Death's Excellent Vacation

Meanwhile, Far Across the Caspian Sea . . . DANIEL STASHOWER

Daniel Stashower is a two-time Edgar® Award winner whose most recent nonfiction books are The Beautiful Cigar Girl and (as coeditor) Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Dan is also the author of five mystery novels and has received the Agatha and Anthony awards. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two sons.

IN those days LifeSpan Books had offices in a three-story garden atrium building in Alexandria, Virginia. The building is still there. Across the street—in the middle of the street, actually—is a Civil War statue called Appomattox, marking the spot where seven hundred young soldiers marched off to join the Confederate cause in 1861. The statue shows a Confederate soldier with his hat off, head bowed and arms folded, facing the battlefields to the south where his comrades fell. Originally there was a perimeter of ornamental fencing and gas lamps, but over the years, as South Washington Street grew into a major artery, the fence came down and traffic in both directions simply jogged outward a bit to avoid the base of the statue. Every so often somebody clipped a fender, but the soldier stood his ground.

One night a van plowed into the base of the statue and knocked the soldier facedown into the street, opening the door to a vigorous public debate about whether a busy intersection was really the proper place for a symbol of the Confederacy. The city fathers ultimately fell back on a musty piece of legislation that the Virginia House of Delegates had passed in 1890. It stated, in part, that the monument “shall remain in its present position as a perpetual and lasting testimonial to the courage, fidelity and patriotism of the heroes in whose memory it was erected . . . the permission so given by the said City Council of Alexandria for its erection shall not be repealed, revoked, altered, modified, or changed by any future Council or other municipal power or authority.” So the statue went back up. Motorists beware.

I know all this because Thaddeus Palgrave told me. He was a senior editor for LifeSpan Books, and he made a point of knowing such things. Actually, Palgrave didn’t tell me directly, he just let it bubble out of him when I happened to be in the room. He had a way of leaning up against the tall window of his office, with his head resting against his forearm, giving impromptu disquisitions on matters of art, commerce, and history. He would usually wrap things up with a pithy moral, sometimes in Latin. Aquila non captat muscas. The eagle doesn’t capture flies. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

It never seemed to matter to Palgrave whether anyone was in the room with him when he made these learned remarks. At first it struck me as a sort of foppish affectation, like an ascot or an ivory-tipped swagger stick, meant to suggest a man of rare breeding set down among the heathens. I imagined him practicing at home, leaning against a bedroom wall, sighing deeply as he tossed off Latin epigrams. But in time I came to realize that he genuinely didn’t care what anyone thought of him—didn’t even consider it, in fact. There were a lot of people like that at LifeSpan Books.

You may not remember LifeSpan. They were the people who produced “multi-volume continuity reference works” on various subjects—low-fat cooking, home repair, World War II—and sent them to you in the mail, once every two months. You’d sign up for a series on, say, gardening, and soon the books would begin to arrive, filling you with optimism and resolve. They’d start you off with Perennials, followed two months later by Flowering Houseplants, then Vegetables and Fruits. You’d dip in here and there—do a little aerating, maybe visit a garden center—and congratulate yourself on making such a good start. Perhaps next year, you’d tell yourself, you might even be able to grow your own carrots and tomatoes. And the books would keep coming and coming. Annuals. Ferns. Lawns and Ground Cover. You never realized there would be quite so many. Still, some of them look quite interesting. Maybe a little more detail than you bargained for, but it’s good. Really, it’s good. And besides, you’ll be able to get back out to the garden after the Little League season ends. Bulbs. Herbs. Evergreens. It begins to dawn on you, at the start of the third year, that perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. For one thing, you’re running out of shelf space. You start stacking the books up on the worktable in the garage. You’ll sort it out in the spring. Shade Gardens. Orchids. Vines. One night around ten thirty, during tax season, you try phoning the toll-free number where operators are standing by, in an effort to take them up on the offer of “cancel anytime if not completely satisfied.” Your resolve crumbles as you spend forty-five minutes on hold listening to “Gospel Bluegrass Classics,” available now from LifeSpan Music. Pruning and Grafting. Shrubs. Wildflowers. The last of your children goes off to college. There will be time now for some serious gardening; you might even make a start on a pergola, if only your back weren’t giving you so much trouble. Roses. Miniatures and Bonsai. Rock and Water Gardens. Over the winter holidays a sudden snowstorm drives your grandchildren indoors. They use the stored cartons of books to build a fort. Cacti and Succulents. Winter Gardens. Heat-Zone Gardens. It is a beautiful day in late September and your eldest son is walking a real estate agent through the house. “Yes,” he says, “it was very sudden, in the garden. He would have wanted it that way.” As they’re signing the papers, they hear the soft thump of a package at the door: Organics.

