A church bell announced that it was noon, which gave Lilly exactly forty-eight hours to get her luggage to the shipping agent. She would have to finish her labeling tonight, and pack the negatives and plates tomorrow, so they could be unpacked when she resettled in Prague. And wasn’t that the story that she had agreed to, the one that ended with her safe and sorted in Prague? After a few months or years, she would develop the photographs, and the time she had passed in New York City, back in the ancient days of yesterday, would strike her as strange and long ago.
But there was another story, one in which she listened to the chorus inside her head that grew louder every day: Stay! If not in New York, then in America. Stay! She was not brave. She didn’t believe that one of her photographs could stop a tank or topple a dictator. Even Josef had joined the Stay, don’t go chorus. She had friends in Munich and Berlin; she knew the laws that had redefined their lives, and she knew that these same laws would soon surface in Prague. But if Hitler wanted Prague so badly and he didn’t want her in it, then she could make other arrangements. She could go to California, or she could simply disappear from her studio one day and set up in Greenwich Village, where she could glut herself on jazz and communism. Change a few letters of her name, become someone new, and hope that the government had more important things to do than find one missing Czechoslovakian. Her nation didn’t even exist any longer! How could she return to a place that didn’t exist?
But that was all for later. Today she had to find a psychic, an item that Josef would never have thought to include on the New York List.
The boy looked from shopwindow to storefront, searching for the telltale hand and eye. Two blocks down Broome Street, Lilly saw a window with the word TAROT outlined in thick red letters, but when she tried steering him toward the door, he shook his head almost apologetically and kept walking. Another sign promised PSYCHIC READINGS but after a pause, during which he seemed to consult with himself, he again shook his head and moved on.
Michael was convinced that their host would soon lose patience with him, but Yeats persisted in his search for a first-rate medium. If not Madame Antonia, then someone of her caliber.
“These aren’t mediums, they’re charlatans,” Yeats said as they passed a storefront decorated with poster-size tarot cards: the Fool, the Sun, the Lovers. “Sad to say, but the spiritualist community is rife with rascals and frauds.”
Michael tried to look sympathetic to the problems besmirching the otherwise sterling reputation of the spiritualists. “So you can smell it on them?” he said. “The spiritus mundi?”
Lilly took his elbow and guided him across the street. This was the sign she’d recalled, the one that had flared brightly in her memory when he’d drawn the hand and eye. The building was a narrow tenement next to the shop where she’d purchased a block of flaky Parmigiano-Reggiano and another of pungent Gorgonzola. For the past month, she had subsisted on little more than black coffee, cheese, bread, and cheap red wine. She put her hand on the knob of a door that led beneath the tenement stoop, then turned to him and raised one eyebrow.
“Well?” Michael said.
“It’s not Madame Antonia, but it will have to do.”
Michael nodded vigorously to Lilly, who gave the door a shove. They found themselves in a cramped anteroom. The red walls were graffitied with standard-issue symbols of the occult: pentagrams, all-seeing eyes, signs of the zodiac, a prime number or two. At the other end of the room, a door that was ajar bore a placard with the words ENTER AND BE KNOWN on one side and WAIT AND BE SILENT on the other. Lilly knocked on the door as she swung it open into a low-ceilinged room hung on all sides with tapestries, velvet drapes, and iridescent bolts of raw silk. It looked like laundry day at a gypsy camp. In the center of the room sat a round table where a candle mounted in the neck of a bottle raised a single weak flame. A damp moldy smell competed with the tang of incense.
Lilly called out a hello. She rapped again on the door, louder than the first time. Behind one of the curtains a pot lid clanged, followed by the sound of utensils being dropped and a muttered curse. A woman emerged, and with her came a billow of steam and the smell of cabbage, onions, garlic, oregano.
“It seems we have interrupted her luncheon,” Yeats said.
She was a small woman with a large head crowned with a pouf of black hair shot through with gray. The hem of her black dress, which was buttoned to the neck, swept the floor as she bustled into the room. She gripped around her shoulders a brightly hued, densely patterned shawl on which tigers cavorted, teeth to tail, and elephants paraded, bearing sultans on canopied palanquins.
“How you get in?” Her voice was like the chirping of an angry sparrow. “The door was locked!”
“It was open,” Lilly said, “but if we are intruding—” She laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder to turn him toward the door.
“No, no, no,” the woman said. “Take a seat. Sit! Sit!”
Lilly and Michael sat side by side at the table, opposite an ornately carved chair. From its upholstered back rose a double-headed eagle whose twin tongues burst through open beaks. Yeats, meanwhile, was inspecting a tapestry depicting a palace scene in some Eastern kingdom: a crowned man sat shirtless and cross-legged on a platform while around him women danced and fruit trees bloomed.
“You wait? Yes? You wait? Then we… begin?”
There was something sardonic in the woman’s voice, as if all of this—the tapestries, the shawl, the single candle, the promise of clairvoyance—were some big joke she was compelled to tell. She disappeared behind the curtain and again came the clattering of pots. She yelled twice, quickly: a name, orders being given, in a language Lilly did not recognize. Not French or Spanish or German or Czech and certainly not English. A child’s voice argued back—the whining tone of the falsely accused—until a slap and a renewed clattering of lids brought the back-and-forth to a close.
The woman reappeared, her cheeks flushed, and took her place at the table. “Now, what you want?” she said.
Lilly looked at Michael; all of this had been his idea. He sat stock-still, his hands folded in his lap and his eyes fixed on the candle. She tapped his knee but he only smiled at her and then resumed his vigil. The woman looked from one to the other, impatient, her mind clearly focused more on the kitchen than on the goings-on in the parlor.
“I have a decision to make,” Lilly said, surprising even herself.
“About him?” The medium pointed to Michael.
“No, he’s just—he suggested I come to you.”
“So, a decision,” the medium said. “Is it a romantic decision or a money decision or…”
Lilly’s mother always said that it was important to tell the medium as little as possible. Make the spirits do the work, she had said. Of course, Madame Bloch habitually violated this rule; she couldn’t keep herself from talking, in detail, about whatever was on her mind. She barely left room for the spirits to do more than nod in agreement or raise vague, easily dismissed objections.