“I’m sure we can do whatever you think would be most appropriate. We never have enough of anything here at the mission. Raising funds is a constant struggle.”

“I was certain that was true,” Sarah said. “Which is why I want to help. I’d like to think that Emilia’s death can bring some good.”

Mrs. Wells smiled sadly. “I’d like to think that, too, Mrs. Brandt.”

When Emilia Donato left home, she hadn’t gone too far, Frank observed. Her parents lived only a few blocks from the mission, where Mulberry Street made a sharp turn between Park and Bayard Streets. Known as the Bend, the area had long been the location of the most notorious slums in the city. A couple decades earlier, it had been the juncture of five streets. The Five Points area had been so dangerous that even the police never went there except in large groups. Five Points crime had been cleaned up, but the poverty and squalor remained.

Thousands of Jewish and Italian immigrants were now crammed into crumbling tenements and rotting houses left over from the original Dutch settlers. The city had recently decided to tear down the worst of them and build a park on the west side of Mulberry Street, but the work was just beginning. The people who lived here now were still trapped in their poverty and misery, and in addition to the criminals that plagued the entire city, they were also terrorized by the more subtle members of the Black Hand.

Frank had waited until evening to call on the Donato family, figuring the father and brother were more likely to be home at that time of day. Frank was assuming, of course, that they had jobs. From the way Mrs. Wells had spoken of them, he would not have been surprised to find them lying in a drunken stupor in their flat at nine o’clock in the morning.

This part of the Bend was inhabited primarily by Italian immigrants, most of them recent arrivals.