“I don’t know. What difference does it make? I told them you made no secret to me about being A.A., that I’d never seen you take a drink, and that fairly frequently you helped other people. They asked me if you were a secretive person, and I said no more than the next cop.

“Then they asked about Joe Brennan. They wanted to know if you had ever mentioned Joe’s death. I remembered what you told me back when we were seeing each other. I told the FBI that you knew what you did because you called the Brennans after Joe’s death, and the person who talked to you gave you the story.”

She hadn’t told them about their connection in the early seventies because he’d been a drunk and that cast her in a poor light. He knew all her tricks—how easily he remembered! She put the decaf down on the table in front of him, and he pretended to sip at it. The FBI had wanted to know if Devlin had some kind of inordinate interest in the Brennans six years ago, almost ten years after the finish. Maybe they knew something he didn’t know.

“Anything else?”

“They asked me when I’d seen you last. I told them the truth, four years ago.”

“When was that?”

“On Greenpoint Avenue, across the street from Kingdom Hall, formerly the Bliss Theater.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“You’re getting old, Devlin.”

“I guess so.” He stood up, taking his cup and saucer with him. The cup was still full. “Have you heard from the feds since last Thursday?”

“No, but on Monday, before Jack Brennan was shot, one of the men in my office who knows you and I dated came in while I was at my desk and closed the door behind him—and asked what I knew about what Brennan was going to do when he got into the Senate. I said I wasn’t aware I was on the inside. Right, so he told the story he wanted to tell in the first place. Brennan was going to kick off the campaign with the promise to introduce a series of anticrime bills that would make organized crime an international issue, among other things. Naturally it sounded familiar—what you told me years ago about Joe Brennan clicked into my mind a moment before this guy in my office asked me if you could be on some ‘secret team’ that Jack Brennan had put together over the years. So there—there you are. That’s the story, Jerry.”