1

Janet Lindsay had been terribly afraid it was a mistake to come to Washington. That was especially so mornings when she’d wake up alone and cold, cast a groggy eye around her chic little room in the cellar of a Georgetown bowfront, find the radium dial and see that, invariably, it was only five o’clock. She could never sleep through until seven. Those two hours were what she hated most. She didn’t have to be at her office until half past eight. The Times-Herald didn’t come until quarter past seven. She couldn’t type whatever report she was working on for fear of waking the Davises upstairs. Early mornings were the worst.

Daytime was a swirl of activity around Senator Lodge’s office and not so bad. She was one of the senator’s seven administrative aides, and the business of answering letters and researching minor legislation was, on the whole, as interesting and as dull as she’d expected it would be. Harold Sisson Evans, her political science professor and advisor—her idol, really—had warned her that the work on Capitol Hill would be an uneven mixture of the exhilarating and the menial. She didn’t mind the work. She rather liked it, even though Lodge had turned out to be an aloof and uninspiring mentor who was made so ill at ease by the presence in his office of a young, pretty Smith graduate that he pretended most of the time not to notice her. The senator dealt with Mr. Forbes and expected him to deal with the staff. That was alright with Janet Lindsay. She thought Lodge a bit of a fogy. No wonder he and her father were such friends.

Evenings were worse than daytimes because there were always parties, and Janet Lindsay was afraid to refuse an invitation, partly for fear of being dropped if she offended her contacts, and partly for fear of spending an evening alone. She dreaded being alone. At Smith she had concocted grand fantasies of Washington parties. She imagined them as gatherings of witty and intellectual men—the New Deal Circle—who smoked pipes and took champagne in tulip glasses from trays carried by handsome young waiters. The talk—as she imagined it—was all of boldly saving Greece and boldly stopping HUAC and modestly crowning George Marshall king of Europe. There were never any women at the parties Janet Lindsay conjured in her mind except herself. And she was always in a corner with Harold Sisson Evans making a point.

In fact, Washington parties were false and stilted affairs. The Young Republican crowd shoved themselves into tiny Georgetown flats with the same flippancy and silliness with which they’d shoved themselves into dormitory rooms at Amherst and Dartmouth. They talked about football and the jobs they hoped to land in the ’52 campaign.

Occasionally Janet Lindsay went to a party on Foxhall Road. Embassy people and senior bureaucrats and undersecretaries in tuxedoes abounded. They were nice to her because she was pretty and from Smith and worked for Senator Lodge, whom everyone was courting. At first she’d been buoyed by the feeling of being among the most important people in the country, but gradually she began to notice that Foxhall Road parties tended to be very boring until almost over, by which time the most important people in the country were all embarrassingly drunk. Once, however, at the Harcourts’, she met Eleanor Roosevelt, who she thought was as wonderful in person as she was in the papers. But even Mrs. Roosevelt seemed unable to transcend the inhibiting party chatter that seemed to make banalities of the most important questions in life. Janet Lindsay hated party chatter for that reason, and also because she was shy and not good at it.

It was nearly a year after she’d come to Washington before she decided it was not a mistake. In April of 1951 she fell in love. When she woke up before dawn that spring, things were very different. She hopped quickly out of bed, donned her old robe, went to the broad oak plank on two stools that served as her desk, flipped on the gooseneck light, and read for the two hours that seemed to her then a luxury, not a dreaded pit of nothing between night and day. She read the transcript of the hearings of the Special Committee of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees to Investigate Organized Crime in the United States. The transcript was enormous because it recorded the year-long investigation of political corruption and syndicate crime in a dozen cities.

Janet Lindsay, like many staffers on the hill, had been interested initially in the work of the Kefauver Committee, as it was called, because it had generated so much publicity. Its hearings over the year had been carried by national television networks and had been the backdrop against which senators, lawyers, and hoodlums had played out a drama so suspensefully drawn in the bold strokes of good against evil that the nation had been totally captivated by it. And so had she. Though she was put off by the manner of the tall, gangling chairman, whose accent and grammar betrayed his Appalachian background, Janet Lindsay was enthralled by the relentless questioning of the committee counsel, Rudolph Halley, whose detailed probing of dozens of witnesses gave the impression of an incredible grasp of the national crime problem. It was to see him in action that she had arranged to take an early lunch hour one day and sit in on the committee session.

