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Outside his working hours, François spent the next three days observing the habits of the man he had identified and patiently gathering the bits of information that the city, and the man himself, left lying around like crumbs.
He did not content himself with simply walking behind him at a respectable distance and noting the streets he took. He recorded his stops, every interaction. He spoke with the shopkeepers of the neighborhood, but refrained from bribing them, fearing that word might reach his target and alert him.
François also spoke with his landlady, a thin woman with a piercing gaze and gray hair as dry as straw, pretending that he was looking for cheaper lodging. The meeting, though brief, proved fruitful.
His name was Arthur Morton, thirty-eight years old. He came from Boston, what had once been Boston.
He had been a widower for six years and had a twelve-year-old son, Robert. The walls in those narrow buildings were thin, and arguments escaped no one, least of all the landlady. She had confided to François, almost with pride, that the boy was ashamed of his father.
Ashamed.
A terrible word. Devastating for a father. What father would not wish to be admired by his own children?
When he heard it, François thought of his own situation, of his relationship with his own sons. François had a good standing, a vast estate, and a solid reputation. Everyone knew he was a war hero. Pierre and Louis often asked to see their father's medal.
In winter, by the fireplace, he would tell them stories about the previous conflict, focusing mostly on the landscapes and the people he had met. Their favorite story was the one about the storm aboard the Océan, and his encounter with Onatah.
Arthur Morton's case was the opposite. He had accomplished nothing notable and had seen several of his employers go bankrupt.
He had nearly remarried two years earlier, but the plan had quickly been abandoned and forgotten. Yet the young woman's origins had not been particularly distinguished. Morton's professional misfortunes had led her family to choose another match, claiming that one does not entrust a daughter to a man whom misfortune seems to pursue.
Very beautiful, she had since married a notable with close ties to the fort. A stable, educated, and promising man. A child had been born within the year.
Morton, meanwhile, had slipped.
It was said that he often came home drunk. Not violent. He withdrew into silence or into a bitter irony as sharp as a blade. His son had seen all of it.
Sometimes the boy had to fend for himself to find food. The baker would occasionally give him stale or overbaked bread. A butcher from Boston who had known his mother well would, out of pity, sell him offal at a very low price.
The few testimonies François had gathered suggested that Arthur Morton only returned home to sleep. The rest of the time, no one knew where he was or what he did. Some supposed he was looking for work; others thought he was simply avoiding his son's gaze.
According to the landlady, the boy was seriously considering enlisting in the Royal Navy as a ship's boy. She even said she was not certain his father realized this—or that, when the day came, he would even notice that his son was no longer at his side.
This story, pitiful as it seemed, was in fact far from exceptional in New York. Times were hard, and the city was full of men whom war, speculation, or decisions made in London had crushed without even noticing.
Drink was cheap and offered immediate warmth and an illusory escape to those who consumed enough of it. At any hour one could see staggering figures with a bottle in hand, cursing the heavens or speaking with a companion only they seemed able to see or hear.
François, keeping his distance from all of this, felt neither contempt nor excessive compassion.
On the fourth evening, judging that he knew enough for a first approach, François entered a modest establishment near the docks. The façade was dull, and its sign was even more worn than that of old Seamus's shop. It creaked softly above the door.
Inside, however, the place was crowded. The air was thick, warm, and heavy. The aggressive smell of alcohol, sweat, and tobacco immediately struck his nose and made him shiver.
The clientele consisted mostly of sailors, carters, and small laborers. People spoke loudly, without restraint. At times bursts of laughter erupted suddenly. Oaths flew like bullets, in a vocabulary François did not fully understand, a mixture of maritime slang and local expressions.
His gaze quickly slid over the silhouettes—broad shoulders, weathered faces marked by life—searching for one in particular. He found him in a dim corner opposite the counter.
Arthur Morton sat with his back hunched, shoulders low, his gaze unfocused. The entire world seemed nonexistent to him. The surrounding noise might as well have been silence.
He raised his glass to his lips, or perhaps his lips came to meet the glass, and took a long drink. His expression did not change. Not even when someone bumped into him.
He glanced vaguely at the man, then turned his attention back to his drink. The glass seemed more important than anything else.
François walked to the counter, where a couple worked busily, assisted by a young man too young to have taken part in the previous war, and bought a bottle of wine. Bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, he made his way to Morton's table.
"Forgive me, sir. It seems the room is full. May I?"
