The Briar Club — Chapter 2: Nora

Chapter 2

Nora

Dear Kitty, Apparently there’s a lair of gangsters down the street from Briarwood House! Irish mob—I sit in my window hoping to see machine guns and getaway cars. My window overlooks the whole square; the best place for people watching. Though my housemates offer plenty of diversion! Will old Mrs. Muller ever crack a smile? Who on earth is sending Nora Walsh

all these sumptuous flowers?

I wish you were here. —Grace

Thanksgiving had come and gone, everyone was buzzing about the upcoming Rosenberg trial, and Nora Walsh was moving up in the world.

“You look very smart.” Grace March, wrapped in a threadbare robe embroidered with Chinese dragons and waiting on the fourth-floor landing with her toothbrush, looked admiring as Nora hurried out of their shared bathroom. “That suit’s new, isn’t it?”

“Hecht Company, sale rack.” Nora gave her smoke-blue gabardine jacket a pleased tug. It took a lot of scrimping and sale hunting to look expensive on a budget as limited as hers, but it was worth it. There were those at the National Archives who thought Miss Walsh was entirely too gauche, too Foggy Bottom to have been promoted out of the file room to personal secretary of the Mr. Harris, executive officer of the Archives. Miss Walsh had decided that even if she hadn’t been raised to be elegant, college- educated, or top-drawer, no one was ever going to know it by looking at her.

Maybe she lived in a boardinghouse room the size of a soup can and waitressed at the local diner on weekends, but the moment she headed to the National Archives her lipstick was flawless, her clothes up to the minute, and her voice ironed of every Irish vowel.

“Very nice, Tipperary.” Grace had nicknamed Nora that since hearing her family had originally made its way over from Tipperary County in the old country and it made Nora grin every time. “Quality gabardine always shows,” Grace continued, rubbing Nora’s cuff between her fingers. For a small-town Iowa widow, she had a very sharp eye for clothes. “Coming to dinner tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” Nora’s usual supper was a cup of soup heated on her hot plate; part of the aforementioned scrimping. Thursday dinners were the best meal Nora had all week, may all the saints bless Grace March and her Thursday night Briar Club. (So dubbed by Pete, with an adorable solemnity that had all the women biting their cheeks in an effort not to laugh. Well, except Arlene Hupp, who giggled out loud just to watch Pete’s face fall. “So sorry, Pete, you’re just too funny!” Claire Hallett had promptly dumped a cup of scalding sun tea down Arlene’s cashmere twinset, which Nora thought a bit excessive but Claire was inclined to overflex her claws at times.) “I saw you writing a postcard yesterday, Grace,” Nora went on, snatching up her handbag. “Want me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out, so Doilies Nilsson won’t snoop?” Doilies was what Grace had dubbed their landlady (when Pete wasn’t in earshot) for all those horridly starched little antimacassars she was always crocheting and draping over every blessed surface.

“I’m not done writing it out yet, thank you.” Grace smiled her sleepy half smile and disappeared into the bathroom, tousling her hair. Nora hadn’t seen Grace get any letters in the five months she’d lived at Briarwood House, or post one either, or mention a single family member back home.

For a woman who had such an easy listening air as she welcomed other people’s life stories, she was remarkably unforthcoming with her own.

Nora appreciated that. She didn’t talk about her family, either.

The square was just waking up as she walked out the front door of Briarwood House, pulling on her pristine darned-at-the-fingertips gloves.

The drugstore across the street was already open, clerk sweeping off the steps; Dave’s Barbershop on the opposite corner already had a fellow

rushing in, barking “Neaten up the sides and leave the top!” Next door, Mr. Rosenberg was out on the front steps of his deli, affixing a small sign in the window: NO RELATION TO JULIUS & ETHEL ROSENBERG. “Think that’ll do the trick?” he asked Nora as she swung past. “The way people are looking for Reds these days, I don’t need any baloney about being the Rosenbergs’ Commie cousin.”

“Ah, no one could think that, Mr. Rosenberg. No one who makes bagels like yours could ever be a spy.” Nora waved and kept walking, round the corner and past the Crispy Biscuit where she hoofed out weekend shifts, past the Amber Club across the street where Joe Reiss played six nights a week until three in the morning. The sunlight was golden, the air crisp and cold, and block by block the slightly shabby streets of Foggy Bottom picked up their hems and put out their lace curtains until Nora hit Washington Circle and veered onto Pennsylvania where suddenly the nation’s capital began taking itself very seriously indeed. Maybe her hometown didn’t have the bustle of New York or the glitter of Hollywood (not that Nora had seen either), but where else could you find a city with the drawling charm of a small southern town, and the electric sense that everything really important in this country was happening right here? Nearly three miles’ walk to work every day, but Nora wouldn’t give it up for anything: the sense every morning that her city was unfurling around her, bright with promise.

Just like her own life finally was, after that horrendous series of bumps that had hit like grenades when she graduated from high school.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, where Nora sent silent well-wishes to Mr. Truman, then a nip down Ninth to Constitution— and there it was: the National Archives, granite-grand, history breathing quietly from every pillar and pediment. Nora had been coming here since she was a fresh-minted eighteen, the newest of the file girls. It still made her catch her breath, stand a little taller in her glossy black-patent pumps.

If she had time, she liked to come through the front entrance and into the Rotunda, past the case where the Bill of Rights was reverently displayed— but her feet slowed today as she reached the top of the steps, and all her morning goodwill curdled. Because leaning against one of the massive columns was a man in crisp policeman’s blues, hair gleaming the same soft

brown as Nora’s.

“Hello, deirfiúr bheag.”

“Nearly twenty-one is really too old to be little anything, Timmy,” Nora said coolly, feeling her heart start to thump. “And I don’t think of myself as your sister anymore.”

Sergeant Timothy Walsh clapped a hand to his heart as if she’d shot him.

“Come on, darlin’, how long are you going to hold a grudge?” He hadn’t ironed the Irish out of his voice the way she had—didn’t have to, when half his precinct resonated with accents from Cork, Mayo, and Meath, and when the name Walsh had already paved his way because their father had made it from the beat to a detective’s desk. No one had paved Nora’s way.

“Did I ever say how proud I am of you, working at a place like this?” He tilted his head to look up at the vast stretch of columns. “Little Nora from Foggy Bottom, hobnobbing with all the bigwigs at the Archives . . .”

As if you even know what an archive is or bothered setting foot in a library since high school. Nora took a harder grip on her pocketbook, exhaling. Her brother knew exactly how to get under her skin, he always had, and there wasn’t any use getting steamed up because it would just entertain him. “Timmy, I’m late for work.”

“If you could see your way to loaning me a bit . . . Catriona’s birthday is this week, and Timmy Junior’s got to see a doctor about his ears. I’ve got expenses.”

“No,” Nora said flatly. He made a good salary, and there was no reason for empty pockets except that he liked the cards and the ponies and the extra dram at Dailey’s over on New Hampshire and Virginia. “I am not giving you a dime—”

But he’d already nipped her pocketbook off her shoulder, fast as a pickpocket. Nora yanked back, hissing “Tim—” but he was rummaging through it, and she didn’t dare make a commotion. Which was why he’d braced her here, right on the front steps of the National Archives where people would give them curious looks. The doorman, who was the biggest gossip in the building, and Mrs. Halliwell, who headed up the file room and had been the loudest voice opposing Nora’s promotion to Mr. Harris’s office —what did they see, a jumped-up file girl talking to a beat cop, or a couple of micks who didn’t belong? What would they think if Nora shouted at Tim and yanked her wallet back?

Nora had made a scene before, the first time her brother hit her up on the way to work and yanked her bag off her arm. She just ended up with a

broken handbag strap as well as an empty wallet. Tim was bigger; he was always going to win if it came to a struggle. He knew it, and Nora did too.

“I’ll pay you back. Next week, I promise.” He never did, and every dollar from her bag had already disappeared into his pocket. He leaned in and kissed Nora’s cheek, or tried—Nora took a step back. “You’re a gem. I won’t forget this.”

“I won’t either,” said Nora, feeling her blood pound in impotent rage.

“Hard to forget it when your brother steals from you.”

“Don’t be like that, deirfiúr bheag. We miss you back home, you know.

Mam wishes you’d visit. So does Siobhan.”

Siobhan misses me because now there’s no one to watch the kids for her, Nora thought uncharitably and accurately of her brother’s wife. That was what an unmarried sister-in-law was for: watch the babies, tend the mother- in-law, iron the police uniforms, be grateful. Not move out to a swank job in the capital and start wearing pencil-slim suits and talking above herself.

“I’m working a new thing, you know,” he went on, flicking a bit of invisible dust off his badge. “The feds are looking to wrap up the Warring brothers, the Foggy Bottom gang, the numbers racket—”

“Good luck prying the District away from the Warrings, Tim. They’ve been here longer than Prohibition. And don’t you play poker with Rags Warring every Saturday at Dailey’s?” While he collected his weekly payoff, Nora could have added, but didn’t bother. Half the local cops were on the take.

Tim shrugged, grinning. “Doesn’t mean I won’t help the feds roll ’em up if it gets me a nice promotion.”

Cops and robbers, Nora thought. Every kid in Foggy Bottom played cops and robbers. If you were from a family like Nora’s—Mass every Sunday and First Communion photographs in the parlor, and a good amount of police blue running through the family tree—you were on the cop side in those games. If you came from a family like the notorious Warrings, where the numbers racket was passed down from father to son (and so was the backyard still and the jugged moonshine back in Prohibition days), you played on the robber side. What most people hadn’t figured out was that both sides were utter rackets. Both sides, in Nora’s experience, understood the game.

“Get lost, Timmy,” Nora managed to say evenly and moved past her older brother into the National Archives, heels stabbing the ground like

knives. By the time she was seated at her desk, sorting the mail with efficient speed, preparing her boss’s cup of coffee (“Good morning, Mr. Harris—don’t forget your ten o’clock and here’s that report you asked for on the new preservation case for the Bill of Rights—”), Nora’s inner calm almost matched her outward poise again.

So you still get the occasional family hand shoving its way into your pocketbook, she thought, taking possession of her glass-smooth desk. You’re still on the right track.

And she didn’t ever—after what had happened at eighteen—intend to get knocked off it.

The flowers were waiting for Nora on Mrs. Nilsson’s hall table by midmorning Saturday: a mass of fragrant lilies sent over from Moonlight Magnolias on the other side of Wood and Briar. No note, as usual. Just the card with its big scrawled X. “Not cheap,” Mrs. Nilsson said, assessing the blooms.

Nora smiled. The bouquets were always expensive, and always different —he never fell back on the old tired standard of a dozen red roses. It was always something unusual: yellow sunflowers mixed with purple sea lavender; freesias in wild oranges and reds; a single enormous pink amaryllis drooping on its stem. That told Nora he picked the flowers himself, rather than telephoning a quick order in. She buried her smile in the lilies, inhaling the fragrance. Just the thing to refresh her stuffy little room; he must have remembered her ruefully complaining how the closed- up house got to smelling like cooking fat and old socks in the wintertime . . .

“How nice,” Arlene Hupp cooed in her Texas drawl, eyeing the lilies as she came clicking out of the breakfast room. Her smile was big and sweet, and her eyes sharp and drilling. Anytime The Hupp got flowers from a date, she flaunted them around the house until they withered down to stems. “Just who is this mystery admirer, Nora?”

“I didn’t say he was a mystery,” Nora said blandly, whisking the flowers upstairs. By the time she came back down in her freshly ironed uniform for her shift at the Crispy Biscuit, Arlene was gone but Mrs. Nilsson was waiting to pounce.

“I don’t like to press, dear, but the rent—”

“Is due in two days, Mrs. N.” Nora kept her smile in place, all too aware her rent money was now residing in Timmy’s pocket, bound for the weekly precinct poker game. “I promise you’ll have it then.” If the tips at the Crispy Biscuit were good.

“Well, then. I know you’re good for it.” Mrs. Nilsson smiled. “A lady to her fingertips, like you! Even if you do work that waitressing job. Most office girls would think that beneath them, but not you! Saving for that hope chest, are we?” Eyeing the flowers.

“Ah, there’s no keeping anything from you, Mrs. N!” Nora snatched her coat and dashed before she had to dodge any more questions. Far better to be on Doilies Nilsson’s good side along with Arlene (neat, pretty) and Fliss (neater, prettier) than to be lumped with Claire (messy, no better than she should be), Mrs. Muller (foreign, unpleasant), or, replacing the widow who had been in 3A, the new black-haired woman who had her knee in a brace (thumping, loud). Being on Mrs. Nilsson’s good side meant the occasional day’s grace on the rent.

Jesus Christ on a crutch, let the tips be good today.

Nora worked noon to midnight at the Crispy Biscuit on weekends, ferrying biscuits and gravy, hamburgers and fries, root beer floats and banana splits. Keeping her eye, the entire time, on the corner booth with its red vinyl. Everyone knew to leave that booth empty after two thirty.

She was up to her elbows cleaning out the soda fountain when he came in —by the time she came out from behind the counter he was already seated, one arm stretched along the back of the banquette, calmly sipping a cup of black coffee. His eyes were steady over the rim. Nora let her smile blossom in return, wiping her hands on her apron, holding his gaze as she called his order in without bringing a menu over. He always took a bacon and tomato sandwich with sweet potato fries and a separate saucer with a single hamburger patty, and Nora was always the one to bring it to him. That was the unspoken rule.

“Your usual,” she said, bringing the plates.

“Join me?” he asked. He always did. She smiled, put down his sandwich, then leaned down and placed the saucer in front of the massive Great Dane reposing under the diner table with the dignity of a diplomat. Dogs weren’t allowed at the Crispy Biscuit, but Mr. Byrne’s Duke was the exception.

Nora spent a while tousling his ears and asking if he was a good boy. (He

was.) Then she straightened, took off her apron, and slid into the other side of the banquette.

That was the other unspoken rule: Nora took her lunch break when Mr. Byrne arrived, and Nora’s lunch break lasted as long as Mr. Byrne stayed at the table.

He pushed a cup of coffee across, already doctored with two sugars the way she liked it. “Want anything else?” he asked as he always did.

“No, thank you, Mr. Byrne.”

“Call me Xavier.” He always asked that, too.

She smiled. “No.”

“Miss Walsh, you’re a trial to me.”

“Mr. Byrne, you should eat before your sandwich gets cold.”

