One Minute Past Noon

At one minute past noon on the sixteenth of September, 1920, a horse drawn wagon standing outside the Assay Office at the corner of Wall and Broad came apart, and five hundred pounds of cast iron window sash weights went out in every direction at the height of a man.Thirty three people died. One of them was never named. The case was never solved. Nobody was ever charged.One Minute Past Noon follows the hour and the six years after it: a sixteen year old runner who counted his own wages that morning, a lobby porter of fifty eight who was proud of his brass, a Bureau of Investigation agent who came to understand that the case would be lost inside its own paperwork, and the men in Boston and Romagna the Bureau was never quite able to reach.Every person who dies in this book died in fact, under their own name, with their own age and address and trade, taken from the death certificates of the City of New York and the newspapers of that week. Where the record is silent, the book is silent.It is a novel about the particular way a country loses something: not in a moment, but slowly, in filing cabinets, by men who are doing their jobs correctly.