“Oh, what I would give to have your father back among the living, just for one moonless night. There was no man on the Westside quicker to snap a neck or crack a skull. Clubber understood. A night like tonight, a bloody pitch-dark night, was always one to savor.”

“You called him a snake.”

“Did I, then? I stand by it. But remember this: on a night this dark, it’s the snakes that get out alive.”

We came to Broadway and hung a hard right, running south between the fence and the sidewalk, then broke down Eighth Avenue at the monstrous wall that cut around Columbus Circle.

Twenty minutes till my deadline, we hit traffic. Sixteenth Street was filled with guardsmen, and when they saw Van Alen’s coach they stopped us dead. They crowded around us, hammering the sides, chanting until he dropped the reins, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and raised a fist for the crowd.

“I’ll get out here,” I said. “I could never stand watching boys play soldier.”

“Before you go—you wanna know who killed your daddy? The night he disappeared, after he was finished raving to me, he went to see another old friend.”

“Who?” I said.

“That crooked son of a bitch that’s too rich for his own good. Calls himself Brass.”

I might have thanked him, but there was no time. I leapt down and went looking for a war. The crowd parted easily for me—they had no interest in something as trivial as a woman—and I worked my way toward Fourteenth. It wasn’t hard to find. Like a spoiled child, the great iron brazier was fed constantly, by a team of soot-covered boys whose hair had been scorched down to nothing. They shoveled more fuel on when I passed, and the flame belched just a few feet higher, fouling the air with an unnameable stench. I kept far to the side. I was starting to prefer it in the shadows.

I crossed the street, the light from the fire glinting on the glass just enough to show me the safest way through. I checked my watch. The deadline had passed.

Three blocks past the Borderline, I heard children singing. First “Benjy’s Bloody Stump,” then “The Night Mae Traynor Died.” And then I saw the banners. The Sparrows, the Gophers, the Swamp Angels, the Claw-Boys, the West Fourth Particulars, and the Dead Barrow Toughs numbered close to a thousand, and there were a few hundred more under flags I couldn’t identify. I scanned the crowd until I saw Roach, the ten-year-old standard bearer, waving the dead feline.

“Go home,” I said. “Please, Roach. Go home.”

“The chief says to fight,” he said. “And we fight. Ain’t it glorious?”

“Turn back now, or I’ll break that oar over your head.”

It was, I thought, a persuasive threat, but the boy marched on.