Freeman sometimes ate there as often as four times a week, after which he’d walk up the flight of stairs to his own spacious one-bedroom flat. Last night, he’d had dinner there with a forty-year-old female attorney named Gina Roake. They’d shared an extraordinary bottle of Romanée-Conti, talked law and politics, law and the theater, law and the recently concluded football season. After dinner, Gina had asked if David would mind her staying over, and he said he thought that would be very nice.Now, just after dawn, Freeman was whistling tunelessly, puttering about his cluttered kitchen in an ancient and threadbare maroon bathrobe and his lounging slippers. Normally, his battered and pitted kitchen table sagged with documents, law books and files on his cases, but this morning he’d cleared all that away, covered the wood with a white linen tablecloth and laid out a formal coffee service—sugar, cream, butter, jams and jellies, and a still-warm and crusty morning baguette from the Rue Charmaine’s morning delivery.Freeman paused and smiled appreciatively as the strains of Mahler’s Fifth began to emanate from his living room at a barely audible volume.
