I.

The smoke in the Cotton Club tasted of gin and regret, which was to say it tasted like New York in 1925. Harry Potter moved through it with the practiced invisibility of a man who had spent three years writing about things he wanted but could never have. He was twenty-four, broke, and possessed of a typewriter that clicked like a dice game, and he had been assigned to write about the social scene, which meant he stood in corners and listened to people say important things in front of people who looked important and then translated their words into prose that sounded more important than the words themselves.

But tonight he was not writing. Tonight he was looking for Draco Malfoy.

Draco Malfoy had been the subject of three articles in the Gazette this week. Three articles in one week, which in the world of New York gossip journalism was either a sign of tremendous scandal or a tremendous waste of paper. Harry had read all three. They were all wrong. The first claimed Draco was dating a Broadway chorus line. The second claimed Draco was investing in a Canadian nickel mine. The third, which had been signed by someone called "H.P.," claimed that Draco Malfoy was, and I quote, "a young man of considerable means and equally considerable charm, whose社交 circle includes some of the most prominent figures in American high society."

Harry had not written that third article. He wished he had. It was his best work this month.

He found Draco in the back booth, half-hidden by a curtain of cigarette smoke and the body of a woman whose name Harry would never know but whose face he would not forget. Draco was alone. The woman had left. He was drinking something dark and slow and looking at the bottom of his glass the way men look at things they are hoping will tell them something.

Harry approached with the caution of a man who has learned, through painful experience, that Draco Malfoy is not a young socialite but a member of one of New York's more sophisticated criminal organizations. His father, Lucius Malfoy, was the kind of man who owned buildings and politicians and occasionally newspapers. Draco was twenty-seven, educated at Harvard, and rumored to have a talent for making problems disappear.

"Mr. Malfoy," Harry said, sliding into the booth opposite him.

Draco looked up. His eyes were the color of ice that has forgotten it is supposed to be cold. "Potter. I wondered whether you would come."

"I wondered whether you would let me."

Draco smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a man who is amused by a dog that has learned to sit up and ask nicely for food. "You are looking for something, Mr. Potter. I know the look. I had it once, before I learned that looking for things is the surest way to ensure that what you find is not what you wanted."

"I'm looking for the truth," Harry said, which was the kind of thing a man says when he is twenty-four and has not yet learned that the truth is like gin: it tastes different depending on who is serving it.

Draco took a slow sip of his drink. "The truth," he said. "How fortunate for you that I have been instructed to provide it."

II.

The notebook was in Dumbledore's study, tucked behind a row of leather-bound volumes on the second shelf, and Harry would never have found it except that Professor Archibald Dumbledore, who was Harry's mentor in everything that mattered and an annoyance in everything else, had asked him to dust the shelves while he dictated a letter to his secretary.

The notebook was small and unassuming, bound in dark blue cloth with no title on the cover. Harry pulled it out because it looked out of place—a small thing in a room full of large things—and because he had learned, over eighteen months of working with Dumbledore, that things that look out of place in this man's study are almost always important.

Dumbledore was a man of considerable reputation and considerable age. At sixty-two, he carried himself with the erect posture of someone who had spent his entire life standing up for things that other people had given up standing up for. He was a professor of sociology at a university that had once been respected and was now respected mostly for having produced a series of politicians who were respected mostly for having said things that people wanted to hear.

He was also, Harry was beginning to understand, an investigator. Not in the sensational sense of the word that the newspapers used—the sense that involved shadows and secret handshakes and men in dark suits smoking dark cigarettes in dark rooms. In the patient, meticulous sense of the word: a man who reads everything, writes everything down, connects things that other people have not connected and finds, beneath the surface chaos of modern life, a pattern that is both coherent and terrifying.

The notebook contained Dumbledore's investigative methods. Not the methods he taught in his classes—those were the conventional methods, the methods of sociology and statistics and survey research—but the methods he used when he was not teaching, when he was working on the things he called "private interests." The notebook was organized with a precision that was almost military: sections on surveillance techniques, on document analysis, on the identification of information sources, on the construction of logical arguments from incomplete information.

And at the top of the first page, in Dumbledore's unmistakable handwriting, was the attribution:

From the papers of "The Prince."

Harry had heard that name before, though he had not known what it meant. Dumbledore mentioned it in passing sometimes—a phrase, a reference, an idea attributed to the Prince as though the Prince were a philosopher or a general or both. Harry had assumed it was a pseudonym, the way academics sometimes use pseudonyms for ideas they are not ready to put their full reputation behind.

He was beginning to suspect he had been wrong.

The notebook's final section was labeled, in letters that were larger and more forceful than the rest, as SOUL VESSELS. Harry opened to it carefully. The pages contained Dumbledore's notes on a concept he described as follows:

"The concept of the soul vessel is not mystical. It is practical. Every man accumulates, over a lifetime, a body of knowledge and insight that is uniquely his. This body of knowledge is fragile. It depends entirely on the continued existence and continued functioning of the mind that created it. The soul vessel is the attempt—scientific, testable, imperfect—to transfer this body of knowledge from its original vessel to a new one, and so extend beyond the natural limits of one lifetime the reach of one's intellectual labor."

Harry read the page three times. He did not understand it fully. But he understood enough. He understood that Dumbledore was working on something that he considered important enough to risk everything on. He understood that the notebook was the result of years of research, of connections to people Dumbledore had met and never named and that Harry would never meet.

He understood, with the sudden clarity that comes from reading something you were not supposed to read, that Professor Archibald Dumbledore was in danger.

III.

