“It means you’re a pain in my side. Your dad was the same. I give you tea. I talk friendly, more friendly than any daughter of that snake Clubber Carr deserves. I could snap your neck like I was breaking an egg, and the only man on the Westside who’d know about it is a Sardinian immigrant who owes me everything he has in the world. So tell me what you know or spend the night in the river.”

I didn’t argue. I just pulled out the gun and drew back the hammer. It took both thumbs, and it didn’t look graceful, but I got that pistol cocked and leveled at his heart before he could take a step. He laughed at it, the reedy laugh of a man remembering that his bodyguard is far away.

“You recognize it?” I said. “It’s one of the guns you stole.”

“Guns . . . guns are funny things. You ever shoot one before?”

“No.”

“They don’t fire as straight as you think.”

He knocked the table aside and covered the distance between us in a single stride. The pistol pressed against his chest. It rose and fell with every shuddering breath.

“Your dad would cry, he saw this.”

“Then it’s luck for both of us that he’s dead.”

“Put it down, girl. You don’t have the stomach to draw blood.”

“But I can cut glass.” I swung the pistol to my right and trained it on the swinging lighthouse lamp. Van Alen licked his lips. “Let’s say, just for argument, that I blast that glass of yours into a million jagged pieces. It would get very dark in here, wouldn’t it? And all across the Upper West, your subjects would see your light go out.”

“That lamp is worth more than you know.”

“Then sit down, Dick, and have a visit.”

“Okay, okay, okay. So what is it?”

“Why the candles? Why the night-fires? Why this silly goddamned lamp? Why are you afraid of the dark?”

“Because your father told me to be.”

“What did he tell you—and for the sake of that light, be specific—what did he tell you and when?”

“You remember ’14?” I nodded. Three thousand missing, the fence, the bombings. The Westside, cut off like a rotting limb. “The first night the fence went up, Clubber came to me and told me it was the night that killed. Told me to build fires, give out candles, beat back the shadows however you can. My whole life, ever since I was just a dumb kid playing with matches, your daddy was the smartest person I ever knew. I believed him.”

I never did.

“I offered to build my night-fires all the way downtown,” he said, “but Barbie said no. She’d handle her territory her way. And so we fixed Fourteenth Street as the line—a border without a fence. Just men, weapons, and glass.”

“Did the candles save anyone?”