A hatchet sailed past my head. It thumped into the nearest tree and, too dull to bite into the wood, clattered to the ground. A slender ten-year-old with a mangled hand leapt out from behind a barricade and scurried to retrieve the little ax. Cherub grabbed him by the collar and threw him to the ground.

“Roach,” he snarled.

“Sir,” said the boy, hiding his bad hand behind his back, as if to spare his chief the sight of it.

“What did I tell you about throwing axes at ladies’ heads?”

“‘Don’t throw axes at ladies’ heads,’ sir.”

“And what the hell do I find you doing, when you’re meant to be guarding the park?”

I helped Roach up by his bad hand and brushed the dirt off his shoulders.

“Apologies, Miss Carr,” he said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Hardly the worst reception I’ve gotten today.”

“Can’t let him off that easy,” said Cherub. “Boys’re meant to be an army. Instead they just act like, like . . .”

“Like a bunch of boys.”

It was a clever answer. It also didn’t please Cherub at all. He clapped, and Roach ran back to the barricade, ax pressed to his chest like a treasured toy.

“It’s bad enough for the children to play soldier,” I said. “I don’t see why you have to encourage them.”

“It’s not play, Gilda. We’ve got enemies on all sides. Any gang in the Lower West would bleed for a chance to run the square, and then there’s the bastards north of the Borderline, and . . . and would you stop giggling at me!”

“Never. How’s trade?”

“Sour. But no matter how sour it gets, Rotgut must be paid.”

“Any news?”

“Always,” he said and launched into a torrent of half-remembered anecdotes, filthy jokes, bloody legend, and bawdy song. Cherub was obsessed with the minutiae of gangland feuding—rumors that the Bleecker Street Stranglers had overtaken Sheridan Square, that the Sparrows and the Cut-Eyes were at peace, that Horace the Bloodletter had been blackjacked to death and buried beneath the footlights of the Cherry Lane Theater. Normally it made me chuckle, but the sun was sinking, and I didn’t have the time. From deep in my bag, I pulled out a package of wax butcher paper.

“Oh,” he said, “you marvelous woman.”

Cherub unwrapped the sandwich, which had been squashed flat in the afternoon’s excitement, and stuffed as much as he could into his mouth. He chewed, spraying flecks of meat across the sidewalk, and closed his eyes in thought.