Sometimes Lilly thought she should board the ship with no luggage at all, nothing more than the clothes she wore. Let her months in America disappear like a dream, so that when she finally awoke in Prague she would have nothing to show for her time away. Perhaps that would make it possible to believe she had never left, but had only slept. With no mementos, no photographic proof of New York’s existence, she would have only a head full of dreams so real she took them for true but that, like all dreams, would fade with time.
Or she could abandon the studio and go west—the traitorous thought that had gnawed at her since she gazed out over the city. Disappear into America with nothing but the Rolleiflex and a few rolls of film. Would anyone look for her? She could go as far as California—Hollywood, even, where her knowledge of light and shadow could be useful. She would take a new name and sit in the constant sunshine. She would pluck oranges from trees and wear dark sunglasses and rely on the heat and the salt water to purge her memories of Prague. She would be a new person, tied only by her accent to the dark continent where, every generation, old hatreds fueled new wars. Prague? she would say while sitting by some crystal-blue swimming pool. A lovely city. Pity, though. It can’t seem to stay out of the way of history.
There was another option, a halfway option: Paris. While many of her friends insisted that Germany had already lit the match and that one day Paris, too, would burn, others scoffed. Germany might gobble up the little nations, they said, might even take a bite out of Poland, but it wouldn’t look west. Meanwhile, the French had learned their lesson in the Great War. They would never take the field in defense of Czechoslovakia or any of the other newly hatched nations, these cartographic daydreams. Perhaps an uncomfortable feeling of stalemate would hang over the Continent and its many flavors of fascism, but Paris would still be Paris. The French bureaucracy, of course, wasn’t leaving the fate of the city, or the country, to chance. No visas were being issued at the consulate, and certainly not to residents of former nations now under Nazi occupation. The French were going to sit out this tussle behind the safety of the Maginot Line, and they weren’t going to do it with millions of refugees crowding their view of the battlefield.
Weary of typing and cutting, Lilly poured herself a glass of the cheap Chianti from the Italian market. She checked again on her guest, fast asleep in his torn clothes, and then stripped him of his shirt and trousers. With a needle and thread she repaired the knee of the pants as best she could. Her mother would have pulled them from her hands and done the sewing herself, and better: Every woman must know how to make those minute alterations that make a dress fit her like no other. Lilly had not cared much. Most of what she’d worn when she was younger shocked her mother with its shapeless, mannish utility. You can try to dress like a man, her mother would say, but I don’t know many men with breasts like yours.
She switched off the lights and went to the window. The flat gray sky was obscured by the haze of the city. Across the street, lights burned in the tall windows of a garment factory during its third shift, and women hunched over their tables, each machine buzzing beside a pile of fabric, one side for the pieces and the other for the finished product. Lilly could feel the same activity in her own building. The floor of the loft hummed with the commotion of the machines. In her first week, the constant tremor had made her nervous—as if something was happening far off but moving closer, little by little. Now, however, she took comfort in that bass-note thrum, when she noticed it at all. It was the sound of women at work when the rest of the world was sleeping.
Sleep. Even Lilly needed to sleep. She crawled into the daybed next to the boy. She was surprised by how little of the bed he took up, and as she lay beside him, listening to the shallow sifting of his breath, she fell into a dreamless sleep.
THE PLAZA HOTEL
MARTIN SPENT THE AFTERNOON and into the evening working his way through the Midtown jazz clubs, dropping in on contacts who might know of a band in need of help: piano, clarinet, sax—he would even play kazoo if the price was right. Plenty of the guys wanted him to describe the look on Chester’s face when Martin walked out, but none of them had a lead on an open seat. This business of lining up a plan B that might have to transform quickly into a plan A was going to take time. He wouldn’t say a word to Rosemary until he had a concrete answer to the question of rent, food, shoes. And besides, he didn’t want her to think he was having doubts about the hush-hush, can’t-miss plan he’d been dangling in front of her since Saturday night.
He came home just before eight, expecting to get some credit for not staying out two nights in a row. Instead, Rosemary launched immediately into the phone call, reporting word for word what the mystery caller had said. She had already contacted the Plaza, she told Martin, and had the front desk ring the brothers’ room. No answer, but all that meant was that Francis was elsewhere.
“The man on the phone,” Martin said. “Was he Irish?”
“He had a brogue,” she said. “And he said minding—that I should tell you your brother needs minding. That’s Irish, not American.”
“And there’s been no word from Francis?” Martin said, but of course there hadn’t been. Hadn’t he warned Francis just last night that the IRA was sure to come looking for him and for its money?
“I think we should call the police,” Rosemary said.
“And tell them what? That a man just telephoned and told me to visit my brother, who’s staying at one of the finest hotels in the city?” He imagined the questions the police would ask, and the impossibility of answering them. The money, the aliases, Michael’s condition, Francis’s whereabouts—the list went on and on.
“Don’t you think there’s something fishy about this?” Rosemary said.
Of course he did, but he asked Rosemary to let him sort it out. It could all be a joke, a misunderstanding—some pal of Francis who had botched the delivery of a simple message. Francis was probably sitting in the Oak Bar right this moment regaling a Texas millionaire with tales from the Scottish Highlands. Martin hoped to put Rosemary at ease, but as he reached for his hat by the door, his hand was shaking. He gave Rosemary a quick kiss on the cheek and told her not to wait up. “Let me see what I can see at the Plaza,” he said, as the door closed behind him.
IT WAS LATE by the time he arrived at the hotel. The front-desk clerk was unwilling to hand over a key to the room, and when he called up, there was again no answer. Martin tried to explain the circumstances—someone had called him to come for his brother, and a deaf-mute couldn’t very well answer the telephone, now could he?—but the clerk was unmoved. Considering the hour, he said, wasn’t it possible that his brother was sleeping? And wouldn’t it be best to wait for His Lordship’s return?
If Martin had to locate Francis before he could find Michael, then the hotel bar wasn’t the worst place to start. He found a seat, shook a cigarette from its pack, and asked the bartender for a whiskey on the rocks. As he sparked his lighter, he heard a familiar voice from a figure on his right, half slumped over the bar.