Half a dozen reporters and editors were there one night after putting the paper to bed a day or two after I returned from New York. Anderson had not yet reached forty years of age and normally had a reserved, if gruff, personality. He usually gave me a hard time, but I was pretty sure he liked me. I wore a shirt and tie. I wrote well, and quickly. And I was ambitious. I had spent much of that year agitating to go to Macedonia, where a conflict had flared up between the Macedonian armed forces and ethnic Albanian rebels. It took some gall to push for foreign assignments in between shifts on the cop desk, but whenever I did the corners of Anderson’s normally scowling mouth would budge upwards. Tonight Anderson was unusually animated and seemed, half in jest, to be affecting the persona of a 1920s newspaper baron. “What am I going to do with you, Petrou?” he said, rocking backwards in his chair. I took a long swallow of my beer and stared back at him.
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