Three men in the rear seat of a touring car were looking back at her while the men in the front seat looked at him, slowing, noticing his blue pants, the blue coat under his arm. They were all heavily bearded. They all wore watch caps. The men in back of the open car brandished sticks. The front-seat passenger narrowed his eyes and Danny recognized him: Pyotr Glaviach, the oversize Estonian who could out-drink any saloon’s worth of men and probably outfight them all, too. Pyotr Glaviach, the veteran of the most vicious Lettish warfare in the motherland. The man who’d considered Danny his fellow pamphleteer, his comrade, his brother-in-arms against capitalist oppression.

Danny had found there were times when violence or the threat of it slowed the world down, when everything came at you as if through water. But there were just as many times when violence moved faster than a clock could tick, and this was one of those. As soon as he and Glaviach recognized each other, the car stopped and the men piled out. Danny’s coat got caught on the butt of his pistol as he tried to clear it. Glaviach’s arms closed over his, pinning them to his side. He lifted Danny off his feet and carried him across the sidewalk and rammed his back into a stone wall.

A stick hit his blackened eye.

“Say something.” Glaviach spit in his face and squeezed his body harder.

Danny didn’t have the air to speak so he spit back in the big man’s hairy face, saw that his phlegm already had some blood in it as it landed in the man’s eyes.

Glaviach rammed his skull into Danny’s nose. His head exploded with yellow light and shadows descended on the men around him, as if the sky were dropping. Someone hit his head with a stick again.

“Our comrade, Nathan, you know what happened to him today?” Glaviach shook Danny’s body as if he weighed no more than a child. “He lose his ear. Maybe sight in one eye. He lose that. What you lose?”

Hands grabbed at his gun and there wasn’t much he could do about it because his arms were numb. Fists battered his torso, back, and neck, yet he felt perfectly calm. He felt Death on the street with him and Death’s voice was soft. Death said: It’s okay. It’s time. His front pocket was ripped from his pant leg and loose change fell to the sidewalk. The button, too. Danny watched with an unreasonable sense of loss as it rolled off the curb and fell through a sewer grate.

Nora, he thought. Goddammit. Nora.

When they were done, Pyotr Glaviach found Danny’s service revolver in the gutter. He picked it up and dropped it on top of the unconscious cop’s chest. Pyotr recalled all the men—fourteen—he’d killed, face-to-face, over the years. This number did not include an entire unit of czarist guards they’d trapped in the center of a burning wheat field. He could still smell that odor seven years later, could hear them crying like babies as the flames found their hair, their eyes. You could never lose the smell from your nostrils, the sounds from your ears. You couldn’t undo any of it. Or wash it off. He was tired of the killing. It was why he’d come to America. Because he was so tired. It always led to more.