We had liquor. We had peace. But no dawn passed without one or two fresh bodies half buried under a snow that fell fat and yellow, like lard from heaven. When convenient, I reported the dead to the guardsmen or, on the rare occasion that I spotted one, a policeman. Mostly, I stared straight ahead as I walked past their stiffened forms, trying to forget the gray of their skin, the dusty red of their lips. These bodies were no mystery, and so they were not my concern. They were killed by anonymous thugs; they were killed by the city itself.

I saw plenty of them after the Byrds engaged me in the quest for the purloined pinkie, when I burned three days combing the gutters, alleys, and ruined houses of Carmine Street, and finding no fingers save those on corpses’ hands.

On the fourth day, thick, wet flakes swept across the city, and the Westside hardened like wax. Once, each block would have been scraped clean by one of Barbarossa’s little gangs of children—the One-Eyed Cats, the Gutter Girls, the Other Gophers, the Cut-Eyes, the Mercer Street Mercifuls, the Barkleys, the Toes—but they were all dead now, and Van Alen’s guardsmen lacked the numbers to do anything but hack a narrow path along the major sidewalks. The rest of the Lower West was left to freeze.

When it was too cold to walk the streets, I brought a pound of brisket to Judson Memorial Church as an offering to Father Lamb. The defrocked priest’s speakeasy was closed until spring, and he was happy to trade a lesson in Catholic history for a side of Jewish beef. I set the table, and he pulled down a volume on the lives of the saints.

“She was born on the south coast of Ireland in 632,” he said between bites. “A noblewoman who renounced her inheritance to minister to the poor. Good girl. While working among the wretched, she picked up a pox that twisted her spine, causing untold suffering until she perished in a poorhouse fire. The end.”

“What was special about her finger?”

“Doesn’t say. It might have been just a finger.”

“Are there any other bits of her floating around?”

“This has no mention of any relics, fingers or otherwise.”

“And the Byrds . . .”

“What about them?”

“Are they as kind as they seem?”

Lamb spent some time coughing down an oversized mouthful. I waited.

“What the hell do you care?” he rasped.

“They’re a client. Before I can find what they’ve lost, I have to know them, inside and out.”

He wiped a greasy hand across his mouth and beard, cleaning some parts of his face and leaving others grimier than before.

“Do you know why I got out of the business of God?” he said.

“I thought you were tossed out for blasphemy.”

He scowled. People hate it when you answer rhetorical questions.