She swirled her cup, scowling at its emptiness. I tilted the bottle in her direction, but she refused.

“It’s not healthy, drinking this filth,” she said.

“Beats the cold.”

She pulled her layers tighter, then leaned across the table and gave me an entirely unworkable hug. I stared as she walked away and wished I knew how to leave by her side. But I had one more appointment to keep.

A party of slummers poured through the door, nearly knocking Bex to the floor, and flung themselves at the bar crying for gin. Berk slid them a couple of bottles, exacting an outrageous price in return, and they occupied the table beside mine, laughing like only Eastsiders can.

“Isn’t it the most marvelous pit?” asked their leader, an overgrown boy in a cashmere overcoat whose slick curls stuck out below the brim of his hat. “Berk’s a troll, but she has her uses. I’ve been coming here for ages, you know, and she loves me like a son.”

I eyed the leg of his chair, which teetered beside the drop. If I smacked it, there was a strong chance he would fall to his death. Warmed by that happy thought, I returned the drawings to the envelope, taking care not to see the one that remained inside, and poured myself another drink.

I was watching snow swirl across the hardwood floor, savoring the mawkish burn of Berk’s red gin, when the bells of Grace Church sang ten o’clock, and Judy Byrd kicked open the stairwell door.

“I come to preach the electric resurrection,” she bellowed, and those familiar with her ministry pulled their glasses close to their chests.

A black woman whose tight curls were just smoked with gray, Judy vaulted onto the oak bar without apparent strain and did not turn her head at Berk’s perfunctory cry that she get the hell down. She wore a homespun orange dress and a tightly knotted kerchief, and spoke with a heavy Haitian accent that I knew to be an affectation. She clutched an ancient broom whose few remaining bristles stuck out at odd angles, hoisting it over her head like an executioner showing off his ax.

“What business have I, an honest woman, a god-fearing woman, what business have I skulking in the worst gin mills the Westside has to offer?” she asked the room.

“I think Miss Berk would take exception to that,” said the cashmere overcoat. He looked around, waiting for the room to acknowledge his barb, but even his friends were watching Judy. She was well into her reverie, which she would follow, as she always did, down twisting paths of mixed metaphor until it led us all to salvation.