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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 MissWalsh 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 MissWalsh 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 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, MissWalsh.”

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,”