“Somewhere in the river, there’s a . . . a gate, a door that runs through the water, that crosses from my city to yours,” I said. “In between there is a nightmare. Galen Copeland found it a long time ago and used it to make himself and a few other people very rich. Every time they came through, my city died a little bit more.”

“And now that girl, that Juliette, is doing the same thing.”

“She killed her father to protect the business.”

“How could she do something like that?”

“He’d been hurting her for a long time. In little ways, over and over her whole life. I think, to her, that made it okay.”

“It’s abhorrent.”

“Yes. Did she say anything before she took your daughter?”

“‘This is where I belong.’ She sounded . . . not mad. Just cold.”

“This was her escape route. She’s going to make a tidy fortune selling guns to the NYPD, and she doesn’t want to spend that wealth in our New York.”

“So why take Juliette?”

“She wanted to make sure there was a place for her here. She was going to kill you, to kill Juliette, then come here and take her place, and the business too. But your wife . . . your wife might interfere.”

“My wife?”

“Edith would inherit in Juliette’s stead.”

“She would, had the fever not taken her in 1919.” Copeland’s oyster spilled juice down the side of his face. He wiped it with the burnt sleeve of his jacket and looked very much like a man who had lost everything. “You crossed over. You didn’t see where the ship made the jump?”

“I was in the hold.”

“You sailed from where, exactly?”

“Jane Street, on the Westside. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, and then the engines cut out, and there was this horrible . . . scrape of metal. That’s when we passed through.”

“And then?”

“Another forty-five minutes, and we ended up beneath the Manhattan Bridge.”

He snapped his fingers. “A chart, Robbins! The harbor. Quick, now.”

Robbins shuffled over—not all that quick—a chart rolled up in his hands. He spread it across the table and weighed it down with our mugs.

“Don’t spill a drop,” he said. “That’s a fine chart.”

“Any of this look familiar?” said Copeland, running his finger along the waterfront.

“Not from this angle.”

“It’s no good. You could have gone anywhere from the Jane Street pier.”

“How well do you know Virgil Carr?”

“Better than most men.”

“Do you speak often?”

“A few times a year, he comes down to the docks for a few glasses of beer, a few hours of reheated stories.”

“Did he tell you about the time they found his head?”

“Aye. It was a strange tale, and I looked past it. Thought it was the ale talking. I should have known better. That man was made of iron, but when they found that head . . . it shook him to his core.”