I applied for an editorial job at LifeSpan straight out of journalism school. They brought me in for an interview with the managing editor, the tenor of which had less to do with my qualifications than with the apparent rarity of the opening. “We haven’t had a vacancy here in nearly a decade, Mr. Clarke,” he kept saying. “Quite extraordinary, really. So I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty on procedure. We should have coffee, I suppose, yes?”

His name was Peter Albamarle, and he radiated a sense of wary befuddlement, as though someone kept hiding his stapler. “I don’t suppose you went to Princeton?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “NYU. It’s there on my résumé.”

Albamarle glanced down at the paper and placed his fingers on it as if it might crawl away. “A very good school. Very good. I only ask because so many of our old boys are Princeton men. With a few Dartmouth types here and there.”

He waited a moment as if I might suddenly recall that I had gone to Princeton after all. I shook my head.

“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” he continued. “We were most impressed with your application. With that piece you wrote.” He pushed a copy of a small academic journal across the desk at me. It contained an article I’d written: “Connected by Fate: Aspects of Dickensian Happenstance.” My debut in print. I nodded and tried to look appropriately modest, like a Princeton man.

“That’s how our recruiters found you. We rely heavily on our recruiters. And they were right about you. You have a fine sense of the balance of fact and narrative.”

“Thank you.”

“And it strikes me as remarkable that your article should have come across my desk just now. We occasionally take on a new photo editor or researcher, of course, but the writing jobs never turn over. Never!” His eyes widened at the wonder of the thing.

“How is it that the job became available, if I might ask?”

“Oh,” his face darkened. “Jane Rossmire. She was tremendously competent, really a most extraordinarily good worker, but she left us suddenly. A bit awkward. We won’t speak of it. I’m sure she’s doing much better now. And no one really blames Thaddeus Palgrave.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean to say, no one really believes—ah! Miss Taylor! Will you take young Mr. Clarke down the hall for his writing trial? Purely a formality, you understand, I’m sure the pashas upstairs will approve my decision, but there it is.”

He said nothing more as I was led away to an empty office. I had been warned about this stage of the interview process and had studied up at the library with some old copies of the Ancient Worlds series. As I understood the exercise, I was expected to take several bulky packets of material from the research department and turn them into a smooth, lulling sort of prose, in much the same way that blocks of cheddar are emulsified into Cheez Whiz. The tough part was writing transitions, which often marked huge shifts of time or geography. Despite such intriguing glimpses from prehistory, students of archeology seem time and again drawn to a later period, to the sweep of centuries from about the thirteenth century B.C. up to the Christian era. This stuff is harder than it looks. According to office legend, one writer had his contract terminated over the phrase: “Meanwhile, far across the Caspian Sea . . .”

Apparently my sample essay on the marriage of Hatshepsut met with general approval. By the end of the week I had signed on as a junior editor on the Civil War series. If all went according to plan, I would serve an apprentice period on the research staff, then ease into some small-scale writing assignments, like captions and sidebars, and finally ascend to the Valhalla where chapters were written.

There are some who would tell you that LifeSpan Books was no place for an ambitious young journalist. I would respectfully disagree. At that time LifeSpan was part of a vast empire of magazines, including Styles and NewsBeat. The books division was where they sent the career correspondents who needed a tune-up or a drying-out period. I learned a lot from those guys. I remember one afternoon—the day of the Challenger shuttle disaster—when I tagged along with a group of them to watch the coverage at the corner saloon. They sat around talking about the ledes they had written nineteen years earlier on the day of Apollo 1. It was a three-martini master class. You don’t get that in J-school.

