All the talking stopped when they were noticed. They were met with nervous, patronizing smiles, and Connor and Pete Wald went up to the bar and ordered a bottle and five glasses. The bartender spread the bottle and the glasses on the bar, and still no one spoke. Connor loved it—the fat silence that ballooned in the air before a fight. It was a unique silence, a silence with a ticking heartbeat. Their brother ADAs joined them at the bar rail and filled their glasses. A chair scraped. Pete raised his glass and looked around at the faces in the bar and said, “To the Attorney General of these United States.”

“Hear! Hear!” Connor shouted, and they threw back their drinks and refilled them.

“To deportation of undesirables!” Connor said, and the other men joined in chorus.

“To the death of Vlad Lenin!” Harry Block shouted.

They joined him as the other crowd of men started booing and hooting.

A tall guy with dark hair and picture-show looks was suddenly standing beside Connor.

“Hi,” he said.

“Fuck off,” Connor said and threw back his drink as the other ADAs laughed.

“Let’s all be reasonable here,” the man said. “Let’s talk this out. Hey? You might be surprised how many times our views intersect.”

Connor kept his eyes on the bar top. “Uh-huh.”

“We all want the same thing,” the pretty boy said, and patted Connor’s shoulder.

Connor waited for the man to remove his hand.

He poured himself another drink and turned to face the man. He thought of the judge. Of the treasonous Vittorio Scalone walking out of court with a smirk in his eyes. He thought of trying to explain his frustration and feelings of injustice to Nora, and how that could go either way. She might be sympathetic. She might be distant, indistinct. You could never predict. She seemed to love him sometimes, but other times she looked at him as if he were Joe, worthy only of a pat on the head and a dry kiss good night on the cheek. He could see her eyes now—unreadable. Unreachable. Never quite true. Never quite seeing him, really seeing him. Or anyone for that matter. Something always held in reserve. Except, of course, for when she turned those eyes on…

Danny.

The realization came suddenly, but at the same time it had lived in him for so long, he couldn’t believe he’d just faced it. His stomach shriveled and the backs of his eyeballs felt as if a razor scraped across them.

He turned with a smile to face the tall pretty boy and emptied his shot glass into his fine black hair and then butted him in the face.

As soon as the mick with the pale hair and matching freckles poured his drink over Jack’s head and drove his forehead into his face, Babe tried grabbing his coat off the chair and making a run for it. He knew as well as anyone, though, that the first rule of a bar fight was to hit the biggest guy first, and that happened to be him. So it wasn’t any surprise when a stool hit the back of his head and two large arms wrapped over his shoulders and two legs folded over his hips. Babe dropped his coat and spun with the guy on his back and took another stool to his midsection from a guy who looked at him funny and said, “Shit. You look like Babe Ruth.”