“We are too good for this world, Mose,” he said. He saw me watching from the sidewalk and blushed terribly as he tried to remember how to look hard. “Gilda Carr. Come to place a bet?”

I stepped into the street and walked the length of the track, bending to inspect the huddled vermin. Away from the pack was a stringy creature, whose scabby skin showed through patchy fur.

“And who is this thoroughbred?” I said.

“Called Gimlet,” said Cherub. “Strictly filler. Hasn’t a chance.”

On a chalkboard leaning against a rusted streetlight, one of Cherub’s pubescent lieutenants scribbled the latest odds. Gimlet was running at an irresistible twenty-five to one. I placed a nickel on the lip of the racetrack.

“I hate to take a destitute detective’s money,” said Cherub.

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” I said, and turned north. Cherub followed, saber clacking on the cobblestones. He waved to the boys in the windows of Cleo’s Pet Shop, which his gang had adopted, along with every animal in there, the day the fence went up. They called themselves the One-Eyed Cats. Their territory stretched all the way from Washington Square East to Washington Square West, and though they were kind to their pets, they were devils in a brawl—or so Cherub always told me.

He had been a One-Eyed Cat since the city was whole. The gang’s elders taught him to read, to lie, to steal, to fight. They had also, and for this I thanked them, taught him that seducing women is far more amusing if you treat them as people, and not territory to conquer. The older boys dispersed when the fence went up, but Cherub hung on to became chief by default. He was ten years older than the oldest boys in his gang, for whom he was father, gang leader, and babysitter all at once. He said they kept him young.

“Headed home?” he said. “The sun is low.”

“Thought I’d stop by Lamb’s.”

“I’ll escort you.”

“I’m sure you will.”

Once I had told this man truths that surprised myself. But since the day I broke his heart by Morton Creek, we could only trade banter—sweet, flirtatious, and hollow.

We turned onto the southern edge of Washington Square. Oaks, sycamores, and elms, their trunks as broad as a subway car, towered over the blackened wreckage of the ruined arch. They rose two, three hundred feet into the sky, their leaves forming a canopy thick enough to block out the sun. On the park’s western edge, surrounded by the rubble of the genteel mansions of my mother’s generation, my town house stood alone. A breeze whispered through the hanging vines. Three deep breaths, and an afternoon wasted on the Eastside washed away.