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martinis, the famous New York liquid lunch. He thought of stopping off at the Bleeding Horse but decided he could not face the crowds and the venal leer of the maître d’.
    Although he would never have admitted it, Glass was afraid of his father-in-law. His fear was of the low-key, fuzzy, four-o‘clock-in-the-morning variety, always there, like the dread of death, a pilot light glowing steadily inside him. Big Bill had notoriously strong opinions on the sanctity of the marriage vow. He had managed to have his own first, brief, starry union annulled by the Vatican on technical grounds, while his second wife, the hard-riding Miz Claire, had come a conveniently fatal cropper; and although Nancy Harrison had left him twenty years ago, he still considered himself married to her. What would Big Bill do if he heard of his son-in-law’s latest peccadillo? There had been scrapes in the past that Glass had managed to smooth over, with his wife’s tight-lipped acquiescence, but Alison O’Keeffe, he was somehow certain, would be a different matter. What was to be done?
    When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver—what is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?
    “For God’s sake,” Louise said, “where have you been?” He mumbled something about lunch, and immediately, like retribution, an acid after-waft of gin burned his throat. “Someone has been phoning for you—he called twice, at least.”
    “Who?”
    “A Captain Ambrose.” Glass frowned in bafflement toward the transparent office wall and the deep canyons beyond. Why would someone in the army be calling him? Then he realized: it must be a policeman. Dear Christ.
    “What did he want?”
    “It seems someone has been killed.”
    Far uptown a speck-sized helicopter was hovering like a mosquito above a building site on the roof of a skyscraper, with a cable or something dangling from it, taut and straight, like a proboscis.
    “Killed?” he said faintly.
    “Yes. Murdered. What on earth have you been up to?”

5
     
    SWEET GUYS
     
    T he police station, if that was what to call it—headquarters? precinct house?—looked just as it would have in the movies. John Glass was led through a big, low-ceilinged, noisy room lined with desks and cramped cubicles, where many shirtsleeved people, some in uniform and some not, walked determinedly about, carrying documents and paper coffee cups and shouting at each other. Glass idly entertained the fancy that, if it were viewed from above, all this apparently random toing and froing would resolve into a series of patterns, forming and re-forming, as in a Busby Berkeley musical. Everyone seemed to be either bored or in a temper. The women, washed-out blondes, mostly, were heavy eyed and slow-moving, as if they had not slept last night, which perhaps they had not, since to Glass it appeared that every other working woman in New York City was a single mother, either divorced or abandoned. The big room had a somehow familiar aspect, which was more than just the memory of countless crime films, and after a minute or two it came to him: it looked exactly like a newspaper office.
    Captain Ambrose had the face of an El Greco martyr, with deep brown, suffering eyes and a nose like a finely honed stone ax head. He was tall and cadaverous, and his light-olive skin was smooth and seemingly hairless. Glass thought he might be an Indian, Navajo, maybe, or Hopi. His accent was pure New York, though, broadvoweled and nasal. He wore a dark brown suit the same shade as his eyes, a white shirt and nondescript tie, and big black leather shoes with quarter-inch rims. There was nothing in the room that did not need to be there. The desk at which he sat showed him to be a fanatical tidier, with documents all sorted and squared, pens ranked by size and color, and every