Vincent said, ‘Most people I know, I’d be happy never to see again.’ He looked at her. ‘There’s a few I’d want to catch up with, now and again.’

She smiled. ‘Your dad’s still around, right?’

‘Yeah. Dad’s still alive. Haven’t really talked to him in a while. He wasn’t too happy about me going off to fight a war he didn’t support. Think he’d have preferred I stayed home and kept working for him. Drive Mafia guys around Bensonhurst. I remember, I called him up this one time when I was on deployment—this was in Fallujah, actually. And he just said, “How’s the fucking invasion going?” And I said to him, “Well, if you’re going to be principled, don’t go driving clients who aren’t organised crime. You know, I think I’ve seen some honest guys creeping in there. People’ll think you’re inconsistent.” I think that was the longest conversation we had in a while.’

Erin nodded. ‘Dad and I stopped talking when I changed positions on Iraq. He thought the occupation was the most absurd thing to support. Said it was just straight imperialism. We thawed things out to the point where we could talk on the phone every couple of months, but like I say, it was all pretty perfunctory. I think he knew my mother would have disagreed with me, and so … well. It could’ve been why he seemed so aggrieved a lot of the time. We should have been able to mend things, but we didn’t. And it was sad too, because Alex seemed to be tarred by association with me. It could have been subconscious, I guess, on Dad’s part. I’m not sure. But they never really had a relationship.’

She smiled faintly, and in that brief expression, Vincent got a sense of her competing inner forces. Nostalgia and regret and obligation. What did she owe her father, considering the fact they didn’t get along, and considering the possibility he was running an illegal enterprise? It wasn’t a straightforward assessment of duty. Then factor in guilt, with its forever transient magnitude, and there would never be a fixed impression of what she was actually supposed to do.

She said, ‘If I ever see him again, I’d like to know why in his head, invasion equals bad, but drug smuggling equals good. If that’s what he was doing.’

Vincent let that have a few seconds while he drank his coffee. He looked out the window at the intersection, State Street coming down to meet Cabrillo, remembered Gutierrez standing out there the other morning, trying to look like a hundred and eighty pounds’ worth of trouble.

He said, ‘It was actually quite a good question that guy asked you. Just before the shooting started.’

‘The radio interview, you mean?’

‘Yeah. About you going from liberal to neo-con.’