At that time there were only two other people in the building who were under age thirty, a pair of photo editors named Brian Frost and Kate Macintyre. They scooped me up on my first day and taught me the rules of the road—the location of the supply closet, the proper operation of the balky Xerox, the kabuki ritual of the time sheets. After work they took me out for beer and nachos, insisting that it was a company tradition. “When you pass your research apprenticeship, you start making real money,” Brian explained. “Then the nachos are on you.”

“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—”

Palgrave waved him off, keeping his eyes fixed on Wegner, pinned and wriggling against the cork wall. “General Hooker was neither bluff nor genial,” Palgrave said. “Quite the contrary, in fact. I suggest you review Mr. Daniel Butterfield’s seminal biography, Major-General Joseph Hooker and the Troops from the Army of the Potomac at Wauhatchie, Lookout Mountain and Chattanooga. You will find it a most bracing corrective. As the ancients might say, Age quod agis.”

It was clear that Wegner had stopped listening well before the Latin epigram. He took another sip of wine, scanning the room as if idly looking for his ride home. Then, pretending to be unaware that all eyes were upon him, he set his plastic cup down on top of a light board, glanced at his watch, and fell back under a curtain of flying shot and blue smoke.

“THAT man is such a prick,” Brian said, setting down his pint glass. “I mean, who does that? And to George Wegner, of all people?”

We were in the Irish pub on King Street, holding something of a wake over a communal plate of nachos.

“He’s not a prick,” Kate said. “He’s not a prick at all. He’s a vampire.”

“You think everyone is a vampire,” Brian said. “You think Lionel Richie is a vampire.”

“Who’s to say he’s not?”

“And Spandau Ballet.”

“I did not say that Spandau Ballet were vampires. I said they were zombies. Not the same thing.”

“You’ve been impossible ever since Mystic Summonings.”

I fingered a “Guinness for Strength” beer mat. “Ever since what?” I asked.

“Mystic Summonings. Or was it Cosmic Beings and Haunted Creatures ?”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Sorry, New Guy. Before your time. We used to do a series called Tales of the Unknown. Surely you’ve heard about it? You must have seen the commercials.” Brian cleared his throat. “A man is about to get on an airplane,” he intoned. “Suddenly he has a strange premonition of disaster. He turns and leaves the boarding area. That same airplane—”

“No,” Kate interrupted. “Come on, Brian. That’s Library of Strange Happenings. I meant Tales of the Unknown.”

“Oh, right. Right. Let’s see. On a windswept hillside in Romania, a strange ritual unfolds far from the prying eyes of frightened villagers. Huddled deep within the folds of a billowing cloak, a lone figure mounts a broken stone altar. In his hands he clasps a bejeweled—”

“There you go.” Kate swirled the dregs of her wineglass. “Palgrave is a vampire. It all fits.”

Brian went after a sliver of jalapeño with a tortilla chip. “I once spent twenty minutes with Palgrave getting a lecture on the difference between a slouch hat and a forage cap. He’s just a prick. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Sometimes a prick is just a prick.”

“What about Jane Rossmire?” There was an edge to Kate’s voice now. “I’m telling you, she’s gone. Without a trace.”

Brian chewed for a moment. “Well, when you put it that way, I guess Palgrave must be a vampire. I mean, she couldn’t possibly just have moved out of town or gotten a better job. The vampire thing is the only possible explanation. What a fool I’ve been.”

“She would have said good-bye.”

“Maybe she was embarrassed,” Brian said. “After today, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never see George Wegner again.”

Kate signaled for another glass of wine. “I’m telling you, Thaddeus Palgrave is a creature of the night. Come on. For one thing, his name is Thaddeus. What kind of a name is that? It’s like he signed the Declaration of Independence or something.”

“I’m not sure I follow your reasoning,” Brian said. “There’s a guy in accounting named H. Basil Worthington. Is he a vampire, too?”

“Um, look,” I said. “I get it that I’m the new guy and maybe I should stay out of this, but are you serious? A vampire? With fangs and a black cape?”

Kate rolled her eyes. “We’re not talking about the Hammer House of Horror. Get a grip. I’m talking about vampires. Real vampires.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“They walk among us, dude,” said Brian. “My grandfather eats black pudding. It’s not a huge leap.”

