It’ll be well into the afternoon by the time we get around to the Russian Mermaid Spa in Sea Gate on the western tip of Coney Island, and everything we pass, it turns out, has a history. Just off from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the driver points out a small green island that used to be a haven for spies during the Revolutionary War but is now a bird sanctuary. Like a tour guide, he knows every point of interest. Over there is the cannon, he says, and over there, just across the river, facing us? — more cannon at Fort Wadsworth, so that whenever unwelcomed parties happened through the Narrows a couple hundred years ago both sides could "blow them to shit.
In the Hands of a Judge