Arthur did not raise his gaze toward François any more than he had toward the man who had bumped into him earlier.
"I've taken a bottle of wine. A little too much for one man alone. You may help yourself."
This time, he caught the man's attention.
His sleepy eyes slowly, painfully turned toward the one offering him free wine. He watched him sit down and muttered an unintelligible word.
The corners of François's lips lifted subtly, too subtly for the target sitting right in front of him to notice.
Morton narrowed his eyes, as if to make sure the bottle was truly there and would not suddenly disappear.
"Wine…" he repeated in a hoarse voice tinged with a faint accent. "You're very generous… Do we know each other?"
François shrugged slightly and poured the dark liquid into their two glasses.
"Generosity costs very little, and it keeps loneliness away," he replied with calculated simplicity. "Tonight, I didn't feel like drinking alone."
He took his glass and left the other within Morton's reach. It was up to Morton to make the final gesture: take it, or leave it.
Arthur watched him for a few seconds, then reached out. He sniffed the wine but did not think long before taking a sip. It was not particularly good, but that hardly mattered to him.
"Didn't feel like drinking alone, eh? And… what are we drinking to?"
François tilted his head slightly and pretended to think. At that same moment, at the other end of the large room, a man stumbled and fell backward onto a table, sending it crashing over. A jug flew through the air and smashed against a wall above another table, splashing everyone nearby with alcohol without injuring anyone.
A large man stood up, strode toward the one who had caused the accident, hauled him to his feet with one hand, and promptly headbutted him square in the face, finishing him for the rest of the evening.
"Why not bad luck?"
A breath escaped Morton's lips, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
"We're old friends… To bad luck. That bitch who follows me like my shadow."
He drank.
François observed him without pressing, his glass suspended near his lips. He noticed the way Morton's hand trembled slightly, proof that this was not his second drink of the evening.
His movements were abrupt and jerky, like a poorly oiled automaton. His eyes struggled to focus, and yet he seemed to be trying. He grimaced.
"You from here?" he asked, his words slightly slurred.
"No. I only arrived last month. They say the New World is a land of opportunity."
Technically, he had not lied, but his words were vague enough to allow the man to interpret them however he wished. He had no intention of introducing himself as James Woods of Portsmouth. In fact, he did not intend to give any name at all this evening, and certainly not a mission.
"Not for everyone," Morton spat. "Maybe for some folks with good friends… but for the rest of us, people like me…"
He drained his glass in a few gulps and poured himself another without asking François's permission. François let him.
"And yet," François continued in a calm voice, almost sing-song, "they say the city offers opportunities to those who know how to seize them."
Arthur Morton stared silently at the dark liquid in his glass as it swirled like a restless sea.
"They say a lot of things, mister. Like they said the war would bring us prosperity. Tss! All nonsense. Though I'm sure some people filled their pockets… at our expense."
A sailor's song with obscene lyrics rose from the center of the tavern, and the tavern keeper shouted a threat that no one seemed to hear.
In this corner of the room, their table formed a strange enclave—almost intimate.
"Did you serve?" François asked in a neutral tone, feigning casual curiosity.
Arthur shook his head.
"No. They tried to recruit me into a provincial regiment back when I still lived in Boston, but I refused. Everyone knew the regular troops looked down on the local regiments, and I wanted none of that. Not to mention the conditions. I figured it wasn't for me."
He paused and gave an empty smile.
"Maybe I should have… A few months later, Boston was burning. But that's not even what makes me regret it."
"Oh? Then what makes you regret your refusal?"
Morton lowered his eyes, and his shoulders sagged even more. Talking about it relieved him, but he could also feel the salt being rubbed into his open wound.
He raised his half-closed eyes toward the man across from him.
"You have children?" he asked suddenly.
François hesitated, then slowly nodded, sensing that it might be useful here.
"Two sons."
"Are they… happy? Proud to be your children?"
"I do my best. Even if I don't spend as much time with them as I would like."
A sad smirk crossed Morton's face.
"Doing your best," he repeated, his mind growing more clouded by the drink. "That's not always enough."
François remained silent to let Morton speak. He was not an exalted patriot, but a sad man who had lost much. The more he spoke, the more he seemed perfect for the mission François intended to entrust to him eventually.
He preferred a disappointed man to a greedy one, because greed could drive a man to foolish acts—the kind that quickly lead to the gallows.
"My son," Morton said to François, "looks so much like his mother. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing her again, especially when he frowns. He… frowns all the time these days. It's like she's judging me from beyond the grave… I miss her so much."
