The boy was awake and on his feet before he noticed that he was without his trousers and his shirt. Lilly stifled a laugh and made a show of placing one hand over her eyes. With her other hand, she pointed to the chair where his clothes were draped. She hadn’t removed his socks and suspenders, which somehow would have felt more intimate than stripping him of his pants. He quickly gathered his garments and dressed, then sheepishly presented himself at the narrow table where Lilly took her coffee. She indicated the cup: Would you like some? He shook his head. He still seemed disoriented—strange room, strange woman, a new day.
She started to ask a question, then cut herself off. She had plenty of paper, along with ink and charcoal and pencils. If words were going to fail them, then fine, forget words. They would go beyond words. With a few deft lines, Lilly sketched a town house like the ones she had seen on her rambles through the more elegant parts of the city: three stories, with stairs up to the front door and tall windows. If he was from anywhere, one of the brownstones seemed a fair place to start. His clothes were dirty but well made. That shirt had not been fished out of a relief bin at one of the Bowery missions. Lilly pointed to the sketch, then to her guest, and shrugged: Where?
He looked at the picture, nodded, then reconsidered: No-no-no. He waved a hand over the building, as if to erase it, and began to shape a structure with his hands. Gestures in the air. Lilly handed him the charcoal and pantomimed the act of drawing. His lines were halting, shakily drafted. At first he seemed to be sketching a barn, with high walls supporting a roof that pitched sharply downward at each end. He added a small box along the bottom—if it was a door, it was too small to accommodate horses or cows—and then with a series of slashes across the front he suggested row upon row of small windows. Yes, a sense of scale! A large building, at least ten stories tall. An apartment building? A hotel?
Her guest stopped drawing. He ran his hand through his hair, which now stood out on his scalp in a great unpomaded spray of black. On one of the first nights when Josef took her to the movies in the arcades off the square, he had arrived with his hair gleaming and his part sharp as a knife’s edge. But by the end of the short feature, his hair had sprung up, a cockscomb. “Why do you bother?” she asked him. Josef played at being offended. “Being the Clark Gable of Prague doesn’t come easily,” he said.
MICHAEL SCRUTINIZED HIS drawing. It wasn’t a bad likeness of the hotel, with its gables and its mansard roof. But where exactly was it? Somewhere between the park and the statue of Atlas, on an avenue lined with jewelry stores and skyscrapers. He snatched up the pencil and drew two parallel lines beneath the hotel. A road. On the other side of the road he drew a grove of trees with bushy crowns and between them the sinuous lines of the footpaths he had walked with Francis and the girl with the kindly eyes. He then drew a pair of ovals, one floating over the other, and connected these with the poles of the carousel horses. He added a pair of stick-figure horses, though if they resembled any sort of animal, it was more likely a dachshund than a stallion.
“Is that supposed to be our hotel?” Yeats said from behind his shoulder.
“Of course,” Michael said, without turning around. He was becoming accustomed to the poet’s comings and goings. “Francis must be out of his head with worry about where we—I am.”
“Francis can’t help us find the answers we need.” Yeats walked to the other side of the table, within arm’s reach of the woman. He leaned over her shoulder, scrutinizing the sheet of paper. “Madame Antonia,” he said. “The map must lead us to her.”
Michael let the pencil fall from his hand. “He must be tearing the city apart looking for me—him and Martin, too.”
Yeats removed his spectacles. His eyes were hard and black. Gone was the mole-ish squinting; this was the man from the ship. The agate-eyed devil in the moment before the Noise demolished him. “Your brother abandoned you on a park bench—which, I’ll remind you, is hardly the first time he’s left you alone to attend to his own… appetites, shall we say? Yesterday you said that you were lost, but that map you’re drawing will only lead us farther from the truth.”
Michael had grown tired of Yeats and his talk of Madame Antonia and the truths she could reveal. But he had a point about Francis, whose disappearances were as abrupt and common as the ghostly poet’s, and if there was anything to this spiritus mundi business—well, was it any more unlikely than the stories he’d read in Lives of the Saints? Michael looked back to the sheet of paper. “And how exactly,” he said, “would I draw a map to Madame Antonia?”
While Yeats suggested a new set of landmarks—gondolas, the Leaning Tower, perhaps a rudimentary Colosseum—to conjure the spirit of the Italian neighborhood, Michael made a few preliminary stabs with the pencil: a long, slightly bent hull; a tall fanlike stern. More than anything, it resembled history’s least threatening Viking longboat, and though Yeats urged him to add a gondolier, Michael dropped the pencil. If Yeats wanted a gondola, he would have to draw it with his own bony, spectral fingers. Meanwhile, the woman had lost interest in his feeble sketching and refilled her cup from a small metal pot. He caught a whiff of the sharp tang of coffee. Wasn’t there anyone in this city who made a decent cup of tea?
LILLY SIPPED AT her second cup of coffee and peered at the mass of lines and curlicues. Perhaps the paper and pencils had been a bad idea after all. But then so had bringing him back to the studio. When she had asked others to sit for a portrait, she offered them a cup of coffee at the end of the session. For the children, she kept a bag of sweets in the cabinet above the sink. Her current guest seemed to fall halfway between coffee and sweets. He had the look of a puppet from one of the Prague street performers: pop-eyed and red-faced, a florid kopf on a skeleton’s frame. But how could she simply offer him coffee and candy, and then with a wave say thank you and farewell? He seemed in no hurry to leave as he alternately sketched and stared, sketched and stared. As she busied herself in the makeshift kitchen, she snuck glances at the paper. The castle in the forest had been joined by—what? A boat? A snake? A giant swan?
The boy again dropped the pencil, exhausted by the effort of mapping the what or the where inside his head. No, he didn’t seem in any hurry to go anywhere. So what was she to do with him? She could bring him to the police; for all she knew, there could be a search afoot for a deaf-mute last seen wandering in the vicinity of the Automat. But the police, no, she couldn’t go to the police. She would have to tell them that she had only three days left on her visa. They would require an address. Her name would be marked down in a file. So the police were out, but he could not stay at the studio. This was not the time for taking in strays. It was impossible, all of it. How had she gotten into this mess?
He had looked so—so heartbroken yesterday, and once she had snapped him with the Rolleiflex she wanted more, and so off to the studio they went. He had followed her so willingly and somehow she assumed that after the photograph was taken she would walk him back to the diner, wave good-bye, bid him adieu. But now what was she supposed to do with him? She had not realized just how fragile he was. Whatever secrets brooded within were more than his narrow frame could bear.