But twenty years ago the two men had occupied pretty much the same space. In the time since, he had grown in one direction, Jack Brennan another. When he’d known Jack, Devlin had wanted adventure with Maryellen more or less at the center of it. Years later, it took him eighteen months to get into his thick head that Maryellen was gone, his party over. Liz Becker blazed through his life, then abandoned him because of his drinking. If he had grown in a different direction from Jack Brennan, he didn’t want to take any special credit for it. If he hadn’t grown somehow, he would have died.

Devlin drove down Broadway, wipers clacking, defogger blasting, vent window dripping rain onto his left knee. At Lincoln Center, traffic backed up, and when the skinny, dark-haired driver of the cab next to the Falcon opened his Post, Devlin reached for Jack Brennan’s letter.

… after all my insistent curiosity? Even now as I write this I am in a state of the most incredible, delicious, unbearable tension.

Behind him a horn blew. Fuck off, Devlin thought, stepping on the gas. Jack’s maundering was irritating the hell out of him. Wasn’t the search for illicit thrills something you outgrew? By the age of forty-seven a man ought to know when he’s kidding himself.…

Suddenly Devlin wasn’t so sure he could pass his own test. Traffic stopped again, leaving him with a view of new apartment and office buildings of the kind of gigantic proportions he could remember from the comic books of his childhood. A generation raised on visions of space travel, buildings that reduced people to the size of ants, and a steady rat-tat-tat of violence had turned them all into commonplaces. Devlin knew he was kidding himself if he thought the words in Jack Brennan’s letter wouldn’t have him drooling into his sock if they had been written by a woman instead of a man. That would have his attention, even if, for instance, the woman were Jane Milburn with all Devlin knew about her. Sure, he thought, letting himself smile, a woman would have made it different. “I could have told you that for nothing,” Eileen would have said, using one of her favorite expressions.

He was south of the garment district, near Gramercy Park, when he was able to pull over and stop the noise of the windshield wipers. No matter what the letter did to Devlin’s nervous system, the fact was that it had worked on Milburn—and given her the really bright idea of hiding the letter well. That meant something, too, and if what Devlin was about to read didn’t justify Milburn’s behavior, he might just have to look for the thing or event that did.

Now he had no trouble finding his place.