The Whiskey Rebel

It was not the sort of public house I frequented with any regularity. I prefer taverns where I may game or drink in quiet or talk in peace with those to whom I wish to speak, not cheer while a man I hardly know gives voice to a resentment I never knew I had.

The owner, however, was an old acquaintance, if not precisely a friend, and I had a reasonable expectation of obtaining some little help in that quarter. The Irishman outside the Statehouse had identified himself as a man of the Jeffersonian faction, and, if he drank in Philadelphia, it would likely be in the Crooked Knight or someplace like it. It was my hope that there I could find some means of learning his name or location.

It was far less wet and cold than recent nights and, as the tavern was the sort of place not likely to make a Negro feel at his ease, I asked Leonidas to wait outside. Pushing open the wooden door, I walked into a long low-ceilinged room filled with tobacco stench, wood smoke, and the scent of sausages roasting in fires. The men sat in small groups, huddled around low tables, their feet pressed into the dirt of the floor. Conversation, which had been boisterous but a moment before, at once tapered down as all inside stared at me. The Crooked Knight was the sort of place outsiders sought to avoid.

I went at once to the bar, where a man of exceptional shortness stood upon a box, polishing mugs. I knew him as Leonard Hilltop, a humorless sort with deeply lined skin that looked like carved stone and hollow eyes dark in color and bright with thick swaths of red, visible even in the poor light of that room. In his youth, he had been part of a network in occupied Philadelphia that had passed intelligence, often to me. It did not make us friends but it made us familiar, and there was undeniably trust and respect between us.

“Go back to your drink, you sods,” called the little man. “He’s all right, this one.”

The men did as they were told, and at once the space was filled with the hum of conversation.

“Well, now,” said Hilltop. “That was my first lie of the evening.”

“Let us hope it is the last,” I said.

He snorted. “What is this? You run too big a debt in every other tavern in town, and now you must drink here? A bit of a risk, isn’t it? The men here might not know your face, but they know your name and what you’re said to have done. If I were to tell them who you are, you’d be torn to bits like that there Federalist chicken.” He waved a hand toward the cockfight.

“It’s well I can trust you to keep quiet then,” I said. “In any case, you know the truth. My reputation was fouled by Federalists. Indeed, you told me so yourself those many years ago. You said it was Hamilton that exposed me. How precisely did you hear that, Hilltop?”

“Christ, I can’t recall,” he said. “It was a long time ago. It was just what I heard. Everyone said so.”

I was not hopeful he would remember, but it did no harm to ask. “In any case, I’m sure you can spare a drink for an ill-used patriot. Perhaps that most American of elixirs, which we call Monongahela rye, that drink of border men, hideously taxed by the nefarious Hamilton. Just a single glass of whiskey shall serve my purpose.”

“As you put it so,” said Hilltop with a grimace, like a man who had been outplayed at cards and now must accept defeat. He poured a hearty quantity into a mug and handed it to me undiluted. I tasted it and found it remarkably like that which the Irishman had given me.

I set the glass down. “It’s good, this whiskey.”

“Aye, the best there is.”

“Where do you get it?”

He gri

I took another sip. “Is your source a rugged Irishman with a hairless and leathery skull?”

Had I knocked Hilltop off his stool I could not have astonished him more, and that was certainly my goal. I might have worked the matter over slowly, like a tongue in search of the precise location of a vaguely aching tooth, but I saw no point in it. Hilltop was a suspicious sort, and a direct approach seemed best.

Hilltop had aided spies in the war, but he was not a spy himself and had no training other than to hope what he did went u

“What do you know of him?” Hilltop asked me.

“I know you know him,” I said, “as you’ve not troubled to inquire of whom I speak. I’d like a word with him, and I should very much prefer if he did not know I was coming.”

“What, do you work for Hamilton again?” Hilltop asked me. “After all he done to you?”

It was uncomfortably close to the truth, and I could not afford the luxury of believing I was the only clever man in this conversation. “I have my own business with him.”

“I ain’t seen that man in here in some time,” Hilltop said. “Few months back, he sold me a dozen barrels of this whiskey, and I was happy to get my hands on it. He ain’t been in since, though I did hear tell of him not two weeks ago.”

Hilltop certainly had my attention, though it was not so full as he believed, but thinking me riveted by his intelligence he gave the slightest of nods to the two men by the fire. One of them, the taller and younger of the two, handed something to the shorter and older. Then the first of these men rose and left the tavern. I hated to let him go, but I could only attempt to apprehend one man, and I thought it might as well be the one who had whatever item had been passed off.

“Haven’t seen him,” Hilltop was saying, “not personally, but a week ago a patron of the Knight says he saw him coming out of a boardinghouse on Evont Street, near the corner of Mary, down in Southwark. I don’t know if the Irishman lived there or was visiting, but this man said it was him, all right. I hoped to find him myself on account of wanting to buy more of his whiskey.”

“You know who he is?” I asked. “His name, his business?”

Hilltop shook his head. “Didn’t say much, but he’d been hurt by Hamilton ’s whiskey tax, that much is certain.”

The whiskey tax had been approved by Congress as a simple means of helping fund the Bank of the United States. What better way to raise revenues, it had been argued, than to tax a luxury, and a harmful one at that, that many enjoyed? Let the men who would waste their time with strong drink pay for the economic growth of the new nation. This had become a major cause of resentment among the democratic republican types who liked to pass their time, as fate would have it, by drinking whiskey.

The shorter and older man, the one who had been given something of import, now pushed himself away from his table and began to head for the door. Hilltop must have noticed my interest, because he said, “Let me pour you another one, Saunders. Even better than the first, I’ll warrant.”

It was tempting, but I thanked Hilltop, and told him I would be back to collect it soon enough. I moved to the door. The man had his eye upon me, and there could have been no way to move without attracting his notice. He opened the front door and broke into a run. I began to run as well. A large man immediately stepped forward into my path, but I dodged past him, more lucky than skillful, and was out of the tavern and into the cold.

Leonidas was already on alert, and I needed only to point to the ru