At the Battery traffic backed up briefly and Devlin found himself looking across the bay toward Liberty Island, where the still-shrouded Statue of Liberty awaited another unveiling. He thought he remembered that the statue had been scrubbed in the forties, after the war. No hoopla then, no drawing attention to the fact that the statue’s relatively soft copper skin was almost as thin as a quarter. Knowing how easy it would be to turn the old girl into a baker’s rack was all the encouragement a lot of weirdos needed to go at her with an Uzi—or even a cannon. The politicians lining up to take their bows might find more fireworks than were being advertised. In the mood he was in, with everything that was gnawing at him, including the revelations in Jack Brennan’s letter to Jane Milburn, Devlin thought they deserved whatever happened to them.

Devlin didn’t want to picture Joe and Jack being sexual with Maryellen. If Jack had really believed that it had been good for all of them, he had been as self-deluded as he had been sexually disordered. Jack had been six years Maryellen’s senior, a huge difference during childhood and adolescence. Was it any wonder Maryellen’s behavior had been so profoundly erratic?

In eight years, it had never occurred to Devlin that Joe Brennan had been murdered. But if John Lord’s father was right, and if Jack had been killed by the same people, then a conspiracy against Frank Devlin made no sense at all. But suppose it did, in a way Devlin couldn’t see? If somebody could wait eight years between one killing and the next, how far back could a vendetta go? What in fact did Devlin know about Jim Brennan?

4:26 P.M. …

4:26 P.M. …

A woman answered the telephone. In response to recent events in her life, her “Hello” sounded as if her head were going on a chopping block. She seemed resigned to it, too, sick of living. Devlin was calling from the back of a kosher deli in Bensonhurst, near the neighborhood in which the telephone on Major’s slip of paper was located.

“May I speak to Mrs. Anita Brennan, please? I realize that this is a bad, awkward time to call, but—”

“I’m Anita Brennan.”

He drew a breath. “This is Frank Devlin, Mrs. Brennan, the brother-in-law you never met.”

“The FBI questioned me yesterday about you. They wanted to know if Jack had spoken of working with you …”

“He couldn’t have.”