The next time I saw Max, I would have to ask if Thorne snored during the interview. He must have woken up toward the end, because at the bottom of the long, narrow column, there were a few words that had the sour taste of the Westside.

“Tell that uptown ——, that great bully calls himself Firecracker, you tell him this was only the start. An opening act. Soon we cross the Borderline, and we do it in force, and the whole Westside is gonna know how heavy the law can come down.”

Finally, the train picked up speed. The sun dipped behind the towers of lower Manhattan, and the air whistling through the windows turned cold. I crumpled the paper and tossed it out the window. It fell through the tracks, down to the crowded river. The train dove past the tenements of the Lower East, and in a few flashing seconds I saw whole lives lived on the roofs of those buildings.

At the top of one of the wood-and-paper shacks, a hundred feet above East Broadway, a girl who could have been eight or could have been a malnourished thirteen looked to see that she was not being watched, then reached under her shirt for a sticky bun the size of her head. She ate it like she had never tasted anything so sweet, and never would again. By the time the tunnel swallowed the train, the sticky bun was gone. I touched my cheeks. I was not crying.

“You gotta get this looked at.”

“Pardon me?”

“It’s incumbent on you, as a resident of the area west of Broadway, to ensure that your paperwork is up to date and in accordance with all city ordinances, rules, regulations, and decrees.”

“This license is valid until December.”

“Every license issued by the city, for transit of peoples back and forth across the Broadway dividing area, has been called up for review.”

Where the fence slashed across Houston Street, there was a gate as grand as any in the city. A cast-iron relief exhibited scenes of Westside landmarks for people who would never gaze upon them again. Below a depiction of the pristine Washington Square Arch stood a pert little man with deep wrinkles around his eyes and tufts of hair bristling out of his ears. His hands shook violently as he pointed to the scrap of paper pasted to the door, whose font was too small to read, that bore the signature of Lieutenant Edward Thorne.

“How long will this license be valid?”

“It ain’t.” He crushed my precious little paper into a ball and licked his lips in a truly obscene way. “Cross over if you want to, but they’ll never let you back.”