The trapdoor at the top of the ladder jerked open. My stomach lurched. My hands slipped. I was about to scream when two hands reached down, grabbed me by the wrists, and dragged me into the heat of the late afternoon.

Two

“Stow those gloves,” said Bex Red, “or I will toss them over the side.”

To underline the threat, she tipped the last of our three dozen clams down her throat and hurled the shell over her shoulder. It tumbled a hundred feet through the air and shattered on West Fourth Street. We sat on milk crates in the church campanile, which a quietly surly defrocked priest had converted into a makeshift oyster house shaded by the canopy of Washington Square. On the Eastside, it would be called a speakeasy, but there was little law on this side of the fence, and certainly no Prohibition agents, so we drank as freely as we pleased. Behind the rough-cut wooden bar, Father Lamb applied a greasy rag to an equally greasy cup. In the far corner, a middle-aged drunk snored softly, hands resting on his belly as if in prayer. A breeze blew through the arches of the tower, and the sinking sun tinted the sky gold.

“Goddamn it, Bex,” said Father Lamb. “Don’t toss those clamshells. They could hurt someone.”

“It’s nothing but One-Eyed Cats down there. If they’re tough as they say, a clamshell won’t hurt.”

“Those are kids.” He spat, and the matter was closed.

“Drink?” said Bex.

I nodded, and she poured from our bottle, which was labeled “rye” but could have just as easily passed for prussic acid. It was the drink that kept the Lower West humming, the toxic brew of Andrea Barbarossa, sometimes known as Rotgut, moonshine queen of New York City. A desperate drunk once offered me a fistful of cash to find Rotgut’s hidden headquarters, that he might tap one of her stills, but I am not a suicidal woman, and I refused.

Since the fence was raised in 1914, two monarchs ruled the Westside. The fat section beneath Fourteenth Street was held by Barbarossa, whose laughter flowed like bootleg gin. North of the Borderline, in the skinny stretch between Broadway and the water, the rest of the Westside—miles and miles of it—was controlled by Glen-Richard Van Alen, despot, pyromaniac, recluse. While Barbarossa won loyalty with cheap liquor and punished betrayal with a cut throat, Van Alen styled himself a man of peace and offered his territory as a haven to those respectable people barred from the Eastside and too genteel to live downtown. Above Fourteenth Street was a bourgeois utopia, lit by Van Alen’s candles. Fearful people believed it was safer there.

I preferred the cheap liquor.