First Adventure, The Case of the Missing Merchant, Session 010
Honest Work
This is an emergent narrative; this story is the retrospective recounting of a TTRPG Session that involved emergent play in an open world.
Opening Narration
There are two classes of work in this world: the kind a man is pleased to describe to his neighbors, and the kind he wishes would not make quite so much noise. A good carpenter may take the front door off its hinges in broad daylight, charge the householder for the labor, and receive a glass of something restorative for his trouble. Let him perform the very same operation at eleven o’clock at night, without first obtaining the householder’s blessing, and the public is apt to call him a burglar. The hinges, I have observed, remain perfectly indifferent to this distinction. So does the door. It is the hour of the undertaking, and the opinion of the man who owns the premises, that determine whether the job is a trade or a felony.
Now, I am not disposed to quarrel with the law on this point. A society in which gentlemen might freely dismantle each other’s houses would soon have very few doors worth knocking upon. But the law has a fondness for the finished appearance of a thing, and an aversion to inspecting what must be done before it comes out looking proper. A prosperous banker may receive a gold coin with the dignity of a bishop; the fellow who carried it across the river without asking inconvenient questions is liable to receive a prison sentence. A merchant signs the manifest, a captain signs the receipt, and somewhere in the middle a hard-working sinner is expected to make the arithmetic agree with the cargo. It is a splendidly organized arrangement, particularly for the man who owns the pen.
The war gave this country a most thorough education in such distinctions. Men who had once been prosecuted for taking another person’s property were given uniforms, a horse, and a government order, and thereafter performed their acquisitions under the respectable title of requisition. Others put their courage to work sneaking past sentries, cutting telegraph wires, or carrying messages through occupied country; they were pronounced heroes by one army and thieves by the other. Peace has not resolved the difference. It has merely exchanged the uniforms for broadcloth suits and permitted the same gentlemen to resume arguing the matter over coffee. The argument is more civil now, but it still depends chiefly upon who signs the warrant.
New Orleans, of course, is full of industrious men who do not trouble themselves about these refinements. A watchman may take his duty so seriously that he keeps the cleanest gate in Louisiana, though the fellow standing on the other side has already made off with half the establishment. A captain may account for every gallon of coal and every foot of damaged iron, while declining to remember precisely what occupied the hold on the last voyage. A detective may spend the morning drawing conclusions from a paper ledger and the evening exploring a different method of obtaining the same facts. All are working men, and each would be offended if you suggested his labor was anything less than honest. That is the pleasant thing about an honest livelihood: nearly everyone has one, once he has been allowed to define the words.
There is, however, an especially difficult case for the moral philosopher. Suppose a man removes a locked box from another man’s possession. He carries it away, hires a professional to open it, and examines the contents with great care. This appears, by any ordinary measure, to be theft, followed by a second offense for the benefit of the first. But suppose he neither spends the money nor keeps the papers. Suppose, indeed, he takes extraordinary pains to put everything back exactly where it was found, and regards the whole enterprise as a failure if the owner ever discovers that the box was missing. I confess the statutes have a harder time with such a fellow than the common footpad. A thief generally knows what he wants. This sort of gentleman is interested only in what he can learn, and regards the stealing as a regrettable expense of getting an education.
It was Sunday night, the fourth of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-six, and the Mississippi lay dark beneath a thin winter chill. The churches had finished instructing their congregations in the duties of righteousness. Across the river at Algiers, a damaged screw steamer sat high and immobile in her dry dock, waiting for the repairmen and the insurance companies to decide which party ought to pay for her misfortunes. Her captain had found a more agreeable way of passing the evening. Three other gentlemen, working under a rather different understanding of maritime commerce, were preparing to put in a late shift. It would be honest work, or at any rate very hard work, and there is a portion of the public which has never learned to tell the difference.
After Dusk, Sunday, February 4, 1866 – The Dinner Hour (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
A wounded ship ordinarily offers a sorry appearance by daylight, but there is something positively unnatural about one sitting in a dry dock after dark. The SS Wilmington Lady rested above the exposed earth of McLellan’s basin at Algiers Point, her iron-strapped wooden hull showing the scars that had given Captain Phineas Atwood such an urgent interest in an insurance settlement. Wooden staging climbed around her flanks. The screw and stern works lay where men could get at them, and the smells of wet timber, tar, oil, and river mud lingered in the cold air. Beyond the dock, the Mississippi continued the business of carrying vessels up and down the country, quite indifferent to the stranded steamer’s troubles.
