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Ray, reciting the standard of proof a public figure like Paul had to offer to win a suit for defamation. In his mid-seventies, Horgan was so red-faced beneath the frost of white hair that you couldn’t quite suppress the thought of a peppermint stick. He was hobbled after two knee replacements, and no longer even pretended that he could recall names. Some dismissed Horgan as a barnaclized pol. But he’d retained his canniness and an air of pure delight in the sly mechanics of power.
    “And can we prove that?” Paul asked him.
    “Should be a slam dunk,” said Ray. “What evidence do they have that you had any role in that murder?”
    On the other side of the sleek conference table, Mark Crully, Paul’s campaign manager, dropped his pencil.
    “We have to sue,” Crully said. Mark was a quiet, driven little guy, general of the backroom army you would never see on TV. He’d run campaigns all over the country for a decade, most recently winning a special election for a congressional seat in California that had been Republican for fifty years. He was good. But about one thing: winning. And he was testy now. He had no patience for lawyers. Or anyone else for that matter. “We have to sue,” he repeated.
    Paul decided to ignore Crully, who often seemed to have his own view of who worked for whom. Paul spoke to Horgan.
    “But it’ll be our burden to show I had nothing to do with that murder, won’t it? It’s always a bitch proving a negative. And it’s not like we can do DNA on the blood at the scene. We’re identical twins.”
    “True,” said Ray. “But we’ll get discovery. And the discovery will show Hal has nothing. Right?”
    The three were sitting in the fishbowl conference room at the center of Paul’s campaign offices, glass walls on two sides. The design was Crully’s. He believed that a look of openness sent the right message, both to the campaign workers and to the press, on the limited occasions Crully admitted them. But Paul, who was accustomed to keeping his own secrets, couldn’t get used to it.
    Looking through the glass to the tumbling office outside, you’d think this was a campaign with no troubles. There were probably one hundred people at work at 10 a.m., all but roughly twenty of them volunteers, hustling about with purpose. The space belonged to a guy Paul had known since law school, Max Florence, who’d donated two floors. They’d bought white modular panels with big windows, and had the entire office up and running the day Paul announced. It demonstrated formidability to his half-dozen opponents.
    A full half of the office was given over to fund-raising. Most of the volunteers here were at the phone bank, dialing for dollars, from the lists Paul had developed in four different campaigns. Field, the second of the three major campaign operations, was situated right across from where they sat. Jean Orange was laughing about something with her two deputies; her metal walls were covered with maps of the county, green tags showing where they had opened local offices, red tags indicating the wards where the committeeperson or councilman had promised to help. Now that the holidays were over, she expected to have a thousand people hitting doors this weekend, identifying their voters. Communications, around the corner, was the place today where people were earning their keep. Tom Mileie, a thirty-two-year-old Internet expert, and his three staffers, not to mention both deputy campaign managers and the policy director, were all fielding calls from reporters who wanted to know what Paul had to say now that Hal Kronon had claimed again that Paul had helped murder Dita.
    Crully interrupted once more.
    “You have to sue this cracker. You gave him a day to calm down. We sent him a letter saying cut it out, and not only did he not cut it out, he repeated it to reporters this morning. So now we have to sue him.”
    Paul had been in public life long enough that he didn’t get spooked by crises. They