“You’d be betraying the trust of your work colleagues.”

“That’s what bothers me.”

“In fact, you’d probably have to resign.”

“Exactly. Because I’d feel a traitor.”

“Besides, they might find out about the tip-off, and when they looked around for the culprit they’d see one black face in the room—yours.”

“Maybe I should do it anyway, if it’s the right thing.”

“If you leave, George, there’s no black face in Bobby Kennedy’s inner circle.”

“I knew you’d say I should shut up and stay.”

“It’s hard, but yes, I think you should.”

“So do I,” said George.

CHAPTER TWELVE

You live in an amazing house,” Beep Dewar said to Dave Williams.

Dave was thirteen years old; he had lived here as long as he could remember; and he had never really noticed the house. He looked up at the brick façade of the garden front, with its regular rows of Georgian windows. “Amazing?” he said.

“It’s so old.”

“It’s eighteenth century, I think. So it’s only about two hundred years old.”

“Only!” She laughed. “In San Francisco, nothing is two hundred years old!”

The house was in Great Peter Street, London, a couple of minutes’ walk from Parliament. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were eighteenth century, and Dave knew vaguely that they had been built for members of Parliament and peers who had to attend the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Dave’s father, Lloyd Williams, was an M.P.

“Do you smoke cigarettes?” said Beep, taking out a packet.

“Only when I get the chance.”

She gave him one and they both lit up.

Ursula Dewar, known as Beep, was also thirteen, but she seemed older than Dave. She wore nifty American clothes, tight sweaters and narrow jeans and boots. She claimed she could drive. She said British radio was square: only three stations, none playing rock and roll—and they went off the air at midnight! When she caught Dave staring at the small bumps her breasts made in the front of her black turtleneck, she was not even embarrassed; she just smiled. But she never quite gave him an opportunity to kiss her.

She would not be the first girl he had kissed. He would have liked to let her know that, just in case she thought he was inexperienced. She would be the third, counting Linda Robertson, whom he did count even though she had not actually kissed him back. The point was, he knew what to do.

But he had not managed it with Beep, not yet.

He had come close. He had discreetly put his arm around her shoulders in the back of his father’s Humber Hawk, but she had turned her face away and looked out at the lamplit streets. She did not giggle when tickled. They had jived to the Dansette record player in the bedroom of his fifteen-year-old sister, Evie; but Beep had declined to slow-dance when Dave put on Elvis singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Still he lived in hope. Sadly, this was not the moment, standing in the small garden on a winter afternoon, Beep hugging herself to keep warm, both of them stiffly dressed in their best clothes. They were off to a formal family occasion. But there would be a party later. Beep had a quarter bottle of vodka in her handbag to spike the soft drinks they would be given while their parents hypocritically glugged whisky and gin. And then anything might happen. He stared at her pink lips closing around the filter tip of her Chesterfield, and imagined yearningly what it would be like.