The speakeasy was beneath a bar on 133rd Street, accessible through a refrigerator door that looked like a refrigerator door until you knew it was not supposed to look like a refrigerator door. Harry followed Dumbledore down a flight of stairs that smelled of cabbage and bootleg whiskey, and the jazz began: a brass-heavy sound that filled the space like a force of nature, loud and joyous and fundamentally sad.

Dumbledore did not look like a man who belonged in a speakeasy. He looked like a man who had been kidnapped by a man who believed in the redemptive power of jazz. His suit was too careful, his hair too precisely combed, his posture too erect for this particular kind of underground New York. But he sat at a small table in the corner with the resigned acceptance of a man who knows that some places must be visited and some conversations must be had in places that are not comfortable.

"I need you to understand something," Dumbledore said, leaning close so that the jazz would not carry his words to the wrong ears. "What I am working on is not a theory. It is a method. A scientific method, based on principles that have been understood for centuries but rarely applied with sufficient rigor. The Prince understood this. The Prince understood that the preservation of knowledge is not a philosophical exercise but a chemical one."

Harry nodded. He was not certain he understood, but he nodded anyway, because he had learned that with Dumbledore, nodding is often more valuable than understanding.

"Tonight," Dumbledore continued, "I am going to attempt a transfer. A partial transfer. I have prepared a solution—a chemical compound, nothing more, nothing less—that will, under the right conditions, allow the contents of my memory to be transferred to a physical medium. Paper is sufficient. The Prince used paper. I will use paper."

"And if it does not work?"

Dumbledore considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Then I will die. The solution is designed to be fatal if the transfer is incomplete. It is, in a sense, a fail-safe: if the knowledge cannot be preserved, it should not be preserved through the death of the preserver. That would be vanity, not science."

Harry felt a coldness in his stomach that had nothing to do with the temperature of the speakeasy. "Professor, you do not have to do this."

"Yes," Dumbledore said gently. "I do. The knowledge I have accumulated is not mine to hoard. It belongs to the people who will come after me. That is the obligation of a teacher. That is the obligation of a man who has spent his entire life studying the structures of human society and finds them wanting."

He reached into his coat pocket and produced a small crystal vial. It contained a liquid the color of amber, and it caught the light from the table lamp and scattered it in ways that made Harry think of honey and whiskey and the particular golden light that New York produces in the hour before sunset.

"This is it," Dumbledore said. "The final step. I have spent forty years preparing for this moment. I have written everything down. I have organized everything. I have prepared myself. All that remains is the drinking."

He raised the vial. He drank.

IV.

Harry found himself on a Harlem street corner hours later, or perhaps days later—time works differently in the underground, moving faster when you are inside it and slower when you emerge—and he was holding the notebook.

The jazz had faded behind him, absorbed into the brick and mortar and cobblestone of the neighborhood, but its echo remained in his chest, a vibration that made his ribs hum. The street was quiet now. The clubs were closing. Men and women were emerging into the cold night air with their coats pulled tight and their eyes on the ground, moving toward subway stations and taxi stands and apartments that were probably cold and probably small and probably perfect.

He looked down at the notebook in his hands. It felt heavier than it should have. It contained, he knew, not just Dumbledore's notes but the accumulated wisdom of a man who had spent sixty-two years learning the difference between what people say and what people mean.

Draco Malfoy had found him at the speakeasy, after Dumbledore had taken the solution, after the wait that Dumbledore had said was necessary and that Harry had spent pacing the small room beneath the bar with his hands in his pockets and his mind racing faster than it had ever raced in his entire life.

Draco had stood in the doorway and watched Harry pace and then said, in a voice that was calm and professional and entirely devoid of warmth: "You should leave, Mr. Potter."

"Leave?" Harry had said.

"New York is a small city for a city that is not small. People notice things. People who notice things include men who are not pleased by what they notice. I suggest you leave."

"Who are you?" Harry had asked. "Really. Not the man in the speakeasy. The man who stands in doorways and tells journalists to leave."

Draco had looked at him for a long time. In that look, Harry had seen something that surprised him: recognition. The look of a man who sees himself reflected in another man's eyes and does not like what he sees.

"I am a man who has been ordered by my father to take out Archibald Dumbledore," Draco had said. "I have spent three weeks trying to figure out how to do that. I have failed to figure out how to do that. So I have decided to do something else. I have decided to tell you to leave. It is, I suspect, the same thing. Different vocabulary. Same outcome."

Harry had wanted to ask more questions. He had had seventeen questions, organized in a logical sequence that would have revealed everything he needed to know. But he had also had eighteen months of working with Dumbledore, and he knew when a man was telling him the truth in the only way that man knows how to tell the truth.

He had left. He had walked out of the speakeasy and onto the street and into the cold New York night, and he had not looked back.

Now he stood on the street corner and opened the notebook to the page Dumbledore had shown him before the drinking, the page that contained the Prince's original formulation, and he read:

"The soul vessel is not an attempt to cheat death. It is an attempt to cheat indifference. Every man dies. Every man's work is forgotten. Every man's knowledge is lost. The soul vessel is the declaration that this will not be the case—not entirely, not completely, but enough. Enough is, in the end, all that any of us can hope for."

Harry closed the notebook. He put it in his coat pocket. He stood on the Harlem street corner with the distant sound of jazz rising behind him like a prayer, and he walked north, toward the newspaper office, toward another article he would write about things that did not matter, carrying inside his coat pocket the accumulated wisdom of a man who would never publish another paper.

The jazz played on, somewhere behind him, somewhere in the dark, and Harry Potter walked through the New York night with the notebook pressed against his heart, which is to say pressed against his left side, because that is where his heart is.

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