The hour was indecent again—the kind that makes the world sound hollow. Same lobby, same hum. I’d promised myself I’d never meet him twice, but ghosts don’t honor boundaries; they find a crack in your resolve and call it a doorway. Roy Cohn was already sitting there. No announcement, no chill, just presence. He looked freshly dead, which was impressive after forty years. “Don’t act surprised,” he said. “You people keep invoking me. Every time someone shouts down a fact or sneers at empathy, I get the call.” He smiled the way a courtroom smiles after a conviction. “I told you,” he said, “I don’t haunt places. I haunt behavior.” Cohn and Joseph McCarthy He began as a prodigy of menace. At twenty-three, Cohn helped prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. Evidence was thin, but spectacle was thick, and he made sure the execution went forward. Two dead parents were résumé material in 1950s Washington. The Justice Department noticed his appetite for intimidation, and Senator Jose...