He found the number and approached an oval desk in the lobby, where two security officers sat behind a bank of telephones, TV monitors and computer displays. He gave his name and waited for the woman to check a visitors' list on the swivel screen. She asked him some questions and then picked up a phone and in a couple of minutes a uniformed man appeared to escort Bill to the proper floor. The woman at the desk gave the man a visitor's badge, an adhesive piece of paper, which he fastened to Bill's lapel.

There was another checkpoint at the elevator bank and they passed without delay and rode an express to the top of the building and when the door came open there was Charlie Everson in a bright tie, waiting. He squeezed Bill's arms at the biceps and looked squarely into his face. Neither man said a word. Then Charlie nodded to the guard and led Bill through a door opposite the reception room. They walked down a long corridor lined with book jackets and went into a large sunny office filled with plant life and polished surfaces.

"Where's your Bushmills?" Bill said. "A bite of the single-malt will do just fine."

"I'm not drinking these days."

"But you keep something in the cabinet for visiting writers."

"Ballygowan. It's water."

Bill looked at him hard. Then he sat down and undid the laces on his shoes, which were new and tight.

"Bill, it's hard to believe."

"I know. So many years, so fast, so strange."

"You look like a writer. You never used to. Took all these years. Do I recognize the jacket?"

"I think it's yours."

"Is it possible? The night Louise Wiegand got drunk and insulted my jacket."

"And you took it off."

"I threw it right down."

"And I said I need a jacket and I did need a jacket and she said or someone said take this one."

"Wasn't me. I liked that jacket."

"It's a nice old tweed."

"Doesn't fit."

"I've worn it maybe four times."

"She gave you my jacket."

"Louise was damn nice that way."

"She's dead, you know."

"Don't start, Charlie."

"What do you hear from Helen?"

"Speaking of dead? Nothing."

"I always liked Helen."

"You should have married her," Bill said. "Would have saved me a ton of trouble."

"She wasn't the trouble. You were the trouble."

"Either way," Bill said.

Charlie's face was broad, with a healthy flush, the windburn that fills the mirror behind the yacht-club bar. Thin pale hair cut short. The custom suit. The traditional loud tie that preserved a link to collegiate fun, that reminded people he was still Charlie E. and this was still supposed to be the book business, not global war through laser technology.

"Those years seem awfully clear to me. And they keep adding on. New things come back all the time. I find myself recalling scraps of dialogue from 1955."

"Be careful, you'll end up writing this stuff down."

"If I live and live and live, boringly into my middle eighties, I wonder how much I'll be able to add to the pleasure of those memories, the intense conversations, all those endless dinners and drinks and arguments we all had. We used to come out of a bar at three a. m. and talk on a street corner because there was so much we still had to say to each other, there were arguments we'd only scratched the surface of. Writing, painting, women, jazz, politics, history, baseball, every damn thing under the sun. I never wanted to go home, Bill. And when I finally got home I couldn't sleep. The talk kept buzzing in my head."

"Eleanor Baumann."

"God yes. Fantastic woman."

"She was smarter than both of us put together."

"Crazier too, unfortunately."

"Strange-smelling breath," Bill said.

"Fantastic letters. She wrote me a hundred amazing letters."

"What did they smell like?"

"For years. I have years of letters from that woman."

Charlie sat parallel to his desk, legs extended, his hands joined behind his neck.

"I was glad to hear from you," he said. "I talked to Brita Nilsson when she got back and she wouldn't tell me anything except that she passed on my message. Took you a while to call."

"I was working."

"And it's going well?"

"We don't talk about that."

"Took you a month. I've always thought I understood precisely why you went into isolation."

"Is that what we're here to talk about?"

"You have a twisted sense of the writer's place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere."

"I've done no dangerous things."

"No. But you've lived out the vision anyway."

"So my life is a kind of simulation."

"Not exactly. There's nothing false about it. You've actually become a hunted man."

"I see."

"And that's what we're here to talk about. There's a young man held hostage in Beirut. He's Swiss, a UN worker who was doing research on health care in the Palestinian camps. He's also a poet. Published maybe fifteen short poems in French-language journals. We know next to nothing about the group that has him. The hostage is the only proof they exist."

"What's your involvement?"

"I'm chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression. We're mainly academics and publishing people and we're just getting started and this is the crazy part of the whole business. This group takes a hostage simply because he's there, he's available, and he apparently tells them he's a poet and what is the first thing they do? They contact us. They have a fellow in Athens who calls our London office and says, There's a writer chained to a wall in a bare room in Beirut. If you want him back, maybe we can do a deal."

"Buy me lunch, Charlie. I've come all this way."

"Wait, now listen. I've been talking to the chap in Athens whenever I can reach him. On and off for weeks. Sometimes his phone rings, sometimes I hear an oceanic roar, sometimes he's there and sometimes he's not. We've finally agreed on a plan. We want to have a news conference, small and tightly controlled. Day after tomorrow in London. We talk about the captive writer. We talk about the group that has him. And then I announce that the hostage is being freed at that moment on live television in Beirut."

"Sounds pretty fucking fishy to me."

"I know. An element of mutual interest. But listen."

"Your new group gets press, their new group gets press, the young man is sprung from his basement room, the journalists get a story, so what's the harm."

"Right. And with this one success we can open up everybody's thinking. How do you create a shift in rooted attitudes and hardline positions if not through public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities? Besides, it's the only way to get this poor guy out of there. Isn't that enough, all by itself? We're obligated to do everything we can to save him and if we learn something about the people who took him, so much the better."

"Where the hell do I fit in?"

"If I hadn't run into Brita that evening, you wouldn't fit in at all. But when she said she was taking your picture, bells went off in my head. If you're willing to be photographed after all these years, why not take it one step further? Do something that will help us show who we are as an organization and how important it is for writers to take a public stand. Frankly I'm hoping to create a happy sensation. I want you to show up in London and briefly read from the poet's work, a selection of five or six poems. That's all."

"Get a Swiss writer. Won't the Swiss feel left out?"

"I can get any writer I want. But I want Bill Gray. Look, I didn't tell anyone you were coming here today. Not even my secretary. Because if I had there'd be a queue outside that door stretching like a conga line into the distance. There's an excitement that attaches to your name and it will help us put a mark on this event, force people to talk about it and think about it long after the speeches fade. I want one missing writer to read the work of another. I want the famous novelist to address the suffering of the unknown poet. I want the English-language writer to read in French and the older man to speak across the night to his young colleague in letters. Don't you see how beautifully balanced?"