“As creatures of the night go, they’re actually pretty interesting,” Kate said. “Did you know that Mexican vampires have bare skulls instead of heads?”

Brian snorted. “Always the researcher. The curse of LifeSpan Books.”

“Really, though. Can you imagine what that would look like? A bare skull?”

“Like the cover of a Grateful Dead album?”

“I just think it’s interesting, that’s all. And supposedly there are vampires in the Rockies that suck blood through their noses. They stick their noses into the victim’s ear. How cool is that?”

“I vant to sneef your bluh-ud.” Brian was on his third beer now.

Kate ignored him and barreled ahead. “In early folklore they’re often described as ruddy and bloated, probably from gorging on blood. I did a sidebar once on strigoi—you know, the Romanian vampires? Did you know that they have red hair, blue eyes, and two hearts?”

“Like Mick Hucknall,” said Brian. “Plenty of heart. No soul.”

I looked at him. “So if Thaddeus Palgrave suddenly starts singing ‘Holding Back the Years,’ I should run away?”

“First, unplug his amp,” said Brian. “That’s just common sense.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s been an interesting start to the new job. Just to be clear, when my mother calls to ask how things are going, I should tell her that everything’s fine, I did some really good research on the Spotsylvania Courthouse, I found an apartment, one of my coworkers is a vampire, and I’m trying out for the office softball team?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Kate.

“I wouldn’t mention the softball team,” said Brian. “You don’t want to get her hopes up.”

Kate was fingering the rim of her wineglass. “I just can’t believe that Jane Rossmire never even said good-bye.” She turned to me. “Hey, New Guy, we’re getting to be friends, right? Brian and I have warmed your heart with our zany banter and all, right? Do me a favor. If you ever decide to disappear for no reason, take a minute to say good-bye. Just slip a note under my door or something. One word. Good-bye. Thanks for the nachos, maybe.”

I finished my beer. “It’s a promise,” I said.

SEVERAL weeks passed before I realized that I had unwittingly drifted into Thaddeus Palgrave’s crosshairs. My job at that time was to fact-check finished copy against the original research material, making sure that every fact and quote had a proper annotation. If there was anything in a chapter or sidebar that I couldn’t verify from the research packets, I was supposed to put a red check in the margin. The chapter couldn’t go to the production department until the red checks had been removed.

At first, while I was learning the ropes, I often had to go back to the writers when I couldn’t confirm a particular factoid. Invariably they’d say something to the effect of, “Oh, sorry, I got that out of the Boatner’s I keep here on my desk.” As I got the hang of things, I did the checking from my own sources and rarely had to touch base with the writers. In time I no longer bothered to take note of which writer had actually written the pages. That being the case, I hadn’t realized that I’d been working on one of Palgrave’s chapters until he appeared suddenly in the door of my office. It was four fifteen on a rainy Friday afternoon. I had been looking forward to the weekend.

“Worm castles,” he said.

I swear the temperature dropped by ten or fifteen degrees. He had a purple file folder in his hand and was tapping it against the door frame.

“Worm castles,” he repeated.

“Excuse me?” I said.

He opened the folder and turned it so that I could see the page of text inside. There was a single red check mark in the margin. He sighed heavily. “You have queried the term worm castles in my sidebar on dwindling Union rations.”

“Ah. So I did. Please, Mr. Palgrave, sit down.” I tipped my gym bag off the folding chair in the corner.

He stayed where he was. “Mr. Clarke—” he began.

“Jeff,” I said. “Please call me Jeff.”

He looked at me with what appeared to be genuine curiosity. “Whatever for?”

“Well, it’s just—if we’re going to be working together, I thought it would be nice to be on a first-name basis.”

“Do you imagine that we’re going to become friends, Mr. Clarke?”

I tried to read his eyes. “I just thought—” I broke off and tried again. “It’s casual Friday.”

The answer appeared to satisfy him. “Yes, of course. Jeff.” He somehow broke it into two syllables, as if translating from Old English. “Let us review the offending section of my description of food rations during the Chattanooga campaign.”

