The snow hadn’t been plowed, even on some of the main streets, and downtown had the desolate look of Ice Station Zebra. The bureau was empty, except for Bob Marcus and a few diehards. Everyone else who could get away with it had taken a snow day. I spent an hour tidying up my Abelard files and then began thinking about what to do next. I was still thinking when I heard the phone ring, and the now familiar voice: “Hello, commendatore. This is your humble servant, Brother John of Ragusa. I have returned to your snowbound capital and I want to talk.”

The Brother John pseudonym was the same one he had used in the letter that contained the original tip about Senator Abelard. It bothered me. “Before we go any further,” I said, “who is Brother John of Ragusa?”

“I’m disappointed in you, dear boy. That was a little puzzle for you. I hoped you’d solve it yourself. Brother John was a Venetian courtier whose specialty was assassination. In the year 1513, he sent a letter to the Council of Ten offering to murder various rivals and enemies of the Venetian state. He proposed a sliding scale of payments—five hundred ducats to kill the Ottoman sultan, one hundred fifty ducats for the king of Spain, one hundred ducats for the pope.”

“That isn’t funny,” I said. “It’s in very bad taste, as a matter of fact. What does Brother John want now, after he’s done with Senator Abelard?”

“Brother John wants a job. But for tonight, he’ll settle for dinner.” He proposed that we meet for dinner that night at his favorite restaurant, a place on Seventh Street called Ruppert’s. He was already memorializing himself. I reminded him that there was a foot of snow outside, but he cut me off. Ruppert’s was open, and he had made a reservation under the name B. J. Ragusa. Despite my stated unhappiness with being a reporter, I couldn’t say no.

15

15

Ruppert’s Real Restaurant—that was indeed its name—was on the edge of the black belt of poverty that girdled official Washington. I approached the restaurant warily, as if I were crossing a fault line. Across the street was the city’s makeshift shelter for homeless women, housed in some derelict trailers. A few blocks west was an open-air drug market. Looking north up Seventh Street, you could still see the burned-out façades of buildings that had been torched during the riots that swept the city in 1968, after Martin Luther King was shot, and never rebuilt. That night everything was covered in soft white flakes of snow.