Somewhere in the mesosphere of Washington, D.C., where the pale marble declines into the concrete prairie, you will find the newish and largish building where special counsel Robert Mueller is silently drilling down into Donald Trump's White House. Try to imagine the shhh of a combination lock turning on a secure filing cabinet in that anonymous building, the ghostly whisper of papers shuffling between manila folders, the steel roll-down gate ascending so Michael Flynn or Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen can emerge from the mouth of the underground parking garage, their souls now unburdened of incriminating secrets, having disclosed them in the windowless confessional of the special counsel's conference room where, The Washington Post reports, Mueller, a “sphinx-like presence,” does not ask any questions himself, instead sitting in the back and letting his staff work the cooperating witnesses over, like a card player who lets his confederates do the betting.

The fuse on Mueller's investigation has been quietly burning away for more than a year. Soon it will, as the dueling partisans tell it, either explode into another Civil War or fizzle away into nothing at all. In the meantime, we make do with whatever pieces of news slip out. From Mueller, we've seen sober legal filings implicating various members of Trump's team. From Trump, we've been subjected to a series of increasingly anguished tweets. He has claimed that Mueller's investigation is “illegal” and a “Witch Hunt.” Most recently, he forced the resignation of Jeff Sessions and reassigned oversight of the special counsel to a loyalist, Matthew Whitaker, setting up what is likely to be the final stretch of the whole affair.

Rather than punch back, Mueller has maintained his silence. Those who know him are not surprised. Robert Swan Mueller III, now 74 years old, has long been revered by elders of both political parties. He is a throwback to an earlier regime, when, the story goes, Ivy League patricians entered government for the sake of service, not self-enrichment.

“He's the perfect choice,” said Ken Starr, whose memoir, Contempt, looks back on his time investigating Bill Clinton. “I know him from observation to be a person of complete integrity.”

“He is smart, dedicated, patriotic, and self-effacing,” said General James Clapper, the former intelligence chief. “There is no straighter arrow.”

Mueller's differences with Trump are expressed in part by their respective styles: barrel cuffs (Mueller) versus French cuffs (Trump), Brooks versus Brioni, lace-ups versus loafers, button-down collars versus spread collars, muted foulard belt-length ties versus shiny red scotch-taped descenders. One man is aiming for quiet adherence to established norms. The other is trying to stun his prey.

John Miller, who reported to Mueller as an assistant director at the FBI and is now a deputy commissioner of the NYPD, described Mueller's wardrobe as being constructed “so that if you got out of bed at 5:18, knowing that you had to be at work at 6:18 in the morning, and you couldn't turn on the light because you couldn't wake anybody else up, it would never make any difference.” It is a kind of sartorial “no comment,” constructed of blue and gray suits, white shirts, quiet ties.

One day, Miller showed up for work at Robert Mueller's FBI wearing a pink shirt, French cuffs, and a gold watch. Mueller called him out in the morning meeting.

“John, John, John,” he said. “What are you supposed to be?”

“Sir, you told me that we dress like lawyers here.”

“Yes. But not like drug lawyers.”

One can only imagine Mueller's thinking when he introduced into evidence receipts for more than $1 million in clothing purchased by Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign manager. Among his acquisitions were $1,500 shirts, $1,000 ties, and jackets made from the skins of ostriches and pythons. Some of Manafort's finery was procured via funds transmitted overseas from a Cypriot shell corporation to the House of Bijan in Beverly Hills. We don't know what Mueller thought about all that because he speaks to us only in court, through the mouths of his deputies and their legal filings. There are no press conferences, no raging tweets, no reply to the president's whining. The quiet is also part of the uniform.