MICHAEL SAT ON THE front steps of Martin and Rosemary’s apartment, waiting for their return. His left arm, bandaged, hung in a sling, and his head still had that rattling, boxful-of-bees feeling that came after every encounter with the Noise. He had hoped that was all in the past, but the past, this week was showing him, had a way of reasserting itself. If that was how Yeats said good-bye, then the old ghost knew how to make an exit.
Lilly had shared the cab with him for the ride up from the Plaza. After his fall in the hotel room, she could not think of leaving him alone. Even as the cab reached the Grand Concourse, her nerves were still frayed. She had heard the crash when he hit the window, and when she wrenched open the door she was certain he was about to topple backward through the glass. Instead, he staggered a few steps and flopped unconscious onto the bed. She’d seen him like this after the flashbulb knocked him from the stool, only now there was blood streaming from a gash that ran from his elbow to his wrist. She ran into the bathroom and retrieved a towel, which she wrapped tightly around his arm, and then called the front desk. Then she waited, taking his head into her lap and smoothing his sweat-slicked hair.
The man who had last night delivered the champagne bustled into the room, a model of cool efficiency. That the countess and young Sir Malcolm were in bed together, and had apparently had some sort of altercation, did not shock him, nor did it slow his response. Collier peeled back the towel, viscous with blood, and with his own belt made a tourniquet for Michael’s arm. By the time he had wrapped the arm in a fresh towel, the hotel’s doctor on duty had arrived, and Lilly began to explain what she knew of his condition: deaf and mute, he was prone to fits, and this latest had almost pitched him out the hotel window. If Collier was skeptical of her narrative, he did not show it.
Lilly asked if they shouldn’t take Michael to a hospital, but Collier assured her that the medical staff at the hotel was top-notch for such injuries—certainly better than what His Lordship would find in the emergency room of one of the city hospitals. As the doctor checked Michael’s breathing and began his first look at the cut, a nurse entered the room with a lamp and a room-service cart bright with stoppered glass bottles and surgical instruments. The light was switched on, the doctor probed Michael’s arm for shards of glass, and Lilly excused herself to the parlor, where she poured herself a Scotch and sipped it while gazing at the park.
She would not leave today. How could she? And she did not think she could leave tomorrow. She had fallen too far behind in labeling her prints and her negatives, and in packing her clothes and cameras. The men from the shipping agent’s office would find her door locked. With no number to call, they would move on to the next job and forget all about her. Lilly would not forget—not about Josef or Prague or the year they had together—but neither would she go back. Earlier that morning, while drinking her coffee, she had read in Friday’s newspaper that a German police officer had been killed near Prague. The response had been swift: “measures amounting to martial law.” The speed of the new dictates was proof that they had been readied long before, just as Josef’s friend in the Castle had said. Prague’s new masters had merely been waiting for the right excuse to implement them. Some of Lilly’s coffee had spilled on the page, and she watched as the dark spots spread across the blocks of black type and white paper.
She could tell herself that this latest news had made her decision for her, but she no longer needed signs from the world of spirits or dispatches from the world of the living. She knew where she would not go. The only open question was where she would: New York? California? Or Paris, her halfway home?
AFTER THE DOCTOR had stitched his arm—a fat, ropy line that would heal into a thick scar—Michael lay sleeping, as he had after his collapse in Lilly’s studio. Francis’s warning was still fresh in Lilly’s ears—an hour, no more!—but what was she to do? It had already been twice that long and the sky had not fallen. She maintained a vigil in the room, a breeze coming through the broken window. The day’s paper had been delivered to the suite and she avoided the international news of the first section. Instead she read of the World’s Fair and the royal visit, and wondered why the paper’s photographers opted for such stiff, formally posed shots.
When Michael woke, early in the afternoon, he was famished. His arm throbbed and itched. He was momentarily puzzled by the bandage, but then the chain of events came back to him: Yeats, the Noise, the window, and now here. Lilly smiled to see him awake and Michael put a hand to his stomach: So hungry! As there were no carts in the hotel selling knishes, she handed him the room-service menu and he almost cried for the joy of being able to read: Rib Veal Chop Casserole with Hearts of Artichoke, Breast of Guinea Hen, Jellied Consommé. He was connected again to the world of words. With the pen Lilly had handed him he circled Steak Frites, then wrote, Your name is______? She filled in the blank: Lilly.
His face bloomed into a grin: How gorgeous.
A short while later, they ate, and then she helped him dress, rolling the sleeves of his shirt. It was another hot day, and freed from being a Scottish lord, Michael could dress like an American teenager—or a Czech-Irish approximation of one. Lilly collected the envelope that Francis had given to her, took Michael by the arm, and together they left the suite.
“Let’s get you home,” she said.
MRS. FICHETTI HAD come outside to shoo these strangers off her steps, but Lilly would not be moved. In calm tones, she explained their situation—Michael was another Dempsey brother and she was a close friend of Rosemary’s. Though Mrs. Fichetti eyed them skeptically, she relented. She would have a word with Martin and Rosemary about the number of strangers who came to the apartment. It made her nervous, didn’t they know, to have so many strangers in her home. Before she went back inside, Mrs. Fichetti insisted, though they hadn’t even asked, that she wasn’t going to let them into the apartment, if that’s what they wanted. You couldn’t be too careful, not these days, she said. But with the sunshine filtering through the scraggy trees, Lilly and Michael were happy to sit on the steps.
A car came to a stop in front of Mrs. Fichetti’s house. The stilled engine ticked in the heat and the man at the wheel eyed Michael and Lilly before opening his door. He was a big man in a crisp white shirt and, like Michael, he had one arm in a sling. In his good hand he held a small brown leather bag, too small for a valise, but too nice for tools. It took a moment for Lilly to recognize him as the man from the hotel suite, the one who’d left in such haste just as the champagne was being poured. Michael, too, remembered the man and waited as he made his slow progress around the car and onto the sidewalk. The Rolleiflex sat next to Lilly and as the man considered how to lift the latch on the front gate, she casually angled the twin lenses in his direction and shot.
“Hello again,” she said once he was through the gate. She was reclining against the steps, taking in the sun, and had to shade her eyes as she spoke.