Lars Prittwitz and Caleb Grayson had already seen as much of the Wilmington Lady as Captain Atwood had been prepared to show them. They had inspected damaged machinery, noticed cargo arrangements that failed to suit the ship’s declared trade, and found concealed spaces that no ordinary shipment of cloth required. Their borrowed maritime expertise, supplied by ‘Jumping’ Jack Fossier, had given them reason to doubt that the vessel’s injuries came from the storm the captain described. None of it yet settled what had actually been moved through those compartments. The official survey had reached its limit; the questions had not.
Their first concern was Atwood himself. They watched long enough to confirm that the captain was observing his customary habit. His stout figure departed the dock, made his way toward the ferry, and crossed the Mississippi to take dinner in New Orleans. That departure mattered more than any part of his insurance claim. A captain at supper was a captain who could not presently open his own cabin door and demand to know why strangers were inside it.
Jack had consented to another evening’s employment for additional money. He arrived as the same broad, red-headed, weather-beaten character who had hauled himself out of a hangover for their inspection earlier in the day. His experience on Union ironclads had proved useful; his experience in the sporting fraternity, particularly in the more physical branches of that calling, made him no less useful now. He took the work with the genial practicality of a man who recognized that a peculiar errand paid just as well as an ordinary one.
“You were willing enough to inspect her in sunlight,” Jack observed, regarding the darkened vessel. “I suppose a look by night might improve a fellow’s understanding.”
“It may tell us what the captain would rather keep to himself,” Lars answered.
They did not approach through the dock’s ordinary gate. A neighboring salvage yard offered a less conspicuous way toward the Wilmington Lady, provided one could manage the disorder of discarded timber, scrap metal, broken tackle, and other maritime remains. The three men worked their way through the clutter and reached the dry-dock area without attracting attention. It was an unglamorous entrance for a professional investigation, but an admirably effective one.
Sunday Night – A Watchman and His Supper (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
They had expected the dock to be guarded, and it was. One of the watchmen seemed to possess an almost religious devotion to tidy arrangements. The neatness of his station advertised a man who could spot a misplaced tool or a careless smear of grease more readily than most of his contemporaries could locate their own hats. It might have been an admirable trait in a clerk, or in a housekeeper. On a working waterfront, surrounded by the materials of a ship under repair, it gave the gentleman a nearly inexhaustible supply of reasons to be offended.
As Lars, Caleb, and Jack moved farther inside the yard, the watchman’s attention became fixed upon an entirely different disaster. He had managed to spill his supper over himself. What followed was a small domestic calamity of the sort that occupies a great deal of a man’s dignity and very little of anyone else’s concern. He attempted to put his clothing in order, but the more he worked at the stains the more aggravating the whole business became. His increasingly irritated efforts failed to restore the immaculate condition he demanded of his person.
At last the watchman abandoned the problem, and with it his post. He left the dock to go home and change his clothes.
The three intruders had arranged none of this. They had not lured him away, bribed him, or laid an ingenious trap involving a plate of food. A man who could not bear the indignity of a spoiled dinner had simply removed himself from duty at a most convenient moment. The dock did not thereby become empty, but one pair of troublesome eyes was gone. The investigators took the opening for what it was worth and continued toward the vessel.
Sunday Night – The Ship’s Own Watch (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
The Wilmington Lady was not entirely deserted while her master ate across the river. A sailor still kept watch upon the main deck, moving through a world of hatch coamings, winches, coiled line, and the black, familiar shapes of a vessel that had ceased to be a home only because it was presently unable to move. The intruders had to reach the captain’s quarters at the stern without inviting an explanation from him.
They advanced in measured stages, watching the sailor’s movements before committing themselves to each exposed stretch. The steady noises of the riverfront and the faint complaint of timbers underfoot seemed remarkably loud whenever one of the men paused. Jack’s familiarity with deck arrangements helped them keep their bearings. Caleb’s heavy frame and iron-shod boots, which could announce his arrival splendidly in a fighting ring, were managed with rather greater discretion here.
They reached the captain’s cabin unseen. The door proved to be locked.
“Neither of you has a pick?” Caleb asked quietly.
Neither had. Jack, for all his useful experience aboard a fighting vessel, had not brought the particular accomplishments of a locksmith to the expedition. The locked door presented a simple problem with no simple instrument at hand. They might abandon the attempt, make enough noise to awaken every sailor aboard, or discover some other way of entering a cabin without appearing to have entered it.
