She could see a remoteness in his eyes, almost an emptiness. She had thought at first glance that they were hazel-colored, but they were actually that rarest of colors, amber. They looked golden in the smoky light of the eatery. But they did not glow like gold. They were opaque like copper. If, as she suspected, John Claggart was a man who harbored secrets, his eyes would never give them up. But whatever secrets he harbored, she did not care. She did not need warmth.

“I know a way,” she said, “to knock them flat.”

•   •   •

ISAAC BELL searched for Mary Higgins at the Tombs, the damp and gloomy city prison, still under construction, where the police had booked nearly a hundred women. He had last seen her half a block away in a crush of cops and boycotters, but before he fought his way to the spot she had vanished. A telephone call to the Cadillac Hotel had produced a messenger with a letter of introduction signed by Joseph Van Dorn. The Boss had already made enough friends in New York to get special treatment—as did Mary’s Irish name. But it didn’t help. The Halls of Justice had no record of a Mary Higgins being arrested.

“You might check the Emergency Hospital for Women on East Twenty-sixth,” said a sympathetic sergeant. “God forbid Miss Higgins may have fallen in the melee. Those Hebrew women are ferocious.”

“No hospitals closer?”

“Brooklyn?”

It was raining hard when he stepped out, and he stood sheltered under the portico while he looked for a horse cab or a streetcar. He spotted a cab and ran for it. A workman in a loose-fitting coat and slouch hat got to it first. A dirty bandage masked his nose and cheeks, and folds of a red neckerchief muffled his chin.

“Take it,” said Bell. Blood had soaked the bandage, and he guessed the poor devil had been caught in the riot.

“No, you take it,” the man said and turned away.

Bell had glimpsed the eyes under the brim of the hat, and his dream in the coal mine was suddenly as real as the rain pelting down. The man glanced back and headed around the corner. Bell hurried after him.

“Wait!”

The man walked faster.

“Wait. You, sir!”

Bell broke into a run.

The man he was following darted to the demolition site where the thick granite walls of the old Tombs were being leveled and slipped between two remaining columns. Maybe he had been injured working on the demolition, thought Bell.

“Hold on, there!”

The man looked back again. When he saw Bell still following, he ran down an exposed flight of stairs. Bell followed him, deep down, into an enormous cellar that reeked of decay. The little light there came from holes in the ceiling.

The man stopped suddenly.

“Are you following me?”