It hadn’t been worth much. The Gateway wasn’t built to last. The flophouses flopped, the pool halls and pawnshops traded derelicts back and forth, but at least it was honest. At least it wore its sins for all to see. One-Two misses the offhand gruffness of the toughs and dealers in the old neighborhood. Then it had been an act, an attitude they put on, that they modified for shopkeepers, lovers, or their relatives. He doesn’t like the modern flash, the seductivity of violence leaching into the Southside from the east.

He shakes his head and moves his hand down to his back. For what it’s worth, the move pushed him closer to Betty. Not close enough. For what it’s worth. Two children dead, one just out of jail, the other disappeared to San Diego, and Lincoln stuck with Betty’s stubborn silence. One-Two feels that he hasn’t been able to help with any of it.

He wants to tell Betty that she should tell Lincoln what happened, that knowledge can crack open the troubled child. Not break him, more like the way warmth and steam escape from a torn loaf of fresh-baked bread. He wants to tell her this but is caught, held fast on the edge of her life and unable to get closer. She could give him the final shove off the edge if he broaches the subject. The fall from the IDS wouldn’t even compare to that.

They were putting in the spacing beams so the glaziers could begin to hang the skin, the mirrored glass panels that would clothe the building. It was 1971. It seemed that things were falling apart everywhere. The boys sent overseas were coming home broken. Different, at least. The news that came with them was hard to believe but impossible to refute in full color on the television. In Washington the President was denying everything.

Tucked away in the upper Midwest, Minneapolis was licking its wounds and thinking ruefully of Hubert Humphrey’s lost bid, wondering how differently things might have turned out. The city looked outward from its perch on the edge of the nation and, given what it saw, everyone in the city was hurrying. One-Two, Simon, the rest of the crews, even the gnomelike architect who designed the building, were hurrying to finish it. They rushed because though the rest of the world seemed broken and unfinished, they were determined to glass the sky with the IDS Tower, a home far better than the company that bore its name deserved.

They worked quickly, the masons running ahead of the ironworkers who scampered to clear their deck before the glaziers burned at their heels. After them came the mad scramble of electricians, plumbers and the specialists who only worked on the ducting or interior walls.