She tipped the driver heavily when he dropped her off. “Thank you, ma’am, but you don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to,” she told him.

He touched the hook to the patent-leather brim of his cap. “Mighty kind of you,” he said, and drove off.

Kind? Flora doubted it. She’d given him extra money not least because cabs like his saved her from worrying about the other passengers on a bus. That was less egalitarian than it should have been, but she couldn’t make herself feel very guilty about it. She didn’t want to get blown up, and that was that.

She had to show her ID to get into the building. Before she could get past the entrance hall, a burly guard checked her purse and briefcase and a policewoman patted her down. By the woman’s smirk, she enjoyed it the way a man might have. Flora didn’t know what could be done about that, either. Nothing, probably.

She hurried to the room where the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was meeting. Several Senators and Congressmen were already there. “Morning, Flora,” one of them said. “We pounded the, uh, crud out of Atlanta last night, if half of what they say on the wireless is true.”

“Good,” Flora replied. About half of what they said on the wireless usually was true.

“You all right?” the Congressman asked. “You look a little poorly.” Foster Stearns was a granite-ribbed Democrat from New Hampshire: a reactionary, a class enemy, and a good fellow. One of the things Flora had found in Congress was that the people on the other side of the aisle didn’t have horns and a tail. They were just people, no worse and no better than Socialists, and as sincere about what they believed.

“I’ve been better,” Flora said. “I heard a people bomb-I’m pretty sure that’s what it was-go off when I was coming in.”

“Oh!” everybody exclaimed. Foster Stearns pulled out a chair and made her sit down. Somebody-she didn’t see who-gave her a paper cup. She took a big swig, thinking it was water. It turned out to be straight gin, and almost went down the wrong pipe. She managed to swallow before she had to cough. She wasn’t used to straight gin right after breakfast-or any other time. But the swig seemed to help. She was less upset afterwards than she had been before.

More committee members came in. They knew about the bomb, too. “Took out quite a few folks, the miserable son of a bitch,” one of them said, and then, “Excuse me, Flora.”

“It’s all right,” Flora answered. “That’s not half what I think of him.”

“Are we all here? Shall we get started?” A Senator and a Congressman asked the same thing at the same time.

Along with everybody else, Flora looked around the conference room. Robert Taft wasn’t there. And that meant something was wrong. They should have convened five minutes earlier, at nine on the dot. He was always on time, as reliable as the sunrise. “Somebody call his apartment,” Flora said.

Somebody went outside to do that, and came back a couple of minutes later. “His wife says he left forty-five minutes ago. He was walking in-trying to lose ten pounds.” More than one committee member chuckled, remembering his rotund father.

Flora knew where Taft lived-much closer to Congressional Hall than she did. And she could make a pretty good guess about how he would have come here. When she did, she gasped in dismay. “I hope I’m wrong,” she said, “but…”

“What is it?” Congressman Stearns asked. Then he must have drawn his own mental map, for he went pale as milk. “Sweet Jesus Christ, you don’t think the people bomber got him?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, “but he would have been in about the right place at about the wrong time. And the Mormons and the Confederates both hate him like rat poison. The Canadians, too, come to that.”

“We’d better find out.” Foster Stearns and three other committee members said that or something very much like it. Stearns added, “We don’t even have to adjourn, because we never convened. Come on!” They all hurried toward the entrance.

“Has Senator Taft come in?” Flora asked the butch policewoman.

“Not by this way,” she answered, and he would have.

Flora and the rest of the committee members looked at one another, their consternation growing. Somebody said, “Maybe we’d better start calling hospitals. Philadelphia Methodist is closest to where the bomb went off, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Foster Stearns said while Flora was still forming the picture in her mind. He nodded to the policewoman. “Where’s the nearest telephone we can use?”

“Down that hallway, sir, on the left-hand side.” She pointed. She was more polite to him than she had been to Flora. With a wave of thanks, Stearns trotted off.

Along with the other committee members, Flora followed him. Maybe there would be more than one telephone, so they could call several hospitals at once. And even if there weren’t, they would hear the news as soon as he got it.

He was already talking when Flora came up. “You do have casualties there?” he asked. “How many? Have any gone to other hospitals, too?” To the other Representatives and Senators, he said, “At least a couple of dozen. It’s a bad one.” He spoke into the handset again: “Is Senator Taft there?…He is? How is he? This is Congressman Stearns. I’m on a committee with him.” He waited. Someone spoke into his ear. Flora knew the answer right away-he looked as if the person on the other end of the line had punched him in the stomach. “Thank you, Miss.” He hung up the telephone like a man moving in the grip of a bad dream.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Flora said.

“He is.” Stearns nodded dazedly. “Massive internal injuries, she said. They did everything they could, but…” He spread his hands.

“Do they know who the bomber was?” Two or three people asked the same question.

Now Stearns shook his head. “Only pieces left. The woman at the hospital said it was a man. Maybe what he’s got in his pockets will tell them more-or maybe it won’t.”

Something flashed through Flora’s mind. A story she’d read to Joshua, back when he cared about stories and not Springfields. “Pocketses,” she muttered, but the memory wouldn’t take any more shape than that. “Whoever did it, he hurt us when he did. Robert was a good friend to his friends, and a bad enemy to his enemies.”

“He was a stiff-necked old grouch,” she heard one of her fellow Socialists whisper to another.

That was also true; no one who’d ever had much to do with Robert Taft would or could deny it. Taft had no patience for people who didn’t measure up to his own stern notions of rectitude. Despite wide political differences, he and Flora had got on well for years. Beyond any doubt, that said something about her. They made odd friends, the austere Ohio aristocrat and the New York garment worker’s daughter, odd but good.

And now they didn’t. I’ll have to go to the funeral, she thought. She had a black dress that was getting too much wear these days. Part of that was the war’s fault, part her own for reaching her fifties. No matter how often you told them not to, people kept dying on you.

“I think,” Congressman Stearns said, “we’d better go back and let some unhappy Army officers know we’re adjourning.”

Going on the way Taft wanted would have meant convening the committee and raking those bungling officers over the coals. Flora was sure of that. She was just as sure she had no more heart for it than her colleagues did.

Two of the officers-a brigadier general and a colonel-were in the conference room when the committee members returned. “Good God!” the colonel exclaimed when he heard the news. “He was a son of a bitch-everybody knew that-but he was our son of a bitch, and everybody knew that, too.”

His words more pungently echoed Flora’s. She kept feeling at the hole losing Robert Taft left in her spirit. It seemed as real, and as painful, as the hole from a lost tooth in her mouth. The dentist gave her codeine after doing his worst to her. There was no codeine for a hole in the spirit. It would have to hurt till time turned it from an open, bleeding wound to a scar.