Then he turned and looked at me, “It’s a lot of money.”

“It is.”

“But Joe made me a better offer.”

“Better than twenty-five G’s?”

“Much.” Hagan looked out the window again; the fan made a dancing ghost of the curtains. “He said he’d let me breathe.”

CHAPTER TEN

In the Caucus Room gallery of the Senate Office Building, known as the S.O.B., several witnesses who might have been similarly characterized waited to present their testimony. Teamsters president James R. Hoffa—the focus of much of what the Rackets Committee was looking into—was one of the three-hundred capacity audience in that vast red-carpeted rectangle. A beautiful August day, warm but not hot, was sneaking in the gilt-ceilinged, cream-marble-walled, black-marble-floored chamber by way of three tall sun-slanting windows that made of the large crystal chandeliers ice sculptures that refused to melt. The same could not be said for the senators, witnesses and audience, who despite the air-conditioning were subject to the punishing heat of the lights required for the TV and movie cameras.

The witness on deck right now was sweating as if subject to the worst Third Degree tactics, but in fact he was smiling and even chortling and doing quite well under the irritated questioning of Robert F. Kennedy.

The young Rackets Committee chief counsel looked trim and composed, his striped tie snugged, his suit crisp, his dark brown hair longish but perfectly barbered. His boyish blue-eyed face seemed perfectly calm. But his voice had an edge that sometimes quavered.

Bob, for whom I’d done considerable work last year for the committee, seemed thrown by the clowning of this current witness, and annoyed by the room’s amused response to it.

The big man at the witness table—a distinguished-looking white-haired attorney at his side—weighed less than four hundred pounds but not much. Yet he’d somehow managed to find a sport coat and trousers large enough to swim in, his brick-pattern tie loose, the collar points of his soaked white shirt sticking up like noses waiting to be thumbed. His eyebrows rode high over the close-set light blue eyes, projecting an inaccurate air of stupidity, his small head sitting on the huge six-four frame like the mistake of a careless God.

“Mr. Baker,” Bob said into his microphone, “it would seem you’ve been reluctant to appear before this committee.”

Barney Baker sat hunkered over the table, hands flat before him, as if he were waiting for a poker hand to be dealt.

“No, sir,” he said. “Here I am, right now.”

Barney’s baritone was surprisingly rich and expressive; amplification only helped it, whereas Bob’s voice seemed thin, reedy, nasal.

“You avoided our subpoenas by twice checking into weight-loss spas.”

Barney raised his plump hands as if in brief surrender. “I am down twenty pounds, sir.”

Howls of laughter.

Not from Bob, though, who next asked the witness about a shooting in Manhattan in 1936, in the parking lot of the Hotel New Yorker.

“All I heard was a lot of noise,” Barney said. “I hit the pavement. They shot myself and Mr. Joe Butler.”