Pat shook his head as he finished his second whiskey. At this point he was maintaining a dull, drunken hum. Who was it who said the only relief from mental anguish is physical pain? Not true at all. Pat knew the two compounded. Say what else, but Pat as an actuary understood a lot of the likelihoods of the universe. Could there be surprises? Flukes? Sure. He scanned a Daily News sitting on the stool next to him. Some senator running for president plagiarized in law school. No one cares. It’s like that story in the Dallas papers where the minister tried to kill his wife. Strangled her in the driveway. He’ll get away with it. The senator too. But over the long run, the anomalies flattened and vanished. Follow the arrow of time, and every variable recedes to its limit—once assets become liabilities. Pat ordered a fresh—Let’s call it third and final—whiskey and studied it. All the unseen motion in that glass, and over time the ice melts, the glass breaks, the bar rots, the building’s mortar cracks, the street sheared by the schist of the island, and it all folds back into the dark, unbearable heat of a planet that winks out after its star decays.

Pat was comfortable around numbers and probabilities, having learned them early on the ledgers of his father’s corner grocery. During the Depression and then the war, everyone in St. Jerome’s parish was on the pad until payday. Even then bookkeeping was a form of risk assessment—Mrs. Reeves owes $6.35, but Mr. Reeves was at the door of Feely’s bar, so good luck with that. During tough times, Pat learned that most people pay, are honest and proud, and you spent 90 percent of your time chasing the other 10 percent who are not.

His father, Jack, was a Corkman who fought in World War I to gain citizenship. He enlisted with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, heralded by Joyce Kilmer and made famous by Jimmy Cagney. Gassed badly at Lunéville, John Malone compounded his terrible respiration with smoking, and then drank to overcome the wheezing. He died when Pat was fourteen, leaving him and his mother with the store and little else. Hannah sent Pat to Cardinal Hayes, where he aced the math exams under the Christian Brothers, which led to a scholarship from Fordham. He majored in statistics, which his uncle Dermot, a sandhog, counseled was a ticket for creating bullshit rather than shoveling it.