“He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing.

Plausible deniability.”