She lifted the blade above Alice’s hand and brought it down hard and fast. The girl screamed. The knife blade buried itself in the counter so close between Alice’s first and second fingers it drew blood from the vee of the webbing.

“Oh, my god!” Alice sobbed. “Oh, my god!”

Charlie let her go, and she slid to the floor in a spent jumble of limbs. Crouching down beside her, Charlie showed her the knife, the very tip crimson with her own blood.

“Alice,” she said softly, “if I were to give you this knife now what would you do with it?”

The girl looked up at her out of red-rimmed eyes. A nerve in her cheek was spasming uncontrollably. “Nothing,” Alice said in a voice as tiny as one of Zhangyiyuan’s magnificent tea leaves. “Nothing.”

*   *   *

The Federalist Club occupied a handsome Florentine Renaissance building on the corner of I Street and 15th Street, NW. It was designed around the turn of the nineteenth century by the same firm that had designed St. Matthew’s Cathedral several blocks away near Connecticut Avenue.

Luther St. Vincent, addressed as Mr. Washington by his fellow Alchemists, was already seated in the clubby library when Albin White walked in. Groupings of high-backed chairs were scattered across the carpets at discreet distances from each other. A fire roared in the stone fireplace, as it almost always did, except during the insufferable summer months. An oval table at St. Vincent’s right hand held an old-fashioned glass of Scotch and a small jug of branch water.

“Good evening, Albin,” he said as White took a chair catty-corner to him.

“And to you, Luther.” White did not have to signal; a waiter made his presence known. White ordered a lager, and the waiter retired, after informing the gentlemen their table was ready any time they chose to move to the dining room.

The two men chatted amiably until the beer arrived, along with a bowl of mixed nuts. White looked around at the few occupied seatings. “When did they start letting women into the club?” he said, sipping his lager.

“That’s very funny, coming from you.”

White frowned. “I didn’t mean it to be funny.” He drank some more beer. “Did you ever wonder why there are no females in the Alchemists?”

“Frankly, Albin, I never thought about it.”

“What could we possibly get, Luther? A beast, who’d try to impose her will on us, or a looker who’d surely be as lily-livered as Adams and Jackson are proving to be.”

“I admit the looker might be distracting.”

White grunted. “Especially to someone like you.”

St. Vincent eyed the other for a moment. “A man like you, with your—what shall we say?—unorthodox tastes, has no business chiding me.”

White finished off his lager, licked his lips. “Well, this is going well, isn’t it?”