She’d been disappointed. Halley was not conducting the interrogation that day. The witness was a functionary from Roosevelt Raceway in New York, and he was being questioned about the bookkeeping methods of the track by one of Halley’s assistants, a young lawyer with a Boston accent. At first Janet had assumed, like most committee members and the press, that the session would be too dull and unimportant to stay with, but the lawyer was very attractive and she was drawn to him. She thought it funny later that after all her time in Washington it was a young man behind the grand dais who moved her. Was it the panoply of Congress, the quiet solemnity of the room, the sacredness of the tradition? No, it had been he, the way he looked away from the witness once right at her, right into her eyes. He had smiled at her. She had blushed. When she left the hearing room, slipping out quietly at the end of her lunch hour, she asked a guard who the lawyer was. He pointed to a name on a page of that day’s Acts; M. Collins Brady, Asst. Coun. An Irish name, she noted, which didn’t faze her nearly as much as it would have her parents if they’d known of her even mild curiosity.

But he’d gone to Harvard, College ’42, Law ’49. Her friend Sissy Williams checked with a friend she had on the Judiciary Committee staff, who said Halley had recruited Brady for the investigation because of some articles he’d written for the Harvard Law Review, but Sissy couldn’t find out what the articles were about. There was talk that Brady would join Kefauver’s personal staff when the committee disbanded, and that meant he would be on board for the campaign. Everyone knew the senator from Tennessee was going to run for President if Truman didn’t.

Janet Lindsay looked up the articles. There were two, one concerned with the civil liberties violations consequent to the televising of government proceedings, and the other a study of the past uses of the contempt citation by congressional committees to elicit testimony from hostile witnesses. Both articles had been written, apparently, in connection with the legal questions rising out of the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ 1948 hearings involving Alger Hiss. Though Brady’s articles did not express an opinion about the Hiss matter, Janet Lindsay was sure, judging from their preoccupation with the rights of witnesses, that he sympathized with Hiss. She was, of course, pleased. And surprised. She thought all the Irish were insane about Communists.

Janet Lindsay also ascertained that M. Collins Brady was not married.

She continued throughout much of April spending what time she could at the committee hearings. Halley was very good, and when Kefauver was conducting the questioning of witnesses, he was impressive for his dignity and drawling innocence. The witnesses at those, the concluding sessions of the investigation, were mainly minor figures whose testimony had not been taken in the on-site hearings. Those highly publicized sessions focused on well-known characters like Frank Costello, boss of the New York underworld, and William O’Dwyer, New York’s former mayor, whose reputation had been damaged by testimony before the committee. The April sessions in Washington had the purpose of tying up loose ends before the committee issued its report to Congress with its recommendations for legislation. Even so, Janet Lindsay was fascinated by the process, which seemed to her much more interesting than anything going on in Lodge’s office. She considered the hearings and their direct effort to combat a major social problem the most important project in the entire Congress, and she felt that way even when M. Collins Brady was absent.

One day, just as a session adjourned, he approached her. She saw him coming. Walking toward her through the chaos of strewn chairs, television cables, reporters, technicians, an exiting gallery, he was tall and self-possessed. He was running his right hand through his tousled sandy hair. His left hand was in his pocket, and his blue pin-striped suit coat was drawn back around it, exposing a gold watch chain that swung in its perfect curve across his vest.

She thought of running out of the room. If he spoke to her, she would die. If he didn’t, she would die.

“Hello,” he said, standing above her. She couldn’t move in her chair. She couldn’t reply.

“I keep seeing you at these sessions,” he said. He had a soft voice. When he questioned witnesses it could be hard, edgy, almost cruel, depending on whom and what he was asking. There was something in him that frightened her.

