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made from a twenty-dollar gold piece, and said, “Well, Butch, I’d love to chat, but unless you have any more little messages from upstairs, I got a bureau to run. Don’t you have another meeting?”
    Karp rose. “Always a pleasure, Roland,” he said, and left.
    He nodded to some of his former bureau colleagues as he left the office. They seemed not to miss him very much, he observed; not one of them clutched his knees and tearfully pleaded for him to return. Karp had to admit that Roland, despite being a male chauvinist, demi-racist son of a bitch, was much more popular around the bureau and the D.A.’s generally than Karp was. Roland was extremely charming when he wanted to be, a quality Karp lacked. He flirted with the secretaries and clerks, and was lavish in his distributions of birthday flowers and candy and purchases of pastries for the coffee room. The cops and the younger assistant D.A.’s seemed to prefer Roland’s hearty obscenity to Karp’s graver demeanor, and his histrionic rages to Karp’s icy contempt. A cold fish, was the book on Karp.
    These thoughts did not much engage Karp as he ascended on the elevator to the D.A.’s suite on the eighth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. His life had moved into a quiet harbor after a decade and a half of the most extreme combat his society offered for professionals not actually carrying firearms, and he was content to let the weed and barnacles accumulate on his hull. He liked his boss well enough, and the job itself, though tedious, was, as his wife often remarked, indoor work with no heavy lifting.
    He gestured inquiringly at Marcie O’Malley, Keegan’s iron-faced, iron-haired guard dog, who looked up from her typing and waved in the direction of the door. Karp knocked perfunctorily and went in.
    The district attorney was on the phone. Karp sat on a leather couch, selected a Sports Illustrated from among the publications lying on the coffee table in front of him, and leafed through it until the call was over.
    “That was John Haddad,” said the D.A. He rose from his desk and walked over to sit in a club chair near the couch. Keegan was a big man with white hair and a broad pink Irish face. He still moved, at sixty, like the fullback he had once been at Fordham.
    “You know who he is?” Keegan asked. Karp did not. “He’s a city councilman from Brooklyn. A leader of our fine Arab community. He doesn’t want a lynching. I assured him that the suspects in Shilkes would be treated precisely according to law, and that I would encourage the judge in the case to be tyrannical with the press, and that absolutely, positively we would not attempt to denigrate the Arabs during our presentation, and that there would be no damaging leaks to the press from this office. The usual. What did Roland have to say?”
    “What he always says. Everything’s okay, the case is a lock, and would I not bother him. He’s taking it himself, by the way.”
    This last was received as Karp knew it would be: reddening face, flashing of blue eye-sparks, muttering of curses. “Why in hell is he going to do that?” Keegan demanded.
    “Oh, I think that’s pretty clear. Last year I took a big political case, which I shouldn’t have as bureau chief, and lost it. He’s going to take a big political case, which he shouldn’t as bureau chief, and win it. It’s important to Roland to show me up.”
    “Of all the asinine things …”
    “Hey, boss, that’s part of the package with Roland. God bless him, he’s a hell of a prosecutor, but he does carry a ruler along when he goes to the John, make sure he’s still got the longest dick.”
    Keegan grumbled some more, but Karp understood that he would make no changes in Roland’s plan. One of Keegan’s great virtues as a boss was his policy of giving his subordinates complete autonomy and demanding absolute accountability if they screwed up. It worked too. Karp did not think that Roland would screw this one up, and he