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aren’t you?”
    “No.” Hardy closed the book. “No, if you don’t want to know, that’s okay with me. Although I know you pretty well, and it’s definitely something you’d be totally into. But I don’t push my brilliant ideas. It was just a thought.”
    Glitsky hesitated another second or two, then sighed audibly. “What
are
the Masons anyway?”
    “A secret organization. George Washington was in it, I think. But if it was that secret, how would anybody know?”
    “I was just thinking the same thing.”
    “See? Great minds.”
    Glitsky moved over to the wet-bar area and felt the side of the water-heating pot that Hardy kept there. He grabbed his usual mug, picked up a tea bag from an open bowl of them and poured hot water over it. Turning, blowing over the drink, he took in the spacious office. “I should go into some kind of private business. Here you are, the middle of the afternoon, feet up, reading, no work in sight. Your life is far better than mine.”
    “That’s because I’m a better person than you are. But I might point out that you are here, too, in the very same place as me, working about as hard, and drinking my good tea for free on top of it all. Qualitatively, there isn’t much between our relative experiences at this particular moment, and one could argue that your life is in some respects as good as mine.”
    “If one lived to argue.” Glitsky got to the armchair in front of Hardy’s desk and settled in. “I still want a better office.” He blew on the tea again. “Okay,” he said, “why do we need to be Masons?”
    “Ha!” Hardy’s feet flew off the desk as he came forward. “I knew you’d ask.”
    Glitsky gave him the dead eye. “If I didn’t ask, we’d never leave it. So why?”
    Hardy opened the book to the place he’d marked. “Because if we stayed at it long enough, you could get to be the Sovereign Grand Inspector General, and I could be either Prince of the Tabernacle or Chevalier of the Brazen Serpent.” He paused a moment, frowned. “Either way, though, you’d outrank me, so that couldn’t be right.”
    “How long would all this take?” Glitsky asked.
    Hardy nodded ambiguously. “You’re right,” he said, and closed the book with a flourish. “So what brings your sunny personality here today? What did the mayor want?”
    Glitsky brought him up-to-date, keeping the punch line for last. “The original inspecting officer—the one I’m supposed to work with or replace—is Dan Cuneo.”
    Hardy’s expression hardened, his head canted to one side. “So replace him.”
    “That’s not a good idea. He’d see something personal in it.”
    “He’d be right.”
    “My point, exactly. Can’t replace him.”
    Hardy drew in a breath, then let it out. “These past couple of years, I kept hoping to hear he’d been busted out of homicide.”
    “Not happening. If you’re a certain type of cop, homicide’s a terminal appointment.”
    “Not for you it wasn’t.”
    “No. But unlike Cuneo, I’m born for greatness.” The banter fell flat, though, and Glitsky’s face reassumed its natural scowl.
    “I don’t like him anywhere near either of us,” Hardy said after a short silence.
    “Do tell. Me? I’m thrilled.”
    Getting up, crossing to the Sutter Street window, Hardy pulled the shades apart and looked down through them. “And you’ve got to work with him?”
    “I don’t see how I can avoid it.”
    Hardy kept staring out, down at the street. “You can’t say a word, Abe. Not one word.”
    “Oh really?” A hint of anger, or frustration, breaking through.
    “Hey.” Hardy, catching the tone, spun around. “You work with a guy every day, you know he suspects you of something—I don’t care what it is—you might get so you want to get along, try to make him understand.”
    “Sure, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll say, ‘Uh, Dan, about the Gerson thing…’” Lieutenant Barry Gerson had been Cuneo’s boss, and he’d been killed at a