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near the window, examining a customers cotton blouse by natural light to determine whether it had been damaged by bleach, when the glass exploded. The police determined that the bomb had been made by filling a smudge pot stolen from a street construction project with paraffin and inserting a flaming rag. The entire front of the store was gutted by fire and Chanah was hospitalized with third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. She died that night—fortunately, they said, without regaining consciousness.
    That was the beginning of the Cleaners and Dyers War, from which the Purple Gang took its name. Sid Yegerov, who paid no attention to territorial disputes and did not keep company with others of his profession, had known nothing of the business until he returned from the bank to find black smoke pouring out of the front of the shop and a hook and ladder clanging up the block.
    Sid wasn’t impressed with the police investigation, even when it produced an arrest at the end of just three days. The suspect, a nineteen-year-old neighborhood youth whom the dry cleaner knew by sight, had turned himself in at the local precinct house and confessed, saying he had intended only to destroy the shop as an example to those establishments whose owners refused to align themselves with the Cleaners and Dyers Protective Association, of which he was the local representative. Guilt over the death of Mrs. Yegerov had proven too much for him to bear in silence. Hearst’s Detroit Times ran a picture of the suspect on its police page, face buried in his manacled hands on a bench outside Recorders Court before his arraignment on a charge of felony murder.
    The widower was unmoved, It was clear the youth had been put up to take the blame, probably in place of some more valuable gang member, and that he had been promised good representation and a sum of money to compensate him for the inconvenience—in this case, seven to ten years of his life for the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter, to which he pleaded guilty. He was out in three.
    Sid didn’t bother to attend the sentencing, or to keep track of what happened to the boy, although he heard a rumor that something had happened during his confinement in the Southern Michigan Penitentiary at Jackson and that it was bad enough to prevent him from returning to the neighborhood, where the story was known. That meant he was in Toledo. The Purple Gang owned that port on Lake Erie down to the manhole covers and the storage buildings where the Department of Public Works kept the piles of salt it spread on the streets in February, as well as several hundred cases of Old Log Cabin, sourmash whiskey, a favorite in Capone’s Chicago. By now he was probably a street commissioner.
    What Sid did, instead of interest himself in the fortunes of the young man who the law was satisfied had taken Chanah’s life, was buy a gun.
    It was a seven-millimeter Luger that Krekor Messarian, the Armenian tailor in the next block, had acquired from a German in the trenches in France during the 1917 Christmas truce. The trade had cost him six cartons of Fatimas. The cleaner gave him fifteen dollars. The pistol, an ugly brown length of pipe with checked wooden grips and a firing mechanism that worked on the same basic principle as a cigarette lighter, shared a White Owl cigar box on a shelf below the counter with an extra magazine loaded with brass cartridges. At night he took it home, box and all, and carried it under his arm to work each morning. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the pistol in Mr. Yegerov’s White Owl box. Boys who came to pick up their parents’ cleaning sometimes worked up courage enough to ask to see it. He always refused. He knew the gun would save his life one day.
    When the little copper bell mounted on a spring clip above the door jangled and a young man came in with an army tunic folded over one arm, Sid didn’t examine him any more closely than he did any other customer,