He never began eating until she’d invited him. It was a greasy spoon joint and he’d paid for his lunch, but he always behaved like it was her table and he was a guest who wouldn’t dream of beginning without a signal from his hostess. Nora sipped her coffee as he ate, slipping her foot from its flat shoe and rubbing her foot along Duke’s broad back under the table. The dog’s master finally pushed his plate back, and they regarded each other. She felt his dark eyes go over her—the stray tendrils of hair that slipped out of her ponytail, the places she nibbled at her cuticles when she was worried about money—and she let her eyes go over him. Xavier Byrne: thirty years old, broad-shouldered and stockily built, dark hair that came to a peak on a tall forehead. Sharp-planed, slightly swarthy face—black Irish, her mother would call him. Xavier Byrne in a flawless three-piece suit of gray worsted that draped like a million dollars and probably cost it. Xavier Byrne with his hawk nose and unsmiling mouth, his Great Dane and his seemingly bottomless stillness, who had been sending her flowers for four months.

“How are the National Archives?” he asked and listened as she told him about the efforts to halt deterioration to the parchment of the Bill of Rights, the reports she’d been compiling and reading for her boss about whether helium-filled glass cases would provide the best preservative. She caught her hands starting to wave in enthusiasm and laughed. “Does this really interest you, preservative gas effects on centuries-old parchment?”

His eyes were steady. “It interests you, so it interests me.”

“You know, most people ask how someone like me”—gesturing at her waitress uniform—“landed a job at the National Archives. Local girl, no college . . .”

“I didn’t do college either.” His speech wasn’t precisely rough, but it was pure Foggy Bottom. “So what?”

“I would have liked to go to college,” Nora admitted. “But there’s something that’ll get you up the ladder faster than a college degree, and I know that because I jumped over a few Bryn Mawr girls when Mr. Harris

picked me as his personal secretary.”

“And what’s that?”

Nora grinned. “Be the kind of person who only has to hear it once to learn.”

Xavier hardly ever smiled—when they’d first met, Nora thought him grim. Now she knew to look for that very faint flick at the corner of his mouth. “Give me six people like you, Miss Walsh, I could own the District.”

Under the table, Duke rested his massive head on Nora’s shoe. She leaned down to tousle his ears, and Xavier rotated his coffee cup in the saucer. “What’s on the menu at the Briar Club?” He knew all about Grace March and her Thursday night suppers. He never forgot anything Nora told him.

“It’s Joe Reiss’s turn to cook next, which means it comes out of a can.

Bachelor cooking, you might call it. The kind that only tastes good when eaten very late at night with a lover, Grace says.”

The flick disappeared. “Is that what Joe is?”

“Of course.” Nora let her eyes sparkle over the rim of the coffee cup.

“Grace’s lover, that is.” She watched the flick reappear. “And how’s the club?”

“Some drama. Also to do with Mr. Reiss.” Xavier owned the Amber Club across the way; after he took his late lunch every day at the Crispy Biscuit, he’d cross the street and run things from six until two in the morning. “A gentleman from Mississippi objected to our jazz trio. Didn’t like seeing whites and Negroes playing the same stage.”

“And you—?”

“Told him to go to hell,” Xavier said calmly. “I pay the best musicians I can find, black, white, brown, or green. They stay.”

The first day she’d met Xavier Byrne, he’d been saying nearly the same thing—specifically, to Nora’s boss here at the diner. She’d been the new waitress, still learning the ropes; when she went to fill the coffee cup of the very silent gentleman with the Great Dane (Mr. Byrne, the whisper had

been, he always leaves a dollar tip on an eighty-five-cent lunch!), the rushing manager had jostled her from behind, sending scalding hot coffee all over Nora’s wrist. Mr. Byrne’s broad hand had shot out with surprising speed, caught the coffeepot before it could upend over the table, then caught Nora’s arm. He was calling for ice before she’d even finished her first gasp of pain. Nora’s manager had ignored the ice, rushing up with apologies for the coffee that had splashed Mr. Byrne’s expensive suit and hissing under his breath to Nora, “Any girl this clumsy on her first day is fired.”

“She stays,” Mr. Byrne had said, not raising his voice in the slightest, but somehow everyone in the diner heard it. “Your coffee is too hot, and she’s lucky she doesn’t have second-degree burns. Get the goddamn ice.” Nora had finished her shift at Mr. Byrne’s banquette with a dish towel of ice pressed to her wrist and a fifty-cent raise in hourly wages. He’d asked for her the next day, because he apparently came in every day at three for lunch, and when she sat down he said without preamble: “Have lunch with me. Tomorrow, Martin’s Tavern.”

The restaurant in Georgetown where senators and presidents and visiting ballplayers routinely ate. Nora smiled. “Can’t, sir. I’m always working through lunch—here on the weekends, the Archives Monday through Friday.”

“I can’t take you out for dinner; I work nights.” That was when she’d found out he owned the Amber Club and inwardly raised an eyebrow.

Somehow he saw that. “What, it’s not respectable to own a bottle club?”

“I’m not sure I know exactly what a bottle club is.” All she knew about the Amber Club was that people came from all over the District— sometimes in sequins and black tie, in very swank cars—for the music, and that Doilies Nilsson was tight-lipped about the noise that sometimes drifted through the square when things closed up at two in the morning.

“No liquor license at a bottle club,” Xavier answered Nora’s question.

“Guests bring their own drink, if they like—we provide ice, glasses, the mixings, the best jazz in town, and tables to sit and listen to it. But anyone gets drunk, hassles my people, they’re out on their ear. That’s the advantage of a bottle club: the music, the company, the dancing, but not the drunks.

More interesting than a restaurant, less trouble than a bar.”

“And you never take a night off from your bottle club?”

“No. I support a lot of people; that means long hours. You never take a day off from the Archives?”

“No. I only support myself, but I’ve got no one to help with that. Means even longer hours.”

“Too bad. I’d like to buy you a mink and take you out on the town.”

“Would you, now.” He’d been examining her still-bandaged wrist; through the gauze, Nora felt the pressure of a ring on his left hand. “I think there might be a Mrs. Byrne who would object.”

He raised his hand. She saw the ring was on his little finger rather than the ring finger, and he twisted the band around to show a big round stone.

Definitely not a wedding ring—it looked almost like a woman’s solitaire.

“My mother’s,” he said. “She made me promise to wear it till I found a girl to give it to.”

“And you wear the stone on the inside?” That was four or five carats’ worth of diamond, if Nora was any judge. Arlene Hupp would have sized it immediately to the quarter-carat.

“Only a Vegas street pimp flashes a diamond on his little finger,” Xavier had said calmly, twisting the ring back around so the stone was hidden. “If I can’t take you to dinner, and you aren’t available for lunch, can I have your address to send you flowers?” And the first bouquet had arrived the next day, sunny yellow roses with the card scrawled simply X.

More than fifteen bouquets later, here they were. He’d never touched more than her hand, never tried to cop a feel. Just looked at her the way he was looking now, quiet, absorbing everything.

“Come away with me for a weekend,” he said. “I got a cottage on Colonial Beach. A dock, a boat. Come see it.”

Nora felt her heart thump. “What do you need a cottage for, when you’re always working?”

“I got the cottage, but I don’t have a girl to take there. If I did, I’d go more often.”

“Ah, but do I look like the kind of girl who goes away for the weekend to a man’s cottage?”

“I know the kind of girl you are. Class, top to bottom. Doesn’t matter where you spend your weekends.”

Jesus Christ on a crutch, Nora thought. What she’d give to say yes. Her room on the fourth floor of Briarwood House could be so dingy, so ringingly silent. “Four months, and I still hardly know you,” she said instead, trailing a fingertip around her coffee cup. “You know nearly everything there is to know about me—you remember the names of all my

nieces and nephews when I only mentioned them once; you could list all my boardinghouse neighbors, you know all the projects I’m working on at the Archives. But you hardly say anything about yourself.”

He shrugged. “Not much to say.”

“There you go, deflecting. Makes a girl wonder if there really might be a wife somewhere . . .”

“There isn’t. I don’t lie. Not to you.” The waitress came to take the plates; he ignored her, holding Nora’s eyes. “You can take that to the bank, Nora Walsh.”

“Maybe you don’t lie, but you don’t tell me much.” Nora rested her chin in her hand, returning his gaze. “What do I really know about you?”

“Xavier W. Byrne, thirty years old. Marines in the war, Sicily campaign.

No wife. No kids. Big Foggy Bottom family, uncles and cousins all over. I own a bottle club, I do well enough, I want you to come to Colonial Beach for the weekend.” His gaze was steady. “What else do you need to know to make it a yes?”

Nora let out a breath. “Dinner somewhere,” she said. “Take a night off.

Let me ask you questions. Answer them.”

That flick of a smile again. “Okay.”

“Do you think Mr. Rosenberg at the deli is related to the Rosenbergs?”

Arlene wondered.

“Sugar pie, there’s more than one Rosenberg in the United States,” Grace pointed out. Nora had observed before that Grace only broke out sugar pie when charming people she disliked. Arlene was always sugar pie.

Mrs. Nilsson was sometimes sugar pie, when Grace needed to use the oven downstairs. Nora was never sugar pie; neither was Fliss, or even the annoying little Lina.

“I’m just saying,” Arlene said primly. “There is a significant crossover between Jews and Reds, you know. Harland says—you know, Harland Adams from the bureau . . .” A pause here so they could breathlessly ask who was Harland, that name she’d been dropping for the last month. No one asked. Arlene went on a little peevishly. “Harland says—”

Nora climbed over Pete’s gangly legs to get to the hot plate and tip a little more corned beef hash into her bowl. Astounding how much food Grace could get out of that single hot plate balanced on the dinky icebox, and how many people she could feed in this tiny apartment. Right now they had ten

in a room barely bigger than a closet: Fliss and baby Angela between Claire and Grace all sitting on the narrow bed with their backs to the wall, Pete on the floor up against the rickety bureau, Joe sitting cross-legged in the doorway, old Mrs. Muller planted scowling in the single armchair like the crone of death, Arlene perched on the window seat, the black-haired girl newly moved into 3A standing by the radiator since she claimed it hurt her bandaged knee to sit. She looked like she was enjoying herself at her very first Briar Club supper—Grace’s mismatched dishes littered everywhere, the smell of corned beef hash and potatoes permeated the air, and the painted vine on the green wall now flowered the entire length of the room.

Periodically someone broke out Grace’s little tray of paints and added a flower to a branch. The quality of the flowers varied considerably, Nora thought. Grace’s were artistic, as graceful as she was. Nora’s were all tulips, the one flower she could reliably draw. Pete’s were big enthusiastic blobs.

Fliss’s were always, always pink.

“Ready for Victoria sponge?” Fliss asked in that bubbly English voice.

“No, you sit right there, I’ll get it!” and soon she was bouncing through the room handing dessert plates around. Everything about Fliss was perky, full of pep: her perfectly curled hair, her perfectly fluffed skirts, the perfectly swirled whipped cream on her cake. It made Nora tired just to look at her— how could any woman with a baby less than a year old look so neat and full of enthusiasm? Nora had endless memories of the various mothers in her family—Tim’s wife, all the cousins—and her old friends from high school, and they tended to run to lank housedresses and irritated expressions. Fliss looked like she’d stepped straight out of a Doris Day movie: freshly applied pink lipstick, clothes exquisitely ironed, all that eagerness to help . . . It was all Nora could do, at the end of every day, to crawl out of her slim suits into a cotton robe, shake her hair down, and curl up on her narrow bed with a cup of Grace’s sun tea. “What?” Fliss asked, seeing Nora’s tilted smile.

My family wishes they had a daughter more like you, Nora thought. Even if you are a Sassenach.

“Take the rest of the hash, Nora,” Grace said at the end of the night after the others had trailed back to their own rooms. The black-haired girl from 3A—Bea, that was her name—had been last to make it down the stairs, hopping on her one good leg, waving off help. “Far too much left over here just for me,” Grace went on, proffering the dish.

Nora took it, wondering if Grace suspected just how empty her neighbor’s cupboards were. She was a woman who noticed things. “Do you have children?” Nora asked suddenly.

“Goodness, why do you ask?” Grace laughed.

“You’re always feeding people. It’s something mothers do.” Even Nora’s mother, forever urging everyone Just a little more colcannon.

“No, no children for me,” Grace said. But Nora wondered. She’d believed Xavier when he said he wouldn’t lie to her; there was that streak of iron running through him that didn’t seem like it would lend itself to a liar’s endless pliability. But Grace March looked like she could lie right to your face and smile sweet as cream while she did it.

Nora admired that. It was hard to be a workingwoman with a past and not know how to spin a good lie when expedient. Nora had spent her childhood in the confessional booth at St. Polycarp’s agonizing if even the mildest fib passed her lips—now, if backed into a corner, she could lie like a rug.

“Good night, Grace.”

“Good night, Tipperary. Your turn to cook next Thursday, remember.”

“Sure, and I hope you like poundies and soda bread.” Nora exaggerated her gran’s broad brogue as she grabbed her coat and headed down the stairs into the December chill.

Just a quick walk around the block to the Crispy Biscuit—the manager didn’t mind handing out paychecks Thursday night if you were willing to pick them up after the dinner rush ended. Nora shivered around the corner of Wood and Briar, thinking of Xavier’s offhand remark about buying her a mink. Not that she’d ever accept such a thing, but how warm was mink?

Never mind; if she gritted her teeth till spring, she could snap a new coat off the sales rack when the winter clothing was slashed down to nothing . . .

Nora had forgotten how fast, how frighteningly fast violence could happen. Across the street the double doors of the Amber Club swung open and a man stumbled out, blood flying from his nose. He hit the curb and stumbled again, right off it and into the street, and as the yellow glare of the streetlight caught his narrow olive-skinned face, Nora’s entire world tilted.

George, she thought, really quite lucidly, all things considered. George, whom she hadn’t seen in over a year. For a moment she heard the low croon of his voice in her ear, felt the sharp snap of the blow against her forehead, and it took a long inward shriek of a moment to realize he wasn’t coming for her. He hadn’t even seen her. He was too busy being beaten to a pulp.

A dark-haired man in his shirtsleeves came out of the Amber Club after George, walking unhurriedly, followed by a stream of waiters and curious patrons holding bottles of beer and tumblers of whiskey. The dark-haired man ignored them, seized George’s flailing hand just as he was rising, and broke it with one fast, efficient yank of the fingers in opposite twisting directions. George yelled, falling back, and his assailant put a fist in his face. He went to one knee and kept sinking punches—applying punches, Nora thought dizzily. This was a beating being applied, like paint being applied to a wall. The man paused at one point to turn a ring around on his finger, and she saw the flash of a diamond before he used it like a knuckle- duster to sink George Harding’s nose back into his face in a shatter of cartilage. That was when her blurring eyes registered that yes, it was Xavier Byrne. Xavier, who bought a hamburger patty every day at lunch for his dog; Xavier, with whom she was supposed to be going to dinner at Martin’s next week when he had a night off from the club. Xavier, who had risen now at the edge of the street, George Harding bleeding on the ground at his feet, and was speaking in that quiet voice that carried with effortless authority across the street.

