Gerrity joined them for the trek over to the other building, and Devlin was thankful that Gerrity didn’t want to make small talk. A chasm was opening under the feet of an awful lot of people, and Devlin wanted to get an idea of where he might wind up. On the bottom, probably, under Levine, Commissioner Torres, Mayor Hamilton, maybe even the cardinal. Levine wasn’t going to get any help from the two men he had to answer to. It was time for Devlin to think hard about that.

As everyone in New York now understood, Norman Hamilton would have cut a deal with the devil himself to become mayor of the city of New York. Why Hamilton had wanted the office so badly was anybody’s guess, because no mayor had ever advanced to higher state or national office, and the city had been running downhill for years. Not since John Lindsay in the sixties had a candidate tried so hard to do the New York equivalent of wrapping himself in the flag. Just as Lindsay had decided that New York was “Fun City,”—Hamilton had campaigned as “Mr. New York,” seeming to laugh along with the street-smart New Yorkers who were laughing at him. He was an independently wealthy Park Avenue bachelor, Jewish on his mother’s side, which was politically useful, wired to Wall Street, which was even more so, and well connected to the city’s nearly all-powerful developers, which was most important of all. In their turns the Irish had had Jimmy Walker and Bill O’Dwyer, the Italians La Guardia and Impellitteri. As one Village Voice columnist had written, it was now the turn of the Jews, and Hamilton was the city’s most presentable haimisch male, a New York Robert Redford. Hamilton was good-looking, just fifty, still yellow-haired. During his first campaign, the stories about his lifelong coolness toward women had had no trouble making the newspapers. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been able to find Miss Right, he had joked, it was just that there were so many of them. That had stifled enough of the talk; he remained hostesses’ number-one extra man at dinner tables all over the Upper East Side. As a campaigner, Hamilton had played the fool as much as any other candidate for mayor in the city’s history, stopping for food at every groaning board from Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island, to the mafia ristorantes of Little Italy, to the glitzy outdoor cafes of newly upscale Columbus Avenue. In the first campaign and the flush days at the start of his first term, Hamilton had looked and sounded like a presidential candidate, but by the time of the next Democratic convention, the surrounding presidential talk had stopped. Too many bad things had happened in the city, Hamilton had put his foot in his mouth too many times. He was holding his first and last elective office, and everybody knew it.