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Commissioner Woods, was all his. He had picked the wrong man.
    The subtle craft of running an agent—being his only lifeline to the world he’d left behind—was new to Tom. Like the commissioner, he too would need to get his education while on the job. But Tom was determined to learn from his previous mistakes.
    He sent word to precinct houses throughout the city that the bomb squad was looking for an Italian-speaking volunteer. It would be a special operation. It would be dangerous. No officer should apply unless he was willing to accept the risk.
    Tom received the names of eighteen candidates. After reviewing their service records, he “reached out,” as the department euphemistically referred to a summons by a superior officer, to six of them. They appeared for interviews at the squad’s second-floor office across from headquarters on Centre Street.

    New York Police Department headquarters at 240 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. The offices of Tunney’s bomb squad were located in a loft across from the building.
    (George P. Hall and Son / Museum of the City of New York)
     
    The sessions were one-on-one, Tom interrogating a single candidate at a time; and the questions he posed were, he’d admit, as irrelevant as the answers. He was searching for a type, and Tom let his instincts guide him.
    He finally decided on Amedeo Polignani. He was a darkly handsome detective, just twenty-seven, with a high pompadour of jet-black hair, a weightlifter’s burly physique, and a warm, ready smile so bright it nearly glowed. What Tom liked best about Polignani, though, was the way the detective carried himself—quiet, confident, and unassertive. He was the sort of good-natured young man whom people found easy to like—even those, Tom was gambling, who were angry enough to want to blow up the city.
    His instructions to his new operative were succinct.
    “Your name from now on is Frank Baldo,” Tom said with the authority of a magician waving his wand. “Forget you’re a detective. You can get a job over in Long Island City. You are an anarchist. Join the Brescia Circle and any other affiliated group, and report to me every day.”
    Tom would be his sole handler. There would be no cutouts; he was to call Tom directly. A special telephone line was installed in Tom’s office, and Polignani—or was it now Baldo? Tom wondered—was instructed to call this number at specific hours. Make sure, Tom told his operative, to call from a pay phone. Choose a store with only one phone booth; someone in an adjoining booth might overhear. The older members of the group will be suspicious, he warned; they’ll follow you. He insisted that Polignani should not call unless he was certain he was alone or not being watched.
    There was one final bit of advice, and Tom, the novice agent runner, repeated it like a mantra. “Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut,” he said firmly. “Eyes open. Mouth shut.”
    Then it was time. Tom was as anxious as if he were the one going off behind enemy lines, yet he did his best to act as if this were not an extraordinary occasion for both of them. He knew there would be emergencies, situations they hadn’t planned for, hadn’t discussed. All he could do, though, was trust that the man he’d chosen would find the ingenuity to deal with them.
    Tom shook his hand. Polignani responded with a sharp salute, a flash of his hundred-watt smile; and then Frank Baldo went off to start his new life.

Chapter 6

    Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, shown here circa 1910–1915.
    (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
     
    I n Europe events unfolded with an increasingly bleak and bellicose momentum. In the shadows, a tense von Bernstorff hurried about Berlin, making the final preparations for his own war.
    On July 27 Kaiser Wilhelm abandoned his summer holiday in Potsdam and returned to the steamy streets of Berlin to confer with his generals and ministers. He strode about meetings in the royal