"That must be very painful," François said, pouring Arthur another glass, which he had not let go of.
"It is. And it's even worse when he tells me he's ashamed of me. As if any of this were my fault. I truly did my best. Ah… Maybe he wouldn't look at me like that if I had agreed to serve back then."
Tears began to run down his poorly shaved cheeks. He cried for several minutes before realizing he was not alone in his home. He hurriedly wiped his face, though some mucus remained under his nose.
"Your son is still young, I presume," François said in a compassionate tone. "One doesn't realize how heavy one's words can be."
"He's a good boy. Very intelligent. He deserves so much better than what I have to offer him."
A shadow passed over his face.
"I don't want him to become like me… And I think that, judging by how much I disgust him, he'll follow another path. That's my only consolation."
He drained his glass again, almost in one gulp, then set it down too abruptly on the table, worn by the years and made sticky by spilled alcohol.
François glanced at the rest of the room out of the corner of his eye and leaned slightly forward.
"That's how you recognize a good father: he wants what is best for his children, even if it causes him pain."
Arthur went on talking, recounting without hiding anything the string of failures he had experienced in Boston and then in New York. Nowadays, no one wanted him, as if misfortune were written across his face.
He had not yet given up, but the more refusals piled up, the less he saw himself as a human being. So he drank.
"It's true that persistence is not valued enough," François said, taking a small sip from what was still his first glass. "Instead, people pay too much attention to connections. It's quite unfortunate. It leaves good men by the wayside, men who want to work and are ready to put in the effort to do things properly."
He pointed a finger at Arthur.
"You, sir, I can say it plainly, are the kind of man every employer dreams of having. It is a shame they fail to notice your worth."
Morton bit his lower lip, feeling his heart fill with a feeling he had almost forgotten, the one that comes with recognition.
"Th-thank you."
A brief smile, lasting no more than a breath, crossed François's face. Then he stood up. His chair scraped against the wooden floor.
"Sometimes, certain opportunities appear before you without warning. They rarely come… usually only once."
Arthur Morton reacted to these strange words but had no time to respond. He watched absentmindedly as the man walked away and finally disappeared into the street.
Silence returned to the table.
He remained motionless for a long moment before his gaze drifted to the bottle. He picked it up and realized it was not empty.
He could feel the liquid moving inside as he tilted it. He poured what remained into his glass—enough to fill it three-quarters full.
-----------------------------------------
The evening air was mild, carried by a gentle breeze drifting up from the Hudson.
The shadows slowly lengthened through the streets of New York. The façades, still draped in the last rays of the sun, took on an almost unreal golden hue, while the river in the distance seemed to burn beneath the glowing red sky.
François paid no attention to it, however, as if the spectacle had long since lost its charm in his eyes.
His face remained perfectly neutral.
He was walking up Broad Street at a steady pace toward his lodging, neither hurrying nor sparing a glance for the passersby. They paid him no more attention than he paid them.
"Hey sweetheart, you wanna have a good time?"
The voice came from a woman leaning against a doorway. Her face was not particularly pretty, and her clothing did nothing to inspire curiosity about what it concealed. But she had a generous bosom.
"I'll do things to you no woman's ever done before—and cheap, too."
François continued on his way as if he had heard nothing.
The woman narrowed her eyes as she watched him walk away.
"Tss. He could at least look."
She pursed her lips and checked that her chest was properly displayed.
François's thoughts were elsewhere.
That first contact was fruitful. As I expected, he's an excellent candidate.
Arthur Morton matched almost perfectly the profile he was looking for. A broken man, isolated, and eager to be recognized.
He frowned slightly.
But I cannot take any risks. A desperate man can become unpredictable. If he is suddenly seized by a sense of duty and speaks, I would be in serious trouble.
He had to proceed methodically.
First I must gain his trust. Then make sure he feels indebted. That is the best development. Only after that can I move to the next stage. Not a direct proposal—present him with an opportunity. He must feel that he is choosing.
François raised his eyes to the now-familiar sign of the John Simmons Tavern. Near the door, the owner, faithful to his habits, was seated in his favorite chair, calmly smoking his pipe.
Seeing François approach, he greeted him with a simple nod. François returned it in the same manner.
What is certain is that I will have to test him. If he succeeds, all the better. But if he disappoints me by trying to alert the authorities…
His gaze hardened almost imperceptibly.
Then I will have to make sure he never speaks.