“George,” he said, one foot resting on the other man’s outstretched wrist, “get the fuck out of my club. No Warring is ever going to employ you again. And if you pull one more marked deck at any card table at any Warring club in town, you’re done.” And he pulled a revolver from his waistband at the small of his back—a .22, the frozen thought stuttered across Nora’s mind; she was a policeman’s daughter; she knew her firearms —and he calmly snubbed the barrel up against the little finger on George’s

uninjured hand and fired a single shot.

He shrieked.

“You’ll lose the finger,” Xavier said, stepping back. “Be smart about this, and it’s all you’ll lose.”

George Harding kept on shrieking. There was so much surprise in his voice, Nora thought. He didn’t ever expect to feel pain. He was the one to dish out pain, never the one on the receiving end. But he was in agony now, clutching both hands to his chest and writhing, and Nora should have rejoiced at that. There was enough of the old fear and rage locked away deep, more than enough to want to see George Harding suffer. But the shock still gripped her, blurring her eyes, her ears, even as little answering cries went up from the crowd and people began to melt away at the sound

of the gunshot, even as Xavier cleaned off the revolver with a handkerchief and tucked it away at the small of his back.

“Boss—” A man was tugging at his elbow, and Nora hadn’t fled yet; her feet seemed rooted to the icy pavement, so she heard every word.

“Someone called the cops. Get on out of here. We’ll clean him up, put him in a cab.”

“Get him to a hospital,” Xavier said. “He swings at any of you, put him in the river.” Nora heard that too.

“We got it. Just clear out, okay?” The witnesses were already melting away; clearly no one wanted trouble. “We’ll tell the cops it was a firecracker or something. Guys, get a hose, spray it all down—”

“I got nothing to hide.” Xavier was turning to go back into the club, looking perfectly calm, and that was when he saw Nora. Something complicated went over his face in a ripple as they stood there, and then he was crossing the street in swift, noiseless strides. There were already police sirens sounding in the distance as he took her elbow and spun her away from the Amber Club, back toward Briarwood House. “We’d better talk,” he said. “Take me to your place.”

She should have refused, Nora realized belatedly. She should have yanked her arm away and told him to go to hell. But it all happened too fast: by the time her voice unlocked in her throat and her ears stopped ringing, they were through the back door of Briarwood House, hustling fast up the stairs even as Mrs. Nilsson came noisily through the front door, bustling and buzzing about the four dollars and thirty-eight cents she’d won at tonight’s bridge game. And by then it was too late, Nora knew, because if she started shouting at Xavier here, she’d be out of the house on her ear for sneaking a man in after hours. She didn’t really think I don’t actually want him here, Mrs. Nilsson, it’s just that he shot someone and needs to lie low would hold much weight as far as excuses went.

So she pulled Xavier Byrne up the stairs as quietly as possible, praying none of the doors would open. Jesus Christ on a crutch, if Arlene pokes her poisonous little head out her door right now . . . But no one did, and Xavier blew unseen into Nora’s fourth-floor room, noiseless as a snowfall. He stopped in the middle of the floor and put his hands on his knees, letting out a long breath, and she could feel the tension coming off him in waves. His

knuckles were bloody, and so was his mother’s diamond. If it really was his mother’s. If anything he’d ever said was true. If— Mechanically she turned the bolt on the door, letting out a breath of her own before she turned around, arms tightly folded across her chest. She spoke low-voiced, spitting out the words like crystal bullets. “Who the fuck are you?”

He blinked to hear her swear. Still think I’m class from top to bottom?

Nora thought. Well, neither of us is exactly who the other thought.

“I said I don’t lie,” Xavier said eventually. “I don’t. Not to you.”

“How do I believe that?” Nora gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “Right now I’m not putting much stock in my ability to spot liars.”

“I’m still Xavier W. Byrne. Thirty years old, Marines in the war, Sicily campaign—”

“I think you left a few things out.” Nora shucked out of her coat and stalked over to the radio, switching on the music to cover their voices. If anyone listened, all they’d hear was Sammy Kaye singing “Harbor Lights.”

“Like what the W in your name stands for. Like this big Foggy Bottom family you said you had, uncles and cousins all over—” She heard her voice rising, gulped it back down. “What family?”

“The Warring family.” She could feel the pressure of his gaze on her back. “I take it you’ve heard the name.”

The Warrings, who had been running the rackets in the District since before Nora was born. In her dad’s day it had been bootlegging. Now it was the numbers game. Two brothers on top running things, an army of cousins and nephews taking care of business. “The Warring brothers, are they—”

“My uncles.”

Nora blinked hard, trying to clear her eyes. “Related to the men at the top, how nice for you.”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was quiet. “I thought you already knew.”

“Your name is Byrne. How would—”

“My mother was a Warring. It’s no secret. You’re a Foggy Bottom girl, a cop’s daughter. Christ, your brother’s on our payroll. I thought you knew.”

I try not to talk to my brother, Nora tried to say. He takes my money and I shut my ears. But the words stuck in her throat. She couldn’t stop staring at Xavier Byrne, looking entirely the same yet utterly different from the man in the corner banquette at the Crispy Biscuit. The same charcoal-gray suit, only the jacket and vest were gone and his blinding white cuffs were turned

back to show hard wrists and work-corded forearms. The same hands that rested gently on his dog’s head and had held ice to her burned wrist, only now those hands were battered and blood-smeared. The same air of quiet force, only now it crackled like a downed power line. He looked like the man who had sent her flowers for four months. He also looked like a gangster.

He finally seemed to notice his own bloodied knuckles. “Do you have

any water?”

“Get it yourself.”

“Your bathroom’s out on the landing. You want me going in and out where your housemates might see?”

Nora took a bowl from her cupboard, stamped out to the bathroom to fill it at the sink, stamped back in. He’d taken the chair by her rickety table, filled a dishcloth with cubes from the icebox—she set down the bowl, he dumped the ice in, then sank his swollen knuckles in. He leaned back in the upright chair, fishing in his pocket for the familiar cigarette case. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.” Nora heard her voice come out eerily polite. “I only mind when you shoot people.”

He lit a Lucky Strike one-handed, dexterously, and offered her the case.

Nora shook her head, pulling up the chair across the table and sitting down straight-backed, as if a teacher was going to call on her in school. Xavier exhaled a long stream of smoke, and she heard the sickening crack that had resounded across Wood Street when he shattered a man’s nose. “Why did you beat up G—that man?” Barely avoiding the name in time. “Why did you shoot the little finger off his hand?”

“To make him think twice before he tried cheating at any card table in the District again,” Xavier answered. “I hate cheats.”

“Is that what you really are, a card sharp? Is that what the Amber Club is a front for?”

“It’s not a front for anything. It’s a bottle club with some of the best jazz in town. I also run a poker game there every night from nine to two.” His voice was even. “I run a straight table, and poker’s legal.”

“And so is everything else you do?” She raised her eyebrows, expecting to see his gaze flicker, but his answer came unhesitatingly.

“You want to know what I do? I run the club; my uncles get a cut. I run the game, high stakes. Every afternoon I pick up the day’s betting receipts

from the numbers game. I do things for my uncles when they need doing.

It’s not sinister. You think I’m a gangster? This isn’t New York or Vegas, and the Warrings aren’t mob. We just provide services, services people want. It’s business.”

“It’s illegal business.” The sound of the gunshot resounded suddenly in Nora’s head, and she flinched. “Why did you shoot him? You’d already beaten him to a pulp; you’d proved your point. Why did you lose your temper and take a finger off his hand?”

“I didn’t lose my temper at all. If I ever get angry, you won’t have to guess at it. Tonight, I was teaching a lesson.”

“You already taught it. His nose was shattered, his other hand too—”

“Not enough on a man like George Harding. Mean as a snake, more temper than sense. I leave it at a couple cracked bones, he’d come back for me with a knife. Tonight I made sure he couldn’t.”

Nora couldn’t deny George was mean as a snake, but saying so would give away that she knew him. She gripped her teeth around that particular fact, shifting course. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Sure. On the Sicily campaign, wearing Uncle Sam’s uniform.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

He started to say something, then looked at his cigarette. “You got an ashtray? I’m not dropping ash all over your rug.”

Nora pushed a saucer from this morning’s cup of coffee across the table.

Grace’s casserole dish sat beside it—had it really been just an hour since the Briar Club broke up and Grace sent her back to her room with the leftovers?

“Nora.” Xavier tapped ash into the saucer, not taking his eyes from hers.

It was the first time he’d used her name. “People want things, they’re going to get them no matter what the law says. Prohibition came around and made booze illegal. Shouldn’t have, because no law stops people wanting a drink.

My uncles provided something the law should have never outlawed in the first place. Same thing now with the numbers racket. No law stops people from wanting a flutter on a lottery game. It’s not hurting anybody, so we provide it.”

“What else do you provide?” Nora knew about other kinds of rackets.

Weapons, drugs, whores. “Can you say no one gets hurt in the other sidelines?”

“My family doesn’t touch those. And I’ve never killed anyone outside the war. Because I’m not a gangster.”

“Then what are you?”

“A businessman. What I do might not be legal, but it’s not wrong. It shouldn’t be illegal in the first place.”

“You can’t put yourself over the law that way.”

“You say that like the law is never wrong.”

“I know the law is sometimes wrong. But there are ways of changing the law, and those ways should never involve a gun.”

He took the .22 out from the small of his back, laying it on top of the radio, which was now crooning Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa.” “I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

“So do I,” Nora heard herself say. “I liked it better when the man

courting me wasn’t a criminal.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

“You bribe cops, you run an illegal lottery, and you just shot a man.” Her hand hit the table, hard. “Yes, you are a criminal.”

“It bothers you so much, me beating up a cheat? Someone who likes hurting innocent people?” He paused. She looked away. “I’ve never spent a day behind bars, Nora. This changes nothing.”

“It changes everything. Why were you even trying to . . . win me over?

Did you think I could, I don’t know, give you information? Tell you what cops you could bribe?” All those lunches, the way she knew her face glowed when he asked her to join him. What a fool she’d made of herself.

She could feel her cheeks burning scarlet.

“I already know what cops to bribe. I was trying to win you over because I wanted you. I still do.” He tapped ash off his cigarette again. “And you want me.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want.” Nora rose. “I don’t date gangsters.”

“I’m a businessman.” His voice was even, but something in it was rising, too. “What, that’s not enough for a cop’s girl? You want a good boy in blue?”

“A lot of the good boys in blue are crooks too. I don’t want anything to do with any of you.” Nora walked past him to the window, parting the curtains. Her window overlooked the alley behind the house; she couldn’t see all the way through to Wood Street, but there were definitely blue lights reflected and flashing off the roofs. Police cars.

“They gone yet?”

“No.” She let the curtain drop. “Won’t the cops be looking for you, even if you aren’t there? A whole crowd of people saw the owner of the Amber Club fire that shot.”

“A whole crowd of people saw absolutely nothing. George was hustled away long before the cops got there, and the people who saw everything

know better than to rat.”

“You sound very confident of that.”

“Confident enough.” He took his hand out of the bowl of ice water. “But if you want me gone, I’ll leave now.”

“You get caught sneaking out of here, I’ll be thrown out of the house for having a man upstairs. Frankly I don’t care if you get caught by police or not—” She didn’t know if that was true, but she said it anyway, her voice hard. “But I can’t lose my room, so please stay until the house is asleep.”

“I lose you this room, I’d be doing you a favor.” His eyes traveled around the tiny apartment, and Nora saw with another acute burst of humiliation how shabby it was. The cramped space barely big enough for the rickety bureau and narrow bed, the hot plate and icebox, the narrow table. The one beautiful thing in the room was Xavier’s bouquet of lilies, scenting the stale air with their delicate fragrance. “You could live better than this. I know what salary you make at the Archives.”

“How do you know that?” Nora put her chin up.

“I inquired. I wanted to know they were paying you what you’re worth.

They are.”

“And if they hadn’t been, what would you have done?”

“Asked nicely that they give you a raise,” he said mildly. “People tend to do things when I ask nicely.”

That faint flicker of a smile was back at the corner of his mouth. Nora felt something twist in her gut like a hook. She didn’t examine the feeling.

She was afraid to.

“You got anything to drink?” He twisted the diamond ring back around so the stone was on the inside, flexing his bruised hand.

“No.”

“Christ, Nora.” He shook his head. A fine silver chain about his neck caught a gleam from the light. “Do you let yourself have one single creature comfort in this sardine can?”

“I work. I save. I eat dinner every Thursday at Grace’s. That’s my life.

I’m sorry a gangster doesn’t find it adequately luxurious or exciting.”

“Businessman. You got no one to take care of you?”

“Does it look like I’m drowning?” Nora picked up her kitten-heel pumps from where she’d set them aside for buffing, fetched a cloth from the ragbag. “I take care of myself. I always have.”

“That there? That’s why I want you, Nora Walsh. Quiet little thing you are, and underneath it’s steel all the way down. Saw it the first day.” That smile in his voice again. “That, and my dog loves you.”

“Dogs love anyone who gives them a pat. I’m no dog.” Nora sat on the bed, shoes in her lap, and began buffing the toes.

He sounded amused. “Why are you polishing your shoes?”

“I’m killing time until you can leave.” Nora examined the heels. Worn down. “And I’ll make you a bargain. I won’t tell anyone what I saw outside the Amber Club, because I don’t want trouble. You’ll stop talking to me at the Crispy Biscuit and go pick up some . . . I don’t know . . . showgirl.”

“You’ve seen too many movies. I don’t want showgirls, I want you.”

Nora made the mistake of glancing up. Looking at her unwanted guest, sitting in his shirtsleeves on her straight kitchen chair, elbows balanced on his knees, cigarette smoldering between two blunt fingers, saucer of ash at his elbow. That direct, dark gaze.

“Let me take you to dinner this Saturday,” he said. “Martin’s Tavern like we planned.”

“No.” She went back to her shoes, buffing harder and harder.

“You want somewhere quiet, I’ll take you to my place on Colonial Beach. You want to scream and hit me, you can do it there.”

“I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t date gangsters.”

“I’m not a gangster. I’m a businessman.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Nora snarled.

“It’s true. I’ll say it till you believe it.”

“That won’t happen.” She held the shoes up, looking at the new shine,

not really seeing it. “You know why?”

“Why?”

