The other customer turned away, grinning. The attendant meant the disclaimer on Devlin’s ticket, the self-determined, limit-of-liability notice printed in type only teenagers and birds of prey could read. It was nonsense as law, but that sort of thinking wasn’t going to get Devlin on the road, either. He didn’t have time to change a tire. He couldn’t leave a key and his triple-A card with the attendant. Devlin yelled to him, “I’m going to have to let the car sit for a couple of hours!”

The attendant answered without turning around. “That’s up to you!”

Devlin’s moment of panic was passing. He had to figure a way to get a key to Sal, his mechanic, and hope that Sal could fix the tire quickly. But that and the other telephone calls would have to wait; Devlin had no time to spare. He wasn’t far from the Broadway-Nassau station of the Eighth Avenue line. Was that the best way to go? Devlin rarely used the subway anymore; the filth, graffiti, and derelicts reminded him so vividly of his depression of a few years ago that his skin prickled. The heebie-jeebies, his parents’ generation had called the sensation. Devlin had heard Jim Brennan use the phrase during one of his evening lecture-reminiscences. Devlin could remember that moment, his sudden wondering about the origin of the phrase, and why it was rooted so deeply in the minds of those who had grown up with the century. Old Jim had been not only healthier back in the early sixties, he had been more powerful, physically strong, still tough enough to kick the shit out of any of the three young men listening to him, good enough, probably, to take them all on and leave them hurting, if not unconscious. Jim talked out of the side of his mouth in the style of the now-gone New York. He was one of the thousands of his time who liked to say he was off the streets and proud of it. What made Jim Brennan different from the rest was that he usually said it in black tie, in a leather wing-back chair, a brandy snifter in one hand, a genuine Cuban cigar in the other.

For all Devlin knew, he remembered those lecture-reminiscences and all the rest of what happened to him with the Brennans as well as he remembered September 16, 1971. Levine said he might want to know everything. It would take weeks to tell, maybe months, and Devlin could sense a reluctance to subject himself to that experience that was much, much stronger than his reluctance to ride the A train up to Thirty-fourth Street.