I rested a shaking hand on the office door, but did not step inside. I had spent the week resisting the lure of Galen Copeland’s slow decline. That mystery was far less dangerous than the memory of my father.

The office had been the sanctuary of Virgil Carr, once a celebrated NYPD skull-cracker, later a private detective, later only my father, and finally nothing at all. He began life as a Sixth Avenue brawler, chief of a makeshift crew whose name never rose to the pantheon of New York gangs—the Dead Rabbits, the Whyos, the Tub of Blood Bunch, the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guard, the Daybreak Boys, the Baxter Street Dudes—but who ruled their patch of 1870s New York with vengeful sadism. Virgil ran them, and they called him Clubber Carr, in honor of the night he tossed two rival boys through a church window and clubbed them until their blood blotted out the crimson offering of the stained-glass Christ.

He would have been dead by twenty, victim of poisoned liquor or an enemy knife, were it not for dumb chance. As Virgil scaled the scaffolding of a new tenement just south of Abingdon Square, a pigeon landed on his fingers, right on the thick black ring that had broken so many young men’s skulls. Afraid it might shit in his eye—for the pigeons of 1876 were no more respectful than those of today—he jerked his hand away and fell fifteen feet to the pavement. He dragged himself to the clubhouse, and directed the treasurer to empty the crate of petty cash, and send for a doctor. The sawbones, a wharf-side drunk who once served as a ship’s surgeon, set his leg poorly, and it was two months before Virgil could walk again. While he waited for his bones to knit, his boys stole him books to read, raiding libraries and newsstands for as many dime novels as they could carry. It took less than a week for Virgil to tire of Buffalo Bill.

“This is garbage,” muttered Virgil. “Get me something substantial, you illiterate gutter rats.”

When his second-in-command protested that the dime novels were the best they could find, Virgil cracked him across the face with the paperback, sending him sprawling across the dirt clubhouse floor. The pudgy toady with the mouthful of dirt was Eddie Thorne, who would one day cadge drinks in Father Lamb’s campanile. He apologized to my father, as he always did, and the matter was settled.

That night, Thorne sat across the street from the home of a society surgeon, safely wrapped in the shadows. When the doctor climbed into his cab, opera-bound, Thorne shattered the basement windows and shimmied inside. The broken glass sliced his flanks, but Thorne did not mind the pain, knowing it was nothing compared to what Virgil would do if he came home empty-handed. Thorne left the house with the doctor’s entire medical library in tow.