“Look, I was simply checking the sources. I didn’t mean—”

“As always, a staple of the Union fighting man’s diet was hardtack, a hard, simple cracker made of flour, water, and salt. Hardtack—a term derived from tack, a slang term common among British sailors as a descriptive of food—offered many advantages to an army on the move. Cheap to produce and virtually imperishable, hardtack easily withstood the extremes of temperature and rough handling to which it was subjected in the average soldier’s kit. Indeed, the thick wafer proved so indestructible that soldiers were obliged to soften it in their morning coffee before it could be eaten. This extra step offered an additional advantage—at a time when improper storage conditions meant that many of the army’s foodstuffs were infested with insects, a good soaking in coffee allowed any unwanted maggots or weevil larvae to float to the top of the soldier’s cup, where they could easily be skimmed off. As a result, the soldiers often referred to their hardtack rations as worm castles.”

Palgrave stopped reading and looked at me expectantly. “Well? This did not meet with your approval?”

“It’s perfect,” I said. “Very concise and informative. But I need a source for the phrase worm castles.”

“A source?”

“I’ve checked every source in the packets you were given. Furgurson, Foote, Livermore—all of them. I’ve found any number of slang terms for hardtack. Tooth dullers. Dog biscuits. Sheet iron. Jaw breakers. Ammo reserves. But I can’t find worm castles.”

“I don’t see the problem.”

“I need a citation. It may be just a formality, but I need it. My job, as I understand it, is to check the facts—even the trivial ones. If somebody says that Grant’s first name was Ulysses, I have to check it. You can’t just say that Civil War soldiers walked around using the phrase worm castles without a source. What if they didn’t?”

“They did.”

“I’m sure they did. I just need you to tell me where you got it.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Mr. Clarke, I have worked here for thirteen years.”

“I appreciate that. And I’ve only worked here for a few weeks. So I’m asking you to help me do my job.”

“You may rest assured that my facts are in order.”

“With respect, I can’t take it on faith. I need a source.”

“I am the source.”

“But how do you know it’s right?”

“It just is.” He closed the folder and stared at me for a long moment. “Per aspera ad astra,” he said, walking away.

I recognized that one. Through hardship to the stars.

PALGRAVE began weaving a single unverifiable fact into every page of his work. Again and again I went to him asking for sources. Each time he looked me square in the face and said, “It just is.” The red check marks continued to bloom in the margins of his copy, creating a logjam in the production chain. The burden of breaking the jam rested entirely with me.

One day Peter Albamarle appeared in the doorway of my office. It was rare to see him moving among the drones, so I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. “I understand you and Thaddeus have been at odds,” he said.

I looked at his face and knew my job was on the line. My first job. The job that was supposed to be my entrée into big-time journalism. “Not at all, Mr. Albamarle,” I said.

He folded his hands. “Thaddeus . . . can be something of a challenge,” he said slowly.

“I’m sure we’ll iron this out. I’m still learning the lay of the land.”

“Perhaps.” Albemarle stepped into my office and closed the door. This can’t be good, I thought. “It’s no reflection on you,” he said, “but not everyone is cut out for this job. If you like, we can reassign you to Imagination Station and pass Thaddeus off to a more seasoned researcher.”

Imagination Station. The kiddie series. The Siberia of LifeSpan Books. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said.

“It’s not a reflection on you,” Albamarle repeated. “Thaddeus takes a certain pleasure in being difficult. This office is his entire world. He has never once in thirteen years taken a vacation. Not once. I’ve tried to speak with him, but . . .” He raised his palms and shrugged.

“I understand,” I said. Actually, I had no clue, but I understood that he was prepared to throw me under the bus.

“It’s just—it’s just that if you can’t resolve your issues, we won’t be able to meet the drop date. That’s ten days from now.”

“So I have to find a source for each of the red checks in Mr. Palgrave’s work.”

Albamarle gave a tight nod. “Exactly,” he said.

“Without his cooperation.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Somewhere among all the tens of thousands of books and references we have available on the Civil War.” I flipped the pages of the book I was holding. “A needle in a haystack—only the haystack is the Library of Congress.”

Albamarle had the decency to look abashed. “I’m afraid that’s the situation precisely,” he said.

