He saw that he didn’t really mean any of it. He was just trying to close the conversation and get the hell out of there. “Do whatever you want. I’d like to get their reaction now, after the killing. They talked to you before, and that I don’t understand.”

She rubbed his arm in a familiar way. “Go home. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Thanks again.”

He heard the locks turn behind him and found the elevator waiting where he had left it. What could he believe? Even five years ago, she had been so concerned with her career and reputation that she had thought twice about the people she had coffee with. Go home. Did that mean someone would be coming for him? Maybe he was tired. Heading the other way up Fiftieth Avenue, he burned rubber on the asphalt. Liz must have heard it. In the confusion between them, what did she think it meant?

Eileen opened the door before Devlin could remove his key from the lock. She pulled him by the sleeve quickly over the threshold. Their lips brushed and he could smell a new perfume on her soft, slender neck, another new perfume, sweet, mild, and clear.

“No British patrols out there,” he said.

“Don’t be smart.” She locked the door again. Her light cotton gown was unbuttoned, and she was nude underneath. “Are you all right?”

“I feel like I’m a hundred years old.”

“You look only seventy-five. Inside. Get undressed, brush your teeth, and into bed. The weather says it’s going to rain tomorrow, and gettin’ wet is all you need after a day like this.” She pushed him toward the bedroom, pausing along the way to extinguish lights. “You were terrible to live with when you had the flu last November.”

He looked at her. She had overdone the teasing. She turned away, hiding her eyes, but he could see the color coming to her cheeks. Only foolin’, she usually said at this point, but now she was quiet.

She raised her eyes to him. They were filling with tears. “At half eleven I turned off the news, and fears I thought I’d put behind me came up again. I realized I was waiting for the ground to thump, as it does when a bomb goes off, or the little pop pop of pistol shots in the next street. I won’t let you down, I’m just sayin’—”

“I know, it was the last thing I was worried about.” He told her about the bomb squad searching his car. And about falling in the subway station. And finally about what Levine had found on Devlin’s telephone bills, and what Cummings’s call here Monday evening said about the privacy, or lack of it, on her line. “Tell me you’ll be careful,” he said.

“Yes, I will. And you have no idea what this is about?”