“I told you I was the kind of person who only has to hear it once to learn.” She put her shoes aside, rising. “You’re the second bad man who said he wanted me. I learned from the first one.”

“I’m not a bad man,” Xavier said quietly. “I got a bottle club, I got a dog, I pay my taxes. I’ve never hurt a woman in my life.”

“That’s what he said, too. With a smack to back it up.”

Xavier stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer, rising. He’d taken over the entire room; the whole space hubbed around him like a black sun. “Who was he?”

A slim build, a handsome olive-skinned face—Nora blocked it out, fast.

“No one,” she said, going to the window and peeking through the curtains.

No more reflected glow of police lights. She watched awhile, until she

could be sure. “Cops are gone.”

“House is quiet.”

She had to pass him to get to the door. He didn’t try to move in her way, didn’t try to touch her arm as she passed. Their sleeves brushed. The Andrews Sisters were crooning “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” No, Nora thought, do not dream, Nora. Keep your eyes open and keep them on the track in front of you. Don’t fall off now.

She put her hand on the doorknob, listening through the door. Nothing but silence outside. He could leave, sneak down those stairs and out the back door with no one the wiser. She could lock it behind him. Quit her job at the Crispy Biscuit. Not have any reason to see him again. Except he’d still know where to find her . . .

“Nora.” He was standing behind her, close enough for his breath to stir her hair. “Listen to me. You tell me to go, I’ll go. You tell me not to look you up again, I won’t. You want me gone, I’m gone.”

Her lips parted, but the words wouldn’t come. Her hand was on the doorknob but it wouldn’t turn.

“Every ounce of how I am in your life is up to you. Tell me to go.”

She could not get the words out.

His fingertip touched her side, gliding down the line of her ribs. “Tell me to go.”

She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to sting. Keep to the track.

Turn the knob. Just say it.

“Tell me to go.” His fingertip passed the edge of her skirt, grazed the bare skin of her thigh, then reversed and slid upward beneath the hem. “Tell me to go.” Higher.

She wasn’t saying it. She was slamming her free hand against the door, keeping herself upright as she trembled, as he took her to pieces with one slowly circling fingertip. Saying with every stroke, “Tell me to go.”

She managed to swallow the cry that came out of her at the end, with the final burst. Managed to wrench her hand off the brass doorknob, distantly

surprised her fingers hadn’t left dents. Turned, setting her back against the door, looking at him. He stood gazing back at her, dark eyes bottomless.

She could still feel the words: Get out. If she said them, even now, he’d go.

She knew that as sure as she knew true north.

“Xavier,” she managed to say.

He stilled, then took a half step back. She felt the hook twist in her stomach again. The twist had been fear when she saw him put a bullet through a man’s finger outside the Amber Club, but even then, there was the twinge of something at the bottom that wasn’t fear. Something that had been stirring since their earliest lunches at the diner, something that had blossomed as they waited the hours away in this tiny room, something that had grown monster-size and insatiable the moment he put his gun aside and said That’s why I want you, Nora Walsh.

She reached out, tangled her hand in his unfastened collar. “Stay.”

One step and he crushed her against his chest, spearing her mouth on his.

And Nora tumbled off the track.

Under the curtains, the sky showed charcoal gray. Dawn. Nora’s swollen mouth burned. Xavier sat on the edge of the bed, getting dressed in quick, precise movements. She sat up, hugging her sheeted knees against her chest, and watched him. He had a huge Celtic cross tattooed on his back from nape to waist, the short arms spanning his burly shoulders. He shrugged into his shirt, and Nora saw the round shape of a saint’s medal on a chain around his neck. She’d felt it earlier, dangling against her collarbone when he sealed his mouth to her throat, tasting metallic under her own lips as she kissed her way across his chest.

“What saint?” she heard herself asking. Everything they’d done over the course of the night—against the door, on the floor, in the narrow bed— you’d think she’d know everything about him. But he was foreign territory.

“St. Jude.” He tucked the chain beneath his collar. “I got a weakness for

lost causes.”

“Is that what I am?”

“You?” He grinned, a full outright grin, and it rocked Nora to the core.

“You’re the last thing from a lost cause. You’re a winning thoroughbred leading post to post.”

I think I’m lost now, Nora thought. At some point around three in the morning she’d had the thought that maybe this one night would call it done:

get it out of her blood, burn it away so she could climb, clear-eyed and hollow-veined, back onto her track. That was when Xavier had flung back the covers and padded naked to her icebox, tipping the dish of leftover corned beef and potato hash into a pan on the hot plate with the neatness of a longtime bachelor. “You learn anything in the Warring family, it’s how to dress up day-old hash,” he said, dexterously frying a couple of eggs on top, then bringing the whole hot delicious mess back to bed where he fed Nora right out of the pan. “No one looks after you,” he’d said gruffly, kissing a dab of runny egg yolk off the corner of her mouth. “That’s about to change.” And Nora had felt something tighten inside, a whisper along her nerves that meant danger. Xavier Warring Byrne could work a lot more damage with a three A.M. breakfast and a steadfast gaze than he could work with a kiss, or even with the rough, devastating flick of one fingertip under her hem.

He crossed the room now, fastening his cuffs, and picked up the .22 where it lay atop the radio. He tucked it at the small of his back, saying, “You could move out of here. I can put you up somewhere nice.”

“I don’t want to be put up anywhere,” Nora said. “I’m staying here.”

He nodded, not arguing. “I don’t want you getting in trouble with Doilies Nilsson because of me, though. Next time we go to my place.”

He’d remembered the jokey nickname for her landlady. She’d probably only said it once, but he remembered it. He remembered everything. Nora pulled the sheet around her shoulders. “Xavier, no next time. At your place or anywhere.”

“Okay. But I’m going to show up outside the National Archives today, because it’s a free country. You say you don’t want to see me, I’m gone.

Anytime you say no, I’m gone. But you got to tell me no.”

She hadn’t said no all night. She’d said yes, over and over. She squeezed her eyes shut.

He came to the bed and tilted her face up, kissing her eyelids and her temples and her mouth. “See you later.”

“No,” Nora said. But she didn’t manage to say it until he’d left her bedroom. And she knew she was sunk.

Xavier’s Corned Beef Hash

1 can corned beef hash, or leftovers from a corned beef and potato

hash dinner 2 eggs

1. Place the hash in a skillet and heat thoroughly over medium heat.

2. Make two indentations in the hash, fill each with an egg, and cook until the eggs are set to desired doneness.

3. Enjoy in bed with a lover, with plenty of extra napkins, while listening to “Goodnight, Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers

“You’ll be coming home for Christmas, Nora.”

Mam didn’t ask questions; she issued statements and then sweetly dared you to contradict her. Nora sighed, turning against the paneled wall of the telephone nook in the hallway. Her eyes were gritty from sleeplessness.

“I’m not coming home, Mam. Even for Christmas.” She’d managed to stay firm on that since moving out—no visits, not for so much as a cup of tea.

She hadn’t quite managed to draw the line at no telephone calls. She knew she should just hang up when Mam called, but Irish daughterly guilt had a way of kicking in.

“What about Christmas Eve Mass?” Behind her mother’s voice, Nora could hear the clamor of the house she’d grown up in: her brother banging around looking for his freshly shined boots, his wife, Siobhan, shouting at the kids. The air probably still smelled of overboiled coffee and starch from Mam’s frantic ironing of Timmy’s police uniform. “Are you attending Mass regularly, Nora? Father Dominic says he hasn’t seen you at confession.”

I certainly won’t be going today, Nora thought. Just imagine babbling Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned to doddering old Father Dominic with her pocketbook full of all the tissue-wrapped condom packets she’d scavenged out of her wastebasket this morning to sneak out of the house so Doilies wouldn’t find them . . .

“I never see you,” Nora’s mother went on, sighing. “Not once you’ve dropped in since moving out! Even to say a rosary for your father or help

me make bread like we used to.”

“You know why,” Nora stated.

A sticky pause. “Have you been following the Rosenberg case?” her mother asked brightly. You have to give her credit for persistence, Nora thought. “They say the grand jury will hand down indictments after the new

year.”

“Mam, I have to go.”

“That man is guilty, you can see it in his face. Russian Jews can’t be trusted, everyone knows that. The wife, though, what kind of woman is involved in spy rings? Women don’t do things like that, even Jewesses.

What this world is coming to, spy rings and the atom bomb and Reds—”

Nora flattened herself against the wall as a stream of her housemates flooded down the corridor: Claire with blouse untucked and red curls flying, headed for her senator’s office; Fliss annoyingly perky and bright- eyed for eight in the morning, clicking off for the park with cooing baby in baby carriage . . . And Pete with his schoolbag, tugging Lina along, stopping to give Nora an elaborate bow with an imaginary feathered hat. (Pete was still on Dumas, bless him—The Count of Monte Cristo.) “Mam, I’m hanging up—”

“If you’re not coming for Christmas, could you pop a little something in the mail?” Nora’s mother dropped her voice. “Your brother came up a bit short this month. He has to contribute to so many police charities. And the children need new shoes—”

“Tim already nicked my month’s rent right out of my wallet,” Nora cut her off. “Though I doubt it went to any widows or orphans.”

“You’d deny your own brother?” The hot, protective flare of the Walsh family temper. They all had it, women included. “He’s family. It’s your Christian duty.”

How often had Nora heard that? He’s your brother. He’s family. It’s your Christian duty. And then— “You don’t need rent, anyway, Nora love. A girl shouldn’t be living on her own before she’s married, not when she has a loving family. Just come home where you belong.”

Nora closed her eyes tight. And hung up.

Mr. Harris kept his office so overheated, Nora headed outside the moment noon rolled around. “Are you quite all right, Miss Walsh?” Mr. Harris called out absently as she took her leave. “You seem distracted.”

“Fine, Mr. Harris,” Nora reassured. Just wondering what to do when a gangster comes to pick me up from work this evening—only to see Xavier already standing outside the staff entrance, cigarette between two fingers, hat brim slashing across his forehead, and overcoat stirring around his knees in the cold breeze. “You said you were coming tonight,” she ended up saying.

“Couldn’t wait.” He admired her up and down, from French twist to the hem of her soft chocolate-brown worsted suit. “You’re a sight. I like your waitress uniform fine, but dudded up like this you’re a long cool drink of water.”

Nora touched the high collar of her cream silk blouse, which she’d snatched off the hanger that morning because it would hide the marks he’d put on her neck last night.

He went on, nodding up at the big pillared edifice behind her. “All you’ve told me about this place, and I’ve never been. It occurred to me, I keep asking you to dinner, asking you to the cottage, trying to walk you into my world. Why don’t you walk me into yours, Miss Walsh? Where do you go to lunch every day?”

Cut him off and go back inside, Nora thought. But she was already answering. “You might be disappointed, Mr. Byrne. Usually I take five minutes eating a sandwich sitting out on the steps here, and then I visit the Rotunda.”

He flicked his cigarette butt away. “Show me?”

Xavier’s polished oxfords made no sound at all on the marble floor when they entered the round, hushed space of the Rotunda: the coffered ceiling arching above, the massive pillars, the two vast murals rippling across the walls. “That’s John Hancock hearing Jefferson report the Declaration of Independence,” Nora said, nodding to the bewigged men painted along the northwest wall. “And on the northeast side there is James Madison submitting the Constitution to George Washington.”

“Read about them in school.” Xavier strolled along, head tilted back to look at the painted figures. They had the Rotunda almost entirely to themselves; everyone else in the District seemed to be out Christmas shopping this afternoon rather than sightseeing. “They didn’t interest me much. Didn’t have much to do with me.”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.” Cuban heels clicking, Nora led him to the display case at the Rotunda’s apex. Just a single, fading piece of

parchment with its proud header: Bill of Rights. “There’s talk that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will be brought from the Library of Congress and displayed here too,” Nora said, feeling the rush of excitement that always warmed her whenever she helped draft a memo on the matter. “New cases, helium-filled to preserve the parchment . . .”

“They’re dusty old pieces of paper,” Xavier said. “Why get excited about that?” But his voice was curious rather than dismissive.

“They aren’t just dusty old pieces of paper. They’re the only things Americans have in common as a people. We come from everywhere—”

Thinking of Jewish Mr. Rosenberg at the deli; of Swedish-named Pete Nilsson and old Reka Muller with her Hungarian epithets; of the dark- skinned drummer and bassist who played with Joe Reiss; of her own big Irish clan. “Our people all spoke different languages and maybe still do; we look different; we live in every possible location from cities to towns, mountains to plains. But”—she waved at the Bill of Rights, including its sister documents off in the Library of Congress—“this unites us. A government established for an articulated principle, not tribal allegiances or lines drawn on a map.”

“Has it made us any better?” Xavier’s eyes were intent. “We’re the ones who got ourselves an atom bomb and dropped it—twice.”

“You were a marine. I’d have thought you agreed with that decision.”

“I did,” he acknowledged. “Doesn’t mean it feels good now, living in a world where a push of a button could end things in one big mushroom cloud. Hard not to wonder if we took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. If we could have done better.”

“We can always do better,” Nora said. “These papers acknowledged from the beginning that we weren’t good enough yet. ‘A more perfect union’— it’s right there in our foundations that we aren’t perfect, that we have more to strive for.” She grinned. “I know, I know. I sound preachy. But isn’t it fascinating, when you really think about it? Most kingdoms or nations just say, ‘we rule because we’re strongest’ or ‘we rule because a god threw a thunderbolt and willed it so.’ We’re the country who said, ‘Here we are; let’s live by these principles and keep getting better at living up to them.’”

Xavier cocked his head. “Why did you get so interested in all this?”

“Two reasons . . . First, just luck. I landed here in the steno pool at eighteen”—Nora turned a circle in the big space, drinking it in—“and I wanted to know everything about the place, what it stood for. So I kept

asking questions, reading books from the library, pulling public documents out of the archives . . .”

Usually Nora noticed people start to yawn when she began rattling on about the importance of archival preservation and historical documents. Or they thought she was being funny: Look at you, Miss Patriotic! She’d never quite been able to explain that patriotism should be more than just a simple wave of the flag without thought behind it. Her pride in this building, being part of it with everything it protected—it was all wrapped up in hope, not complacency. Hope, and a dose of shame: Look at me, a girl with some bad things in her past, but she got past them. Bettered herself, so she could be part of something bigger than herself. So she could live up to something more.

The nation could do the same. It was 1950, the beginning of a new decade. She hoped it would.

“You said there were two reasons you got interested in all this.” Xavier was still watching her. “What’s the other?”

