Slummers. They are a plague on the Lower West, traipsing through our alleys, drinking our liquor, staining our gutters with their blood. I might have screamed at Edith for taking such a stupid risk or pushed her into traffic for risking my life on a lie, but the blood was receding from her eyes, and a smile was sneaking across her lips, and it didn’t seem right to knock her back down.

The Sentinel linotype machine was as grand and twisted as the devil’s pipe organ. At its foot sat a tiny man with an overflowing belly, whose eyes seemed to have grown closer together from the daily effort of staring down minute pieces of type. Those narrow eyes stared through Max Schmittberger, who had worked himself into a frothing rage as loud as the Sentinel presses.

“With two T’s!” he shouted. “It’s Schmittberger with two T’s—just the way it sounds! You’re a nitwit, you know that? A war criminal! You should be arrested, chained up, tortured, and shot for criminal negligence, for crimes committed against newspaperdom. You should be hung by your toenails, and your sinuses should be stuffed full of hot linotype lead.”

“Don’t they teach you cub reporters nothing?”

“I am not a cub reporter, you syphilitic buffoon. I have a byline.”

“Then you should know that this is a rough and ready operation. An afternoon rag. We work quick, we do not proof. Any word uncommon, or longer than six letters, is in danger of being misspelled. That goes for the governor’s name, and it goes for Schnittbergens.”

“Schmittberger!”

Max attacked the linotype, an iron beast that had been standing before he was born and would remain long after he was gone. Three swift kicks left the machine undented, but tore the thinning leather on his right shoe. Rage seeped out of him; his shoulders sagged, and he could not meet the linotype man’s eye. I took him by the shoulders and guided him out of the room.

“That fink had better be careful when he leaves tonight,” he said, almost in tears. “I’ll wait in the alley. I’ll shatter his skull.”

“Of course you will.”

He wiped his eyes and saw me for the first time.

“G. Carr. What are you doing here?”

“I need a look at your morgue.”

He smoothed what remained of his hair and stood a little taller.

“And just what do I get in return?” he said.

“The name of the dead man. Galen Copeland.”

“Never heard of him.”

“A modestly successful Eastside merchant.”

“And just what was he doing on the Westside docks?”

“I believe,” I said, lowering my voice to a melodramatic whisper, “that he was a smuggler. Moving liquor out of the Lower West and taking it upriver to god knows where.”

“That’s an expert way to get yourself killed. If it was liquor, that means . . .”

“Barbarossa.”