By the end of the decade, Jim Brennan was a power in Queens Democratic politics. La Guardia’s antics, Brennan told Devlin and the pups, made him see the wisdom of participating in the political process. As mayor, La Guardia drove burlesque out of New York, closed down the slots, drove the numbers into the ghettoes—and asserted the city’s right to franchise the buses that ran on its streets. Brennan had to win again from the city what he had already wrested from the competition, and in the end only his assets, including the best-connected lawyers he could buy, put him in business under the new system. “Too close a call for me,” Brennan expansively told the three young men one night. “I lost a sweet thing when the slots went. They had to go sooner or later, but if I’d known then what I know now, it would have been later rather than sooner.”

By the end of the war, Brennan had control of the last unbuilt lots in Jackson Heights, acres of them. The leases, deeds, and other paperwork filled two rooms of filing cabinets, he recounted gleefully. When the G.I.s came home, his congressmen and senators pushed through legislation for veterans’ housing. Through boardmen and bagmen, Brennan’s land became the site of thousands of metal quonset-hut apartments from whence the ex-G.I.s took Brennan’s buses to the subway that carried them to their jobs in Manhattan. When the last of the huts was bulldozed away, seven or eight years later, Brennan was a landmark on the city’s political landscape, his wife noted for her religious and charity work, and his growing children famous in the Sunday magazines for being rich, smart, good-looking, and not the least ashamed of any of it.

Could some secret business have been going on while Devlin had been in the Brennan family? Devlin thought not. If old Jim had been up to something unacceptable even for a political power broker, it would have made itself known to Devlin at the time. Brennan bragged about bribery the way he bragged about bimbos. He was making millions out of the redevelopment of the Rockaways, working his Washington connections with dazzling finesse. He took his women down there, too, although Devlin only occasionally heard about them directly. Brennan talked to Joe and Jack as if they were drinking buddies, and in turn they talked to Maryellen as if she were another brother. Once, in an argument, she told Devlin, by then her husband, that he could not possibly be as virile as her father.

But by then Devlin knew that Maryellen would say anything if she thought his attention was drifting away from her … In another tantrum, after a morning quickie, she clenched her fists and cried that she didn’t want to be fucked all day.