The harder reason. Nora found herself examining the faux-pearl button on her cuff. “My family,” she said quietly. “Beat cops for four generations, backbone of the precinct. My dad even made detective. And so many of them stand for nothing. So many of them just scratch each other’s back, cover up for each other, play the game. Not all of them—” Nora knew there were good cops; she could even tell you which ones in her family they were: generally, the ones who didn’t get promoted. “But there are so many on the take, the good ones often as not find their hands tied.” She gulped a breath. “When I was little, I eavesdropped on my grandfather getting drunk with a crony late one night, and they were reminiscing about burying something out at a construction site. I was too young to realize they were talking about a body. I don’t know where, I don’t know who. I wish I remembered enough to do something, but I don’t. I just remember them talking about how hard it had been, and what a relief nothing ever rebounded on the department.”

She looked up at Xavier and saw absolutely no surprise. “My family are all police blue, but so many of them are crooks. They stand for the law—the law that needs good police—and so many of them wink at it. I wanted to

find something that wasn’t . . .”

“Crooked,” said Xavier.

She lifted a shoulder, smiled too brightly. He took her arm as they walked another circuit of the Rotunda, and she nodded to the guard on duty.

“So that’s your world,” Xavier said as they strolled out. “This place.”

“I love it.” Nora trailed her fingertips along a bit of marble scrollwork along the wall. “Someday, maybe, I could be promoted to chief of Building and Grounds . . . my boss already says I know as much about the place as men who have worked here for a decade. They’ve never appointed a woman to the position but who knows? Let’s go out the Penn Ave. entrance,” she added, directing them. “It’s the research entrance, but they’ll let you through with me. There are four allegorical statues by the entrances —on the Constitution Avenue side the statues are Heritage and Guardianship. I like the ones on this side better.”

They walked out slowly into the winter afternoon between Future and Past. Xavier stopped to look up at Future as she loomed over the passersby: a young woman in carved limestone, gazing outward over a blank book where the future had yet to be written. “I got a place there?” Xavier asked Nora, pointing at the book. “In yours?”

That hook twisted in Nora’s gut again. No, she knew she should say.

What she said was “Perhaps.”

“I took a walk in your world,” he said, extending a hand. “Come walk in mine.”

The night nearly began with a disagreement. “I can’t take that from you,”

Nora protested weakly in the front hall of Briarwood House.

“So throw it in a gutter if you want. I like to give you things. What you do with them is up to you.” Xavier draped the chinchilla wrap around Nora’s shoulders and she couldn’t help rubbing the sumptuous silvery fur between her fingers, feeling the satin lining caress her bare skin. It was gorgeous, it was entirely too much, and Nora already knew she was going to give it back at the end of the night but she also knew she was going to enjoy wearing it all evening, first. “Let’s go.” She sighed, feeling Mrs.

Nilsson eavesdropping around the stairwell—she couldn’t forbid her boarders from going on dates, but she could hover disapprovingly.

Nora had never been inside the Amber Club. It seemed to bloom as they came in: low-ceilinged and intimate, amber-shaded lights turning the air golden, amber velvet curtains glowing behind the stage where Joe Reiss and his bandmates were already lilting a sultry rendition of “I Wish I Didn’t

Love You So.” Women in sequins listened from small tables through a purplish haze of cigarette smoke; men brought out their own bottles of vodka and whiskey as waiters glided back and forth with martini glasses and soda water. A raised section at the back, bigger tables heaped with poker chips, whispers and clinking glasses and the flick of cards . . .

“Miss Walsh gets what she likes,” Xavier told the nearest waiter, pulling out a chair for Nora at the high table. She pulled the chinchilla wrap close, feeling suddenly shabby in her blue rayon frock—she spent her clothes budget on work suits, not evening dresses, and all these sequins and satins would have been putting her to shame if not for the fur. Maybe he’d known she’d feel that way. “I won’t stay long,” Xavier was saying, hand lingering at her wrist. “It’s boring, watching someone play cards. A few hands and we’re out. I just want you to get a feel for it all.”

Oh, I am, Nora thought. The way everyone here rippled as Xavier entered. “Boss,” said the head waiter. “Boss,” called the dealer at the back, raising a hand. “Boss,” rumbled the thickset man by the door. They all turned toward him like sunflowers, waiting for his nod. She couldn’t hear what they said to him at the back table, but they waited as he took off his jacket, turned back his cuffs, called for a drink. “I’ll have whatever Mr.

Byrne is having,” Nora told the waiter, curious, and her brows shot up when she sipped at the amber fluid served in a brandy snifter. “Apple juice?”

“Mr. Byrne never touches a drop at work, miss.”

“I see.”

She sipped her juice, watching him focus fiercely through a few rounds of poker. He didn’t look up once, but he was somehow watching everything: he gestured without looking up when her drink needed refreshing; when two men at the next table started getting rowdy, and the bouncer rumbled forward to issue a warning. “Look at you, Nora Walsh,”

Joe Reiss said, grinning from the stage between sets, ash-fair hair gleaming.

“All dolled up like a proper moll.”

“I’m nobody’s moll,” she fired back. “Is that what they’re saying?”

“Can’t hear you,” he said innocently and waltzed into “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

That’s how they see me, Nora thought, an entirely different kind of hook twisting in her gut. Not Miss Walsh of the National Archives, buttoned to the gills and stuffed with knowledge. Just a gangster’s girl in chinchilla,

appraised up and down by the men here and enviously side-eyed by their overlipsticked girlfriends.

“I’m done.” Xavier materialized back at her elbow, shrugging into his jacket. “Normally I play until two, but there’s something else I want to show you. Mind a quick cab ride?”

“Not at all.” She took a welcome gulp of frosty night air as they left the club. “Did you win?”

“Won four.” He saw a cab, raised a finger.

“Four dollars?”

“Four hundred.”

Nora gulped. Sliding into the cab, she couldn’t help but think of her brother, Tim, how much he liked a flutter at the precinct poker games.

Usually those were the months he came round to dig into her pocketbook.

“I don’t play for the rush,” Xavier said, reading her mind as he slid into the other side of the cab. “That’s gambling, not card-playing, and I don’t gamble. I play the numbers, count the cards. You do that, treat it like a job and not a game, you don’t lose much. Macomb Street,” he told the cabbie.

“And where’d you learn to count cards?” Nora persisted.

“The sharks in Vegas, after the war. I’m one of the better poker players on the Strip.”

He said it matter-of-factly, no boasting. Nora supposed that when you’d won four hundred dollars in less than an hour, without turning a hair, you had the right to call yourself that good. He took her hand, lacing their fingers together on the seat, and Nora realized the cab had left Foggy Bottom behind. A more upscale neighborhood, bigger houses with swaths of lawn, porch lights shining on Cadillac convertibles and Chevrolet Bel Airs. “Where is this?” she asked as the cab pulled up in front of a neat white picket fence.

He flipped a few coins at the cabbie and handed her out onto the

driveway. “My home.”

“This?”

“What, you thought I lived in some mobster’s lair over the club?”

Nora looked up at the house, slightly stunned. “I didn’t think you lived in a classic brick four-bedroom between Wisconsin and Massachusetts.”

He laughed, pulling her up the drive onto a gray slate porch and then through the door. Nora heard the padding of enormous paws, and then the Great Dane was capering around them in the entryway, tail lashing. “Duke,”

she greeted him, bending down to ruffle his ears, and couldn’t help laughing when the huge dog reared up, placed his paws on Xavier’s shoulders, and proceeded to give his master’s face a thorough washing. Xavier withstood it patiently, reached for a towel, then moved through the house switching on lights. A quiet, gracious house with a walnut bar, a bachelor’s kitchen, a den with deep leather armchairs. Xavier let Duke out into the backyard where Nora saw tidy flower beds. “I put roses in,” Xavier’s voice sounded behind her. “I like pruning them myself. Getting my hands in the ground.”

She turned, seeing him on the porch in his shirtsleeves, hands in his pockets.

“This is me,” he said simply. “How I live. It’s cards and clubs and late nights, yes, but it’s nothing bad. I play with my dog, I prune my roses, I know all my neighbors.”

“And you do other things,” she said steadily. “You run errands for your uncles, you pick up the take for the numbers racket every day, you walk around armed—because the other things aren’t legal.”

“I’m not a crook,” he said. “This is my life, and I want you in it.”

She pulled the chinchilla stole off her shoulders and piled it over the nearest chair.

“Stick around awhile is all I ask.” He came closer, slipped his arms around her waist. “Talk is cheap, so let me show you I am what I say I am.”

He held her lightly; she could have tugged away in one step. Reaching up to her neat French twist, he pulled a pin out. “Stick around, Nora.” Another pin. “Stick around.” One more, and her hair slithered down around her shoulders. “Stick around.”

Can I get a picture of my girl? Xavier asked after the New Year turned, so Nora took herself to Huckstop’s Photography just up the street and got a portrait done. A few days later she went to pick up the prints and bumped into Grace March.

“I’d have thought you’d be at Trinity Presbyterian,” Nora teased, knowing her neighbor’s love of Sunday lie-ins. “Teaching Sunday school and bringing a casserole for the minister!”

“Oh, honey, no church would have me.” Grace laughed. It was the kind of crisp, cold January morning just made for sleeping late and avoiding all the neighbors headed to St. Polycarp’s or Trinity Presbyterian, all squabbling over whether Catholics or Presbyterians had the right to the

single parking lot. “You got your picture taken? Oh, that’s lovely. You could be the queen’s cousin, Tipperary.”

Xavier will like it, Nora thought. His proper Miss Walsh in her studio pose, faint smile and French twist and the string of pearls he’d given her for Christmas . . . contrasting with his not-so-proper Miss Walsh who came to Macomb Street with her hair shaken down, sliding over his sheets naked except for the pearls.

“You’ve got a certain glow,” Grace said, still scrutinizing the picture.

“The glow a woman gets when she’s been very thoroughly . . .”

Nora raised her eyebrows. Grace looked innocent.

“Appreciated,” she finished, handing the picture back.

Nora couldn’t help laughing. The way Grace just said things that everyone else let hover unspoken. “What brings you here?” she said. “To change the subject, please! Mr. Huckstop isn’t normally open on Sunday, so —”

“I asked if I could drop by with a special project.” Grace dug out a black- and-white photograph of her own: a girl of perhaps ten, crooked teeth, huge smile. “I lost the negative, but I wonder if he can do a fresh print of this somehow.”

“She’s beautiful. Your niece, or your sister, or—” But Grace cut her off, calling hello across the street to Fliss, who was clipping off toward the park with her baby carriage. Limping in the other direction was the new Briarwood House boarder, Bea something, the one with a knee brace and short black hair.

“I keep forgetting her last name,” Grace mused. “Verotto? Veretto?”

“Verretti.” Nora waved at Bea, who waved back. “Did you see she keeps a baseball bat just by the inside of her door? I saw it when she came out asking to borrow my toothpaste. A baseball bat . . .”

“Goodness. Who would have thought?” Grace smiled and disappeared inside Huckstop’s—without, Nora noted, mentioning who the little girl was in the black-and-white photograph. The new boarder named Bea wasn’t the only one at Briarwood House with a secret, not that Nora was one to throw stones.

Except everybody seems to know your secret, she thought in some chagrin. Arlene had been dropping pointed comments ever since clapping eyes on that chinchilla wrap; Mrs. Nilsson had remarked how often Nora was staying overnight with family lately. And just yesterday Mr. Rosenberg

had been putting up a new sign in his window with even larger lettering— ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION TO JULIUS & ETHEL ROSENBERG!—when he beckoned Nora to ask in a low voice if she couldn’t convince her Mr. Warring to get people to stop harassing his deli. The schmucks who say I must be a Commie spy. He could put a stop to it with a word.

“His name isn’t Warring,” Nora had said sharply. “And he’s not mine, and he’s just a businessman.” Flushing to hear Xavier’s own words shoot out of her mouth, only to get a raised eyebrow in turn from Mr. Rosenberg.

“Rosenberg? Best chopped liver in town?” Xavier was still in his bathrobe when Nora arrived at the house on Macomb Street, sipping his first cup of coffee of the day though it had gone noon—he didn’t get to sleep till after three on Saturday nights. “Sure, I can put in a word.”

“And how exactly does that work?” Nora stepped out of her shoes, taking the cup of coffee he poured her. “Does he pay you for the favor?”

“No. It’s being a good neighbor.” Xavier, Nora knew by now, took being a good neighbor to a slightly obsessive degree. He habitually watered the next-door widow’s petunias. He took note of which cars on the street needed new tires, and as often as not a new set would quietly appear in the driveway. When the boy across the street had his BB gun confiscated by a bad-tempered cop, Nora heard Xavier make a brief call and the BB gun was hand-delivered back within twenty-four hours. Another set of contradictions about the man who had been calling her his girl since Christmas. “Being a good neighbor builds up goodwill,” Xavier explained, seeing her dubious look. “You do things for people, things the cops won’t do without getting their backs scratched. Means the people who matter don’t want us in jail or run out of town.”

“And the cops don’t interfere?” Nora scratched Duke behind the ear as he came to drool on her skirt.

“Not since my uncle made friends with the chief of police,” Xavier said, smiling at the look on her face. “Are people on the block really thinking

Mr. Rosenberg is a Rosenberg?”

“A few idiots.”

“Same idiots who think Reds are a threat, I’d bet.”

“They aren’t?” Nora sipped her coffee.

“Communism is the stupidest system on the planet.” Xavier refilled his coffee. “It ignores the biggest urge people got, which is that they want to

build something. First for them, then for their kids. Ignore that urge, you’ll get in trouble fast. Maybe Communism is perfect on paper to some economist, but it doesn’t account for the fact that humanity thrives on imperfection.”

“It seems to be working all right for the Russians.”

“Maybe because Russians don’t got that urge—I don’t know; I’ve never met a Russian. But if I were a betting man, I’d say they want the same things as us, deep down. Which is why I’d lay odds the Russkies won’t stay Commie forever, and the rest of the world won’t go tipping Red, either, no matter what Joe McCarthy has to say about it.”

“Xavier Byrne, political philosopher,” Nora teased. “President Truman should hire you.”

“He could do worse. That your picture?” Xavier spotted the package under her arm, pulling her against him. “Let me see, Miss Walsh.” He whistled. “You’re a dish. Huckstop make you an offer?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s got a side business under the counter, different kind of pictures for sale. Pictures where the girls aren’t modeling pearls, or much of anything else.”

“Mr. Huckstop? How on earth do you know that?”

“My uncles get a cut,” Xavier said, which made Nora blink. Every time she forgot that he wasn’t precisely just a businessman, every time she thought This could work; it could—some casual remark like this brought her up short. Xavier went on, setting his lips just under her ear. “I’m going to Vegas next weekend. Business. Go with me?”

