“I don’t mean the produce. I mean, how do you ignore matters of life and death? How do you find the strength to stick to vegetables?”

“For one thing, I ignore stupid questions.”

From her desk drawer, Ida Greene took a silver whistle and emptied her lungs into it. Through the door stepped a hideous beast, with hairy knuckles and a forest of stubble. Across his left cheek ran a puckered scar, roughly the shape of Manhattan.

“Ugly,” said Mrs. Greene, “remove this woman.”

“Ma’am.”

The beast named Ugly slouched across the room and stood awkwardly at my side, waiting to see if I would come quietly.

“I don’t want to touch you,” he said, with a thin accent that might have been Italian. “But if she says, I gotta.”

“A smart woman would leave,” said Mrs. Greene.

“Because I’m only half smart, I’ll say one more thing. Barbarossa is on the warpath. I can stop her if you get me to Van Alen this afternoon.”

“I don’t know about war, girl. I just run a train station.”

“And I don’t bother with this kind of mystery, but for the sake of several hundred lives, I make an exception.”

Mrs. Greene did not look up from her work. Ugly smiled weakly. I held up my hands and left peacefully. He followed me, an awkward step and a half behind, out of the office, past pushcarts advertising the last of the Jersey beefsteaks and the first of the winter squash, to the foot of those lovely stairs.

“Did you mean that,” he said, “about war?”

“I did.”

“You ever see a war?”

“No.”

“I fought for Italy, in the mountains. I was—the word, I think, is ‘sapper.’ You know what this is?”

“Explosives.”

“Trench warfare, you know . . . it’s not as fun as people say.”

He waited there, leaning on the railing, smiling at his little joke, waiting for me to ask a question.

“We have a friend in common, you and I,” I said. “Edith Copeland. You danced with her at Merrill’s. A wealthy woman, slumming. You kissed. You had the roughest, most wonderful hands.”

“Oh no,” he said, blushing through his stubble. “It was not that at all. She sort of, you know, she fell on me.”

“She fell?”

“She tipped off her stool and knocked the drink out of my hand. She couldn’t stop laughing. I took her back to the fence. It was very dark. The whole time, she kept laughing, laughing until her eyes were wet.”

“Why?”

“She’d lost a glove.”

With one of those gestures permitted only to Italians, he dismissed the follies of womankind with a single flick of the wrist. I couldn’t argue. How stupid to fret over a missing glove.

“What were you doing getting drunk in Barbarossa’s territory?” I said.

“Mr. Van Alen, you know, hates strong liquor. It makes men weak, he says.”

“He’s right.”