He tiptoed down the steps of their Greenwich Village brownstone and quickly hailed a cab to the Manhattan House of Detention, called the Tombs because the original structure, built in 1838, had resembled an ancient Egyptian mausoleum. The prison had been torn down and rebuilt twice since then, but the nickname stuck, as did its reputation for unrivaled wretchedness.

Two hours later Charlie was wedged into a small booth deep in the bowels of the facility looking through a thick pane of glass at his freshly arrested father.

“This place is infested with cockroaches and rats,” Winston Marder barked into his end of the telephone. “My cellmate weighs around eight hundred pounds and was pinched for molesting children. How do you think I’m doing?”

“But what did they charge you with?” Charlie asked.

“Some nonsense about consorting with known criminals. You can blame the playboy in the White House and his prick brother,” his father said, apparently by way of explanation. “A particularly specious charge to level against an attorney, as Alistair will prove. I’m sure they’ll cast it as part of Bobby’s crusade against organized crime.”

By his inflection, Winston conveyed his contempt for the attorney general. Charlie wondered if there was any truth to the charges but didn’t ask; the walls probably had ears.

“But why aren’t they offering bail?” Charlie asked.

“Some nonsense about me being a flight risk,” Winston said. “Where’s Alistair? Didn’t you call him?”

“He’s in Washington, he’s coming back on the first train.”

Winston grunted, a guttural note of dissatisfaction.

Winston Marder had a predilection for dark rooms and evening hours, so it had been years since Charlie had seen his father in such harsh light. What he saw under the fluorescent bulbs was dismaying. Winston’s skin looked almost greenish. The bags under his eyes appeared inflated and underlined. He was sixty-five but looked eighty, and his voice was shaky.

To the outside world, Winston was a savvy fixer and New York power broker who had worked his way up from a Brooklyn tenement to a four-story Upper East Side residence by making the right friends and the right deals. A Teddy Roosevelt Republican, he’d fought on the western front during the Great War and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Somme. Winston had a hand in every political pot he could reach. Seeking distraction after his wife’s death, he’d worked hard with his friend Governor Rockefeller to deliver the Empire State to Nixon in 1960, only to see that slick Jack Kennedy and his bootlegger father snatch it away.