“No, thank you.” She’d been to Sunday dinner at his sister’s house with about five hundred Warring cousins, not so different from Nora’s own batch of relations; she’d been out with him to Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown where she’d watched him shake hands with a U.S. representative and two district judges; she’d spent the week after Christmas (lying through her teeth to Mrs. Nilsson) at his cottage in Colonial Beach, the two of them talking endlessly as they watched Duke ramble the frosty shore. But she hadn’t been back to the Amber Club, or to any of the other places he worked. Some deep unease still twitched in her stomach at that. “I still don’t entirely know what I’m doing with you,” she said candidly, running a finger along the saint’s medal at his throat. “You bring out my bad side.”

“You don’t have a bad side. What’s your biggest sin, returning a library book a day late?”

“Skipping Mass the first Sunday of the year to stay in bed with you all day.” She’d successfully dodged all her mother’s calls about when she would be dropping by. No overheated parlor; no fighting children or endless church gossip; no motherly hints about moving home; no need to hide her pocketbook from Tim . . . Just Xavier’s big bed, a hamper from Rosenberg’s unpacked over the foot of it, “Auld Lang Syne” on the radio, and Duke gnawing a bone on the floor.

“I’d pull you off to bed”—Xavier kissed her, something that still scattered her thoughts as if a shotgun had gone off—“but Louise is coming to clean in twenty minutes.” The doorbell rang, and he put his cup down.

“She’s early.” He took a look through the peephole in the front door, heard his housekeeper’s Just me, Mr. Byrne, and swung the door wide.

But when Louise stumbled wide-eyed through the door, she wasn’t alone.

“Mr. Byrne—” she managed to gasp, and the man who shoved in behind clubbed her casually with the butt of his revolver.

“Hey, boss,” grinned the slender, olive-skinned man with the little finger missing on his gun hand, two bigger men filing in behind him with revolvers of their own, and even as Duke began to bark and Xavier’s hand went for the small of his back, Nora froze as though her blood had turned to ice. “Don’t you reach for that piece,” George Harding warned, still grinning as his friends fanned out across the room.

Xavier’s hand came slowly back into view, empty, his eyes blazing.

“Nora,” he said levelly, not looking at her. “Louise. Stay calm. No one’s going to hurt either of you.”

“I don’t know about that. Hey, Nora—” George mugged at the sight of her, though Nora knew he wasn’t at all surprised to see her here. “You screwing this one now? You always liked the bad boys.” He gave her a casual cuff on the temple that made her whole head ring, and Nora knew then. How it would go, if George was stupid enough to leave Xavier alive.

He was.

“I know you got a safe,” he said, after Xavier had been roughly disarmed of his .22. “It’s upstairs, I hear you got at least fifteen thousand in there— look, shut that fucking dog up, or I shoot it.”

“Nora.” Xavier spoke softly under Duke’s barking. “Take Duke to the

basement and—”

“No. Your bitch stays.”

Xavier exhaled. Nora had never seen him so still. He looked like a waxwork, hands taut and open-fingered at his sides. “Louise,” he said even more softly, looking at his housekeeper, who stood against the wall with blood on her temple and tears running down her brown cheeks. “Please take Duke to the basement and lock him in.”

Lock yourself in with him, Nora thought in a silent shout. George didn’t like Negroes; he thought they were taking jobs away from hardworking Irishmen everywhere. Louise took Duke by the collar, the big dog whining and barking, and led him off to the basement. She must have thought the same thing Nora did, because she hurried in after him and shot the bolt from the other side before any of the men could move. George’s revolver twitched, and Nora felt it in her whole body like a scream. How well she remembered watching for that twitch of his, afraid he’d snap— “George,” Xavier began, but the revolver snapped back.

“Shut up. Walk upstairs to that safe I know you got in your bedroom, and open it up. You get to pay me back for costing me a job and a finger. You pay me today, or else I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

“Go ahead,” Xavier said calmly.

Wrong answer, Nora thought.

George shrugged, swinging the revolver toward Nora. “So I blow her brains out. Your call.”

Xavier made a tiny movement forward, making all three intruders tense.

“Tie the bitch up,” George ordered one of his friends. “Stay down here with her, while Mr. Boss Man and the rest of us go upstairs.”

Nora barely felt her hands being roughly tied behind her back with a dish towel. She just looked at Xavier, even as they stuffed a rag in her mouth, and thought at him as hard as she could: Don’t.

She didn’t think she was the only one who felt some unimaginable pressure in the room ease, as though a volcano ready to erupt had just rumbled and vented a plume of smoke. He gave a tiny nod and let himself be shoved upstairs.

It seemed to go on forever: the footsteps in the bedroom above; the sound of George’s hectoring voice. The man George had left to stay with Nora didn’t even look at her; he wandered through the room looking for

valuables, shrugged in disappointment, and opened the icebox instead. “You got any Coca-Cola?” he asked her, seemingly not remembering she had a rag in her mouth. Nora just stared at him.

Upstairs, George laughed. He was high; Nora could tell just from the note in his laughter. High enough to let a grudge get the better of him; let a spectacularly bad idea like this—like robbing a Warring in his own home— seem like an entirely plausible course of action. He said something else inaudible, taunting. Xavier must have answered sharply, because he came back downstairs with his nose and temple bleeding freely. George was crowing, admiring the six-carat diamond ring now sitting on his own little finger, and his friend had a bulging knapsack. “Put that down,” George snapped to the man with Nora, who obediently parked his Coca-Cola bottle on the counter. “Tie up Mr. Boss Man here too.”

Xavier made no protest at having his arms roped. He was back to being a waxwork. Nora felt herself shivering.

George came over, pulled the rag out of her mouth, kissed her. She smelled Brylcreem, whiskey, something sharp from whatever had his pupils so dilated. She kept her lips sealed in a line. Put that tongue in my mouth, I’ll bite it off. But he just pulled back, gave her cheek a pat with his revolver’s barrel. “I’d take you with me if I could, Nora girl,” he said, yanking the string of pearls off her neck with a snap and slipping them into his pocket. “Best lay I ever had.”

He went out chuckling, and his friends with him, someone saying “That finishes that.” And Nora thought, Oh, you idiots, it’s just the beginning.

It felt like their first night in her Briarwood House apartment: the two of them on opposite sides of the room, the air sparking. Louise had gone—as soon as Xavier got himself out of his bonds, unroped Nora, absorbed her silent headshake to his sharp “You hurt?,” he called his housekeeper and his dog out of the basement, rubbed Louise’s back awhile as she cried, rummaged among the spice jars for a roll of cash, and pressed it into her hand. “Go get that cut on your head looked at,” he told her. “Then head home, take the week off. The cops come, you don’t know anything.” He’d walked Louise out and hailed her a cab, handing her into it like she was made of porcelain and handing another wad of cash to the cabbie. “Take her to the nearest hospital that will see Negroes, wait till she’s done, and then you take her home, understand? However long it takes, you wait.” When he

came back inside he bent over and took Duke’s big head between his hands, burying his face for a moment in the dog’s shining neck.

When he straightened, the look in his eyes made Nora’s entire spine shrink. He didn’t say anything. Just wrapped a handful of ice in the dish towel that had bound his hands and gently held it to the swelling on Nora’s temple.

“I’ll do that.” She took the ice pack. “Get one for you.”

He ignored the blood at his nose, going to the side table and pouring two big tumblers of whiskey. Pushing one in front of Nora, he sat at the barstool with the same slow control, and Nora once again had the impression of a dormant volcano venting pitch-black smoke.

“Those men with George,” she asked. “Who were they?”

“Out-of-town muscle, probably. They’re nothing.”

“How much did you lose? From the safe—”

“About twenty-five.”

“Dollars?”

“Thousand.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Nora said faintly. Under the counter, Duke whined and

pressed against their legs.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Twenty-five thousand doesn’t matter?”

“It’s not all I’ve got. And money’s recoverable.” Xavier bolted half his whiskey in one swallow. “I need to know something, Nora. Did George Harding hurt you before today?”

“You want to know if what he said was true.” Nora’s lips felt numb. “If I screwed him.”

“I don’t care about that. I had women before you; it doesn’t matter to me if there were men for you before me. I know who you are, what you are—”

“Class top to bottom?” Nora’s voice was bitter.

“That’s right.” Xavier’s gaze was unblinking. “I don’t care if he slept with you. I need to know if he hurt you.”

Nora exhaled, feeling the bump on her head throb. He waited. He’d wait forever, she knew. And if she wouldn’t tell him, he could find out. It wouldn’t even be that difficult—it had been in the goddamn papers.

“I was eighteen, just out of high school.” She fortified herself with a sip of whiskey that burned all the way down. “Trying to find a job, trying to dodge my mother setting me up with all those nice young police sergeants

my brother kept bringing home. Me knowing I’d rather die than be a cop’s wife, so what do I go and do but run straight for a bad boy. George ‘Mad Dog’ Harding, how do you like that name, a cliché right out of one of Pete’s Mickey Spillane books. George, new in town with his sharp suits and his emerald cuff links, turned up at Dailey’s one day when I was dragging my brother out of a card game. I dated George for six weeks, and I liked every bit of it. I liked him taking me out on the town, I liked rolling in the back seat of his convertible, and, oh, did I like how mad my mother was.” Nora took the ice pack away, not looking at Xavier. “Stupid girl. Not as stupid as I might have been, though. George slapped me just once, after a big loss at the track, and that was enough for me. I told him never to call me again.”

“And?”

“George doesn’t like hearing the word no.” She felt her mouth twist.

“The day I came home from my interview at the National Archives, walking on air because they said they’d start me in the file room, George pulled up in that convertible and dragged me into it. For the next three hours he drove me all over the capital, drunk, rambling about how he was going to marry me, and smacking me in the forehead with his gun butt whenever I argued.”

Nora bolted the rest of the whiskey. “I was dizzy enough at the end, he dropped me off at the hospital. Such a gentleman. They admitted me with a concussion, and he came back that night with candy and roses. I woke up to find him holding my hand . . .”

Breathe. Breathe. Xavier didn’t seem to be breathing at all.

“I pulled away shouting that I was going to press charges against him.

The noise brought the nurses in, and he ran. Couldn’t run from the charges, though. The newspapers even reported it: ‘Caveman Wooing Tactics Lead to Indictment.’ He ended up getting a stretch for assault and carrying an unlicensed weapon.” Finally, she made herself look up at Xavier. “I didn’t even know he’d been released until I saw you throwing him out of the Amber Club.”

Xavier sat statue-still, big rough hands laced around his tumbler. She remembered him saying before that if he ever really got angry, she wouldn’t have to guess it—she could feel his anger now, filling the room in slow, icy rolls, making the air thick. “That all of it?” he asked at last, neutrally.

“That’s it,” Nora lied, looking him right in the eye.

Xavier moved closer, cradling her head in his hands. He kissed the bruise on her temple and then he kissed her mouth, and Nora trembled because it

felt like something was being set in motion. A boulder tipping over the verge of a cliff and hovering before a long fall; a mountain rolling its shoulders.

“You should go home,” he said, pulling back, hand still cupping the back of her neck. “Call in sick from the Archives tomorrow; take some time to rest. You need a doctor, have him bill me. Cops come around, you don’t know anything.”

“Just like Louise?” Nora rose, Duke pressing against her legs. “Xavier —”

“I won’t see you for a while,” he broke in. “I’ll keep you clear of it.

You’ll hear from me.” And she was being walked out the door of this house where she had her own key and her own drawers for her nightgown and makeup, Xavier’s fingertips at the small of her back light as butterflies, his steady breath stirring her hair like a wind made of pure rage. Just an ordinary winter day in an ordinary Washington neighborhood, but the air in the hall crackled and Nora smelled blood.

She turned in the doorway, wrapped her arms around him, spoke directly into his ear. “The bed on New Year’s Day,” she said. “Bagels and lox and champagne, Duke snoring on our feet. Don’t throw that away. Don’t do this.”

He didn’t say anything; just hailed a cab and then held her till it was time to put her in it. His breathing was very even. He was, Nora thought, already gone.

The delivery came to Nora three weeks later: January 31, 1951, the day the headlines were full of the news that the Rosenbergs had been indicted. A slim fellow in a sharp suit was waiting outside the steps of the National Archives on her lunch break, a fellow she was pretty sure she’d seen calling Xavier “Boss” inside the Amber Club. “Miss Walsh,” he said, passing over what appeared to be a handful of wadded-up newspaper.

She smoothed out the wad and found herself looking at the Evening Star, page 1, headline so fresh it had to have just been printed: “George ‘Mad Dog’ Harding Slain in Gun Attack at After-Hours Club.” Nora’s vision tilted as she saw the page had been wrapped around a very familiar six-carat diamond ring. A scrawl of pencil ran along the margin of the screaming

headline.

I kept you out of it.

Marry me when I get clear of this?

Nora raised her eyes to the man who’d made the delivery.

“Mr. Byrne passed the package to his lawyer for you,” the man said.

“He’ll be charged with first-degree murder.”

“Are you following the trial?”

Nora started violently at her desk. “What?”

“The Rosenberg trial!” said a dizzy brunette from the National Archives steno pool. “Did you hear Julius Rosenberg will be testifying in his own defense? I can’t wait—”

“That trial,” Nora said, forcing her fingers to relax around the file she had fetched for Mr. Harris. “No, I hadn’t heard.” Being a bit too preoccupied with another trial that was set to begin at the end of March.

I won’t go, Nora promised herself. But she’d absorbed details about it anyway: that Xavier had pleaded not guilty, that the Warring clan had hired Charlie Ford to head his defense, and that the saying in Foggy Bottom went If Ford’s your lawyer it’s 3–1 you’re guilty and 6–5 you’ll be acquitted.

Nora had spend long, tossing nights wondering if 6–5 odds were good enough when the penalty was the electric chair. And wondering if she had the right to hope a man would be acquitted when he was guilty as sin.

But she pushed that aside, heading to her boss’s office. “The report you wanted on the effects of helium on parchment in preservation cases, Mr. Harris. And though there hasn’t been any official word from the Library of Congress as regards the transfer of the Declaration—”

“That can wait, Miss Walsh.” Her normally cheerful boss looked suddenly serious, almost stern. “Please close the door and take a seat.”

It was a very brief exchange. Four minutes at most. Nora walked out mechanically, not really feeling her feet underneath her. She aligned a pencil on her desk and pretended to transcribe a stack of shorthand, but her fingers kept fumbling. “Are you all right, Nora?” asked Mrs. Halliwell, who had opposed Nora’s promotion, and who had an avid gleam in her eye now.

