“I’m not certain that’s a wise course of action. What Barbie’s become—she makes the girl who killed Viv Pretzker look like a saint.”

“Where is she?”

“The best way to find her, as far as I understand, is . . . do you know a speak called Merrill’s?”

Eight

An hour later, I was lost in the dark. Carla Stone’s inexplicably popular New York guidebook, A City Divided, spends most of its 128 pages cautioning the reader against venturing into the Westside, where the innocent tourist is certain to be defiled, molested, abused, attacked, subjected to a fate worse than death, or—when euphemisms fail Mrs. Stone—simply raped. If a visitor to the city does find herself caught on a darkened Westside street and is unsure how to find the stem, Mrs. Stone recommends three possible approaches:

1. Creep forward slowly, feet always on the ground, feeling for obstructions.
2. Run as fast as you possibly can, in any direction that seems appropriate, trusting that eventually, you will get somewhere.
3. Scream until help finds you.

Bex Red and I had always laughed at that passage, but alone in the Westside dark for the first time, I was beginning to see the appeal of her third suggestion. I’d left Max at the hotel—he caught my eye just as the elevator doors were closing, shocked that I would leave such a marvelous party—and crossed the fence at Fourteenth Street, where Van Alen’s billowing night-fires beat back the shadows as best they could. I followed them to Sixth Avenue and turned left into the dark.

What should have been a ten-minute walk stretched out into a nightmare. The Westside darkness was limitless, and in every pool of shadow I saw the one staring eye of Margie Fournier. The night before, the shadows had lunged for the gunman and then taken me too. Wherever they dragged us, I escaped by death. What would it take for them to move again?

I passed under a tree whose roots had split the sidewalk. Was it my overheated imagination, or were the shadows cast by that thinning moon beginning to quiver? I stopped and held my hand beneath the branches of the bulbous, overgrown tree. In my palm, the shadows pulsed in 4/4 time.

I lit a match. It pushed the shadows back and gave me a moment to breathe. I was in one of the nameless alleys of the Village, where my father had forged his legend. It was a sticky night, but the sweat on my back was cold. A shattered horse cart blocked half the street. It was surrounded by smashed, bird-pecked, rotting fruit. The scene was still, but the shadows were moving, and they seemed to be moving toward me. My match began to die.