“That’s right. That’s how I remember her. My Mary, she isn’t like that anymore. Not since we lost Gilda, she—it was better, you were right not to see her. And why would you want to, if you have the same woman back at home?”

We crossed onto Broadway, which was hardly crowded. The crowds moved over it freely, unaware that they were crossing the fault line that divided the city, that separated the lucky many from the desperate few.

“My father has this theory,” I said, “that our city was doomed the day Galen made his first trip upriver, his first trip through this . . . this hell that exists between your city and mine. Those trips poisoned my New York and caused thousands to die.”

“It’s mad.”

I had a thought. “You ever play with a length of cheesecloth?”

“Mary would rap my knuckles if I meddled with her pantry.”

“Pull it, and it stretches. Keep pulling, and every little hole starts to rip. That’s what Galen’s done to us. He found a hole in the river and used it to make a fortune. Every shipment he pushed through, the other holes stretched and stretched until they tore. Those tears look like shadows, and they swallow people whole. They drag them into this city of shadows, and once they’re there . . .”

“Why didn’t Galen and Andrea stop?”

“They were making money.”

“But if people were dying . . .”

“A disappearance isn’t a death. There’s no body. No culpability. Every time someone vanished, the people left behind got a little more frightened and needed Barbarossa’s liquor that much worse. Of course they wouldn’t stop.”

He didn’t ask any more questions after that, which surprised me. My father would have been peppering me with demands for theories, for data. Whatever I gave him, he would have spun it into a dozen webs of possibility—none of which would have had any relationship to the truth. Those mad webs had comforted him ever since my mother died. This Virgil had never lost his Mary Fall. Even when he watched his Gilda dragged beneath a milk truck, he still had Mary by his side—no longer schist, but still beautiful enough to support her Virgil as I could not support mine.

“Van Alen,” he said finally, a few blocks past Union Square. “Hmph.”

“Let me guess. In this city, he’s a kindly old toymaker who gives out free chocolates at Christmastime.”

“He’s a savage thug.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I was beginning to fear my city had a monopoly on evil men.”