AND the strange thing was, I began to think I could do it. I wanted to prove to Palgrave that I could take whatever he threw at me. It became my only goal in life to erase every single red check. I came in early to get first crack at the 128 volumes of The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. I dipped into the memoirs of officers and enlisted men—Company Aytch by Sam Watkins and Following the Greek Cross by Thomas Worcester Hyde. I made a special study of Major General John D. Sedgwick, the highest-ranking Union casualty of the war, who fell to a sharpshooter’s bullet at Spotsylvania. His last words: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

Brian and Kate watched with mounting horror. “You can’t learn everything there is to know about the Civil War in ten days,” Brian told me. “It takes three weeks, minimum.” But I wouldn’t be deterred. I began refusing to go out for lunch, preferring to stay at my desk with a tuna and avocado pita pocket, skimming through regimental histories. If a call of nature pulled me away from my desk, I hummed “I Cannot Mind My Wheel, Mother” on my way down the hall. After five days, I had erased seven check marks. By the eighth day only three remained. And by the last day I had whittled the list down to a single red check mark—the one that had started it all. Worm castles.

On the night before my deadline, Brian and Kate returned to the office after dinner and found me dozing over a copy of Advance and Retreat. “Right,” Brian said. “This is not healthy. We’re going out for a drink.”

They pulled me out of the building, all but dragging me by the ear, and hustled me to the Irish pub. Kate refused to speak until we were settled in a corner booth with beer and nachos. “This has to stop,” she said at last. “You’re turning into him.”

“Look, I’m the newest member of the staff. I’m just trying to save my job. If I have to put in a little extra time, so be it.”

“Extra time? You no longer leave your office. You no longer sleep. You have become careless in certain areas of dress and personal hygiene.”

“My hygiene is fine, thank you.”

“Why are you doing this, exactly?”

“I told you. I want to—”

“No,” Kate said firmly. “It’s not about your job. You’re doing it because you think you’re going to crack the big mystery.”

“What mystery?

“The mystery of Thaddeus Palgrave. You think there’s some kind of pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow. You think he’s going to take you under his wing or something. You want him to sponsor you for membership in the League of Pompous Dickwads.”

“Mr. Clarke,” said Brian, imitating Palgrave’s vaguely British accent, “the packet of clippings and scrap material you have gathered on the Union fortifications at City Point has been deemed sufficiently anal by our board of directors. It is my pleasure to present you with a Pompous Dickwad badge and decoder ring.”

“Asinus asinum fricat,” Kate said. “The ass rubs the ass.”

I sipped my beer. “You two have issues,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “We’re the problem.”

“Look, I appreciate that you’re looking out for me, but the deadline is tomorrow and I have to get back.”

“Not a chance, New Guy. This is an intervention. We’re deprogramming you.”

“But tomorrow—”

Kate reached across the table and grabbed both of my hands. “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said. “Three years ago, I took my sister’s kids off her hands for a weekend. By Sunday afternoon, I’m going nuts. I’m desperate. So I take them to a Renaissance fair in Wheaton. It’s pretty grim. Jesters. Minstrels. Guys in funny hats playing flutes. So there I am, drinking a flagon of Diet Coke and watching a beanbag toss, and who do I see standing nearby, waiting for the royal joust to begin? None other than Thaddeus Palgrave. Wearing a white shirt and a bow tie. Holding a tankard of mead. And that, New Guy, is the road you’re on. One day you, too, will be a man who attends Renaissance fairs in his work clothes.”

I considered this. “I have a life outside the office, you know. I have other things going on. Maybe I’m just gathering material.” I regretted it as soon as I said it.

“Ah! The novel!” Kate clasped her hands together. “How’s that going? Does it feature a recent college graduate nursing a broken heart? Does he struggle, with quiet dignity, to build his life anew?”

“No,” said Brian. “It’s about a promising young journalist learning his craft, with quiet dignity, as he makes his way in a cold, unfeeling world.”

I reached for the pitcher and refilled my glass. “How did the two of you manage to fill your time before I got here?”

Brian leaned back. “In later years, it was recalled that young Jeff Clarke never spoke of his novel, giving no hint of the epic struggle playing out in the fiery crucible of his genius. Whenever the topic was raised, he gave a boyish grin and pushed the subject aside.”

“With quiet dignity,” Kate added.

