She stared me up and down like I was a gown she was looking for a reason not to buy. Once she was fully unsatisfied with my appearance, she took a step closer, and I caught a whiff of the waterfront—one of those stenches that never scrubs out.

“Whatever nonsense my mother has engaged you in,” she said, “I will be inspecting your invoices with a microscope. You will not swindle that woman.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You were leaving?”

“Yes.”

“Then go.” She stood aside. The breeze from the slamming door was strong enough to ruffle my hair. I chuckled and spun around in the hallway, happy to have a case, to have money coming, and to be working for Edith Copeland, who had no idea that I had signed on for this silly business because I knew how cold a house can be when it’s haunted by a man who has chosen to let himself die.

There were eight rats, and the fat one was fastest. He pulled ahead at the first turn and never gave back the lead. A handful of racing enthusiasts loomed over the gaudily painted wooden track, old men and young boys who groaned as the fat rat skittered across the finish line. Only one clapped—a twenty-four-year-old wearing a frayed tuxedo jacket and a cavalry saber, whose giddiness was childlike, but whose eyes were ancient and gray.

“Mose, you fat, beautiful bastard,” he said, loud enough to echo from the rooftops of the empty tenements. “Mose, you beauty. Mose, you demon. Mose, my beloved—you’ve done it again!”

He cradled the victorious rat against his cheek, swept the losers’ bets into his change purse, and twisted his pockmarked cheeks into a devilish grin. He had oak-brown skin and coarse black hair, cropped tight at the sides but wild on top, like the plume of a distant volcano. His harsh Westside accent was softened by notes of Tennessee, inherited from a family that vanished long before we met. When he felt like smiling—which was often—he was undoubtedly the Lower West’s handsomest overgrown child.

“Eight minutes till the fifth race,” he cried. “Mose the champion takes on all comers. Witness the greatest racing sensation of the age: the Westside comet, the runaway rat. Get your bets down now, get your bets down now.”

No one took him up on the offer. The crowd melted away, and Cherub Stevens was left alone beneath the hanging vines of Thompson Street. He gave his rat a tender kiss and set him back on the track, and I remembered why I had once loved this man. Trouble melted at the sight of him, and for a moment, I was just a woman greeting an ex-lover on a late summer day.