Harvey the Horse Thief Golod, whose specialty was stolen and swapped meats (hence the nickname), made immediate friends at the abattoir and within weeks was earning rent for the whole family. His brother—Mordecai, Rebecca’s father—thought more conceptually, and slowly. Mordecai tended to walk the streets with his hands at the base of his back, woolgathering, and at the family home, during the raucous banging and shouting of dinnertime, the notepad came out.

Mordecai noticed two things upon moving to San Francisco: First, the police here were the best in the world—airtight and right and square as a billiard ball; in other words, many of them could be bought. He had never bought a cop before, but he liked the idea. Second, Rebecca, now thirteen years old, had grown to be a great beauty. Mordecai told her so, but the compliments were like pebbles bouncing off a window. He also told her that, with a mind like hers, she could be a scholar of the Talmud. This she listened to more carefully, for it would be about studying goodness. But she quickly figured out that roles for women as Talmudic scholars were slim pickings.

Ah, but to be a Girl Scout—that was the personification of goodness. When the leaders of Troop 14 came to her eighth-grade classroom to show off the sash and kerchief and khaki uniform, she appraised them like dull birds with hopeless plumage. But then they left their book behind, How a Girl Can Serve Her Country, which described in its first chapter (after the introduction, which was about virtues or something) how to track animals in the snow. Rebecca remembered Chicago—how useful this would have been for her uncle Reuben when Ivor Overholt had run off with a pallet of furs.

Every chapter had something helpful like that. She was especially impressed with the sections on tying knots, signaling with Morse code, and using a magnifying glass to start fires. This was her own Talmud. She accrued badges like summonses, flimsy tin disks celebrating her achievements as Interpreter, Laundress, Farmer, Child Nurse, Artist, Needlewoman, and so on, until her uniform was blinding with them.

She coveted the ultimate award, the Silver Fish, which required “skills beyond imagination.”