“I’m Janet Lindsay.” She was tall enough, when she stood, to feel as though their eyes moved in the same plane. Most of the men who attracted her were too short. He was perfect, even without the dais.

“I know you are.”

“You do?” She was looking at him with that cool self-assurance that her parents had spent so much money on at Willow Country Day, and Miss Hall’s and L’Ecole de Suisse and Smith. She had an air of competence, achievement, and brain that she never drew over herself except when she was uncomfortable and afraid and nearly speechless. She smiled. He would never know. Men never did.

“Yes, I found out. I’m an investigator, right? You work for Salty.”

“No. Lodge.”

“A purely legal distinction if it’s between Saltonstall and Lodge. In any case, you work for me.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m from Massachusetts, too. My name is Collins Brady.”

“I know.”

“You do?” He was pleased and showed it.

“Yes. It’s in the Record. You’re the assistant counsel.”

“Not ‘the’; ‘an.’”

“A lawyerly distinction.”

“What do you think of the hearings?”

She had to be careful. It would not do to gush. “I think they raise some serious problems. At times you seem to be conducting a trial—not you so much, but Halley. One could hardly call it due process.”

“We try to be careful of that. One has to balance the rights of the person with the rights of the public.”

“Another lawyerly distinction.”

He laughed.

“I think the hearings are the best thing happening on the Hill.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Better than, say . . . ?”

She thought he was going to mention HUAC. He would be testing her, trying to find out her sympathies. Everyone met each other with measuring sticks.

“. . . the Neptune?”

“The Neptune?” she replied, surprised. It was a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue, a joint younger staffers went to in the late afternoon.

“Yes. It’s a bar.”

“I know what it is. I’m just surprised.”

“But are you free?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I could get free.”

She looked at her watch, a sensible watch, an Elgin with a big face and a manly leather strap. The ease with which she lifted her wrist and turned it belied what she was feeling. Here was this man whom she had been watching for a month, whose face she had been holding in her mind just before sleeping, whose name had been on her tongue or just beneath it each morning—here he was asking her to go to the Neptune now.

Something in her rebelled. Why wasn’t he asking her about HUAC? Why wasn’t he pursuing the point she’d raised? But that had been a ploy. It had been his point, after all. He must have known what she was up to, her old tricks. She had won Harold Sisson Evans over at Smith by flattering him mercilessly with a bombardment of his own ideas, the small puffs from his books, as if she’d thought of them herself. But that technique wouldn’t work with this man, something told her. Or had it worked already? She didn’t want to discuss fine points of law with him. She wanted to have a drink with him.

“Shall I meet you there, then?” he asked.

“Alright.”

“When?”

“Half an hour.”

“Fine.”

Brady couldn’t believe his luck. He’d been watching her for weeks. The sight of her eleven rows back in the grandiose room—she almost always sat in the same chair—had merely piqued his curiosity at first. Who was she? She was very tall and slender. She was beautiful, with bright golden hair down to her shoulders. Whenever he looked up at her she was taking notes, which made him wonder at first if she was avoiding his eyes. Once she looked right at him, and he smiled at her and she smiled back. He had lost his train of thought and forgotten what he had just asked Pete Incarra about the take at Roosevelt. After that he had looked forward to seeing her in the hearing room, and he was disappointed when she wasn’t there. And now he was meeting her for a drink. He couldn’t believe his luck.

“Hi,” he said. She was sitting in a booth. He had deliberately arrived late. He slid into the bench opposite her.

“Hi.” She raised her beer at him.

“You arranged your schedule, I see.”

“I did. I’m en route to L.O.C., if anyone asks.”

“Researching?”

“Regulation of seaboard fishing.”

Brady nodded.

The waitress brought him a beer and a shot of bourbon. He downed the shot and sipped at the beer.

His abrupt manner with the drink made Janet uncomfortable, but she didn’t show it.

“I’m glad finally to meet you,” he said.

“You said you’re from Boston.”

“I said Massachusetts. I’m from Brookline. A lawyerly distinction, eh?”

