Sam smoked his cigar and flicked the ash. The cigar made him lightheaded.

“I know you’ve been thrust into the middle of something you don’t understand,” the Colonel said. “You want to do the right thing. I pegged you for a man of character the moment I first laid eyes on you.”

“What do you want from me?”

The Colonel gripped his arm, and Sam felt captured. “Help me. That’s all. Be one of us, not against us.”

“I’m not against you.” But he wasn’t sure. He wanted to remain passionately neutral.

Waddell stepped back and smiled, exhaling perfect wreaths of smoke. Sam had never been able to blow smoke rings. “You can do this thing, or you can do that thing, but you cannot do them both at once,” the Colonel said. He drew on his cigar, and the end glowed. “Dichotomy. Choice. A man is either with us, or he is against us. There is no middle ground.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.” Sam felt an irrational desire to justify himself to this man, to please him. He sounded so reasonable.

Waddell’s voice took on an avuncular tone. “You have been doing it all along—writing the truth.”

Is that what I’ve been writing, Sam wondered?

“But now, I want something more. I want your loyalty. I want to know I can count on you.” He clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder. Then, suddenly, he punched him lightly in the chest. “I want your heart.”

Sam didn’t speak. This was beyond politics now. It was a battle for souls. Maybe it had been that all along—the battle for the soul of this city. The particulars didn’t matter. Paving contracts, dockage rights, railroad bonds, sewer rights of way—these were just the word made flesh.

It came to him, sitting in a leather chair in the presence of a Confederate colonel, inhaling cognac and Cuban leaf: he was at last being invited inside the club.

“What are you going to do?”

“No one will get hurt, I give you my word.”

“Why do you need me?”

Waddell waved his cigar. “We don’t. It will all happen whether you are part of it or not.”

“What would I have to do?”

“Tell my story from the inside.”

So he wanted a biographer to make him famous. “Let me think about it.”

Waddell stubbed out his cigar. “Don’t think too long. Afterward, it will matter who was with us. Names will be remembered. Loyalties will be counted.”

Sam felt a chill. “I see.”

“An enterprising young man like yourself could go far. The opportunities in this city will be nearly boundless.”

Sam heard the back door open and close, heard the voices of the women.

Waddell gathered his speech in a neat sheaf and locked it in his top drawer. “I love the precision of rhetoric,” he said happily. “Parallel structure. Either, or. Every word accounted for.”

Mike Dowling was back in town.