It was then that the investigators turned their attention from the lock to the hinges. A door could remain locked and still be persuaded to leave its frame; the trick was persuading it to do so without rattling like an empty coal scuttle. What followed occupied something approaching half an hour. The three men worked with improvised means, slow leverage, and an increasingly fine appreciation of how much a small piece of iron could complain when disturbed. They steadied the heavy timber, freed the necessary fittings, and finally eased the door away while its lock remained quite innocent of interference.
There was no triumphal entry. Every movement had to be undone before they left. The door was set aside so that it could be restored, and the three passed into Atwood’s quarters with the uncomfortable knowledge that the success of the entire evening might yet depend upon putting the thing back exactly as they had found it.
Sunday Night – Beneath the Floorboards (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
The captain’s cabin was somewhat more commodious than the narrow staterooms elsewhere in the deckhouse, though it remained a working sailor’s compartment. The ordinary objects of a master mariner’s life occupied the available space: a writing surface, storage for papers, navigational necessities, and the daily records of a ship that must account to agents, owners, harbor officers, and insurance men. Atwood’s position required him to preserve a great deal of documentation. The interesting question was which portion of it he chose to preserve where visitors might see.
Lars began with the materials that an ordinary surveyor might reasonably examine. The ship’s main logbook was available, and the men looked through it with care. Whatever irregularities might have occurred in the Wilmington Lady’s private business, the visible record supplied no immediate answer. They searched the cabin more thoroughly, looking for the sort of practical hiding place that a man entrusted with valuable cargo and large payments might prefer to a conspicuous safe.
It was Caleb who discovered the concealed floorboard. An edge, a fitting, or an arrangement that did not quite belong led his attention down to the timber beneath their feet. He worked at the concealed opening and exposed the space below.
Inside sat a heavy, waterproof strongbox, secured to its hiding place. It was no little cash tin that a clerk might tuck under one arm and forget. The box weighed approximately sixty pounds, and its maker had provided for two quite separate difficulties. A stout warded padlock held the box fast to the vessel. A fine combination mechanism protected the lid itself. Atwood had evidently preferred that a visitor be unable either to open the box or to take it somewhere more convenient for opening.
“There are two of them,” Lars said, examining the arrangement. “One keeps the box here. The other keeps us out of it.”
Their earlier experience with the cabin door had not produced a sudden mastery of lockpicking. Instead, Lars and Caleb attacked the fastening that secured the strongbox to the floor. It was work of a less delicate kind, requiring strength and the application of force where a locksmith would have preferred a key. At last the warded lock gave way. They preserved the broken piece rather than leave it as evidence beneath the floorboards.
The combination dial on the lid remained untouched. It was a different order of difficulty, and there was little sense in wrestling with a superior mechanism inside a ship where a sailor might at any moment decide to make his rounds. Lars and Caleb could carry the box to Carondelet Street, employ someone who actually possessed the required skills, record what the documents revealed, and put the whole thing back before Atwood knew his private effects had taken an excursion.
The plan required an extraordinary amount of confidence in their ability to undo a burglary. For the present, it required only two strong men and a clear route off the ship.
Later Sunday Night – Putting Things Back (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
The men settled the cabin as carefully as circumstances allowed. The concealed space was left behind, the ordinary papers restored to their places, and the displaced door returned to its hinges. This last work demanded the same patience as removing it. A door rehung carelessly might catch, sag, or show a mark bright enough to advertise the entire proceedings to its owner. They took pains to leave the entrance looking as it had when they found it.
Their burden made the journey out more difficult than the journey in. The strongbox was substantial enough to demand deliberate handling, and there was no disguising the fact that men emerging from a captain’s cabin with such an object were engaged in a business rather more interesting than measuring damaged winches. They moved across the main deck in stages, again avoiding the sailor’s attention while working toward a ladder that descended to the dry dock below.
For a time the cautious progress succeeded. They had reached the point where the yard, and an apparently clear retreat, seemed close enough to be counted upon. Then came a voice from the darkness.
“You there!”
A watchman had seen them and was approaching. The distance between the men and the dock was suddenly very short, and not nearly short enough. The strongbox weighed sixty pounds; it could not be slipped into a waistcoat pocket, dismissed as a surveying instrument, or made to resemble an ordinary sailor’s personal baggage. The explanation that had carried them aboard by day would not readily explain a locked iron box traveling out of the captain’s quarters at night.