As if she knew that no, Nora wasn’t all right, and exactly why. Ordinarily Nora would have chirped Ah, you know everything’s right as rain, Mrs. H!, but today it was all she could do to keep the tears out of her eyes. She could not manage to chirp.

“Nora, hallo!” bubbled Fliss, knocking on Nora’s door that evening. Did all Englishwomen bubble like her? “It’s Thursday—surely you heard us all trooping up the stairs? Grace made stroganoff and we’re all working on the wall vine; Pete brought the ladder up so we can take it up across that slanted bit toward the ceiling. Lina’s bringing brownies—”

Fliss rattled on, dimples gleaming, hair gleaming, even the baby on her hip gleaming. Across the landing behind her was the usual spill of music and laughter from the half-open door of Grace’s room. Nora pulled her threadbare robe closer around herself, feeling dreary, drab, dour, and worthless. “I’m not coming to dinner tonight,” she managed to say, starting to close the door.

“Oh, you poor love, are you sick? Shall I bring you a plate? I brought a shepherd’s pie—”

“No, thank you. I don’t want to trouble you.” Still trying to close the door.

“It’s no trouble! Let me just cut you a piece—”

Nora heard herself shouting, “I don’t want any goddamn pie, Fliss, go away!”

Fliss’s smile blinked for a moment like a light bulb flickering, then winked back on. “I’ll just wrap something up for later,” she said, as Nora slammed the door.

She wasn’t sure how much later it was when Grace’s voice floated in from the landing. “They’ve all gone,” she called. “Care for some sun tea?

It’s about half gin.”

Nora found herself opening up, less for the gin than for the smile in her neighbor’s voice. Grace stood in her old robe with the faded Chinese dragons; it was too light for this chilly March night, but she never seemed to feel the cold. “Come on, you,” she said, offering the glass. “Add a flower to my much-extended wall vine, and I’ll tell you all the gossip you missed tonight.”

“I hurt Fliss’s feelings, didn’t I?” Nora said resignedly, trailing across the landing.

“Mmm, hard to tell with the English. The outward shellac of good manners runs a mile deep. More like two miles on that one.” Grace closed the door behind them both, her tiny room in its usual state of confusion after a Thursday night supper: glasses scattered about, cigarette butts in an old saucer for an ashtray. “Actually, the gossip tonight was all about you.”

Nora tensed.

“It was really very kind of you not to come, because poor Arlene could finally drop the subject of her latest diet regime and talk about your ring.

It’s nearly killed her, having to be in the same room with a diamond that size and not talk about it. Especially since her Harland, whoever he is, hasn’t given her one yet.”

Self-consciously, Nora turned the diamond around to the inside the way Xavier usually wore it. “I’m not engaged. I just—he’s not around for me to give it back, and I can’t just leave it lying about.”

“A rock like that? Certainly not.” Grace gave her sleepy-looking smile.

“You don’t have to wear it on that particular finger, though.”

Nora was silent.

“Did I tell you I have a new man in my life?” Grace turned to the window, raising the sash. “He’s a bit of a loner, but he should be in the mood to drop by now . . . Yes, here he is.”

A bony ginger cat came winding along the ledge outside and through the window, flowing down to the floor in one practiced jump. “Doilies Nilsson will skin you,” Nora warned. “No pets allowed.”

“But this house needs a pet. All houses do, if they’re to become real homes.” Grace stooped to stroke the cat, who was winding around her ankles with a rusty mrow. “To hell with Doilies. What she doesn’t know

won’t hurt her.”

“Is that your motto for life?”

“It’s worked so far.” Grace poured out a saucer of milk for the cat, who lapped it up briskly and then sashayed back out the window without a backward glance. “I do like a man who lets himself out without leaving a mess behind,” Grace mused. “Rare in the male sex. I thought I’d call him Red, what do you think?”

Nora sat down rather suddenly on the edge of Grace’s narrow bed. “I’m eating my heart out over a gangster, and I have no idea how to stop.”

Grace took the glass out of Nora’s hand, refilled it from the jug in the icebox, tipped in another slug of gin, and brought it back. “Ah,” she said, curling up in her worn armchair rather like her cat.

“You don’t exactly look surprised. Does everyone know?” Nora couldn’t help saying. “Fliss? Mrs. Nilsson?”

“No . . . I put one or two things together. That lovely wrap you picked up, and all those overnight visits to family. And Pete said something about the

gentleman who came into Moonlight Magnolias to pick your flowers. ‘He’s got a cruel cliff of a brow’ was how Pete put it, sounding a bit wistful. He still has a crush on you, of course.”

“He won’t for long, once he knows. My boss knows,” Nora burst out.

“He called me into his office today . . . I don’t know how he found out, Xavier kept my name out of anything in the papers, but Mr. Harris knew.

Government men, they all talk. He’d had a word from a lawyer or someone in the police. He knew.”

Grace’s voice was quiet. “Have you been fired?”

“I will be,” Nora said raggedly, “if I cause any embarrassment to the

National Archives.”

“Goodness, can they do that?”

“Of course they can. Even though my work and my conduct have never been anything but exemplary. Even though it’s none of their business who I see in my private life. Even though they’d never dream of asking a man who he dates on his own time.” Fury smoldered in the pit of her stomach, remembering Mr. Harris’s censorious face as he delivered his lecture. Her potential; her responsibilities to the Archives. How badly she’d wanted to stand up and tell him she wasn’t some wayward teenage daughter who needed to be slapped on the wrist and sent to her room, that she was a grown woman and he could take his lecture and shove it.

But the job. The job she’d worked so hard to get—the job that was levering her slowly but surely out of Foggy Bottom.

“I could lose it all,” she said, voice so low she could barely hear herself.

“Because, yes, it will be seen as embarrassing if the personal secretary of the executive officer of the National Archives continues a known relationship with a man on trial for first-degree murder.”

And when you said it like that, Mr. Harris’s lecture sounded entirely warranted, didn’t it? The facts were so stark, when they weren’t muddled up with the way Xavier could melt her heart hunkering down to wrestle with Duke—the way he listened when she talked, as if memorizing every word —the way he took her to pieces just slowly running a thumbnail up her spine. None of that mattered. He was a man on trial for murder, and she was wearing his diamond on her left hand, and she didn’t know how she’d gotten in so deep.

“I was so careful,” she whispered into her glass of sun tea. “I got burned once—I said never again. And here I am, right in the middle of another

goddamn bonfire.”

“You must like the heat,” said Grace.

“I feel like I’m drugged,” Nora said. “He walks into the room, and it goes through my veins like smoke. Even though he’s a murderer.”

“Men commit murder for many reasons.” Grace’s scarlet-polished fingernails tapped her glass. “Did he at least have a good one?”

“Someone hurt me. But that excuses nothing. What he did, taking the law

into his own hands, that hurts me too.”

“You’re a great believer in law.”

Nora thought of the Bill of Rights, which she saw in its case every day.

“The law is not perfect, but it is perfectible. Scorn that and we’re spitting on our foundations.”

“Don’t be pompous, Tipperary. You’re far too young.”

“All right, maybe that sounds pompous. But it’s still what I believe.

Because if we don’t have the law, then all we have is might makes right.

And then women always get hurt, instead of just often,” she finished bitterly.

“So—your gangster is sometimes a violent man. But is he a bad one? A weak one?”

“No,” Nora stated. “If he was, I could walk away without a backward glance.” The way she had from George. Who was now dead, and she couldn’t manage to be sorry. Only about how it had happened. She squeezed her eyes shut before they spilled over. “You don’t have to pretend you aren’t disgusted with me,” she managed to say. “I’m disgusted with myself.”

“I’d be more inclined to disgust if you were head over heels for a weak man,” Grace said. “Men of violence, well, they have their uses. Nations

tend to begin with violent men.”

“They do not—”

“Yes, they do,” Grace retorted. “Foundations of law like the ones you prize; who are they laid by? Men who aren’t afraid to bloody their knuckles or hurl tea in harbors. Now, this nation of ours decided to lay aside a violent beginning—in some ways, at least—and try to ground our future in something more rational . . . But that doesn’t mean violent men didn’t kick off the American experiment to begin with.”

Nora admitted she might have a point there. “Are you a history professor now?”

“Merely a woman who’s given a lot of thought to her origins. Both my own, and my nation’s, and violent men played a part in both. And I can tell you—” Grace ran a finger around her glass’s rim. “Violent men who are also smart and strong are not completely lost causes. They can learn different ways, if they choose. It’s the weak ones who cause the most damage. Nothing wreaks havoc like a weak man—because they never learn, so they just go blithely on, leaving pain and wreckage behind them.”

“My brother is like that.”

“Interesting.” Grace tilted her head, a handful of curls slipping down one shoulder. “You told me you were in love with a gangster before you told me you even had a brother.”

“Because I despise him,” Nora said quietly. “My brother and most of my

family.”

“Why?”

She hadn’t told Xavier this part. Hadn’t dared. She didn’t know why she was telling Grace now. Maybe it was the gin in her sun tea, which was starting to build a glow in her stomach . . . but the words were coming out, halting, rusty. George Harding; the affair at eighteen. The caveman wooing tactics that landed her in the hospital ward. “There was worse waiting when I got home,” Nora said in a monotone. “My mother waiting for me, Timmy next to her. She wanted to know if George had knocked me up. I didn’t think so—I was stupid, getting involved with him, but not stupid enough to let him in without using, you know.” She wasn’t much of a good Irish girl anymore, but she still didn’t know how to get any of the words for condom

out. Rubbers, raincoats, sheaths.

“Good for you,” said Grace.

“I told Mam I’d been careful, but she didn’t believe me. And she didn’t want to wait to see if I missed my monthly, because then morals came into it.” The knee-jerk recoil; mortal sin. “So her loophole was that we’d make sure now, before anything was certain—make sure I wasn’t pregnant, that I wouldn’t disgrace the family. And she parked a mug of some disgusting tea in front of me, and when I wouldn’t drink it, Timmy started shouting.

Telling me our father was rolling in his grave, telling me I was a whore and a disgrace. I asked which was the bigger disgrace, being a whore or being a crooked cop who goes to whores behind his wife’s back, and when Mam started flying to his defense and saying I had no morals, I said at least I wasn’t preaching the sacredness of life while shoving miscarriage tea down

my daughter’s throat. And that’s when Mam said if I didn’t drink that mug down she’d put me out of the house that night, and Timmy backed her up.”

Grace was silent. Nora concentrated on breathing. In, out. In, out.

“I had nowhere to go,” she said softly. “No money, no friends who would side with me over my family. So I drank it. I wasn’t pregnant, I knew I wasn’t, so it just made me horribly ill for a week. I spent that whole week planning how soon I could move out. Mam didn’t understand when I came down with my suitcase a few months later, when I’d scraped up just enough from my National Archives salary to pay a month’s advance rent on this room. She kept asking why I was making a fuss—hadn’t she and Tim stood by me? I said I never wanted to speak to her again, but she still phones and lays on the guilt. And every month or so, Tim comes round and helps himself to my rent money when his wallet’s light. That’s fine in his eyes, and it’s fine in Mam’s, too, because ‘girls help their brothers, deirfiúr

bheag.’”

In, out. In, out.

“You know the funny thing?” Nora bolted the rest of her tea. “I could tell Xavier this, and he’d take care of it. He’d get my family out of my life in a heartbeat. He’d beat Tim to a pulp and threaten to send him to jail for corruption if he or Mam ever contacted me again.” She finally let herself meet Grace’s calm golden-brown gaze. “And Mother of God, but sometimes I’ve been tempted.”

“You were betrayed by a weak man on the right side of the law, so you ran to a strong man on the wrong side of it.” Grace tilted her head. “Why not let him take care of your brother for you? At least scare him off.”

“Because a belief in the law shouldn’t only be maintained when it’s convenient.” Nora leaned back, trailing a fingertip along the painted wall vine. “And because Xavier is like an atomic bomb—once he’s set off, I have no idea what the damage might be. I need a scalpel here, not a bomb. I need to take out my own dirty laundry.”

“Your dirty laundry is currently stealing your rent money,” Grace pointed out.

And my lover might be going to the electric chair, Nora thought.

As if reading her mind, Grace said, “He might be acquitted. Get off scot- free.”

Nora looked at the huge diamond on her finger. “But he’s guilty, Grace.”

“You still don’t want him dead.”

“No, I don’t want him dead. But I don’t know what else to want. I’m such a roil inside.” Nora looked at Grace, sitting there so calm. “I wish I was more like you,” she heard herself saying. “All self-contained and self- sufficient.”

“It took a good long while to get myself this way, Tipperary. I’ve done my share of roiling.” Grace drew up a knee, resting her elbow on it. “What will you do if he gets off?”

The question echoed inside Nora’s skull. “I don’t know.”

“When does he go on trial?”

“The end of March.”

“Well,” Grace said, rising. “You’re hardly a ditherer, Nora Walsh. I strongly suggest you have a decision by the time the jury comes out with theirs.”

Nora set her empty glass aside, unable to help wondering aloud, “Why doesn’t any of this shock you, Grace? Does nothing shock you?”

“Very little.” Grace smiled over her shoulder, a tilted smile. “In the days when I wasn’t quite so self-contained and self-sufficient, I, too, mixed with my share of weak men—and violent ones.”

Nora felt sorry for the Rosenbergs, truly she did. Even if they were guilty, no one could see their pinched, frightened faces in the newspapers and not feel a certain swell of pity. But at the same time, she was grateful the trial consumed every paper in the District, day after day. Because on the day the jury returned a verdict of guilty against the Rosenbergs, eight men and four women were filing into a different courtroom to hear the charges against Xavier Warring Byrne . . . And no one, thank god, was paying attention.

I won’t go to the trial, Nora had promised herself, and that held the first seven days. It wasn’t page one news; that was all saved for speculation about what sentence the judge would levy on the Rosenbergs, but back pages of the Evening Star and the Washington Post held enough updates to get a picture of the trial’s progress. “Jury Told Shot Killed Harding at Point Blank.” And “‘I had to do it,’ Byrne says; Threat Made by Harding Told by Waitress.” And finally “Byrne Murder Trial Expected to Continue Through Next Week.”

I won’t go, Nora chanted—but the morning after she read “Byrne to Testify in His Own Defense,” she found herself claiming gastric flu at the

National Archives, looking pale and sick enough that even Mrs. Halliwell didn’t look skeptical, and making her way to the courthouse.

She was glad it was packed—it meant she could slip into the very back, in the shadow of a woman in an enormous hat. Around the brim she saw a phalanx of dark-suited men at the front, some familiar faces from the Amber Club . . . As for the two stone-faced men at the front, she had no trouble identifying Xavier’s uncles.

