Harry Calabash said quietly, “I do detest a bully.” Sam said nothing—just watched the Red Shirts move down the wharf like a gang of schoolyard toughs out for mischief. “Well, let’s go get you started.”

Sam hesitated, then asked, “Do you think I might get away for lunch? I promised my cousin I’d meet him and get reacquainted. It’s been years.”

“Who’s your cousin?”

“Hugh MacRae.”

For the first time since Sam had met him, Calabash looked nonplussed. “Tom didn’t tell me that.”

“You know him?”

“He’s only one of the three richest men in town. Put him on your list, too—right at the top. Where are you meeting him?”

“A place called the Cape Fear Club.”

Calabash laughed, and then his laughter dissolved into a fit of coughing. “Joke’s on me. Come on, let’s check in at the office. You’ll need your coat. Then I’ll walk you over there.” He got up from the table with difficulty, then stamped his left foot on the floor a couple of times, hard. “Leg stiffens up,” he explained. “Got to get some fresh blood into it.”

As they walked, the town was full of racket. Buildings were going up, shoehorned into alleys. Second and third stories were being added to old structures. Everywhere, workmen were hammering, sawing, slapping bricks onto mortar, stirring concrete in big, dented tubs. Sam took it all in. Something was strange about the scene, though, and all at once he realized what it was: from hod carrier to foreman, all the tradesmen were black.

On the way back up Market Street, thick with the traffic of drays, carriages, and freight wagons, Sam spotted Colonel Waddell strutting along the opposite sidewalk. He waved and called out, but the street was too noisy. The wagons crunched over the loose oyster-shell paving and stirred up a constant cloud of lime dust. Calabash held his handkerchief over his nose but hacked relentlessly anyway.

Another man, dressed in a black suit despite the heat, encountered Waddell from the other direction. The two stopped and conversed as pedestrians flowed around them.

Calabash pointed a crooked finger. “That man is a vector of ambition.”

“The Colonel? But you said—”

“George Rountree—he already made the list. Vice president of the club that’s serving you lunch today.”

George Rountree had been avoiding Waddell for weeks. Waddell was a fossil, but canny and potentially troublesome. He had a way of getting into everybody’s business and taking a piece of it.

“Morning, Colonel. Too hot to be walking.”

Waddell took his arm. Rountree was a large man, powerfully built, his middle already running to fat though he was barely into his forties. Waddell steered him against a lamppost. “Mr. Rountree, I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

“My office?”

“Too hot. The club?”