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possible, to imprint his victory in the minds of every cop in the crowd.
    “Go shake your opponent’s hand, Stanley.”
    “What?” Moodrow looked down at his trainer as if surprised to find him there.
    “Go shake his fucking hand. Tell him it was a great fight. Tell him anything, but don’t leave him sitting there.”
    “You’re right,” Moodrow admitted. “I forgot.”
    O’Grady’s handlers had him up and sitting on his stool when Moodrow approached. The fireman stared at the bloody apparition kneeling in front of him for a moment, then nodded his head. “You fought hard, Stanley,” he said. “You deserve it. But I want a rematch. One more fight to settle the issue.”
    “Sorry, pal,” Moodrow replied evenly, “but you’re gonna have to learn to live with this one. I’m retired.”

Three
January 3
    P ATRICK FRANCIS MATTHEW COHAN lingered in the bedroom of his ten-room Bayside home, despite the fact that most of his guests had already arrived. He knew his guests were out there, having met each of them at the door. He also knew about the gusty winds blowing through the borough of Queens. Those winds had greeted him each time he opened the door and now he was thoroughly absorbed in the task of patting rebellious strands of feathery white hair back into place.
    Pat Cohan was always careful with his hair because he wore it long, despite the current fashion. There was no rebellion involved in the style he preferred. (Patrick Cohan was, after all, a full inspector in the NYPD, not some Greenwich Village beatnik.) It was just that a tall, broadly built, fifty-nine-year-old Irishman with a thick head of silvery hair couldn’t, on pain of being declared a Protestant, wear that hair in a two-inch brush cut.
    Pat Cohan thought of his hair as “the mane,” called it that as he worked each strand into place. “Guess it’s time to tame the mane.” His daughter, Kathleen, liked to tease him about the amount of time he spent in front of the mirror. Pat didn’t particularly like to be teased—he only took it from “my darlin’ Kathleen”—but he also knew it was important that his hair always be neatly combed. Short hair, in 1958, was a badge of patriotism, the physical equivalent of a loyalty oath.
    Satisfied that every hair was firmly in place, Pat Cohan drew himself up to his full height and measured the result of his efforts. His “mane” floated above a large skull, just as it was supposed to. It framed his broad brow, strong assertive jaw and blue, blue eyes. He liked to describe those eyes (to himself, at least) as the color of an Irish lake under a cloudless sky.
    Of course, there were the negatives. (There were bound to be negatives when you were on the wrong side of fifty and tied to a desk.) His once-flat belly had gone the way of his colleagues’ hair. And Pat Cohan had jowls, too, and the florid complexion and small broken veins of the habitual drinker. Not that he was a drunk, by any means. Alcohol was the curse of the Irish and every Irishman knew it. But the functions he was expected to attend as an NYPD inspector often required him to stand in a little circle of politicians with a drink in his hand. There were only forty-two inspectors in the 24,000-man NYPD and they spent as much time on the politics of the job as they did on policing the City of New York.
    But not tonight. Tonight was special. This was a ‘friends only’ occasion and Pat Cohan’s definition of the word ‘friend’ excluded all politicians. As far as Pat Cohan was concerned, politicians, with their addiction to public opinion, were only one step above the journalists who created that opinion.
    “Not bad, Pat,” he said to himself, pulling his vest down over his belly. He was wearing a black three-piece suit cut from the finest Irish broadcloth and tailored by a Lithuanian from the Yorkville section of Manhattan. The black suit was his trademark and, offset by a starched white shirt and a blue tie that matched his