ARCHIE ABBOTT, WHOSE BLUE-BLOODED FAMILY HAD FORBADE him to become an actor, belonged to a club in Gramercy Park called The Players. The Players had been founded nineteen years earlier by the stage actor Edwin Booth, the finest Hamlet of the previous century and the brother of the man who had shot President Lincoln. Mark Twain and General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose famously destructive march through Georgia had hastened the end of the Civil War, had joined the effort. Booth had deeded over his own home, and celebrated architect Stanford White had transformed it into a clubhouse before he was shot to death in Madison Square Garden by steel heir Harry Thaw.

Bell and Abbott met for a quick supper downstairs in the Grill. It was their first meal since a breakfast gulped at dawn in a Jersey City saloon. They climbed a grand staircase for coffee before they headed uptown to Forty-fourth Street and Broadway to see the Follies of 1907.

Bell paused in the Reading Room to admire a full-length portrait of Edwin Booth. The artist's unmistakable style, a powerful mix of clear-eyed realism and romantic impressionism raised a tide of emotion in his heart.

"That was painted by a brother Player," Abbott remarked. "Rather good, isn't it?"

"John Singer Sargent," said Bell.

"Oh, of course you recognize his work," said Abbott. "Sargent painted that portrait of your mother that hangs in your father's drawing room in Boston."

"Just before she died," said Bell. "Though you would never know it looking at such a beautiful young woman." He smiled at the memory. "Sometimes I'd sit on the stair and talk to it. She looked impatient and I could tell she was saying to Sargent, 'Finish up, already, I'm getting bored holding this flower."'

"Frankly," Abbott joked, "I'd rather answer to a painting than my mother."

"Let's get going! I have to stop at the office and tell them where to find me." Like all Van Dorn offices in large cities, their headquarters in Times Square was open twenty-four hours a day.

Dressed in white tie and tails, opera capes and top hats, they hurried to Park Avenue, which they found jammed with hansom cabs, automobile taxicabs, and town cars creeping uptown. "We'll beat this mess on the subway."

The underground station at Twenty-third was ablaze in electric light and gleaming white tile. Passengers crowding the train platform ran the gamut from men and women out for the night to tradesmen, laborers, and housemaids traveling home. A speeding express train flickered through the station, windows packed with humanity, and Abbott boasted, "Our subways will make it possible for millions of New Yorkers to go to work in skyscrapers."

"Your subway," Bell observed drily, "will make it possible for criminals to rob a bank downtown and celebrate uptown before the cops arrive on the scene."