They held their position long enough to consider their options. None of them offered much comfort. Then Jack leaned in close enough to speak without carrying his voice across the deck.
“Powder,” he whispered.
It was a word from the wrestling ring, where a man who has had enough of the contest contrives to leave it, and where the business of getting something out of the ring may become the whole of the strategy. Caleb understood the cue. There was no time to discuss a second scheme.
Before the approaching watchman could obtain a clear view of their burden, the men heaved the strongbox over the rail. For a moment it seemed to hang in the black air below the ship’s side. Then it struck the ground of the dry dock with a heavy impact that might, on another evening, have been ruinous. The Wilmington Lady was out of the water. Their prize had fallen upon earth, not into the Mississippi. The iron box survived the descent intact.
The watchman approached men who were no longer carrying a safe. This was an important alteration to the situation, though it did nothing by itself to explain their presence. Jack took the lead before the fellow had settled upon an accusation.
“We came back to finish the insurance measurements,” Jack said, with the aggrieved assurance of a man whose work had been interrupted. “There were figures we wanted to put right before the claim goes forward.”
“At this hour?” the watchman demanded.
“The captain wants the settlement expedited,” Lars answered, lending his professional authority to the story. “We have been aboard with his permission. He can confirm the survey himself. A proper report requires the proper figures.”
Jack supplied the easy practical detail of a sailor discussing ship’s work; Lars supplied the businesslike manner of an adjuster answerable to the men who paid the claims. Together they made an inconvenient late visit sound like an earnest effort to relieve the shipowner of an even more inconvenient delay. The watchman accepted the explanation. He had seen the men, but he had not seen the box. He allowed them to pass.
Only after they were safely below did the investigators recover what they had thrown down. A cluttered neighboring yard supplied a piece of canvas, which they took and draped over the strongbox. The cover gave the heavy iron object the anonymous appearance of any large, awkward parcel being carried by men who might be moving ship’s stores. It remained an uncomfortable burden, but at least it no longer advertised the nature of its contents to every passing eye.
Late Sunday Night – The Returning Captain (Lars, Caleb, Jack Fossier)
They made their way toward the ferry, bearing the covered box between them. The great river could be crossed at this point only by joining the ordinary traffic of people and goods that moved between Algiers and the New Orleans bank. A man might carry a respectable parcel aboard without drawing questions. Whether he could carry a very heavy, very secret parcel past the person who owned it was another matter.
They spotted Captain Atwood as he came ashore on the Algiers side, returning from his customary dinner in the city. The evening had delivered the investigators the benefit of his absence, but it now threatened to bring him into their path at precisely the wrong moment. The captain needed only a glance at the familiar faces of his morning visitors, or a question about the canvas-wrapped load, to make the business difficult beyond ordinary explanation.
Lars, Caleb, and Jack slipped into a nearby alley and kept their burden out of sight while Atwood passed. The captain continued on toward the dock without noticing them. Only then did they resume their route, join the ferry traffic, and carry their stolen property back across the Mississippi.
Once they reached New Orleans, Jack took his leave. He had been well compensated for the work, and his approval of his employers had survived both the danger and the exertion. The extraordinary nature of their errands appealed to him; so did the money. For the moment, however, he wanted a rest from excitement.
“You fellows know how to make a night of it,” Jack told them. “Give me a little breathing room. After that, if there’s pay and something worth doing, you know where to find me.”
It was a friendly departure, not a severing of acquaintance. Jack remained a man they could seek out again should they require maritime knowledge or the practical assistance of a former ironclad sailor. For now, the two investigators were left with a sixty-pound strongbox, a broken fastening, and the necessity of transporting both up to the third floor of Lars’s office.
Late Sunday Night – A Professional Man (Lars, Caleb, Jeremiah Hanning)
The polished front of No. 18 Carondelet Street gave no indication that the offices of the Insurance Company of North America had acquired a remarkable new piece of maritime evidence. Lars and Caleb carried the covered box upstairs to the third floor, where the quiet of the building afforded them a place to work without a deck watchman, a suspicious captain, or an entire dry-dock yard listening at the walls.
