I finished his sentence. “Over two hundred years old. My God, Prescott, are you serious?”

“James Madison was our fourth president and the city of Washington, D.C., had just been founded a few years earlier.” He leaned back and crossed one slim leg over the other, reaching for his cane and playing with the engraved silver handle. “As to how Ian acquired the Madeira, I probably don’t need to tell you that he was a Prohibition bootlegger working with The Man in the Green Hat.”

That much I already knew: George Cassiday, an unemployed veteran from World War I, more famously known as The Man in the Green Hat, had literally set up shop in the U.S. Capitol, first in the Cannon House Office Building and later, after the police caught him, moving to the Russell Building on the Senate side, providing a steady supply of alcohol to members of Congress that went on for years. I’d heard stories that Ian worked with Cassiday, often carrying suitcases of booze directly to the offices of congressmen and senators. So while Congress was busy telling the rest of the country drinking was illegal and immoral, they were awash in the stuff themselves.

I nodded and Prescott went on. “What was less well known was that while Cassiday had his hideaway offices in the basement of these buildings, Ian knew all the secret places in the warren of passageways and underground tunnels that linked every House and Senate office building to the Capitol just like he knew the back of his hand.”

He set down the cane and picked up the decanter of Madeira, pouring some more into my glass before filling his own. “What happened was that Ian got scammed by a fellow who owed money to the Mob, promising to take a shipment of some top French vintages, all premier cru wines, off the guy’s hands. Ian paid him, the man vanished, and then Ian discovered the wine had been stored in a closed-off tunnel near a boiler room. Everything was undrinkable.”

“Except the Madeira?”

Prescott held up a finger. Not so fast.

“The Madeira had already been there,” he said. “Two cases of it. Twenty-four bottles. All nailed shut, never opened. Hidden in the recesses of that tunnel, but far enough from the boiler that it wasn’t destroyed the way the wine was. When Ian finally got a look at the bottles, the labels told him everything. The Madeira had been imported via Baltimore for a congressional ceremony to toast the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. President Madison was supposed to be there.”

I caught my breath. “Then those bottles would be quite valuable.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Indeed.”

“So who owned the Madeira? Not the guy who sold Ian the spoiled wine, apparently.”