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pauses. “What?” He’s incredulous. “Just wait till I talk to that guy….”
    “You mean you still haven’t reached him?”
    “Hell no—he’s missed two full days at the office.”
    Manning bites his lip, thinking. “Gordon, his apartment is only a few blocks from here. Why don’t I run over there and take a look?”
    From across the room, Neil rolls on the floor, laughing. He calls to Manning, “You’d better put some pants on first!”
    Five minutes later, Manning is on the street, walking through his Near North neighborhood toward Clifford Nolan’s apartment building. The long summer evening is a warm one, and the urgency of Manning’s stride has caused him to break into a sweat. He tells himself to slow down. Nothing is wrong.
    After all, Cliff Nolan has pulled these brief disappearances before. When he won the Partridge Prize a few years back, there was the traditional Friday-afternoon champagne toast in the newsroom. With uncharacteristic spontaneity, Nolan invited everyone to his apartment to continue the celebration that night. Manning was inclined not to go, but dismissed his reticence as base jealousy of Nolan’s award (known among reporters as “the coveted Brass Bird”), so he joined the festivities later that evening. Funky dance music was blasting from the apartment, and Manning laughed in astonishment as he climbed the stairs—at the office, Nolan never missed an opportunity to flaunt his ballet-and-opera tastes. Inside the apartment, the party was in full swing, and so was Nolan. His usual abstemiousness, which only rarely allowed a glass of port or an exceptionally fine Armagnac, was out the window that night, and he raced through the crowded rooms half-naked in pursuit of female coworkers who laughed hysterically at his metamorphosis. The next week, he didn’t show up at the office for several days, and when he did arrive back, he offered no explanation for his absence. Whether he was drying out somewhere, or shacked up with someone, or simply embarrassed into hiding was never known.
    The incident reminds Manning that there has been newsroom gossip of other parties, not attended by Manning, that also led Nolan to miss work. In the course of Nolan’s career, however, these aberrations have been rare, and Manning is willing to dismiss his colleague’s current disappearance as merely another brief escape from a repressed personality.
    Manning has reached his destination, standing now at the canopied entrance to the other reporter’s building. He tries the door, knowing that it will be locked, and indeed it is. He presses the buzzer to Nolan’s apartment, and predictably there is no response after several tries. Stymied, he stands there in the shade of the awning, wondering what other options he has. Perhaps he could try to reach the building’s superintendent. Then he notices an older resident approaching the building, a woman with two bags of groceries, packed high. As she steps up to the door, she struggles with her purse, fishing for her key.
    “May I be of help?” asks Manning, reaching for one of the bags.
    “Thank you so much,” she gasps, handing him the groceries. “Every day, it seems that life just gets more complicated .” She laughs at her futile complaint.
    When she unlocks the outer door, Manning opens it for her, steps inside with her, then opens the inner door. Inside the lobby, when she has recomposed herself, he hands back her groceries. She thanks him again and hobbles off toward her own apartment. Manning is already up the first flight of stairs.
    Arriving on the top floor, he walks past several doors to the one he knows to be Nolan’s. He pauses, listening. There’s a television playing somewhere, but it comes from another apartment. Otherwise, silence. He knocks. There is no response. So he knocks louder, calling, “Cliff? It’s Mark Manning. Are you in there?”
    Down the hallway, the door to the next apartment cracks open, emitting the sound of the