It was Dunne. He asked Addis if he could stop by.

“Sure, Clarence,” he said, “whenever you like.”

Addis entered his house through the kitchen and ignored the tower of dishes in the sink. As he reached for the light switch in the dining room, he felt something against his leg. He spun around and knocked a lamp to the ground.

Shit, I’m too jumpy.

He turned on the overhead fixture. Eric, his cat, was on the floor in front of him. The cat cried in Addis’s direction and then trotted out of the room. Addis put down the soaked file and followed the cat to the kitchen. The food dish was empty. He checked a cupboard. He was out of cat food.

He poked around until he found a small jar of caviar. The prime minister of Russia had given Addis the caviar in Moscow while guiding Hanover and Addis on a late-evening tour of the Kremlin during the first summit. We read much of you here, he had said to Addis, when they were in the kitchen facilities. “Do you have a brother?” And he placed a jar of caviar—“the best,” he remarked—in Addis’s pocket.

Addis opened the caviar and fed it to the cat.

He knew her voice would be there—Holly Rudd’s, on the answering machine—so he disregarded the blinking light. He sat down at the desk in the corner of the living room, opened the file, and laid out the damp documents. When he ran out of desk space, he used the floor.

Earlier that day, Margaret Hanover had stopped by the office. “Remember,” she had said, “the loose ends. Give them a good tying.” Addis had tried to make a start by going over the documents. But concentrating in the office had been impossible, especially after M. T. O’Connor had burst in, waving a sheet of paper.

“From Kelly’s office,” she had declared. He could see the page had once been crumpled.

“From the garbage?”

“Does it matter?” she shouted. It was a first draft of the initial policy initiatives of the Mumfries administration: tax cuts; deregulation; enhanced business subsidies, particularly for energy companies. “He took two bullets so Mumfries could reward the home-state shits who have greased him ever since he was a numskull bootlicker in the state legislature?”

She wanted to leak the document to the Post. Addis talked her out of it. Any leaks, and Kelly would clean house and clear out the Hanover holdovers. Piss inside the tent for a while, he counseled.