The Basement Club went on forever. The bar ran the length of the room; the earth floor was studded with melted snow, vomit, and blood. Built in a pit where a Bleecker Street apartment house used to be, it was below street level and had a low ceiling of irregular boards that kept out snow but let in damp. Rubber hoses snaked out of the bar at one-foot intervals. Drop a nickel in the slot and out slid a trickle of gin to be caught with a cup, if the patron brought one, or a mouth. A tangle of machinery ran the length of the place, whirring and clanging as the poison poured. There was no music, no talk, no chairs—just the cheapest drunk on the Westside. It was fiendishly popular.

Judy and Enoch left me at the door, proving that there were places of sin too filthy even for them. I entered through a turnstile that shot a ticket into my palm, which told me I was the seventy-third patron of the night.

I paid my nickel and cupped my palms under the hose, slurping up whatever didn’t run through my fingers. I wiped my hands on the patron to my left, who was glassy with drink, his mouth stained bloody by the beet red liquor. The bartender surveyed his automated gin mill from a high chair, a lifeguard ignoring an ocean of drowning men. After several minutes’ concentrated effort, and another few mouthfuls of gin, I caught his eye.

He was short and broad, with bushy hair and a nose like a ball of cookie dough squashed flat. His candy-striped uniform was a dizzying mess of black and green. On his chest was a wrinkled slip of paper, held with safety pins, that read “64.” He smoothed it with his wrist as he climbed down from his perch and walked my way. His name was Abner Byrd.

“He’s a scourge,” Judy had said. “I’m sorry, brother, but it’s true. Walked out on us when he was sixteen, and he’s spent the last thirty years sinking deeper and deeper into sin. Doesn’t speak to us except once or twice a year, when he crashes into the church, blind drunk, to scream that there is no god but death.”

“He is a difficult case,” admitted Enoch. “But God would ask us to forgive.”

“I’ll forgive when he gives us the finger back. He’s the only rat on the Westside low enough to steal it. He’d do it just to watch us cry.”

As I looked Abner in the face now, I wondered if that was true. The prodigal Byrd leaned on the bar and spoke, sleepy and slow.

“Trouble with the tube?” he said. “Sometimes a roach’ll die in there and it’ll get plugged. Let me get the pipe cleaner.”

“The gin flows free.”

“Then why the eye?”

“I’m looking for the finger of Saint Róisín.”