"Cormac."
"You're Brendan O'Connell's niece."
"I am."
"He was a good man. I drank with him for fifteen years."
"I know. He talked about you."
"All good things."
"Some of them."
Cormac smiles. The smile is one of a man accurately described by an old friend’s niece, and he is amused by the accuracy. He nods at Nora.
"And who is this, then?"
Nora, who has been considering the room from my hip the way she considered Lex on the first day, slides down. She walks across the hardwood in her fuzzy white socks. She stops two feet in front of Cormac, who is six-six and built like a wall, and she looks up at him with her gold eyes.
"You are very tall," she informs him. "Are you a giant?"
Every man in the room becomes very still. I stand a few feet back with my heart in my throat, watching my almost-three-year-old walk up to a wall of men who have, between them, ended more lives than I will ever know, and ask one of them whether he is a giant. I don’t call her back. Calling her back would teach her to fear the room. So I hold my breath and let her go.
Cormac doesn’t move for one full second. Then he kneels. The kneel is a slow, controlled motion, the kind of motion a six-six Irish boss makes when he’s making himself smaller in the presence of a small girl who has just asked him a serious question. He kneels on one knee, which puts his face roughly at her face, and he says, "I am, lass. The biggest one in Boston."
Nora considers him gravely. "Okay," she says. She holds out Brontos. "You can hold him."
Cormac takes Brontos with both hands.
He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t look up at me. He doesn’t look at Lex. He looks at Brontos, who is a stuffed elephant with one eye and most of his stuffing concentrated in his trunk, and he says, in a voice gentler than any voice I have heard him use in the eleven minutes I have been in his presence, "He’s a fine elephant. I will hold him."
"His name is Brontos."
"Brontos."
"He doesn’t like milk."
"I will not offer him any."
She nods. The matter is settled. She turns away and goes to investigate Dimitri.
Dimitri is standing by the bookshelf.
He’s not come further into the room. He’s been in the room for ninety seconds and has not yet sat down or extended a greeting or said a word to anyone, and Nora has decided he’s the next item on her list. She walks across the rug. She stops three feet from him. She studies him.
Dimitri studies her.
It is the second silent conversation in this living room in the last three minutes, and it is happening between a forty-year-old Greek strategist and an almost-three-year-old in dinosaur pajamas, and it’s doing several things in two seconds.
Then Dimitri's eyes move from Nora's face to Lex's face.
He doesn’t say anything. Lex doesn’t say anything. The look between them is brief and absolute, the kind of look two brothers exchange when one of them has just been shown the answer to a question the other one was about to ask. Dimitri's eyebrows do not move. His mouth doesn’t move. He registers what he’s registered, and he files it, and he turns his attention back to Nora.
"I am Dimitri," he says, very gently.
"I am Nora."
"It is good to meet you, Nora."
