Chapter 17: Perkins's Impossible Choice

The message reached Perkins on a Thursday, which he would later note was the day Watson had gone to Greenwich to examine the body of a shipping clerk found in the river, leaving the Montague Street office empty and the morning unusually without anchor.

It came through Denny Farr.

This was the part Perkins turned over most carefully in the hours that followed, because Denny Farr was not a name he had spoken aloud since the previous February, and not a name he had written down anywhere, and not a name that appeared in any of the manifests or registers or financial notations that had accumulated in the Montague Street office like geological strata over the preceding months. Denny Farr was a name that existed only in the part of Perkins's life that predated Watson — predated the office, the notebook, the particular sensation of being trusted with something real. Denny Farr was from the other side of a border Perkins had not consciously acknowledged drawing until someone crossed it without permission.