“Quite. I’m from Ipswich.”

“And you went to Smith.”

“And you went to Harvard, twice. You must have liked it.”

“I couldn’t get into Yale. Why Smith?”

“My mother went there. Did your father go to Harvard?”

Collins interrupted her with a laugh. “My father’s Irish.”

Janet raised her brows. She didn’t see why that mattered.

“I mean real Irish, from the ould sod.”

“Oh?”

They were silent for a moment.

“I met a Negro,” Janet said, “who, when I asked him what he did, said he went to Harvard. I was very impressed, and I said, ‘Harvard, how nice.’ To which he said, ‘No, Harvard.’ And I said ‘Harvard?’ And he said emphatically, ‘No, Harvard!’ Of course he was saying ‘Howard.’”

“But with a Harvard accent.” Brady laughed. “Actually we had quite a few coloreds there. Four in my class alone.”

“How liberal.”

“How snide!” Collins liked her very much.

“I was just thinking it probably takes a lot for the average Negro to go to Harvard.”

“The average Negro doesn’t go to Harvard. Why did you come to Washington?”

“Politics. I’m interested. The job with Senator Lodge looked better than teaching kindergarten.”

“Is it?”

“To tell you the truth, it’s pretty dull. We have a sleepy office. Mostly it’s trying to keep units at Fort Devens and get the new SAC base for the Cape. I write letters. ‘Dear Mrs. Gallstone, let me take this opportunity to assure you that I could not agree with you more. I intend to incorporate your contribution to my thinking on the subject in my next speech from the Senate floor. In the meantime I am enclosing the texts of several other addresses, each of which in its own way concerns itself with the broader implications of the question you so usefully raise. Sincerely, Henry Cabot Lodge Junior, period, exclamation point.’”

“What question?”

“Any question. You name it.”

“How often do you write that letter?”

“Fifty times a day. And I sign it. Blur the initials, but with a flourish.”

“Very clever.”

“I’m a clever person.” She paused. “I don’t mean to be so with you. I spend my day counterfeiting and forging. It’s hard to stop.”

“I spend my day interrogating.”

“So we’re both still at it? I need another.” She held up her glass. When he took it from her he touched her fingers.

“What?”

“The champagne,” she said crustily, “of bottle beer.”

Brady slid out of the booth and disappeared.

Janet Lindsay did not know what to do. She had drawn attention to their banter, the light and slightly false set of it. He had noted it with as much solemnity as she. They were both ready for something less quick, flamboyant, self-conscious. She was flattered and excited. He gave her looks of such open interest that she could hardly keep from blushing. When his fingers had touched hers around the glass, she felt innocent and therefore afraid.

Two beers later—an hour’s talk about politics and the future and the aftermath of war and the meaning of Korea and the odds in favor of atomic warfare and whether Truman could make stick his relieving of MacArthur of the Far Eastern Command—he leaned grandly back against the leather booth and said, as if announcing the findings of a court, “Janet Lindsay, I believe you are what is commonly called in our era an idealist.”

“Do you think so?” She beamed at him. She took his remark as a compliment, even though she was not insensitive to its condescension and the hint of mockery in it.

“I do. And I like idealists.”

“You do?”

“Yes. Very much. Especially French ones.” She had quoted Sartre.

“Well, I think you’re an idealist too, Collins.”

He bowed. “In that case,” he said, “do me two favors.”

“What?”

“One; call me Micko. I’ll explain its origin to you sometime. But call me Micko, OK?”

She nodded.

“And, two; have dinner with me.”

She nodded again. “But first you must tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“What did you think of Alger Hiss’s conviction?”

“Why do you ask that?” Their playful, impish mood evaporated.

“It’s strange we haven’t discussed it. Everyone brings it up first thing. It bothers me not to be able to guess what you think.”

“I know what you think.”

“You do?”

“Certainly. You think he’s a victim of witch-hunters. You think HUAC is dangerous, the real un-Americanism. You think McCarthy is a demagogue.”

“Don’t you?”

