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“Can I ask you a personal question, Mick?”

“Shoot.”

“Have you ever been out of the country?”

“No. Why should I have been?”

“Then what’s with the worldwide dial Zero Zero One as the country code telephone all about?”

“I’m thinking of going to Europe,” Mickey said.

“Really? What for?”

“Actually, Matty, that’s one of the reasons I came all the way over here. The other was to apologize for not coming to see you after Doc Michaels told me that he let you out of the loony bin. I was busy.”

“You have been discussing my mental condition with Dr. Michaels, I gather?”

“He said medical ethics prohibited his discussing your case with me, but apropos of nothing whatever, there was nothing wrong with you that a little rest wouldn’t fix. He’s a good guy.”

“And he suggested you come to see me?”

“No,” Mickey said, his tone suggesting that even the question surprised him. “What happened was after I heard that you’d been in and out of the loony bin, I called your mother, and she gave me th

e runaround about where you were, so I called your father, ditto, and I began to have visions of you in a rubber room somewhere, so I went and saw Doc Michaels, and he told me… what I told you he told me.. so I called Denny and asked him where you were, and he told me. So I came.”

“Tell me about Europe.”

“I told you I was busy. What it was was that I was involved in a contractual dispute with my employers.”

“About what?”

“I knocked my city editor on his ass,” Mickey said. “With a bloody nose.”

“Why?”

“It was a matter of journalistic principle,” Mickey said. “The lawyers for the Bulletin said it was justification for my termination, unless I apologized to the sonofabitch, which I will do the morning after the Pope gives birth to triplets.”

“So where does the matter stand now?” Matt said, smiling.

“Casimir responded that in this era of political correctness, it is not professionally acceptable behavior for a supervisor, before a room full of his fellow employees, to call an underling ‘you insane Shanty Irish sonofabitch’…”

“He actually called you that?” Matt asked, on the edge of laughter.

Mickey nodded, smiling, and went on, obviously quoting Bolinski verbatim,

“…‘and to threaten a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist such as Mr. O’Hara, before the same gathering of his peers, with using his influence to ensure that Mr. O’Hara would never find employment again, even with the National Enquirer, a periodical generally held in contempt by responsible journalists.’ ”

“He did that?”

“As blood dripped down his chin from his bloody nose onto his shirt,” Mickey said.

“What set you two off?” Matt asked.

“That’s not important. The sonofabitch has never liked me, and vice versa. It just happened.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“We have entered a thirty-day cooling-off period, during which they hope that I will change my mind about apologizing-they know I won’t-and the Bull hopes Kennedy will make a full and public apology for his reprehensible remarks and behavior to me-which he just might. During this period, I have withdrawn my professional services from the Bulletin. I still get paid, of course.”