked to be buried back here, alongside her son. Don't you think, Schop?" The tomb of Devereux Plantagenet Cockburn is adorned with a life-size statue of the deceased, a young fop reclining with a cocker spaniel in his lap and his thumb inserted in a book, as if every visitor to the grave were a pleasant interruption from his studies. Oliver reads the lengthy inscription, which concludes: "He was beloved by all who knew him, and most precious to his parents and family, who had sought his health in many foreign climes. He departed this life in Rome, on the 3rd of May 1850, aged 21 years."
The sun resigns its position in the sky and the mosquitoes assume theirs, so Oliver and Schopenhauer head back to the Aventine Hill. Their home is a sixteenth-century mansion that Cyrus Ott bought cheap in the early 1950s. Oliver punches in the digital code and the mechanized steel gate parts squeakily. Inside, the telephone rings.
Oliver releases Schopenhauer, winds up the leash, and enters the living room. The ceiling is even higher than in the entrance hall, paneled with rococo reliefs, with starbursts and peach cherubim gamboling around the corners. The oil paintings on the walls are too poorly lit for their subjects to be immediately discernible-from a distance, all appear to depict woods at night; only the gilt frames glint. Into the Oriental rugs, deep paths have been worn from pedestrian traffic: to the kitchen, to the shuttered windows, to the bookshelves, to the tete-a-tete settee, to the old telephone whose antiquated bell at this moment rattles against the wallpaper. The answering machine kicks in.
"Hi, it's me again," Kathleen says. "I'm at the office. Please give me a call. Thanks."
Oliver plucks a paperback Agatha Christie from a stack on the floor and settles himself and the dog (lured with a chocolate cookie) on the settee. At 7 P.M., the housekeepers announce dinner. It's some sort of stew. Too much rosemary and too little salt, but perfectly edible. Schopenhauer sniffs the meat-scented air beseechingly, his droopy eyes bloodshot, spittle on his chops. Oliver fetches that day's paper-the subscription department insists on sending it, though he never reads the thing. He spreads it across the table and places his plate of leftovers on top. He pulls up a chair for Schopenhauer, who leaps up and shoots his snout across the table. The dog turns his muzzle to one side to snap up meat and carrots, then jerks his head back, flinging the food down his throat.
"A knife and fork would be preferable," Oliver says. "But there's no teaching you."
Once the plate is clean, Oliver scrunches up the paper, specked with gravy and gobbets of gristle. He disposes of the mess in the kitchen as Schopenhauer drinks from his bowl, tongue and ears slapping the water.
The phone in the living room rings again. And, again, the machine gets it. "I'm headed home now," Kathleen says wearily. "You can get me on my cell. Appreciate if you'd call tonight. Kinda urgent. Thanks."
Schopenhauer noses open the door and wanders off, padding upstairs.
"Time alone is good for any relationship," Oliver comments as if the dog were still in the room to hear it. Oliver lies on his belly on the floor, piles of books ranged around him like tall grass: Miss Marple's Final Cases, a Taschen monograph on Turner, Sotheby's twentieth-century British art-auction listing, The Penguin Complete Father Brown, a catalog from Caravaggio: The Final Years at the National Gallery, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. "Where have you gone?" he asks the absent dog. He checks in the kitchen. "Schop?" He peers into the dining room. "Where in the devil's name are you?"
He climbs the darkened staircase with a flashlight. (Oliver inhabits only the ground floor; the rest of the mansion is all darkness, covered by tarpaulins.) The beam of his torch sweeps across the second-floor landing. "Schopenhauer, where are you?" Oliver is swallowed into the black belly of the house; a chandelier twinkles; the telephone in the living room rings. The answering machine beeps, its message number flashing permanently at "99" because the display lacks a third digit.
"Where are you, you fool?" Oliver calls into the darkened ballroom. He shines the flashlight about and exclaims, "Ah!"-reflective eyes under the piano. "Sorry, I'm blinding you." He turns off the flashlight and the basset hound trots over, his overlong nails clacking on the hardwood floor. Oliver kneels to greet his friend. "What were you doing under the piano? Sleeping?" He strokes Schopenhauer's long, damp ear. "I hope I didn't wake you."