“You asked me about Hiss. I don’t know the facts well enough to express an opinion.”

“You wrote about it.”

“I was a student. I knew more about everything then. What I know about now is Frank Costello and Al Capone and Sam Giancana and Crazy Joe Gallo and how to slice parimutuel betting books eight ways so that nobody in the entire world can know how much money a major league track takes in each year.”

“I’d like to hear more about it.”

“I’ve said too much already. My work is confidential. Only the Congress can make what I think public. Otherwise everything becomes gossip and rumor-mongering and cheap Hearst sensations. It wouldn’t be fair to the defendants.”

“They’re not defendants, are they?”

“Christ, you’re right. That’s what I mean. See how easy it is?”

“You set great stock by fairness, don’t you?”

“I try to.”

“That’s why I asked about Hiss.”

“The Hiss thing may or may not have been unfair. I don’t know. When I wrote about it, the Russians didn’t have the atom bomb. They do now. That’s not fair. And frankly that bothers me more than the fate of Alger Hiss. Joe Stalin frightens me more than Joe McCarthy.”

“Said like an Irish red-baiter.” Janet tried to smile as if she were joking.

“No. Said like a lawyer. I told you. I don’t know the facts. I haven’t seen the evidence. Have you?”

She shrugged. What could she say? She had ruined a lovely moment by getting him to expose his dreadful opinions.

“We were about to have dinner,” he said.

“Yes.” She put her regret aside and smiled at him. He raised his glass to her and drained it, a gesture she accepted with a nod, but did not relish. She wondered if he had a drinking problem.

“But,” he said, “it’ll have to be a hurried one, I’m afraid. I have to work tonight.” Brady was thinking that, after all, she was very young. He was nearly thirty. She was no more than twenty-three. He was thinking she was still enthralled with the opinions of some Smith professor, an old-time leftie, no doubt, who’d spent all his class time defending Hiss and the Rosenbergs. She was practically still an undergraduate. Maybe he wasn’t so attracted to her after all.

Their dinner—they stayed at the Neptune and had the menu brought over from the grill—was hurried and awkward. By the time they said goodnight to each other and went their separate ways—he to the Senate Office Building, she onto the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar to Georgetown—night had fallen and they were both glad to be alone again. But each went to sleep later thinking of the other.

Two days after Collins Brady and Janet Lindsay had their brief dinner together, General MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress. In the furor surrounding his removal by the President it seemed the Senate had little time for or interest in the concluding hearings of the Kefauver Committee. Brady nevertheless worked tirelessly with Halley and other staff members in preparing the final report. They wanted it out before the summer adjournment. The report was turning out to be several things at once. Senator Kefauver, in the garbled rhetoric for which he was known, described it as “the record of the persons and biography, and then by modus operandi or the technique of how they operate, how they kill, how they hijack and how they work and then by narrative description of the individual cases and the times.” One section of the report pulled together various threads of information about syndicated crime and its potential for political corruption. Another presented a set of charges about “the elusive organization known as the Mafia.” Collins and two other lawyers argued futilely against inclusion of this section because it contained little substantiating evidence of a national crime cabal other than certain convenient factors of ethnicity. Brady was one of the authors of the section of the report that dealt with big-time gambling, which received the bulk of the committee’s attention because of the economic importance it had for all other aspects of underworld activity. The incredible sum of over twenty billion dollars was generated annually by illegal gambling, unchecked and unsupervised funds that furnished capital to launch other criminal operations—particularly the burgeoning trade in narcotics—and that made possible the graft necessary to buy official protection of those activities. The final section of the report contained dozens of legislative proposals, the most publicized of which called for the establishment of a federal crime commission, but the most practical of which would have curbed the use of wire services for gambling purposes and would have required more detailed tax records by racketeers. One of the major concerns of the committee was how to prevent the infiltration of legitimate business by underworld figures. Brady and others argued that a way had to be found to watch and control the expenditures of the vast sums of money that criminals were known to be accumulating. They focused their proposals to this end on new tax legislation and prepared to shift the burden of the anticrime campaign away from the FBI and the Bureau of Narcotics toward the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Collins Brady was deeply committed to his work. After nearly two years he was still consumed by the investigation, and even as the committee’s tenure ran out that spring he continued to work, compiling dossiers, reviewing data, scrutinizing testimony, researching the new laws, as if there would always be a Kefauver Committee, as if he would always be a key part of it. He knew that the highly touted TV confrontations between gangsters and senators had revealed little. He knew that the myth about the tight-knit Italian Mafia, which received such publicity, had little to do with the reality of a loosely related collection of individualist entrepreneurs who had nothing to do with medieval pledges signed in blood, and whose activities were benign compared to the images the press had nurtured. He knew that the committee itself had crossed the line repeatedly into areas of unconstitutional procedure, encouraging, indeed requiring, for example, hearsay evidence of witnesses. But he also knew that the committee had focused the glare of publicity on nefarious activities that could survive anything but. He felt an enormous satisfaction to have been part of what Kefauver called a crusade. Brady thought that was not too sentimental a word for it, though he would not have used it himself.

