“Not at all,” Yamamoto replied smoothly while glancing about surreptitiously to see who on the crowded platform was watching them. Nobody he could see. His mind was racing. Had she tried to trick him into revealing gaps in his hastily acquired knowledge of art? Or had she made a genuine mistake? Thank the gods that he had known that Ashiyuki Utamaro had presided over a large printshop and had not been the monastic sort of artist who toiled alone with a few brushes, ink, and rice paper.

She was looking about as if desperate for an excuse to break away. “I’m afraid I must go,” she said. “I’m meeting a friend.”

Yamamoto tipped his boater. But she surprised him again. Instead of immediately fleeing, she extended her long, slender cotton-gloved hand, and said, “We’ve not been introduced. I enjoyed talking with you. I am Marion Morgan.”

Yamamoto bowed, thoroughly confused by her openness. Perhaps he was paranoid. “Yamamoto Kenta,” he said, shaking her hand. “At your service, Miss Morgan. If you ever visit the Smithsonian, please ask for me.”

“Oh, I will,” she said, and strolled away.

The puzzled Japanese spy watched Marion Morgan sail sleek as a cruiser through a billowing sea of flowered hats. Her course converged with that of a woman in a scarlet hat heaped with silk roses. Their brims angled left and right, forming an arch under which they touched cheeks.

Yamamoto felt his jaw go slack. He recognized the woman who greeted Marion Morgan as the mistress of a treacherous French Navy captain who would sell his own mother for a peek at the plans of a hydraulic gyro engine. He felt a strong urge to remove his boater and scratch his head. Was it coincidence that Marion Morgan knew Dominique Duvall? Or was the beautiful American spying for the perfidious French?

Before he could ponder further, he had to doff his boater to a beautiful lady dressed head to toe in black.

“May I offer my condolences?” he asked Dorothy Langner, whom he had met at the unveiling of the bronze tablet at the Washington Navy Yard shortly before he murdered her father.

A MASTER CARPENTER in blue-striped overalls served as Isaac Bell’s guide when he made his final inspection under the hull. They walked its length twice, up one side and down the other.

The last of the wooden shores bracing the ship had been removed, as had the poppets—the long timbers holding her bow and her stern. Where there had been a dense forest of lumber was a clear view alongside the cradle from front to back. All that remained leaning against the ship were temporary tumbler shores—heavy timbers designed to fall away as she began to slide down the flat rails, which were thickly greased with yellow tallow.