They fumble through the dark to the study, which contains documents from his grandfather's time in Rome. Oliver clicks on the lamp and, snooping like a whodunit detective, peeks into the drawers. He finds a letter pad containing Ott's notes of fifty years before-references to newsprint rolls, the price of Linotype machines, telex rates. There is an unfinished letter from Ott to his wife and son: "Dear Jeanne and Boyd, the important thing to realize, and I need to make this clear." It ends there.
Oliver turns the page and finds another of Ott's letters. "I want you to have all the paintings-we bought them together and I feel they should be yours," it begins. "Take this to my lawyers and they will do as I say." The next line is illegible. Then: "I long to see you, but I will not telephone. Nothing pleasant about this illness. Nothing anybody needs to see. But you should know that I regret certain things," the letter says. "I regret that I left you in New York. But I made that decision and I must live with it. I married, then you married. I was not going to interfere after that. I was an honorable man, I believed, and did not know how to stop being one. To think of that now, it seems outright madness. But I got myself into a tangle. I tied myself in knots. I built and I built-heaven knows I have done that well. Those skyscrapers, full of tenants, floor after floor, and not a single room containing you. You asked why I came here to Rome. I never cared about the news. I came to be in the same room as you, even if I had to build that room, fill it with people, with typewriters, the rest. I only hope you understand that the paper was for you."
A blue ink stain follows, as if the tip of the pen rested here for some time. The handwriting resumes, tiny now: "Can't send this… Damn well must… Too late now… Don't be a fool-just send her this."
He never did.
Oliver places the pad back in the drawer. "You fat beast," he tells Schopenhauer, as he carries him down the stairs. "You're so much heavier than I think-I always forget that." He puts the dog down in the living room, as if lowering a table to its feet. The table scampers away. "Asleep under the piano!" he remarks, smacking his hands together. "Now I'm all covered in dust."
The phone rattles the wallpaper. "I pretend it's not ringing," Oliver says, "and it pretends I'm not here."
The machine beeps. "Oliver, this is Abbey. I'm happy to brief you on my meetings in Atlanta. Anyway, I'm back now. So call me. Thanks."
Oliver coaxes Schopenhauer back onto the settee. "Stop staring at me," he tells the dog. "I'm trying to read."
Schopenhauer burps.
"You disgusting contrarian," Oliver says. But he is unable to resist for long and strokes the dog's ears. Schopenhauer rumbles contentedly, leaning into Oliver's hip. "My dear friend," Oliver says. "I'm so lucky." He adds, suddenly self-conscious, "If anyone heard me talking to you! But it's not like I'm talking to myself. You're listening because-" He stops there, to see if it prompts a response.
The dog yawns.
"See, I have to get to the end of my sentence. You won't have it otherwise."
The dog's eyelids sink shut.
Over the coming weeks, the phone calls increase.
"Money, money, money," Oliver tells Schopenhauer. "What am I supposed to do? I don't run the Ott Group."
Kathleen is talking into the machine: "… and I'm going to need you at that staff meeting. I've told everyone you'll be there, so I'd appreciate it if you'd call me back."
At the Valle dei Cani, Oliver switches Schopenhauer to the extendable leash, which allows the animal to play with the dogs but not to run away. The other owners watch Oliver with amusement: he retreats to the edge of the grassy bowl, behind a tree, with a detective novel pressed to his nose, unwilling to engage human eyes as he clings to the world's longest and most unmanageable leash. Every few minutes, he must rush over to Schopenhauer and remove the cord from an animal or a person. Oliver never speaks on these occasions, even if spoken to. He unties his friend, hurries back to his tree, resumes reading-or, rather, resumes pretending to read.
He has no friends in Rome except Schopenhauer. He has no friends anywhere except Schopenhauer, unless his companion from school days, the pensioner Mr. Deveen, is still alive. But Mr. Deveen must be dead by now. How old would he be? He'd not have reached the twenty-first century, not with all those cigarettes. Dear man. Can't condemn him. He must have been lonely. That's the best way to explain it.
Dinner that evening is bigoli al tartufo nero, and Schopenhauer makes an ungodly mess of it again. Long pasta is not his strong point. "They warned me that you bayed," Oliver says, "but never about your table manners."
The two best friends embark on another expedition to the darkened upper floors. Oliver steals through the rooms, peeking at the paintings under tarpaulin: Modigliani's portrait of a Gypsy; Leger's green bottles and black bowler hats; Chagall's blue chickens leaping over the moon; the English country landscape as seen by Pissarro.
