He could see his own pattern now, drawing into the comfort of zero-horizon darkness and the warmth of old memory. Some scientist two centuries from now will be able to relate it to primordial animal behavior under similar threatening circumstances. He was in a motel room in New Jersey, on his back with his eyes closed. His mother wasn’t far from the surface of his thoughts. He was thinking about Liz, and his late cousin Alice, and of Eileen so frightened for him earlier tonight. Women’s lives ruled, wrecked, and possibly destroyed by men. Devlin would never have met Eileen if not for the trouble in Ireland. Some psychologists insisted that the world would be no better off if it were ruled by women. All Devlin could see was that in this world there was no way to know, no vision or technology capable of lifting the clamp of male warmaking, and the effects of winning and losing, from the hearts and souls of women.

Devlin was trying to rest, and in those moments when he realized it was impossible, he forced his thoughts back to old Jim Brennan—Devlin aware that he was running to the refuge of himself as cop, avenger, warrior, away from life’s nightmare rising up around him from every side.

Liz. Liz and the Brennans, Liz buying eagerly into her piece of the nightmare, giddily telling him a story her mother had passed on to her about old Jim Brennan, this one from back at the start of World War II, or shortly before it, when Brennan and his whole generation were younger than Devlin was now—or Liz had been. His horror and grief for her gave him a sad, strange perspective of the passage of the generations from youth through adulthood to old age. When were adults not railing against the primal terrors of childhood? When were the old not pathetic replications of themselves as children, surrendering at last to those same terrors? Liz’s mother’s story was about a girlfriend modeling in the garment district before the war, a woman who could not have been thirty at the time, perhaps barely twenty-five, not a woman in Devlin’s eyes so much as a girl.…