Still, throughout May he was distracted.

He thought continually of Janet Lindsay.

He called her.

“You haven’t been at the hearings.”

“I know. We’ve been very busy. We’re doing a huge mailing.”

“I was afraid it was because of me.” As soon as he said that he regretted it as a remarkably self-centered statement. She would think him conceited and arrogant, when the truth was just the opposite.

“No. Not at all.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, I really have been busy.”

“Me too.”

“How has it been going?”

“We expect to report before recess after a final flamboyant hearing. The senators want one last blast of TV before going home.”

Janet Lindsay couldn’t think of anything to say. Surely they weren’t going to chat about work and let it go at that. Where were all those clever bits she’d been rehearsing? She had promised herself that if he called she would ask him over for a drink.

“Listen,” she said, “I was thinking we might . . .”

“I was, too.”

“Don’t interrupt me!” She couldn’t believe she’d said that, but he was laughing. Did he know he’d interrupted a line she’d practiced? “I want you to come over and have a drink sometime.”

“What a good idea! When?”

She took a deep breath. “How about tonight?”

“I’d love to,” he said.

She didn’t have any bourbon and she worried he’d think her unsophisticated. But she had to straighten the small room, try to bring some order to her desk, then shower quickly and put on her new dress, a beige cotton shift she’d bought at Garfinkle’s thinking of him. He’d have to take beer and be satisfied with that, or rum. She had brought a fifth of rum back from Havana when she’d gone there in January. She could offer him rum and Coke.

He took it and said he loved it.

They talked about the Existentialists and each was delighted at how smart the other was.

When he left at ten before midnight he kissed her on the cheek.

The following Friday they went to dinner at the Shoreham on the open-air terrace that overlooked Rock Creek Park. A wonderful orchestra played sentimental music and, after eating, he asked her to dance. Janet was aware of the eyes of the other patrons as they filed through the tables, and she couldn’t help thinking they were the best-looking couple there. She was wearing her long black evening dress, which showed her shoulders and drew attention to her breasts. She wore her hair up to display her long neck. He wore a tan serge suit that made him look rakish and cavalier. When she went into his arms they began to glide. The evening was warm, the stars were enormous overhead, the music was lilting and soft. The trumpet player made his instrument sound like a muted, distant bird in mourning. She let her head rest on his shoulder and she felt a tear come to her left eye, it was all so exquisite and lovely. She had dreamed of this before. When they returned to their table the waiter had brought a silver bucket with ice in it and in the ice was a bottle of Dom Pérignon. They toasted each other, and their talk came more slowly than before. When they danced again they were silent. Janet was aware of the pressure of his right hand against the small of her back. When his leg brushed the inside of her thigh repeatedly she shuddered and closed her white-gloved arms around his neck.

As they were getting into a cab he pointed up Connecticut Avenue at the Sheraton Park and said that was where he had his apartment. For a terrible moment she thought he was going to ask her home with him, but he didn’t. When he took her back to Georgetown he kept the cab waiting. They agreed to spend the next day together, and he kissed her on the mouth.

