“That’s what he came to ask me. And I told him, ‘Clubber, if you want to fix a fight or court an heiress, I’m your man. I know every crook and blue blood on the stem. But I haven’t set foot in the Westside in years. Its mysteries are beyond me.’ I tried to let him down easy. I thought he was drunk. I mean—what the hell kind of sense does it make? Some woman disappears in Times Square. Things like that happen. I’m sure there was another woman who’d disappeared the week before, the month before, and no one had any clue where she’d gone. It’s not like they saw her taken by shadows. But your father was stuck on it.”

“There must have been a reason.”

“He’d lost his goddamned mind. That’s your reason. He thought it was my fault, mine and Galen’s. What the hell could I have had to do with it? I just gave an old friend a little money to expand his business, and now it’s my fault some woman nobody heard of died? How is that fair?”

Brass seemed to want me to absolve him, but it was not within my power.

“They’re bringing in more guns,” I said. “A bigger shipment, Thorne said, big enough to wipe the Upper West off the map. Do you know where Copeland might have hidden a boat big enough for all that?”

“I don’t. That’s what I get for losing touch with old friends. But anyway, what do you care? You know what’s coming. Why not run?”

“Last night, I heard those boys dying in the dark. I saw the things that killed them. The way they screamed . . . that doesn’t need to happen again.” I put on another record, took the bottle from Aiken’s clammy hand, and drained the last of it into my throat. “After you—who did he go to next?”

“Barbie. He wanted her to shut down their operation. Silly bastard. He told me, ‘She loves me, Brass. Always has. I’m not worth a damn but she loves me anyway. And when I tell her what’s been going on, she’ll quit, or I’ll tell the world.’”

“She should have laughed. She should have dared him to tell the papers, to make a fool of himself one more time.”

“But it wasn’t a joke to her. It was real, wasn’t it? The whole silly thing.”

“And they killed him to protect it. Copeland or Barbarossa. My god.”