The cold slowed Leonard's chatter as they walked, and he seemed almost contemplative. The three or four blocks that radiated south and west from the Ellicott Square Building resembled a bustling downtown, but once the brothers passed the city's police headquarters, a squarish afterthought of dirty yellow brick, the office buildings gave way to a grim patchwork of low anonymous structures, weed-choked lots behind chain-link fences, and here and there a darkened church. The bundled-up pedestrians disappeared, and closer to the thruway overpass the downtown traffic dwindled to the occasional car cruising Erie Street, hip-hop blasting from behind rolled-up windows. In the shadow of the overpass, the temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. Thruway traffic drummed the vaulting concrete.

Leonard huddled into his topcoat. “One thing I'll take to the grave with me is the bleakness of this place. I can be at the beach in the middle of July, but if I think about Buffalo, I feel the cold in my bones.”

Seeley said, “Austerity has its virtues.”

“And that's why you left New York? Not enough austerity? This city is falling apart, Mike. It's no place to live.”

“You know as much about Buffalo as the tourists on their way to Niagara Falls.” Apart from a terrifying childhood, he and Leonard had little in common. As a boy, Seeley was the explorer, taking his bicycle to every corner of the city while, other than on the occasional family outing, Leonard rarely strayed outside their dark immigrant neighborhood on Buffalo's far east side. “What California architect can match Louis Sullivan? H. H. Richardson? Daniel Burnham? Your idea of a boulevard is a street lined with strip malls.”

Leonard said, “I'm surprised you came back. You're not the kind of person who comes back.”

Even when you left home, Seeley finished his brother's thought.