“I may be stupid, lady—I may be real stupid—but even I’m not dumb enough to go after Rotgut Barbarossa. Not even for a spot on the front page. Not even for nothing.”

“I gave you the information. What you do with it is up to you.”

“You really chasing this story?”

“As fast as I can.”

“Don’t expect me at your funeral,” he said, but led me to the stairs.

The Sentinel morgue was just below street level. A strip of frosted windows ran the length of the room. Their meager light was swallowed by the cloud of dust that hung in the air, as stagnant as old news. Max made a show of displaying his press pass to the stooped Turk who guarded the entrance, but the old man paid him no mind.

“Your name, miss?” he asked me.

“Gilda Carr.”

“If you will be so kind, miss,” he said. “Right this way.”

He led me to a long, scarred table, withdrew a chair, and brought me all the clippings I asked for: whole lives reduced to wads of newsprint stuffed in faded yellow envelopes. Max lingered until he saw that no one was going to be impressed by him, then disappeared into the stacks. When he was gone, I popped open the first envelope and spread Andrea Barbarossa across the table.

Her file was thin. A 1920 item about gangsters expected to profit from Prohibition mentioned her in passing, as did a 1916 feature about the spread of vice through the walled-off Westside. In each article she was granted precisely one adjective: “ruthless.” No further explanation was needed.

The longest article was the oldest. “Rivers of Blood Flow over Tenderloin,” screamed the headline, which topped a column of smudged, miniscule type. It told the story of a rough night at Lasko’s Twenty-Seven, an old-style Tenderloin dance hall. There, at the climax of a floor show that could only be described as “infamous,” dancer “Starlight Angie Barbossa” leapt from the stage, smashed a bottle, and tore its jagged edges across another woman’s cheek. She continued stabbing until the girl’s face was stripped to the bone, then stood over the poor, dying creature, fighting off any who tried to help, until her victim heaved a last breath through her ragged, ruined mouth and, mercifully, died. The dead girl was Vivian Pretzker. The motive was unknown.

“She should have known better than to come in here,” Angie was quoted. “Not after she done what she done. Not when I was dancing.”

Starlight Angie was arrested, but there was no mention of a trial.

In the narrow drawer marked “Co–Cr,” I found a single article on Galen Copeland, credited in 1902 for saving a pair of ginger twins from drowning in Spuyten Duyvil Creek, at the mouth of the Harlem River.