I never made it back to the office. We ordered another pitcher of beer and just talked. Brian talked about his band. Kate talked about her family. I talked about my romantic woes and had the good grace to laugh at myself just a bit. At one point Kate reached across and ran her fingers along Brian’s arm, answering a question that had been in my mind for some time.

We closed down the bar at two A.M. I left them outside the parking garage on Cameron Street, pretending not to take an interest in whether they left in one car or two. There was a light dusting of snow on the cobblestones, and I had my hands in my pockets as I trudged toward my apartment, occasionally turning my face up to the falling snow.

I’m still not sure what made me turn up Prince Street to walk past the LifeSpan building, but as I looked up at the third-floor windows, I was only mildly surprised to see a light in Palgrave’s office. As I drew nearer, I could see a shadow move across the window.

I kept walking. That wasn’t me anymore, working away in the middle of the night. I was a young man who knew how to enjoy life. I was a man with friends and ambitions and a half-written manuscript. I glanced up again. The light flickered as the shadow passed again.

THE guard at the security desk was sleeping, and I took care not to wake him. I rode the elevator to the third floor and buzzed myself in with my entry card. Everything felt dim and empty. My shoes made a peculiar crackling sound on the industrial carpet.

It’s important to understand that I never intended to speak to Palgrave. I just wanted to spend a few minutes in my office. I knew now that I wasn’t going to be able to erase that last check mark. I think I may have been planning to write a note of explanation to Mr. Albamarle. If Palgrave happened to see me and register that I was working every bit as hard as he was, well, so be it. I settled behind my desk and took the cover off my typewriter, leaning back in the chair to compose my thoughts.

When I woke up three hours later, Palgrave was sitting opposite me in the folding chair. It took a few moments for it to sink in. I can’t say I was startled—somehow his presence struck me as familiar and almost reassuring—but I knew at once that we had turned a strange corner. For one thing, he was smiling.

He waited a few moments while I came around. “You sleep here?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “No, I just came in to do a little work. I didn’t mean—”

He waved it off. “I sleep here. Most of the time. I have an apartment, but it’s just for show.”

“What?”

He was rubbing his chin, staring at me appraisingly as if trying to guess my age and weight. “You’re very persistent, Mr. Clarke,” he said.

“It’s the job.”

“The job, yes, but more than that. You’re curious. Always asking people about their hobbies, their interests.”

“Look, I never meant to be nosy, I just—”

“No, it’s good. I should do more of that sort of thing. I forget to do it. There’s so little point, in the circumstances. The time is so short, it scarcely seems worth the trouble. People like you are gone in the blink of an eye.”

I bristled. “No, you’re wrong. I’m committed to this job. I’m going to stay at least five years. If you drive me off this series, I’ll do my time on Imagination Station and work my way back. I’m in for the long haul.”

“The long haul!” he cried. “Five years!” He clapped his hands. I had never seen him so animated. “Five whole years! As long as that? Do you know how long I’ve been here?”

“Thirteen years.”

“Well, yes, I suppose. Thirteen years in this particular building. But do you know how long I’ve been . . . here? In the larger sense?”

“I’m not quite sure I—”

“Twelve hundred and sixty-seven years. But my relationship to time isn’t quite linear.”

“Pardon me?”

“So you’ll forgive me if your five-year commitment fails to impress. You must excuse me if I haven’t troubled to get to know you, to stand at the water cooler and make inquiries about your life and your interests and your football team. Would you take the trouble to get to know a fruit fly? Would you pause to exchange pleasantries with a falling leaf or a raindrop running down a windowpane?”

I struggled for a foothold. “I have no idea—”

“Shall I tell you my source for that troublesome information in my latest chapter? Worm castles? Mr. Clarke, I was there. At Chancellorsville. In 1863. I heard it firsthand. I tried to tell you: I’m the source.” He reached past me to a bookshelf and pulled down one of the early volumes of the series. Mustering the Troops. He flipped it open to a section of regimental photographs, showing rows and rows of grim-faced young men posing with their units before they mobilized. “There I am in the third row, Second Connecticut Light Artillery. No one could understand why I insisted on using this particular photo in the book. Just my idea of a little joke. And they say I have no sense of humor.”

