Sublime

Unlike the professorial Declan, Ben Diamond looks vaguely menacing, with his shaved head and black leather jacket. It takes innate command presence to pull off a look like that at age seventy-three, but Ben still has it.

The black-folder, tip-of-the-spear gang doesn’t come to the meeting themselves. They send representatives I think of as gray folders—spook look, spook jargon, but stuck here at HQS when they’d rather be out in the field. Some of them tried and didn’t make the cut. Others are still training. The worst are the has-beens: former field officers cooling

As Burke said in describing his early years in Albany, “Murphy delegates to the point of anarchy.”7