Atwood’s combination lock remained quite as stubborn in an insurance office as it had been aboard the ship. Lars had neither the necessary instruments nor the skill to open it by force without risking what lay within. He sent an emergency message through the Pinkerton cipher arrangements asking for a man who could open a combination strongbox. The request was urgent, but it required a particular sort of talent, and there was nothing for the investigators to do but keep the box secure and wait.
Approximately two hours later, Jeremiah ‘Jem’ Hanning arrived. He was a tall, slightly stooped Southerner in a faded but carefully tailored brown sack suit, with a sun-worn, sallow face and pale eyes that showed little excitement at the work awaiting him. His fingers were long and sensitive, marked by the faint traces of machine oil and graphite. His manner was deliberate to the point of ceremony. He belonged to that class of craftsman whose trade becomes easier when he speaks less about it.
Hanning was known as an exceptionally accomplished keysman and safecracker, a criminal by profession whose reputation rested upon the quiet handling of difficult locks. Lars and Caleb had asked for a specialist; the specialist had appeared. He examined the combination mechanism as a clockmaker might examine an unfamiliar movement, not with reverence but with the calm respect owed a piece of careful engineering.
“You want it opened, gentlemen?” he asked in a thin, unhurried drawl.
“Without damage to the contents,” Lars replied.
Hanning settled himself beside the box. He worked slowly, listening, feeling, and making adjustments so small that to an impatient spectator they might scarcely have qualified as movement. He used the quiet of the room like another instrument. When his hands paused, neither detective interrupted him. Once or twice his head inclined toward the dial, as though the metal were confiding a private observation that he wished not to miss.
Close upon an hour passed in this way. At length there came a small, distinct click. The lid yielded just enough to show that its resistance had ended. Hanning stopped immediately. He had not opened it to satisfy his curiosity, and he did not attempt to inspect the contents.
“There,” he said, easing back. “Don’t close that lid again if you know what’s good for you. My part’s done.”
Lars offered to pay him. The keysman declined with perfect composure. His fee, he explained, had already been taken care of. Nor did the man’s manner invite further discussion of financial arrangements. He collected his tools and departed into the dark, leaving Lars and Caleb in possession of a strongbox that could now be examined but was not to be shut and relocked.
The practical difficulty of returning an open safe to a hiding place where its absence must never be noticed remained unresolved. For the moment, it was enough that the contents were accessible.
After Midnight, Monday, February 5, 1866 – The Other Logbook (Lars, Caleb)
The ordinary ship’s log aboard the Wilmington Lady had been of little use to the investigators. The volume now lying in Atwood’s strongbox was a different sort of record altogether. It was a private log, accompanied by receipts, correspondence, and papers that the captain evidently preferred not to leave within reach of visiting adjusters. Alongside them lay French gold in a quantity that would have impressed even a man more accustomed to commercial fortunes than Lars Prittwitz.
Lars and Caleb began by taking an exact inventory of what they could see. There were receipts drawn upon L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant, earlier payments that had risen over time—amounts of $5,750 and, later, $6,500 appearing among the papers. There was also a more recent payment corresponding to the gold now before them. The coins were French twenty-franc Napoleons, the money amounting to approximately seven thousand dollars in American value. It was not a casual petty-cash reserve, nor was it in any sense a shipment of textiles.
The private logbook reached back into 1864. It showed voyages to Mexican waters that the more ordinary records had no reason to advertise: secluded coves, strange places of discharge, and movements far less consistent with innocent coastal commerce than the ship’s official account suggested. For Lars, whose investigation had begun among suspicious warehouse weights and questionable manifests, the entries supplied a much more substantial line of documentary evidence.
One entry bore the date of September 27, 1865. It placed Adrien-Luc de Saint-Cyran himself aboard the Wilmington Lady as supercargo on a run to a cove south of Veracruz. At that landing he had met a French colonel identified as Valogne, whom the log also called ‘Marc.’ Here, among the dry observations of a merchant captain, was a direct connection between the missing Frenchman and the vessel’s concealed operations in Mexico.
“September twenty-seventh,” Lars said, looking again at the date. “The man we’re looking for was aboard her.”
“And meeting a French officer,” Caleb answered.
Other pages carried the story forward. On January 5, 1866, Atwood noted a complete reorganization and a forthcoming voyage to a new destination. The January 13 entry named Cabo Rojo, described a new supercargo whom Atwood had not seen before in two years of such work, and recorded the sandbar damage that the captain intended to charge to his French employers in full. The January 31 notes concerned loading for another run to the same destination, expected on Mardi Gras night. That was future business, not a voyage already undertaken.