The judge, bald, fierce as a bantam; the jury, twelve faceless sketches in their box—everything was a blur until Xavier took the stand. And Nora had to lower her face swiftly and gulp down the visceral tug in her gut that the sight of him still yanked out of her.

He was taking the oath; he was swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help him God. You liar, she thought. He looked leaner, inscrutable, no hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth. He took his seat in his blue suit, leaning back, at ease.

“The jury has already heard that George Harding followed you upstairs to the second floor at one fifty in the morning of the day in question,” Xavier’s lawyer began at last, looking avuncular. “Can you tell us why you went upstairs?”

“I’d seen George Harding walk into the club, and I’d heard he was looking to kill me.” Xavier spoke with perfect ease, laying it all out one question at a time. No mention of the robbery on Macomb Street; all that had been swept under the rug. Just a man acting in self-defense, pulling a gun when an ex-employee with a grudge drew on him first.

“How many times did you pull the trigger?” the lawyer asked.

“Three.”

“Why three?”

“In the Marine Corps, we’re taught to aim for the center and shoot till the target’s down.”

Xavier sounded like he was asking for a bacon and tomato sandwich at the Crispy Biscuit. Calm as ice water. No one on that jury would ever believe a man like this could throw a tennis ball endlessly for his dog, or read the morning paper with his girlfriend’s head in his lap, absently playing with a lock of her hair . . .

There was a break before cross-examination, and the matron next to Nora looked indignant. “They’d better not come after him too hard. Mr. Byrne is

somebody down in Foggy Bottom, you know! Wouldn’t be the same without him and that dog around, keeping an eye.”

“Isn’t he—” Nora nodded toward the block of Warring men at the front.

“You know.”

“Maybe, but he’s done more for the neighborhood than any of those prosecutors and judges.” The woman sniffed. “I’m not saying it’s right, breaking the law, but some of those that do are better men than those frauds in double-breasted suits who don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t gamble, but wouldn’t give you a dime out of their pocket or a minute of their time. Just because a man ain’t lawful don’t mean he can’t be good. And vice versa.”

Nora thought fleetingly of Timmy in his police blues, rummaging wrist- deep in her pocketbook.

Cross-examination. The questions fired like bullets. Wasn’t it true Mr. Byrne had carried a pistol long before the night in question? “Yes. But I never had any intention of shooting George Harding.”

“Yet you did shoot him, didn’t you?” the prosecutor barked.

“Yes.” There was the smile, the knife edge of it at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so fast you’d have to know him very well to see it.

Nora saw it. “I did.”

And the next day—the day when all the headlines blared “Rosenbergs Sentenced to Death; Julius & Ethel Face the Electric Chair”—Nora found the page four headline that stated “Jury Acquits Byrne of Murder; Convicts on Secondary Charge.”

Nora’s Colcannon

6 russet potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for serving 1 cup heavy cream 1/31/2 to cup cooked and chopped thick-cut bacon (optional)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

3 cups chopped cooked kale 3 green onions, minced

1. Place the potato pieces into a large mixing bowl, cover them with water, and let them sit for at least 1 hour to remove starch. This will enhance the texture.

2. Fill a large cooking pot (at least 8 quarts) with water and bring to a boil. Add the potatoes and boil for about 15 minutes. Once the pieces can be easily pierced with a fork, remove the pot from the heat. Let sit for 2 minutes, then drain. Return the potatoes to the pot.

3. Add 3 to 4 tablespoons of the butter and a splash of cream. Mash potatoes with a masher or mixer, slowly adding the remaining butter and cream until the desired consistency is reached. Add bacon, if using, reserving some for garnish, then season with salt and pepper to taste.

4. Add the kale and half of the green onions. Whip hard with a wooden spoon, incorporating as much air as possible into the mixture.

5. Transfer the mixture to a serving dish and make an indentation in the center. Top with 1 to 2 knobs of butter, the remaining green onions, and the reserved bacon, if using.

6. Enjoy alone on a bad day, with nips of Jameson, while listening to “If” by Perry Como.

St. Patrick’s Day was the biggest holiday in the Walsh family. This year it was celebrated late: chicken pox had swept from Tim’s children through all the cousins, so the huge family lunch, the keg of green beer, the party streamers and shamrocks were postponed until everyone stopped scabbing and scratching. Two days after Xavier was sentenced to a year in prison for carrying a deadly weapon, Nora set off for her family home with a big pot of colcannon.

She’d pondered wearing Xavier’s chinchilla wrap and the reddest lipstick she could find—look like a moll, since her family had undoubtedly Heard Things. In the end she shrugged into her old green-sprigged dress and saddle shoes, looking like her mother’s daughter—like Timmy’s deirfiúr bheag.

“Nora!” Tim’s wife, Siobhan, greeted her at the door. “I haven’t seen you in an age. Take the baby, won’t you?”

“Sorry,” Nora said, juggling the pot. “Hands full!” She slipped through the mix of aunts and uncles, cousins and cousins and more cousins, back to the table already groaning with food. Except for the sheer number of police badges, it looked very much like a Warring family lunch.

Nora got herself a glass of the green beer her brother had brought in from Dailey’s and found a corner to sit, legs crossed. Normally a Walsh daughter would be expected to make the rounds on St. Patrick’s Day: pay tribute to all the relations and let them ask her why she wasn’t married yet; play with any babies anyone thrust her way; ferry whatever dirty dishes any male Walsh handed her to the kitchen. Nora sat back in her corner this time like Xavier, sipping her beer, returning the various curious gazes with his cool, slow-lidded blink, watching the eyes flit away. Like Xavier, she was waiting for her target to come to her.

“Nora, darlin’, you’re finally back!” Tim came at her with open arms, a whiskey flush already on his cheeks. He looked so delighted to see her. He always did. Nora wondered if he really didn’t remember the names he’d called her. Slut, whore, tramp. If she brought it up, he’d probably look wounded and say something like Water under the bridge, right?

Tim gave her the family gossip, and she nodded and smiled, waiting until he started dropping hints about when she’d move home, give Siobhan a hand with the kids—only until Nora married, of course. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a proper lad to bring round to Sunday lunch, do you?” Tim asked finally. “Because we’ve heard things . . .”

“Nothing to hear, Tim,” Nora said. She’d said the same thing yesterday to Mr. Harris, telling him there was nothing and no one in her acquaintanceship that would bring embarrassment to the National Archives.

Said it with a hint of frost so he flushed. So he’d think twice about poking in a subordinate’s personal affairs again.

“Look, Nora—” Tim looked down into his green beer. “Since you’re here . . .”

Nora looked up at the stairs, twined with green crepe paper and cutout shamrocks. “Kids did a grand job decorating this year.”

“They did, didn’t they? Look, spot me a bit till my next payday? They passed the hat at the precinct for a pal laid up with a broken leg; can’t stint at times like that—”

“Or when it comes time to lay five-to-one on a horse still running backward somewhere at Pimlico?” Nora set down her beer.

Tim grinned that charming lopsided grin. “Never could fool you, deirfiúr bheag. Come on with you, just a few dollars, a fiver if you’ve got it . . .”

Nora waited until he reached into the handbag she’d left open on her lap.

Then she snapped the metal clasp shut on his fingertips, hard.

“Ouch—” He yanked back with a surprised huff. “Come on, Nora—”

“Shut up. You’re going to listen for once, Timmy. I’m never giving you another dime, hear me? You will never show up outside the National Archives again, or Briarwood House. If you do, I won’t hesitate to make a fuss.” There were worse things, Nora had learned, than a public fuss. “You will never steal from me again. Or sweet Jesus help me, you will rue the fucking day.”

Her language clearly shocked him more than anything else. “What’s gotten into you?”

Nora smiled Xavier’s smile, like the gleam off a knife’s edge in winter.

“Say it. Say you’ll leave me alone. Or—”

“Or what? That mobster in your pocket will—”

“I don’t have a mobster in my pocket, Tim. Be afraid of me. Because I can get you kicked off the force all on my own. All the things you’ve done, the payoffs and the kickbacks? You try to stick your hand in my pocket again, I’ll hang your dirty laundry out for the world to see.” Threats like this wouldn’t have worked on George Harding, who would have promptly backhanded Nora across the room, and they wouldn’t have worked on a great many of the other Walsh men, either—the ones who didn’t mind taking a hand to their wives and a belt to their kids.

But threats would work on Tim. Because he was weak, and Nora had learned something about weak men—weak men, and how to be terrifying.

“Jesus, Nora.” He looked so hurt, his eyes full of how could you? “I’m family. Doesn’t that—”

“Mean anything?” Nora rose, feeling a little lightheaded. “It means absolutely nothing, Timmy. You made sure of that.” She slid her handbag over one arm and headed for the door without a backward glance. She could feel him staring after her.

“Going so soon, Nora?” Mam cornered her by the groaning kitchen table, looking flushed and reproachful. “I was counting on you to help me get the roast out, and then sit down with your cousin Deirdre’s new baby. Speaking

of babies, Timmy Junior is bursting out of his clothes again, and your brother could use just a little bit extra for—”

Nora smiled Xavier’s smile at her mother, watched it hit, and lowered her voice. “Mam, get off my back. Stop telephoning, stop nagging, stop all of it. And if you or Timmy ever try to help yourself to my rent money again, I will report him to the Washington Post for being on the Warring family payroll.”

She stepped past the table, but not so fast she didn’t see her mother’s face drain. “You don’t have any proof,” Mam hissed, hand shooting out to catch Nora’s elbow. Not shocked that Tim took payoffs; everyone did that. Just shocked it might come out. “You don’t have anything!”

Nora looked her in the eye. She couldn’t lie to Xavier, any more than he could to her, but she had no problem lying to her flesh and blood. And Tim might forget what she’d said today, but Mam never forgot anything. “I do have proof, Mam. And I don’t care if he goes to jail. So keep out of my life.”

Nora took her seat at the visiting-room table, folding her hands precisely before her. She’d jumped through all the hoops, heard all the rules from the guards outside. Xavier’s eyes drank her in from French twist to French slingbacks, lingering on the diamond on her finger. He smiled, then pointed silently at the ceiling. She nodded. Foolish to assume no one would be listening. “I assume one of your uncles set up the private visit,” she said.

“The one who drove me here?”

Xavier nodded. He looked just as relaxed in prison garb as he had in one of his expensive three-piece suits. “What did you think of him?”

Short, lean, brisk, hard as granite, asking her no questions on the brief drive. The uncle Xavier described as the brains of the family, the one who ran everything. “I think he’s a tolerable preview of you in a few years.”

Low-voiced, considerate, loyal. At least one prison term behind him. No softness at all. The man who ran the District, or at least the shadowed parts.

“He told me you’ll serve your whole sentence here,” Nora said, managing to clear her throat. “A year seems like a lot just for carrying a deadly weapon.”

“Judge made sure I got the maximum.” Her lover didn’t sound angry or resentful. He’s the kind that can really do time, Xavier’s uncle had said on

the drive, approvingly. It won’t make a dent in him. Nora didn’t imagine it would.

“The Rosenbergs will get the electric chair,” she said. “I’m . . . glad

you’re not.”

“You came to hear me testify.”

“You saw me?”

“Always.” Xavier hesitated. “I’m sorry you had to hear it.”

“Hear you lie?”

“I don’t lie. Not to you.” His face was impassive. “I said I had no intention of shooting George Harding, and I didn’t.”

You just put out the word he was a dead man so he’d make a run at you, Nora thought, looking her lover right in the eye. You didn’t have to intend anything. Just arrange things so you could shoot him in self-defense.

That’s right, Xavier’s eyes said back. But he changed the subject. “I’ll be home in a year. Maybe less, with good behavior. I arranged for Duke to stay with my sister, but she’s not so fond of dogs. I’d rather leave him with you.”

“Mrs. Nilsson doesn’t allow pets.”

“She will if I send her a wad of cash. But he’s a lot of dog for that little room of yours.” Xavier paused. “You could stay in my house on Macomb Street. The bills are paid, Louise would keep house for you. My family,

they’ll check in—”

“Xavier—”

“—and in a year I’d be back.” He reached across the table, touched her ring finger. The lightest touch. “Then we’d make it official.”

“And you’d go back to the Amber Club.”

“It’s where I work. I’m a businessman.”

Nora tilted her head. “And if—this—comes up again, something like

this? Would you do it again?”

No answer.

“You’re not just a businessman, Xavier.” She took the big round diamond off her finger, laid it down on the table. “I love you. But I wouldn’t ever lie on the stand for you. I don’t have it in me. And can you tell me it would never come up, while you’re in this business?”

He was silent.

“I appreciate your honesty.” She slipped the ring into her pocket to give to his uncle, rose, headed toward the door.

“Nora.”

She turned back. Dark eyes in battered sockets, still making her spine prickle. Still the hook in her gut. She didn’t think it would go away, ever.

She still felt him filling her veins like a drug.

“I’m out in a year,” he said. “Let me try to change your mind then.”

“Our first night, you said you’d go the moment I told you to go. And you said you had a thing for lost causes.” Nora opened the door, spoke over her shoulder. She had to gulp the words, but they came out steady. “I’m no one’s lost cause. And I’m telling you to go.”

“Mrs. Muller,” Nora said when she got back to Briarwood House, nearly bumping into the old woman in the hall. “Will we be seeing you at Grace’s on Thursday? Maybe you’ll add a flower to the wall vine—”

“No,” Reka Muller said, speaking English for the first time in Nora’s recollection. “No, absolutely not, never.”

“Well. All right,” Nora said, startled, and headed up, planning a solitary dinner of leftover buttery mashed potatoes and green ribbons of kale eaten straight out of the pot. Solitary, but not lonely. She was Miss Walsh of the National Archives, possibly the future chief of Building and Grounds, first woman ever promoted to such a position. She was going to watch someday soon as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were brought into the Rotunda: six pages of parchment encased in helium-filled glass cases, escorted from the Library of Congress by the Army Band, the Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps, an armored Marine Corps personnel carrier, down Pennsylvania and Constitution. She’d end up exchanging a look of complicit, dizzy delight with a young Negro servicewoman in proud dress uniform who’d been part of the escort cordon on the library steps; she’d listen to President Truman speak as the documents were enshrined; she’d wait until the Rotunda was empty and she could look at the glass cases by herself, gazing at her foundations. Everyone else’s foundations, too, but also just hers. Stroll out of the Rotunda, nailing a smile over that tug in her gut, the beguiling smoke in her veins.

Miss Walsh. Heartsick—but her own woman.

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