Oliver stands before the Turner: a disintegrating ship and the spray of the sea; the way Turner captured water, the sloshing bulk of it. He could stare at it for hours-and Turner is not particularly his thing. What is his thing, then? At Yale, his thesis (aborted when Boyd fell ill) was "Wreck in the Moonlight: Caspar David Friedrich and the Nineteenth-Century German Landscape." But it's preposterous to speak of "his thing" when it comes to art.
As he admires the Turner, his gaze flits from one aspect to another on the canvas, impatient for the pleasure of the next detail, rapt by the process of looking. "Beauty," he tells Schopenhauer, "is all I care about." Only the drowning figures in the foreground are a disappointment: visual noise within an otherwise impeccable panorama. Turner flubbed it, not simply because his human forms were inept but because the human form can never be rendered beautiful. A face is the opposite of beauty, lurching as it will from laughter to brutality. "How," Oliver asks, "can people be attracted to each other?"
His ear twitches at the incessant ringing downstairs. It's after midnight. "Can they not leave me alone?" From the answering machine comes the drone of his eldest brother, Vaughn, calling from Atlanta. Presumably to ask if Oliver has an Italian girlfriend yet. The family fears he is gay. They don't like gays. Or Communists. What about art historians? Same difference. He's not, though. Not what? An art historian. He's an art fancier. An appreciator of beauty. Only, not of faces. "You would have liked Mr. Deveen," he tells Schopenhauer. "But I would have been afraid to bring you two together-what if you hadn't gotten along? Still, I think you would have. You know, I was assigned to Mr. Deveen; I didn't pick him. It was luck. You see, there was this adopt-a-pensioner scheme at my school. Everyone had to do it." Unlike his three siblings, Oliver was sent to a boarding school in England, his father not wanting such an irritating little boy mincing around the house. "I went every Saturday to Mr. Deveen's house," Oliver tells Schopenhauer. "Made him tea, did the chores, the shopping, which in his case meant cigarettes and Irish whiskey-what brand was it? And the New Statesman. You wouldn't know that, Schop-it's a magazine for leftists and art historians. And actors, I imagine, which is what he'd been. In healthier days, he virtually lived at the galleries. He had the most amazing catalogs. I can fairly say, Schop, that Mr. Deveen introduced me to art. What an education! He could talk about absolutely any period, and in such a captivating way. Though he didn't fancy contemporary art-he had a bee in his bonnet about Pollock and just about everyone who came after that. I used to ask him about artists, and he'd respond with the exhibition, as in, 'Mr. Deveen, what do you think of Klee?' To which I'd get: 'The Collections of Sir Edward and Lady Hulton at the Tate in 1957-top shelf.' I'd bring down the catalog and he'd flip through, explaining it all, sipping his Irish whiskey with milk, which I had to keep warming on the stove. (It's harder heating milk than you think, Schop-it keeps sticking to the bloody pot.) That smell, though-I'll never forget it. And the same chipped mug. He used to say, 'Don't destroy it, I beg you!' Had the finest baritone voice, too. Did radio plays for BBC Manchester in his day, and you could hear why. Ah, well," Oliver says. "It was the whiskey, I think. Not anything else. He wasn't. It wasn't. I mean, I don't condemn him. He was alone and… Yes, and the whiskey. Not his fault. Well, anyway, enough fussing."
Oliver asks the housekeepers to make involtini di vitello for dinner. He isn't crazy about the dish, but his wagging companion is an avid consumer. Schopenhauer eats almost all of it-too much, it turns out, for he suffers an upset stomach. Oliver plays nursemaid for the next twenty-four hours, cleaning up puddles of dog vomit.
Once the worst is over, he reads aloud from The Hound of the Baskervilles as the Hound of the Aventine dozes at his hip. Oliver knows this book so well that "reading" is hardly the word-he wanders about in it, renews old acquaintances, allows Dr. Watson's lank thread to reel him gently forward. This evening, however, the pages remain dry and yellow. He raises Schopenhauer's chin.
