“There’s a problem we have to talk about first,” he said.

“All right. Let’s talk about your problem.”

“The problem is we have to fire Richard.”

The name, which he’d refused to speak until now, hung in the air. “And why do we have to do that?” Lalitha said.

“Because I hate him, because he had an affair with my wife, and I never want to hear his name again, and there’s no earthly way I’m going to work with him.”

Lalitha seemed to shrink as she heard this. Her head sank, her shoulders slumped, she became a sad little girl. “Is that why your wife left on Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“No!”

“Yes you are. That’s why you don’t want me near you now.”

“No, that’s not true. That’s totally not true.”

“Well, be that as it may,” she said, straightening herself briskly, “we still can’t fire Richard. This is my project, and I need him. I’ve already advertised him to the interns, and I need him to get our talent for August.

So you can have your problem with him, and be very sorry about your wife, but I’m not firing him.”

“Honey,” Walter said. “Lalitha. I really do love you. Everything’s going to be OK. But try to see this from my side.”

“No!” she said, wheeling toward him with spirited insurrection. “I don’t care about your side! My job is to do our population work, and I’m going to do it. If you really care about that work, and about me, you’ll let me do it my way.”

“I do care. I totally do. But-”

“But nothing, then. I won’t mention his name again. You can go out of town somewhere when he meets with the interns in May. And we’ll figure out August when we get there.”

“But he’s not going to want to do it. He was already talking on Saturday about backing out.”

“Let me talk to him,” she said. “As you may remember, I’m rather good at persuading people to do things they don’t want to do. I’m a rather effective employee of yours, and I hope you’ll be nice enough to let me do my work.”

He rushed around his desk to put his arms around her, but she escaped to the outer office.

Because he loved her spirit and commitment and was stricken by her anger, he didn’t press the issue further. But as the hours passed, and then several days, and she didn’t report that Richard was backing out of Free Space, Walter deduced that he must still be on board. Richard who didn’t believe in a fucking thing! The only imaginable explanation was that Patty had talked to him on the phone and guilted him into sticking with the program. And the idea of those two talking about anything at all, even for five minutes, and specifically talking about how to spare “poor Walter” (oh, that phrase of hers, that abominable phrase) and save his pet project, as some kind of consolation prize, made him sick with weakness and corruption and compromise and littleness. It came between him and Lalitha as well. Their lovemaking, though daily and protracted, was shadowed by his sense that she’d betrayed him with Richard, too, a little bit, and so did not become more personal in the way he’d hoped it might. Everywhere he turned, there was Richard.

Equally unsettling, in a different way, was the problem of LBI. Joey, at their dinner together, with moving expenditure of humility and self-reproach, had explained the sordid business deal he’d been involved with, and the key villain, as Walter saw it, was LBI. Kenny Bartles was clearly one of those daredevil clowns, a bush-league sociopath who would end up in jail or in Congress soon enough. The Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd, whatever the fetor of their motives for invading Iraq, surely still would have preferred to receive usable truck parts instead of the Paraguayan trash that Joey had delivered. And Joey himself, though he should have known better than to get involved with Bartles, had convinced Walter that he’d only followed through for Connie’s sake; his loyalty to her, his terrible remorse, and his general bravery (he was twenty years old!) were all to his credit. The responsible party, therefore-the one with both full knowledge of the scam and the authority to approve it-was LBI. Walter hadn’t heard of the vice president whom Joey had spoken to, the one who’d threatened him with a lawsuit, but the guy undoubtedly worked right down the hall from the buddy of Vin Haven who’d agreed to locate a body-armor plant in West Virginia. Joey had asked Walter, at dinner, what he thought he should do. Blow the whistle? Or just give away his profits to some charity for disabled veterans, and go back to school? Walter had promised to think about it over the weekend, but the weekend had not, to put it mildly, proved conducive to calm moral reflection. Not until he was facing the journalists on Monday morning, painting LBI as an outstanding pro-environment corporate partner, had the degree of his own implication hit him.

He tried, now, to separate his own interests-the fact that, if the son of the Trust’s executive director took his ugly story to the media, Vin Haven might well fire him and LBI might even renege on its West Virginia agreement-from what was best for Joey. However arrogantly and greedily Joey had behaved, it seemed very harsh to ask a twenty-year-old kid with problematic parents to take full moral responsibility and endure a public smearing, maybe even prosecution. And yet Walter was aware that the advice he therefore wanted to give Joey-“Donate your profits to charity, move on with your life”-was highly beneficial to himself and to the Trust. He wanted to ask Lalitha for guidance, but he’d promised Joey not to tell a soul, and so he called Joey and said he was still thinking about it, and would he and Connie like to join him for dinner on his birthday next week?

“Definitely,” Joey said.

“I also need to tell you,” Walter said, “that your mother and I have separated. It’s a hard thing to tell you, but it happened on Sunday. She’s moved out for a while, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

“Yep,” Joey said.

Yep? Walter frowned. “Did you understand what I just said?”

“Yep. She already told me.”

“Right. Of course. How not. And did she-”

“Yep. She told me a lot. Too much information, as always.”

“So you understand my-”

“Yep.”

“And you’re still OK with having dinner on my birthday?”

“Yep. We’ll definitely be there.”

“Well, thank you, Joey. I love you for that. I love you for a lot of things.”

“Yep.”

Walter then left a message on Jessica’s cell phone, as he’d done twice a day since the fateful Sunday, without yet hearing back from her. “Jessica, listen,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to your mother, but whatever she’s saying to you, you need to call me back and listen to what I have to say. All right? Please call me back. There are very much two sides to this story, and I think you need to hear both of them.” It would have been useful to be able to add that there was nothing between him and his assistant, but, in fact, his hands and face and nose were so impregnated with the smell of her vagina that it persisted faintly even after showering.

He was compromised and losing on every front. A further bad blow landed on the second Sunday of his freedom, in the form of a long front-page story in the Times by Dan Caperville: “Coal-Friendly Land Trust Destroys Mountains to Save Them.” The story wasn’t greatly inaccurate factually, but the Times was clearly not beguiled by Walter’s contrarian view of MTR mining. The South American unit of the Warbler Park wasn’t even mentioned in the article, and Walter’s best talking points-new paradigm, green economy, science-based reclamation-were buried near the bottom, well below Jocelyn Zorn’s description of him shouting “I own this [expletive] land!” and Coyle Mathis’s recollection, “He called me stupid to my face.” The article’s take-away, besides the fact that Walter was an extremely disagreeable person, was that the Cerulean Mountain Trust was in bed with the coal industry and the defense contractor LBI, was allowing large-scale MTR on its supposedly pristine reserve, was hated by local environmentalists, had displaced salt-of-the-earth country people from their ancestral homes, and had been founded and funded by a publicity-shy energy mogul, Vincent Haven, who, with the connivance of the Bush administration, was destroying other parts of West Virginia by drilling gas wells.