I peered down at the face he had indicated. It was grainy and nondescript. “Mr. Palgrave . . . Thaddeus . . . I don’t understand any of this. You’re telling me that you’re some sort of supernatural creature? Is that what you’re trying to say?” I thought about Kate and her Mexican bare skulls and strigoi. “You’re a vampire of some kind?”

He shook his head, even pursing his lips as if disappointed by my pedestrian line of thinking. “Not a vampire, not a werewolf, not a zombie. We’re not at all like those people, though we have no objection to them. In fact, they can be quite useful. But we don’t drink blood or howl at the moon. Nothing so colorful. We simply observe. We are researchers, like yourself. When all this is gone, there must be some record.”

Even now, I still clung to the notion—or perhaps the hope—that this was all an elaborate joke. “You—you’re a researcher,” I said. My voice had gone flat. “A researcher who’s lived for hundreds of years. And of all the places in the world where you might go—of all the fascinating, important places where you might go—you’ve chosen to spend thirteen years in an office at LifeSpan Books?”

He appeared delighted by the question. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he cried. “As I mentioned, our relationship with time is not quite linear in the way you might be thinking. But these past thirteen years have been a wonderful break.”

“A break?”

“Don’t you see? I’m on vacation! All of this is just another Renaissance fair to me!” He sighed fondly. “But it’s time to be getting back.”

“Getting back. To your research job.”

“Actually, Jeff, I’m no longer in research.”

“No?”

“No. I’m in recruiting. And we’re all terribly impressed with you. With your application. And so soon after Miss Rossmire! Do you know Miss Rossmire, by the way? I’m sure you’ll like her.”

I lurched to my feet. “You—you’re impressed with me? But all those red checks. All those missing citations. All that—”

“Just a formality during the apprentice period. Nothing to worry about now. I’m really quite charming when you get to know me, as you’ll discover in the fullness of time.” He extended his hand. “What do you say?”

I simply stared at him.

“Do you need some time to think about it? Of course you’re perfectly welcome to stay here and carry on as before. I will be moving on, and there will be no further obstacles to your advancement. Should you elect to remain, however, I should perhaps mention that matters will not proceed as you might wish.” He leaned up against the window, resting his head against his forearm. “If you and I part company tonight, you will continue here for another twelve years. It’s all a bit conventional, I’m afraid. After four years you move into a small town house in Shirlington, telling yourself that you need space for an office in which to write your novel. Two years later you fall behind on the mortgage, and your new girlfriend—Cheryl, from copyediting—seizes upon the opening to move in with you, in the interests of sharing expenses. What had been a casual, halfhearted romance on your part now becomes fraught with the expectation of marriage. You resist for two more years, finally bowing to the inevitable two days before Cheryl’s thirtieth birthday. Within three years you begin an affair with a woman you meet at Gilpin Books, which becomes public just as your wife discovers a lump in her left breast. Her bravery and fortitude as she battles with cancer is thrown into brilliant relief by your disgrace; she is a martyr in the eyes of everyone you have ever known. Though you tend to your dying wife with saintly devotion, it is too late for redemption. At her funeral fourteen months later you sob inconsolably and no one makes a move to comfort you, not even Kate and Brian. In time you turn to drink, and after many warnings and probation periods, you finally lose your job at LifeSpan. For a while you cobble together a living of freelance writing and editing, but the loneliness weighs heavily. One rainy night, driving home from a strip club in the District, you slam your car into the base of the Appomattox statue at the corner of Washington and Duke. You are not hurt—indeed, in your drunken state you find the accident to be the very last word in hilarity. You climb out of your car, spread your arms to the heavens, and roar with laughter as the rain drenches your face. At that moment, you are struck and killed by a dairy van.”

I couldn’t speak. He reached past me for the list of missing citations on my desk.

“I don’t understand,” I said at last. “Why is it—how do you—”

“Don’t you see?” He spread the page across his knee and erased the last of the red check marks, brushing away the crumbs with a flick of his hand. “It just is. You’ll see. It just is.”

EVERYTHING started to happen very quickly then, but I found time for a final piece of business. Before we left, I slipped a note and a five-dollar bill under the door of Kate’s office:

Aeternum vale. Farewell forever. Next time, the nachos are on me.