"You must get well!" he says. "You must be better soon!" He pulls Schopenhauer nearer. "I've spent too much time as a nursemaid already." He strokes the dog. "And I'm awful at it. When I nursed Boyd, I was constantly bothering him. I tried not to, but I couldn't help it. He used to tell me, 'You must be thrilled that I'm sick-you can use me as an excuse to drop out of Yale. You'll never have to graduate now.' But I thought he'd wanted me home to look after him. I mean, I thought so. I sometimes wonder if he called me back home to test me-to see if I'd comply. And, being such a softie, I did, of course, and he hated that. He used to say, Women comply, men defy.' Ah, well," Oliver says. "And, I mean, was I really going to end up as an academic? Me, lecturing? Can't see it. I hope I was useful to him. He certainly adored you, my little friend! Do you remember my father? He liked to throw that squeaky rubber rat of yours. Do you remember him throwing it down the lawn for you in Atlanta? And you'd just sit there, doing nothing, staring at the thing with such disdain." Oliver smiles. "Oh, come on-you know exactly the look I'm talking about. And my father-hardly a man to fetch objects-going down the garden with his cane, picking up your silly rat, throwing it again. And you sitting there, yawning!"
The phone rings, and Kathleen leaves another message: she has set a date for the staff meeting and Oliver must address the employees about the Ott Group's plans.
"What plans?" Oliver asks Schopenhauer.
Vaughn calls that evening, and Oliver picks up this time-if there are plans, perhaps he should be apprised.
"So," Vaughn asks, "are we going to sell that house?"
"Which house?"
"The house you're living in."
"Grandpa's? What for?"
"Well, you are coming back, I assume."
"What are you talking about, Vaughn?"
"Ollie, you do know we're putting the paper out of its misery, right? Abbey recommended that we shut it. How can you not know this, Ollie? What are you doing out there?"
"But why close it?"
"Money, basically. Maybe if we'd got more layoffs a few months back we could've dragged it out. But they fought us on everything-all they agreed to in the end was one job cut from editorial. And they're expecting capital infusions after that? It's crazy. We kept Kathleen going for a while, dangling the possibility of fresh investment. But what's the point? You guys don't even have a website. How can you expect revenue without a Web presence? We could have ditched Kathleen, I guess. But let's be honest: the paper is a lemon. Time to move on."
"Don't we have enough money to keep it going?"
"Sure we do," Vaughn responds. "We have enough money because we make a habit of not keeping shit going that's a lemon."
"Oh."
"I want you at that staff meeting. Kathleen is adamant about it. And we need to keep her happy for now-we don't want bad publicity, okay?"
"What do they want me there for?"
"We need an Ott rep on-site. No way out of this one, Ollie."
The morning of the meeting, Oliver asks Schopenhauer, "If they come at me as a mob, will you bite them?" He tickles the dog. "You wouldn't, would you-you'd be useless. Come on."
They walk all the way there, up Via del Teatro di Marcello, through Piazza Campitelli, along Corso Vittorio, Oliver muttering to Schopenhauer as they go: "I mean, we all know that I don't understand this sort of thing. The rest of the family does. But I seem to be missing it somehow. Missing the chromosome for it. The cleverness gene. I'm faulty. So here's my question, Schop: can I be blamed for my defects? I mean, are my faults my fault?" The dog glances up at him. "Don't give me that condescending look," Oliver says. "What have you ever done with your life that's so spectacular?"
They arrive at the scribble-gray building that has housed the paper for a half century. Employees smoke industriously before the towering oak door. Oliver hurries past them all, through the hinged portal, down the frayed burgundy runner to the elevator cage. Upstairs, he learns that Kathleen and Abbey have gone out. Thankfully, most of the editorial staffers are occupied piecing together copy on a shooting at Virginia Tech. But a few employees attempt to buttonhole Oliver about "the big announcement" they have been promised. Is it good news? Sinkingly, he realizes that they don't know yet. He touches his cold hands to Schopenhauer's coat for warmth. The dog licks them.
Kathleen returns, escorts him to her office, and says he will have to run the meeting alone. Abbey joins them and seconds Kathleen's position: he will get no help.
"But I don't know anyone here," he says.
"I'll introduce you," Kathleen replies.
"And I don't know anything about the media industry."
"Maybe you should have learned something," she says. "You've been here two years."
They check the clock: a few minutes until the meeting.
"I'm really sorry," he says, "about this."
