The long Island highway stretched ahead like a ribbon of black asphalt laid down by someone who had given up on the idea of beauty and settled for function instead. Arthur Pendelton III drove his yellow cab with one hand on the wheel and a cigar clenched between his teeth, the smoke curling up into the cab's cracked vinyl ceiling and settling into the fabric like a secondhand smell that would never leave.

It was October 1925, and the Prohibition agents patrolled these roads in their dark sedans, hunting for bootleggers who drove faster and knew the back roads better. Arthur knew the back roads. He had grown up knowing them, before the bank took the house, before his father walked into the East River and didn't walk out, before Arthur had to learn that the name Pendelton meant nothing to a man who couldn't pay his tab.

He was thirty-two years old and driving a cab and wearing a suit that had been fashionable three years ago and would be fashionable again in five, caught in that awkward middle period where nothing fit quite right and everyone could tell you had fallen.

The sun was going down, painting the sky in colors that would have been beautiful if Arthur had had the energy to appreciate them. Instead, he was thinking about the rent, and the bottle of bourbon he intended to drink when he got home, and the letter from his ex-wife that he hadn't opened yet.

Then he saw her.

She was on the shoulder of the road, and two men were behind her, and the way they moved told Arthur everything he needed to know. He slowed the cab, rolled down the window, and saw her face—pale, beautiful, frightened in a way that was almost performative, like she had practiced being frightened and was very good at it.

"Need a ride?" he called.

She didn't hesitate. She opened the door and slid into the back seat, and Arthur put his foot down and the cab lurched forward and the two men broke into a run that was fast but not fast enough.

She sat in the back, breathing hard, her eyes sharp and calculating even in fear. Arthur caught her reflection in the rearview mirror—expensive dress, expensive perfume, and something else underneath that didn't match. Something that didn't fit the picture of a frightened woman on a highway at sunset.

"Who were they?" Arthur asked, keeping his eyes on the road.

"Does it matter?" she asked back.

"It matters if they're going to catch up."

She smiled, a small thin smile. "They won't."

Arthur didn't like her confidence. It reminded him of his father, who had been confident right up until the day he wasn't. Confidence was a luxury that poor men couldn't afford, and rich men wasted it like champagne.

He drove past the toll booths, past the mansions with their iron gates and their gardens and their lives that had nothing to do with him, and into the narrower streets where the streetlights were fewer and the shadows were longer.

"Pull over," she said.

Arthur pulled over.

She got out of the cab and stood on the side of the road, looking at him through the open window. "Thank you," she said. "You don't know what you've done."

"I'm counting on it," Arthur said.

She smiled again, and then she was gone, walking down the road into the darkness with the kind of purpose that told you she had exactly where she was going and exactly what she intended to do when she got there.

Arthur drove on. He passed a smaller cab parked at the side of the road, and in it sat a big Irishman with a face like a fist and a cigar that glowed in the dark.

Arthur rolled down his window. "Charlie," he said. "I need to borrow a flame."

Charlie O'Malley looked at him, looked at the road behind him, and nodded once. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a lighter, lit it, held it up, and then passed it through the window to Arthur, who took it, lit his cigar, and passed it back.

It was a gesture, a signal, a chain of communication that existed only in that moment between two men who understood that the world was not what it seemed and that sometimes the only thing you could do was pass a flame to the man next to you and trust that he would do the same.

Charlie drove on in the other direction. Arthur drove on in his.

The next morning, the papers reported that a bootlegging operation had been raided in a warehouse on the East River, and three men had been killed in a shootout, and a woman matching her description had been seen leaving the area the night before. Arthur read the article in the cab, parked outside his tiny apartment in Astoria, and felt nothing. Not pride. Not regret. Just the cigar burning down to his fingers and the knowledge that somewhere in this city, two men were passing flames to each other in the dark, and that was enough.

He turned off the engine and sat in the silence, listening to the jazz music drifting from a bar three blocks away, and thought about his father, and about the name Pendelton, and about the way the city glowed at night like a jewel that had been stolen and would never be returned.

He went inside his apartment, poured himself a glass of bourbon, and sat by the window and watched the neon lights flicker on, one by one, across the skyline, and he thought about borrowed flames and borrowed time and borrowed names, and he wondered which of them he could ever really call his own.

The bourbon burned going down. The city burned brighter. And Arthur Pendelton III, who had once been someone, drove his cab through the streets of a city that had forgotten him, and passed a flame to the man next to him, and that was enough.