They went to Great Falls, where the waters of the Potomac fell in a glorious cascade down from the hills of Maryland onto the coastal plain of Virginia.

“Harper’s Ferry is up there,” he said, pointing upstream. “This falls was the great barrier to the C and O canal. They never defeated it.”

“Hence the collapse of trade with the trans-Appalachian interior. And hence the decline of Alexandria as a port city.”

“Very good.”

“But the advent of railroads made canals irrelevant anyway.”

“But too late for Virginia. If the canal had worked, they’d have been tied to the North economically. The Civil War would have been very different.”

They were walking along a winding path, woods on one side of them, the falls on the other. They were holding hands. Occasionally they separated to negotiate a narrow place or mount a boulder. But they came easily together again. The sun was bright and warm. Collins was in his shirt sleeves. Janet had her cashmere over her shoulders.

They came to an outcropping that reached far out over the raging water like a sharp tooth snagging the air. They made their way out to its farthest edge, carefully, singly, each with a separate caution. They sat above the roar of the falls, content with their own silence, feeling the power not only of the river, but of the stone that, having been worn to a sliver, still claimed its victory over time.

“You know your history,” she said finally. She turned his hand in hers, examining it as if its lines had secrets.

“I’m a child of history, so to speak.” He said that without pompousness, and she looked at him.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m named after a character out of the books, Michael Collins.”

“Who was he?” She felt ignorant, but not embarrassed.

“An Irish patriot. Do you know the Yeats poem ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’?”

“‘A thought of that late death took all my heart for speech.’”

Brady looked at her; God, she was wonderful! “He was one of Collins’s aides in the early years of the war against England.” Then he recited, “Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart./ O when may it suffice?/ That is heaven’s part. Our part/ to murmur name upon name/ As a mother names her child/ when sleep at last has come/ on limbs that had run wild.”

“‘Easter 1916.’”

“Yes. Only in my case, it was my father who put name upon name. My mother was killed.”

Janet Lindsay felt her eyes filling. Very softly she said, “By the English?” She pressed his hand.

“No. By the Irish. In the Irish Civil War. The same faction that killed Collins. My father was with him. He was also an aide to Collins, after Gregory. I never knew my mother. I was born in the middle of it.”

“It must have been . . . terrible.” She thought of Yeats’s phrase. There was an enormous sadness about Collins. She knew he was feeling the emptiness of never having known his mother.

“Yes.” He faced her. “Not for me, of course. But for my dad.”

“He must have suffered.”

“It ‘can make a stone of the heart.’” He smiled at her, a sudden graceful smile. “But it didn’t. My father is a wonderful man. Whatever he experienced then made him better, not worse. I admire him more than anyone in the world. I want to be like him.”

“What does he do?”

“He used to be in politics. Ever hear of Curley?”

“Are you kidding?”

“My father was his partner in a storefront insurance business in South Boston. During the Depression they devised a system to fund the retirements of city workers. My father was a kind of advocate for the common people, for the Irish, with the mayor and the State House. What they needed in those days was respite from the great insecurity of the times. The Irish lived in dread of the dole and the pauper’s house. When the New Deal faltered and it became clear that Social Security was going to be minimal, at least for big Irish families—Catholics, you know—he quit politics to work full-time in the insurance thing to make sure the people would have what they needed when they needed it most. My dad practically invented the mechanism for supplementing the pensions of city workers. Monument Municipal Insurance and Annuity Association. Only municipal workers, blue-collar mainly, are eligible. It caught on, spread from Boston to cities all over the state and then all over the country.” Collins laughed. “Of course, he made a killing at the same time. He’s not all altruism. He’s a very successful businessman now. But he started out just trying to help people who were very desperate. He still does.”

“No wonder you’re proud of him.”

“I look forward to working with him someday. I can’t imagine anything better than to be his partner. He doesn’t need me right now. The business runs itself.”

“You have to get your politics out of your system first.”

“I suppose.”