Kathleen scoffs. "Sorry? Come on-you could have averted this. You've been totally indifferent."
"No, no, I'm not."
"Oh, come on-you've made no effort here. The paper has been going all these years, and it's ending with you in charge. Your grandfather started this place. Doesn't that bother you? He wanted to build a newspaper for the world. Now you're closing it."
"But I'm totally useless at this sort of thing-they shouldn't have given me the job in the first place."
"Yeah, but they did, Oliver. They did. You were it."
"But I'm-I'm faulty, if you know what I mean. I don't work right." He laughs nervously, sweeping hair from his spotty forehead, still staring down at Schopenhauer, not once looking up at the women. "I lack the right chromosome or something."
"Cut it out."
"We should probably go in there," Abbey says.
Oliver moves toward the door, but Kathleen halts him with her forefinger. "You're not bringing the dog in."
"For moral support, I thought."
"Absolutely not. Show some respect."
Oliver ties Schopenhauer's leash around a leg of Kathleen's desk and strokes his friend quickly. "Wish me luck." He closes the door after himself and follows Kathleen and Abbey into the newsroom.
They lead him to a central position and retreat several paces. The staffers gather before him. How dirty the carpeting is, he notes. Whispers emanate from the crowd. He fills a plastic cup from the watercooler.
"We should probably start," Kathleen says.
He offers a wobbly smile.
"You know everybody here?" Kathleen asks.
"I think some faces might be familiar," he says, looking at none. He leans in to shake hands, murmuring, "Thank you… thanks… hi… thanks for coming."
Most of the paper's employees have worked here for years. They married based on their earning prospects, took out mortgages because of this place, started families knowing that the paper would fund their children's lives. If this place folds, they're ruined. All these years, they have vilified the paper, but now it's threatening to quit them, they're desperately in love with it again.
"Everyone here?" Oliver asks. He speaks extemporaneously for a minute, then loses his nerve and grabs for a copy of the Ott board's confidential report on the paper. As he scans its pages, he glances imploringly in Kathleen's direction. She looks away. He clears his throat and locates a relevant passage. He reads it aloud, adding, "That's what the board decided." He clears his throat again. "I'm really sorry."
The room is silent.
"I don't know what else to say."
A question rips from the back of the room. The crowd turns, makes a gap. The questioner is the head technician, a broad-shouldered American who appears even taller because he happens to be wearing Rollerblades that day. "What the fuck is this?" he says. "In plain English, tell us what's happening."
Oliver stammers out a few words, but the man interrupts: "Stop bullshitting us, man."
"I'm not. I'm trying to be clear. I think that-"
Ruby Zaga breaks in: "So, the Ott Group is pulling the plug? Is that what you're saying?"
"I'm afraid that's how I read it," Oliver answers. "I'm incredibly, incredibly sorry. I know that's inadequate. I do feel terrible about this, if that makes you feel any better."
"No, it doesn't actually," the head technician says. "And what the hell do you mean, 'That's how I read it'? Read what? You guys wrote it. Don't give me that, man. Don't give me that."
"I didn't write it. The board wrote it."
"Aren't you part of the board?"
"Yes, but I wasn't at this meeting."
"Well, why didn't you go?"
Someone else mutters, "Who appointed this guy publisher?"
"The report says," Oliver continues, "that… that it's a question of the business environment. It's not solely the paper-it's the whole of the media. I think. I mean. All I know is what's written in the report."
"Bullshit."
Oliver turns to Kathleen and Abbey.
"Wait a second," Herman Cohen says. "Before we all fly off the handle here, is there something that can be worked out? I'd like to know how final this decision is."
The head technician ignores this and clomps in his Rollerblades closer to Oliver. "You're an asshole, man."
The situation teeters on the edge of violence.
Oliver steps back. "I… I don't know what to say."
The technician storms out, taking a dozen furious employees with him.
"My kids are at private school," Clint Oakley says. "How am I supposed to pay the fees now? What are they supposed to do?"
"Is the Ott Group offering buyouts?" Hardy Benjamin asks.
"I don't know," Oliver says.
"Not to be blunt," Arthur Gopal interjects, "but what's the purpose of this meeting if you're not able to tell us anything?"
"Would it be possible to talk to someone who can give us a bit more information?" Craig Menzies asks. "Kathleen? Abbey?"
