Eliot Ness stepped out on the balcony of his office and surveyed the angry mob below, facing what was any public official's worst nightmare with an expression as placid as a priest's.

Despite the sweltering late afternoon, they swarmed the City Hall sidewalk, perhaps fifteen hundred men and women, strikers from the steel mills, many with their wives in tow, children too, jammed together tighter than their anger. A banner said: THE POLICE CAN'T BREAK THIS STRIKE! Another said: BRING ON YOUR MILITIA! Someone spotted Ness, out on his perch, and a wave of outrage rolled across an already turbulent sea of humanity.

Ness nodded at them and smiled faintly, waving, popelike, as if the booing had been cheers, then ducked back inside. His smile disappeared; the sound of displeasure behind him-muffled now as he shut the balcony doors-did not.

Cleveland's Director of Public Safety was, at thirty-four, the youngest such officer in any major city in the United States. But right now he felt anything but young. He moved to one of the conference tables that took up most of the floor space of his ample office, a masculine room of dark wood and pebbled glass, where three men stood, their eyes on him like magnets on metal. He sat on the edge of the table, his casual posture at odds with his crisply tailored, double-breasted brown suit with its green-and-yellow striped knit tie and flourish of a tan silk breast-pocket handkerchief. His boyish face seemed devoid of any thought or emotion, save for an inch-long crease between his dark eyebrows.

Earlier today more than one thousand steel strikers, blocking entrances to Republic Steel's Corrigan-McKinney plant in the industrial Flats, had done battle with one hundred reserves from the Cleveland police department. Bricks had flown, billy clubs flailed.