“Kefauver’s running, isn’t he?”

“Probably. Depends on Truman. Frankly, I don’t see myself involved in it if he does. I love the law stuff, believe it or not.”

“I believe it.”

“We’ve just begun to scratch the surface of interstate crime. I’d like to see it through somehow. I have to wait and see what Congress does with our proposals. As the law stands now, there are a lot of cracks in it. People fall through those cracks and get lost. Innocent people. And others get away with murder, sometimes literally.”

“Your father must be proud of you.”

“I hope he is.”

Janet put her arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “I am,” she whispered.

“You’d better be careful of that.” He hugged her. “You wouldn’t want to get involved with the son of an Irish mick, would you?”

“I don’t know. What other kind of mick is there?”

He laughed.

“You were going to tell me about your name, ‘Micko.’ Is that its origin?”

“Michael Collins used to call my father Amico. It became their name for each other, shortened to ‘Micko.’ It’s what my dad calls me, and my family. I grew up with my aunt and my cousins, two girls and a boy. He’s a priest now in Boston.”

“Oh my God!”

“I warned you.”

“I couldn’t be more Protestant, you know.”

“I know. That’s why I like you.”

“My father would die. He’s a member of the vestry at Trinity.”

“Just tell him I lived at Phillips Brooks House at Harvard.”

“Do you know Lindsay Hall?”

“Yes. Don’t tell me. Lindsay Hall in the Yard?”

“I’m afraid so. My grandfather.”

“Oh my God! Well, we all have to bear the weight of our ancestry, don’t we?”

“Don’t we ever. You mine, me yours.”

“And the C and O canal George Washington’s.”

They stood and walked back along the path, holding hands and silent.

It was evening by the time they returned to Georgetown. They ate in a small cafe on O Street that was popular with students.

At the door to her flat Janet timidly invited him in. She made coffee. He sipped his once and put it down. He touched her. Janet had prepared herself for that. She was a virgin, and not regretfully. She had never been naked in front of a man, partly because she had accepted the values she’d been schooled in and partly because she’d never met a man she could imagine loving for life. That was the chief value to her, and that was why she was prepared to allow Collins his initiatives. She had been, in fact, looking forward to them enormously. She loved him, and she trusted him and she wanted to give herself to him.

When he kissed her, it was passionate and full for the first time. Janet was as aroused as he was. She kept kissing him and rubbing her hands through his hair and around his neck while he undressed her. They did not speak at all, even when they crossed to the bed, but when they made love Janet repeated the name “Micko” again and again until it too was lost in their pleasure.

They saw each other every day after that, and they made plans to go to Boston together when Congress recessed for the summer.

The Kefauver Committee convened for the final time on June 12 for the purpose of making public its report. All three television networks broadcast the hearing, which was conducted with the solemnity of a climactic scene in a major drama. The committee had held hearings in fourteen major cities: Washington, Tampa, Miami, New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Over eight hundred witnesses had been heard, and the resulting testimony ran to thousands of pages. The committee’s success at identifying criminal personalities and activities gave it a prestige probably unequaled by any other congressional investigation.

More people had watched the Kefauver proceedings on television than had watched the World Series, the year before. In the eerie half-light of darkened rooms before small frosty screens, Americans had watched the good men of their government in complete absorption. Never before had the attention of the nation been so riveted on a single matter.

Among those who tuned in the final hearing for the committee’s last word was Colman Brady. He sat alone in a corner of his bedroom on Prescott Street. He watched the pale images and heard the static-ridden voices and felt his first real fear in years. Four senators gave their speeches, and Kefauver read a precis of their report. They were unctuous and pious. They didn’t frighten Brady because they would turn their attention to their elections and to other business of the Senate. Rudolph Halley outlined the shape of the new legislation. He was a technician and a bureaucrat whose power would fade with the committee’s mandate. He did not frighten Brady.

But to the rear and left of Halley, Colman Brady saw the figure of his son, who sat upright and alert, and from whose earnest gaze, even through the damned machine, he could find no shelter.