Abbey steps forward. "Mr. Ott is the only person authorized to speak on behalf of the Ott Group." She steps back.
More enraged employees walk out.
"How long have you known this was coming?" someone asks.
"I just found out," Oliver answers.
Several staffers roar with incredulity.
"Total waste of time," someone says.
More people leave.
"Maybe if the Ott Group had tried investing in the paper at some point instead of running this place into the ground, we wouldn't be in this mess."
Oliver leans toward Kathleen. "What do I do?" he whispers. "I think this is getting out of hand. Should we end the meeting?"
"That's your call."
He turns back to the crowd, though it's not much of a crowd any longer. Only a few people stand before him. In various corners of the newsroom, employees commiserate, make unauthorized long-distance calls, put on their coats to leave.
"I'm incredibly sorry," Oliver says. "I keep repeating that, but I don't know what else to say. I'm going to try to get answers to all your questions."
"Could you bring in someone who actually knows something?"
"Yes," he says, nodding at the floor. "Yes. I'll try to get a proper person to come and talk to you."
Even Kathleen and Abbey have gone. It is him alone now, before the last few bewildered staffers. "Uhm, bye," he says.
He is lost for a moment, then stumbles toward Kathleen's office. But midway there he pauses. He turns his head, sweeps the hair from over his ears.
A noise is coming from down there.
Oliver hurries into her office. Abbey and Kathleen are kneeling on the floor.
Between the two women is Schopenhauer, looking not at Oliver but at the wall, in the direction that someone has twisted his neck.
The dog wheezes, his jaw hangs limply, he emits a curious sound. He cannot seem to draw a breath: his lungs expand partly, he winces, his chest falls. He is still lashed to the leg of the desk and Kathleen yanks at the leash. "Damn it!" She pulls the knot apart finally, but to no useful end: Schopenhauer has stopped moving. "Damn it," she repeats. She slaps the leg of the desk. "Damn."
"What happened?" Oliver asks. "I don't understand what happened."
"Someone came in, I think," Kathleen says, "while we all were out there."
But Oliver didn't mean that-he meant, What just happened? He meant, Why is Schopenhauer so quiet?
"This is sick," Abbey says. "Completely sick. And it was someone who works here. Did you notice who left the meeting early?"
"Almost everyone left early," Kathleen replies.
Abbey says, "I'm really sorry, Oliver."
"Extremely sorry," Kathleen says.
"Is he badly hurt?" Oliver asks.
Neither woman responds.
"We have to call the police," Abbey says.
"Don't, please," Oliver says.
"We have to find who did this."
"I'm going to take him now. Let's not," he says, "let's not blame people. I don't want to know who did it. They were all angry with me."
"That doesn't make it okay. This is disgusting."
"It's not anybody's fault," he says.
"Yes, it is," Kathleen insists.
Oliver slides his arms under Schopenhauer's limp body and, with a grunt, lifts the animal. "He always weighs more than I think."
He carries the dog across the newsroom, tugs open the elevator cage with his baby finger and enters, straining for the ground-floor button. But he cannot reach it and must put Schopenhauer down. "Good boy," he says, lowering his friend to the floor. "Good boy." He presses the button and stares up at the ceiling. The elevator rattles for a moment, then descends.
2007. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME
The final days of the paper were fraught. Some employees stopped turning up. Others looted computer equipment in lieu of future wages. A few drank openly, missed deadlines, even scuffled in the newsroom. Then the last day arrived, ended, and they were all, abruptly, free.
Some had jobs lined up, but many did not. A few planned to take time off. Others aimed to get out of journalism altogether. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise, they said, though it was hard to say how.
In Paris, Lloyd Burko was blissfully unaware of the commotion. He hadn't read the paper, or any other news, for months. He and his son, Jerome, lived together, scrimping and getting by, just. Each man believed he was looking after the other. Lloyd cooked with gusto, if badly, for Jerome and his skinny friends, a pleasant bunch of bohemians. They always invited the old man to join in their activities. Lloyd smiled thankfully at their offers but retreated graciously to his room.
To everyone's surprise, it was Arthur Gopal who got the most prestigious job, moving to New York as a reporter for a major newspaper. This was quite a change: doorstepping gunshot victims, getting yelled at by cops, feeding color to rewrite hacks who said things like "Yeah, we know the shooting took place in a soup factory, but what kind of soup?" A year earlier, Arthur had a wife and daughter. It was strange to think of that now, so he did not.
