I’d expected a bodyguard of ten or fifteen young soldiers, but aside from one man dozing at the door, she was alone. I peered down the sight of the pistol just long enough to remember that I had never fired a gun before, and that if I was going to start it would be good to be close. A bridge ran from her subway car to the platform. I placed my gun on it and climbed up. I’d hoped to sneak across the bridge and down the platform, to bury the gun in her back and see whether or not I could pull the trigger, but the bridge creaked under my weight, and Barbie turned her head.

“Who’s that?” she roared, with a voice as wide and powerful as Broadway itself. “Who’s that lurking in the dark?”

I held the gun at my hip and crossed into the light, and a smile exploded across her round, red face.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s finally you.”

She stepped toward me. Before I knew what to do with the gun, she swept me into a suffocating embrace. She smelled of spilled liquor, mothballs, fermentation, and damp, like the shack of a fisherman who’s given up catching fish. Soft arms crushed me against an even softer chest, as she buried my head in the folds of her infinite, amorphous velvet dress. Finally, she allowed me to breathe.

“And what are you doing with that pistol?” she asked.

“Let’s decide together.” The words sounded wrong in my ear. I felt every stitch of fabric on my body, every ounce of steel in my hand. Her awful liquor coated my tongue, and I felt like any choice I made would be fatally wrong. I forced out a few more words. “Did you kill Galen Copeland?”

She leaned back on the nearest still, mouth wide, teeth black, laugh loud enough to shatter glass.

“Kill him! Did I kill Galen? You darling girl—why should I kill that ridiculous old sailor?”

“For running liquor in your territory.”

“You’re not half the snoop your father was,” she said, and I wanted to blast the words out of her mouth. “You don’t know one-tenth of what goes on in the Lower West. You don’t know anything at all.”

I did my best to hold the pistol level.

“But he was running liquor?”

“Of course,” she said. “What do you think I was paying him for?”

“It was your booze in the storeroom.”

“Naturally. No one moves a drop below the Borderline without my permission. Galen and that little yacht of his had been shifting my product for years.”

“And Marguerite Fournier?”

“Was just one of dozens of local business owners who have chosen to boost profits by joining my organization. She was a skittish woman, but strong in her way. What happened to her was a tragedy.”

“It was gruesome.”