“You didn’t approve when she married my father, did you?” I said.

“Why would you ask me such an inane question?”

“I’ve always wondered how they met.”

“Your father was a brute, and after she met him, Mary was never my daughter again. I never bothered to ask how it began.”

I followed her down the long hallway, keeping my eyes on the photo of Mary for as long as I could. At the end of the immaculate passage, one of the doors was open an inch. Behind it I saw a heap of broken furniture, rotted books, ruined artwork, tarnished silver, cracked glass, and other refuse far past the point of identification. Ana shut the door, and I pretended I hadn’t seen.

She insisted on helping me put on my coat. As I slid my left arm home, I asked, “Was she as good as I remember?”

“Better,” said Ana. “There never walked a purer soul.”

She called her carriage, an electric green behemoth drawn by a black horse speckled white with snow, and I glided home. As we crossed the Borderline, the tranquility of the Upper West fell away, and I steeled myself for work.

Two

That winter had been all red gin and frozen corpses. Six months prior, my beloved Westside—a vast, desolate territory overrun with relentless vegetation but by unknown magic spared the tedium of modern technology like electricity, automobiles, and guns—convulsed into a civil war between the Upper West’s hulking dictator, Glen-Richard Van Alen, and the Lower West’s bootlegging bandit queen, Andrea Barbarossa. When their armies were slaughtered by the New York Police Department’s savage Fourth Precinct, in a massacre that it disgusts me to say was already being romanticized as the Battle of Eighth Avenue, the lawless Lower West passed into Van Alen’s hands.

He promised order and the pathetic trappings of civilization that are the hallmarks of the bourgeois Upper West. He gave us nothing but a tattered force of guardsmen who feared our streets and loathed our people, and whose only contribution to civic life below Fourteenth Street was to light candles nightly at each intersection and walk on, abandoning the corners to those who thrive in the dark.

Without Barbie’s army of eager children to patrol the sidewalks and alleys, the few thousand who remained below the Borderline became the targets of robbery, battery, murder, and rape, a wave of street crime not felt in the city since the close of the last century. When his new territory threatened revolt, the feverishly teetotal Van Alen relented by opening a distillery on Morton Creek, churning out industrial-grade gin stained red with beets. The stuff was toxic, but he sold it cheap, along with a warning that if even a drop of the red stuff appeared on the far side of the fence, where it might arouse the attention of the Volstead agents, he would burn the distillery to the ground.