Taylor paid them in cash, but made a notation in his ledger so the committee could reimburse him later. When they had gone, he downed his brandy in one quick gulp, then poured another for sipping. So they meant to tear this town apart. They meant to tear down the old order. Well, there would be order. He and Hugh would see to that. It began with the list of names copied in a neat hand, running down the page in two precise rows.

Rountree met the Pinkertons at his office in the Allen Building rather than at his home. He disliked letting business intrude on his family life. A gentleman kept things where they belonged—to maintain perspective.

He checked his railroad watch—nearly one. They were late. He couldn’t abide lateness. Passion and time were all a man had in life. With a careful calendar, he could do his life’s work three times over.

And why in the world did they insist on these midnight rendezvous? My God, he’d bought a Gatling gun in broad daylight. Surely, their secrets weren’t so dangerous. Must be their training, he reflected. Their instinctive distrust of daylight. Their love of shadows, secrecy, masquerade.

He heard them talking loudly in the hall, then watched their shadows bloom through the frosted glass of his door. “It’s open,” he said.

Two white men entered, both in soft clothes, wearing caps. With their rough faces and square hands, their clodhopper brogans and soiled corduroys, they had been passing for laborers in Brooklyn all week. Smith and Brown.

“You’re late.”

Brown said, “Fellow can get lost in these streets.”

“Never mind.” It wasn’t worth the trouble to upbraid police agents. They ran on their own clock. In any case, they’d come with reliable references from a judge he knew in Chicago. They’d give him the straight story.

Smith opened a notebook. Rountree wondered how he kept it so crisp and clean under the circumstances. The agent pulled out a miraculously sharp pencil, licked the point, then licked his thumb and flipped through the pages, occasionally checking off some item.

“Well?”

Smith smiled sardonically. The agents were still standing, as if to announce that this wouldn’t take long. Smith said, “We’ve been high and low, Mr. Rountree. We’ve been in the mills, under porches, inside the churches.”

How had they managed that? Blackface, like in the minstrel shows?

Brown said, “We’ve bought a round of drinks in every tavern between here and Virginia.” Rountree said, “Get to the point.”

Smith shrugged and closed his notebook, as if disappointed not to be able to recite dates and times and places and names. “Point is, you’ve wasted a little money. And we’ve wasted a good deal of time.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning there’s no uprising. There’s not fifteen guns in all of Brooklyn.”