“I’m not much of a cop, and I know that, but I don’t want to be the one to let Clubber Carr’s only kid disappear into the dark.”

“What sentiment.”

“Besides, it’s a long way, and I hate giving directions.”

I followed him down, far past the bend in the stairs, until I felt cool air for the first time in months. At the bottom was another door. Thorne’s match went out as he opened it. The darkness was complete. I tried to remember to breathe. I followed the shuffle of his footsteps through the door, tripped on something unseen, and fell onto my hands and knees. Beneath my palms was something metal, long, and ice cold. He lit another match, and I saw that I was clutching the third rail.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “No juice.”

“This is the IRT?” My voice was hoarse, scared. Not my own.

“Seventh Avenue Line. Started it, I don’t know, ten years back. By the time they finished, you think any one of them drivers wanted to work a tunnel in the Westside?”

“And Barbarossa moved in . . .”

“The day the IRT cleared out.”

We moved slowly, staying between the gleaming silver tracks, picking our way over rats, dead and alive. The breeze, at first sewage-sweet, gradually became fuller, rounder, like baking bread. I was happy to have Thorne in front of me. I did not trust him well enough to have him at my back.

“So just what brings you to this particular patch of paradise?” he said.

“Did he love her?”

“I don’t follow.”

“My father,” I said, and I was surprised by how angry I sounded. “Did he love Barbarossa?”

“Oh.”

“Well?”

“Oh lord, Gilda, I guess you could say he did, like an addict loves the needle or a drunk gets warm just looking at the curve of a bottle’s neck. I’m sorry, kid. It’s not easy, learning something like that.”

It was like acid, straight to the face. Every time I stumbled, I felt the rage surge within my chest, rage at a woman I’d never met, who made my father forget my mother and took him away from our home. I was not sure what I would say to her when I met her, and that uncertainty took root and blossomed into something that might have been fear, or might have been hate.