Hardy Benjamin found work in London, reporting on technology for a business newswire. Her Irish boyfriend, Rory, didn't have a job, so she paid the rent for their flat on Tower Hill. She bristled at those who suggested that he was living off her-in this regard alone, she refused to see matters in terms of business.
Kathleen Solson was rehired at her old newspaper in Washington, but to a lower-ranking position. Ultimately, the interlude in Rome hadn't served her career. She and her husband, Nigel, returned to their former apartment near Dupont Circle. She had a few days left before her new job started, so she caught up on the news online, took her books out of boxes, hung the oversize black-and-white photographs. Mostly, though, she wished this liberty were over.
Herman Cohen retired to write a history of the paper. He and his wife, Miriam, bought a house outside Philadelphia, and he told her, This is the last time I move. In the end, he never did start his book-it was so pleasant simply to be near the grandkids. When the little ones visited, he was in heaven, and no matter how much they abused the English language he never corrected their grammar.
Winston Cheung, after a period of sleeping in his parents' basement, found work at an exotic-animal refuge in Minnesota. He adored the job overall but disliked lining the monkey cages with newspaper-even the sight of headlines made him panicky these days. However, this was not to bother him for long: the local paper folded, and he switched to sawdust. Soon, even the monkeys forgot the comforts of newspaper.
Ruby Zaga could finally return home to Queens. And it was the last thing she wanted. Rome gave her solace. She had saved money and, in theory, could stay for years without working. The notion petrified her, then excited her. Her family-the beloved nieces, nephews, her brother-could come stay. She'd give them the grand tour. She had spent half her life in Rome. Half her life at the paper. She exhaled: she was free.
Craig Menzies left journalism to work at a lobbying firm in Brussels. He could afford to rent an entire house now and set up a science workshop in the garage. He even toyed with the idea of compiling a proper patent application. Often, he thought of contacting Annika in Rome, where she still lived. He had something to say to her, a point yet to make.
Abbey Pinnola was offered a position at Ott headquarters in Atlanta, but she refused it. She wouldn't uproot her kids, or put an ocean between them and her ex-husband in London, no matter how much she disliked the man. Her next job, she decided, would be in an industry that would never betray her. So she settled on international finance and found a post at the Milan offices of Lehman Brothers.
As for Oliver Ott, he did take a job at headquarters, where he was expected to do nothing, and he did so. He stared out his window over steamy Atlanta, wishing each day to be over. His siblings encouraged him to buy another dog at least.
He attended all the board meetings, voting however everyone demanded, even acceding to the sale of the mansion in Rome and all the paintings inside. At auction, the Modigliani went to an art dealer in New York, the Leger to a private collector in Toronto, the Chagall to a foundation in Tel Aviv, the Pissarro to a gallery in London, and the Turner to a shipping company in Hong Kong, which mounted it behind the receptionist's desk.
As Oliver's siblings debated in the boardroom, he contemplated the portrait of their grandfather. Nobody in that room had met the late patriarch. They knew only the legends: that Ott had fought in World War I and been shot, which took him out of the fighting and probably saved his life. That he'd turned a bankrupt sugar refinery into an empire. Much more was unknown. Why, for example, had Ott gone to Europe and never come back? There had been a woman at the paper, Betty, and some said Ott had had an affair with her. Was that true? She had died in 1979, and the paper's other founding partner, Leo, had passed away in 1990. Who was left to say?
Overnight, the paper disappeared from newsstands, taking with it the front-page banner, the characteristic fonts, the sports pages and the news, the business section and culture, Puzzle-Wuzzle and the obits.
The paper's most loyal reader, Ornella de Monterecchi, trooped down to headquarters to demand that closure be reconsidered. But she had arrived too late. The doorman was kind enough to unlock the vacated newsroom. He turned on the flickering fluorescent beams and left her to wander.
The place was ghostly: abandoned desks and cables leading nowhere, broken computer printers, crippled rolling chairs. She stepped haltingly across the filthy carpeting and paused at the copydesk, still covered with defaced proofs and old editions. This room once contained all the world. Today, it contained only litter.
The paper-that daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species-had never before missed an appointment. Now it was gone.