It was, after all, past time for him to leave the DA's. He had been there twelve and a half years, ever since law school; it had been his only real job. It was more or less expected that after a period of seasoning in the DA, lawyers with ambition would go private, or switch over to the federal side, or, after a little longer, become judges. He looked around his office. It was a small spare room with a frosted-glass-windowed door that gave on the bureau's outer office, where the clerks and secretaries sat. It contained a battered wooden desk, a leather chair behind the desk and two in front for visitors, and behind these a long, scratched oak table with a miscellany of chairs around it, for conferences.

These furnishings were part of the original equipment of the criminal courts building, which had been constructed in 1930. The leather of the chairs was cracked, and gushed white stuffing. To the right of the desk were two large windows looking out on a short street and the New York State office building across it. If you stood at the window and leaned out you could see the trees of a tiny park, beyond which was Chinatown. It was the office's best, or rather its only good, feature.

Karp was no sort of status hound, but he understood that the tattiness of his personal surroundings and the even worse conditions with which his staff had to contend were petty symbols of the contempt for Karp and all his works that steamed perpetually in the heart of Karp's boss, the district attorney, Sanford Bloom.

Bloom had not the guts to fire Karp outright, but neither Karp nor anyone who worked for him would ever get a new office or new furniture. The paint would rot off their walls. Their promotions would be delayed and their personnel records screwed up.

Everyone in the DA's office knew this. As a result, only the intrepid came to work for Karp in the homicide bureau, and what should have been the cream of the DA's prosecutorial staff grew milky with the years.