Sometimes the old man wanted Devlin to talk about what he was doing, and Devlin could see that his father needed the connection through him to police work. No garbage about being New York’s Finest. They talked—away from Devlin’s mother—about being on the pad. The old man had never been in plainclothes. As for taking money, he said, he had learned never to initiate anything, never to make trouble for himself. “You never know who the players are,” he said late one night. “Even when I was in Traffic, I was careful about the folded tens and twenties in with license and registration … who I took them from, I mean.” Devlin already knew these conversations made his father feel important. He would keep talking as long as Devlin was willing to listen. And so the old man said, “You never know who you’re dealing with and what he’s liable to do, because human beings will do anything, anytime, anyplace—all they need is a reason.”

Learning to be a detective and read people’s faces, Devlin was beginning to see how his real feelings for his father poured out of his eyes. Devlin’s mother dealt with her son’s private life in her own style. One night, during a television commercial, she said, “Look, son, if you’re taking violin lessons, it’s all right with us if you practice at home.”

A year later, outside the Copa, a Mafia capo’s daughter dismissed the chauffeur by saying, “It’s okay, Carmine, he’s a cop!” Devlin woke up the next morning in a motel in Fort Lee with fresh, white snow on the ground outside. The brightness of the snow whacked his hangover so hard, his memory whited out, and for almost a minute, staggering back from the window, he could not remember his name. Later, Devlin heard, the girl’s father beat her up in an attempt to get the name of the cop who had made a laughingstock of his family and reputation. Devlin had to go back to the Copa—he had been in there so much in the previous half year that his absence would be noticed and, possibly, connected to law enforcement’s latest, and friendliest, assault on organized crime.