Cover

Map

Dedication

For Yvonne

and Dr. Baby

One

I stole a glove.

It dangled off a table in a decrepit leather shop in Thieves’ Market on the Eastside of Manhattan in sweltering late September 1921, and it was in my bag before I even knew it had been in my hand.

It was white leather, paper thin and butter soft, with irises along the knuckles and a strange brand embossed at the wrist that showed a stamp smashing into a puddle of ink. In that vile shop, where canvas walls kept out sunlight but trapped heat, the glove was a splash of ivory in the darkness. It was surrounded by wallets, boots, belts, caps, jackets, aprons, strops, and straps—all stained, stolen, and badly made. The glove was too fine for that dusty stall, and so the shopkeeper was watching when I took it away.

“Girl!” he barked. I did not turn my head, for that is not my name.

He shoved aside a rack of loafers and strode toward me, bowlegged, sweating, a triangle of moles sprouting hairs just to the left of his mouth. He blocked my exit, and the smell of him made the sausage I’d called lunch lurch in my stomach.

“Think I didn’t see it?” he said. “This is my place. I see everything.”

“That’s no great accomplishment,” I shrugged. “It’s such a small place.”

He bristled. “You give it back, or it’s trouble.”

He wrapped his meaty fingers around a short leather club. My neck brushed against the canvas walls. There was nowhere else to go. I put on my sweetest society girl smile.

“I really don’t know what you mean,” I said, “but trouble is something I strive to avoid at all costs.”

“So hand it here.”

I dug into my long, amorphous sack of a purse, and he smiled a horrid smile. He rolled the club between his hands. “Right, right. Nice and slow, and there’ll be no trouble at all.”

He was right—it was no trouble for me.

My little knife flicked open quick as a stinging wasp. I jabbed it toward the shopkeeper’s ample belly. His balance failed him, and he crashed into a table of leather scraps. I turned away, slashed a hole in the canvas, and leapt through it like an acrobat through a ring of fire.

The leather shop was just one of a jumble of tents erected in the middle of the street, where sagging tables offered chipped glassware, stained collars, limp hats, out-of-date calendars, and purposeless hunks of metal. Most of it had been parted from the original owners, just as I was liberating this glove now. The crowd moved steadily, because no one was buying. They browsed to forget that they had nowhere better to go. From somewhere uncertain came the stink of gutted fish. From behind me came the shopkeeper’s shout.

“She’s a thief! The little bitch is a thief!”