Barbarossa’s private car was as cool as a crypt. The seats and straps had been removed and replaced with two long burgundy couches. Scarlet curtains covered the windows, and wood as rich as Costa Rican chocolate ran the length of the floor. There was almost no room for furniture, but that hadn’t stopped her from filling the space with as much looted treasure as the Westside had to offer. Stuffed into the corners and piled on the couches, I saw stacked portraits, family silver, Chinese vases, illuminated manuscripts, a six-foot globe, and a carved mahogany chair tall enough to serve as a madman’s throne. Somewhere in the back, I saw a four-poster bed.

Barbarossa, walking noiselessly on her peculiarly small feet, glided toward the conductor’s compartment, which had been replaced with the most ornate bar I had ever seen. She handed me a frosted glass of rye, so cold that it ran like sludge down my throat.

“Boulton’s,” I said. I hadn’t had it in years.

“The good stuff.”

“So the gun is yours.”

“It used to be. It was stolen, along with a few dozen of its mates, off the docks by whoever killed poor, sweet, melancholy Galen.”

“And the rifle that killed him?”

“That was stolen too, a few days earlier, right out of his office.”

“Why do these guns work? Why don’t they rust away to nothing? How the hell is any of it possible?”

“I have no idea.”

“Where was Copeland getting them?”

“Somewhere upriver, where liquor is scarce and guns are cheap. A military base, perhaps, or just some awful hick town. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. He’s been selling my booze there for years—just enough to keep that pathetic business of his afloat—but the guns are something new.”

“Who stole them?”

“That, my dear, is what I’d like you to find out.”

My hand twitched, wanting to pelt the heavy, frosty glass through the surface of that hideous globe.

“In the past days,” I said, “I have nearly been exploded, shot, and burned alive. I have been menaced by shadows and forced to try on a corset. My father’s home is vanishing, joint by joint. My client is an uncooperative shrew, my only ally a nitwit newspaperman. My clothes are tattered. My feet are tired. You want me to find your guns? Well, I want to know what in the seven hells of Greenwich Village is going on!”

That was when I threw the glass. It punched straight through Greenland and left an oddly Greenland-shaped hole.

“That was a seven-hundred-dollar globe,” said Barbarossa, and for a moment I thought she might plant her jewel-studded fist right in my face.

“Not that you paid for it.”

“No,” she said, forcing out a chuckle. “No I did not.”