Brass grabbed my wrist, tight enough that I couldn’t pull away, and traced his fingertip along the brand on my glove.

“This emblem here, he drew it in the snow, and from then on, it was our sigil. ‘Forevermore,’ he said, because he was always talking like a knight out of some silly book, ‘we shall be known from Houston Street to the Borderline. Every moll, every mort, every rabbit, every thug will crumble before the Seven Bloody Fists.’”

He had always seemed a gentle man. I knew, even as a girl I knew, that when he stepped out of the house, he changed into something else, but I had never really seen him as a killer. I traced my finger along the imprint of the leather brand. My father’s bloody fist. The music from inside fell away, the lights grew dim, and I saw him fighting, a boy I had never known stepping out of the darkness to break necks and frighten children, running from something I could never understand.

“The Seven Bloody Fists,” I said.

“He called us that because we were too broke to buy gloves.” Aiken twisted his hands into fists, and the ancient cracks in his knuckles glowed red. “All winter, our hands were the color of a bad drunk’s nose.”

“Whose hands? Yours and my father’s. Who else?”

He was whistling again, that same awful melody. I wanted quite badly to lift him by his suspenders and fling him over the ledge. He looked light enough. I twisted my highball on the glass side table, and the screech got his attention.

“Whose hands?” I said.

“It was quite a lineup. Several of our alumni went on to great things. Others never managed to escape the gutter.”

“You and my father.” He nodded. “Eddie Thorne?”

“A pathetic little man. Well, not that little.”

“Galen Copeland?”

“A strange boy. Always unhappy.”

“That’s four. Who else?”

“I’m quite proud to say that I once battled side by side with the lord of the Upper West.”

“Glen-Richard Van Alen?” I said, swept up again by that dizzy feeling of being caught in a coincidence too awful to ignore. It was a sensation, I’m sorry to say, that I was growing accustomed to.

“We called him Firecracker,” said Aiken. “He liked to make things go boom.”

“Two more.”

“The Fists were a progressive gang. Coeducational, right from the start.”

“Don’t tell me.” He smiled wide. His teeth were white in the front, yellow on the sides, and black at the back of his mouth. Good liquor burned in my stomach, and I felt that familiar, deadly coincidence tugging at the back of my neck. “Andrea Barbarossa.”

“She was as tough as your father, and much more lovely.”

“One more.”

“Can you guess her name?”

“Not . . . it wasn’t Mary Fall.”