Chapter One

Chapter One


The White House correspondent for the Washington Post gleamed like a brand-new car.

Even his name was elegant: Lee Adrien Lescaze.

That day he wore a double-breasted gray flannel suit, its patrician authority both undercut and emphasized by the burnt-orange shirt with white collar and cuffs, the blue silk tie, the polished black wingtips. Any other man would have looked like a dandy, but his ease and confidence dispelled any such idea. He was no schmo, as my grandmother would say.

He was headed for the newsroom, and as he passed my desk, he tossed me an amused, detached smile. Something in me stirred.

I knew about Lescaze–everyone did. He was something of a legend at the Washington Post: an elegant writer, the quintessential foreign correspondent who had been assigned first to Vietnam, where his stories about the Tet Offensive had earned him a reputation for courage and rare insight, and then to Bangladesh and Hong Kong and many of the world's dangerous and dusty places. In the newsroom he'd worked as both national and foreign editor; his name was on some of the short lists as a possible successor to Ben Bradlee.

His background was glamorous: his father had been a distinguished Swiss architect, his mother the locus of a literary and cultural salon for New York artists and intellectuals. He'd gone to Exeter and Harvard–rumor had it he'd smashed up a Jaguar there. He played tennis and squash, spoke Mandarin and French, collected jazz, blues, and rare books–first editions of Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound. He wrote book reviews with the same finesse as he did war dispatches, and he talked of the Mets and Matisse wi