The correspondence and payment papers reinforced the significance of the record without answering every question it raised. The names, dates, rendezvous, and sums could be copied, compared, and carried to men who had the authority to act upon them. Yet the original documents were more dangerous as missing property than as evidence in the detectives’ pockets. If Atwood opened his hiding place and found the box gone, the captain might have no difficulty deciding that someone had discovered his private trade. Whoever depended upon the Wilmington Lady could then vanish before the investigators identified the full operation.
Lars and Caleb worked with the patience the circumstances required. They took notes of the entries and examined the remaining private papers without removing any original. There was no temptation acted upon to pocket a Napoleon, no decision to preserve a letter as a souvenir, and no attempt to lighten the box of anything that might betray a change. Their purpose was to learn from the evidence and return it intact.
The contrast was extraordinary. The men had spent hours and considerable ingenuity taking the box from a ship where it did not belong in their hands. They now spent further hours making certain that not one of its contents would remain with them.
Early Monday Morning – As They Found It (Lars, Caleb)
It was not enough to have read the hidden logbook. The men had to undo the physical evidence of their visit as far as their present circumstances allowed. They replaced the correspondence, receipts, and private papers in the arrangement in which they had found them, and settled the French gold back among the contents. The combination lid remained unlocked in accordance with Hanning’s warning. Caleb placed the broken securing padlock on top of the strongbox, keeping the damaged piece with the property rather than discarding it.
They had thus restored the contents of Atwood’s safe without restoring the safe itself. That last and most difficult part of the undertaking would have to follow. The strongbox still rested on the third floor of Lars’s Carondelet Street premises, not beneath the floorboards of the captain’s cabin at Algiers. Until it was returned, its absence remained capable of overturning everything the detectives had accomplished.
“We cannot have him find it missing,” Lars said. “If the men behind this learn what we’ve seen, they’ll be gone before we can bring them to account.”
What they possessed was a record, not a captured smuggling ring. They had uncovered the relation between Adrien-Luc and a covert commercial route through Mexico; they had learned the ship’s next intended destination and had seen how substantial the payments were. But none of that knowledge would prevent Atwood from changing his plans if he had reason to believe his secrets had been read. The investigators’ caution was therefore no contradiction of the night’s audacity. It was the point of it.
After some three hours of reading, recording, and restoring the contents, their work was complete for the moment. Their next step required someone beyond the room.
Approximately 1:00–3:00 AM, Monday, February 5, 1866 – The Last Messenger (Lars)
The hour had advanced well beyond midnight. The lamps in No. 18 Carondelet Street had burned through a long night of illicit industry, and the hidden cargo of knowledge sat inside the strongbox with its broken fastening laid across the lid. Upstairs, Caleb remained with the evidence while Lars stepped out into a city that had not entirely ceased moving even at this hour.
A messenger was not so easy to come by in the dead of night as he was at the noon rush. Lars looked for several minutes before finding a street boy still abroad. He gave the youngster ten dollars, a sum sufficiently persuasive to ensure that the errand would not be mistaken for an ordinary request to deliver tomorrow’s correspondence. The message was an urgent cipher addressed through the Pinkerton arrangements to Henry Allworth, the chief operative in New Orleans.
Its immediate demand was simple: Lars required a meeting with Allworth at half past seven that very morning. The evidence obtained aboard the Wilmington Lady had become too important to remain a private matter between an insurance adjuster and his former corporal. By the time an ordinary office opened for business, a good portion of the night might already have been lost, and the captain’s secrets were still in the wrong building.
The boy departed with the message. Lars had sent for the authority and assistance he needed, but neither Allworth’s response nor the meeting itself belonged to the night’s completed business. The strongbox had not yet been returned across the river. They had left Atwood with no obvious sign of its absence, but concealment could last only until the hiding place was examined. For all the extraordinary effort already expended, the hardest part of making the theft disappear might still be ahead.
Thus ended their evening’s honest work: a door removed and replaced, a stolen safe spirited over the Mississippi, a professional criminal engaged to open it, and seven thousand dollars in French gold carefully restored to its original arrangement inside the still-stolen strongbox. They had taken only the facts, and even those were going to require careful handling. In a city where respectable commerce and private crime frequently occupied the same account book, it was perhaps the most difficult kind of job a man could undertake—one in which success depended upon leaving no one the wiser.