loys a number of free-lance writers, including his most talented, Martin Pemberton, the disinherited son of of the late Augustus Pemberton, a millionaire whose death and funeral had made the papers the previous September. None of the editorial comments or public eulogies mentioned the true sources of the old man's fortune, although McIlvaine the newspaperman knows what they were: Pemberton had run illegal slave ships out of New York harbor, with the connivance of Boss Tweed's ring, and had also profitably supplied Union troops during the Civil War with substandard goods - "boots that fell apart, blankets that dissolved in rain, tents that tore at the grommets, and uniform cloth that bled dye." Now, Martin Pemberton tells McIlvaine and several others, he has seen his father alive, on the streets of Manhattan. The editor at first assumes that the disillusioned young man is speaking in metaphor, that he means his father's evil lives on in the rapacious city all around them. After Martin drops out of sight, McIlvaine begins to investigate and comes to believe the vision could have been true, that a white Municipal Transport stagecoach might actually have carried old Pemberton and other presumed-deceased rich men through the teeming, oblivious streets of Manhattan. McIlvaine imagines Martin's impression of the passengers: "Their heads nodded in unison as the vehicle stopped and started and stopped again in the impacted traffic." To find out whether and why the city he loves and thinks he knows includes the living dead, McIlvaine seeks the help of Edmund Donne, a rare honest captain in the municipal police, which has become, under Tweed, "an organization of licensed thieves." The trail these two follow - with powerful forces conspiring against them - leads sinuously through accumulating outrages: unexplained murders, a mysterious orphanage, missing millions in inheritances and a waterworks north of the city where very strange things are going...
