What Gavin had wanted was to be an investigative reporter, a newspaperman, but nothing about his career was as he’d imagined it would be. When he’d graduated with his journalism degree he’d thought that this would be the moment when his life would finally begin. In idealistic daydreams he’d thought he might help change the world or at least improve it, and in shallower moments he’d just wanted to be a star reporter. He’d wanted to extend his hands and feel the weight of the Pulitzer with the crowd applauding before him, step up to the podium and clear his throat in the spotlight. He’d managed eventually to land a job as a reporter at one of the city’s best papers, but coming to the New York Star was like stepping into a drama in which all the major roles were already taken, or perhaps the play had already closed. There were veteran journalists at the Star, men and a woman who'd brought down titans and gone into war zones and propelled the paper to a point only just beneath the Times in the New York City newspaper pantheon, people who didn't have to imagine what a Pulitzer felt like, but even the veterans seemed adrift in the changed world. The paper was sending out fewer and fewer correspondents on faraway stories. There were no more bureaus overseas or even in Washington. The paper was covering local news, relying on Reuters and freelancers for everything else. Too many of the stories seemed more like entertainment than news to him. "You have to put in your time," his editor had told him, but Gavin feared more and more that his time had passed. On two or three occasions he'd managed to get invited along for drinks with a couple of the veterans, and their stories mostly concerned a time that seemed better and more glorious than now and ended with some variation on "those were the days." He'd come home from the bars leaden with disappointment. "You know what your problem is?" his friend Silas said one night, when they were drinking together at an Irish bar near the paper. "I just figured it out." Silas was a copy editor, and had been at the paper longer than Gavin had. Their desks were side by side in the newsroom. "Please," Gavin said, "tell me what my problem is." "Look at you. Jesus. The fedora, the trench coat. You want to run around the city with a flashbulb camera and a press card in your hat band." "How is that a problem?" "Your problem is that you don't really want to work at a newspaper, per se. You want to work in 1925." "I don't disagree," Gavin said. It had been clear for some time that he was in the wrong decade. All of his favourite movies were older than he was. His camera was a 1973 Yashica. He'd seen Chinatown a dozen times.
He suspected his editor was sending him on his first out-of-town assignment to make him feel better about not being senior enough to be sent into a war zone, or perhaps to make him feel better about having missed the days the veterans drank to.