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what constituted a dead end, though. He’d been made a columnist after he’d brought a Pulitzer home to the long-suffering Mirror for a three-part series on extortionate lending practices on the South Side generally and in Grand Crossing particularly, but despite having been given carte blanche it turned out that there was nothing in the entire world (nominally, his beat) quite as corrupt or done quite so badly as it was in the ghetto at home. His ledes, usually drawing a contrast between some showy boondoggle that benefited the few and the hidden and unrelieved suffering of the many, became notorious for their vitriolic hyperbole, and he’d been kicked upstairs and named midwest editor when his columns, as reflexively indignant as they were, began to irritate even the constituencies he was defending, who had grown tired of being called credulous fools for playing the lottery or enthusing over some costly civic initiative.
    Nables had gazed at the e-mail for a long time. He’d manufactured an office for himself by barricading his desk behind tall lateral filing cabinets. Everyone else sat in the bullpen. This cheerless, metal-lined space contained no clue to his character, his personal life, or his vanities. Kat thought of him as an unexceptionally intelligent man with a certain kind of inflexible integrity that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and she didn’t know how she felt about it. She wanted her incorruptible heroes to be genius rogues, and that wasn’t what she had here with Nables.
    “Do Native Americans gamble at these casinos?” he’d asked, finally.
    “I don’t know. Why?”
    “Because if I’m going to send you to Michigan I want to know who this is ripping off and why I ought to care.”
    “I think up there it might be mostly white people.” She’d pushed her hair out of her face, and shrugged. “A lot of people from Chicago have houses on the lakeshore.” She’d shrugged again. “Local interest.”
    “Local interest,” said Nables. “Like we couldn’t find ourselves some god damn white man banging a tom-tom and calling himself Geronimo right here in the city of Chicago. If you’re telling me that this is where a lot of rich folks go to spend discretionary income, maybe you ought to think and tell me again.”
    Kat hadn’t been sure what her trump was. Story about the hijacking of racial identity?
    “You are aware that Michigan is the state that gave us Eminem? I am interested, Kat, in injustice. Not in exasperation. There are no African Americans, and I presume that there are no Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Asian Americans for that matter, who are not exasperated by, who are unaware of, the ways in which we are belittled and stereotyped, mimicked and plagiarized. We are all aware and we have made it our project to make other people, white people, aware . And what have white people done? This is what white people have done. They’ve learned to express regret, to watch what they say in public, to exalt carefully selected public figures, to scrupulously integrate their advertising, and to visibly celebrate a diversity that exists only in that advertising. Meanwhile, the master program continues uninterrupted. Underpay us, siphon money out of our neighborhoods, cheat us out of an education, keep us high, put us in jail. How does pointing out one more time the ways in which insult is added to injury help? See, I don’t think you can answer that except to say that it doesn’t.”
    Story about an audacious theft?
    “ Audacity is a term I prefer to reserve for the exercise of righteous daring. The word is derived from the Medieval Latin: audacitas, or boldness, derived from Classical Latin, audacis, genitive case of audax, or brave. How we would be degrading this ennobling word, a word describing a way of being that I would like our citizenry, our young people, to aspire to! Theft in all its forms is craven, a hidden act that takes place in the shadows even when those