The governor was late. No governor, no ceremony; the distinguished people gathered in the private office of the district attorney muttered to themselves and to their pals. They brought out their cell phones and their Date Minders and juggled their schedules. The office buzzed with talk, quiet or annoyingly loud, directed at people not physically present, so that the place took on the appearance of a day room in a mental institution. The DA himself, John X. Keegan, did not talk on either a cell or a regular phone, but simply relaxed, smiling, a drink in his big fist, and chatted quietly to a small group of men who were too big to bother about their own schedules. Keegan wore a wide white smile on his broad red face. It had hardly been off that face (not even in slumber) since he had gotten the news of his appointment some months ago. Today was his last day as district attorney after nearly a decade on the job. He was going to become a federal judge, a lifetime's ambition, or rather an important step toward his real ambition. It had never escaped Jack Keegan's notice that Chief Justice Earl Warren had started as a DA.

One other person in the room, now slouched against a corner of the long conference table in the center of the office, was equally unconcerned with schedules. His own smile was thin and a little false, because he disliked events of this kind. Even slouching, he was the tallest person in the room (at six-five), well-knit, and still athletic in these, his middle years. He had a peculiar flat, sallow face, close-cropped brown hair just starting to show gray on the sides, and eyes set slightly aslant over strong cheekbones. These eyes were his signal feature apart from his hugeness: bright, inquisitive, don't-fuck-with-me eyes, gray in color, shot with flecks of gold. An ethnologist observing the room as if it contained a herd of beasts would have noted that this tall man, like the DA, occupied the center of a circulation, a node of power.