Lost

Inside the Chimney

—that was the best Winnie could imagine it for herself, a succession of shafts within shafts, like nesting dolls—the sound unsettled the silence. A hammering precisely parroted the noise of Mac's labors, as if the space behind the chimney breast harbored some thrumming armature. The realization dawned on Winnie—and, she guessed, on Allegra—that they were indeed imprisoned in John Comestor's flat, and the chimney's unmusical thud began to recede, but slowly, a long train passing very far away, on a very still night.

“Phone?” said Allegra.

“Disconnected. You remember—you tried to call,” said Winnie.

“We'll climb out through a window. He may be coming back here—with his mates or something.”

“We'll keep an eye out the windows. We'd see him coming. Don't be hysterical.”

“It would seem to me this is a singularly apt time for hysteria.” Allegra raised an eyebrow, which in her circle probably passed for an expression of extreme nervous agitation, Winnie supposed.

They paced the apartment. The back two Victorian rooms were windowless, boxed in by the vacant flat rented to Japanese in the adjoining building. Some dingy skylights were pocked with pellets of gray rain. “Could we climb up there?”

“Doubtful.”

The forward Georgian rooms—the older rooms—were not much better. The side windows gave out on a bleak yard of rubbish bins, the front ones on the recessed forecourt. There was no convenient drainspout to scrabble down. And they could scream all they wanted—feeling idiotic, they tried—but the storm was hitting its stride, and the winds barreled abroad with vigor and commotion. And the lights were out, and the gloom was rising in the room.

Winnie, hunting for candles in the kitchen, afraid to turn her back to the chimney stack but doing it anyway, thought: Allegra Lowe is almost the last person I'd like to be incarcerated with. John Comestor's “friend.” How those imagined double quotes clenched around the word friend . They squeezed the real meaning out of the word and made it vulnerable to infection by irony.

Winnie commanded herself to speak levelly. “Here's some dinner tapers anyway, and there'll be matches by the fireplace, no doubt.”

“Trust John to be equipped with beeswax tapers and no torch.”

“How extensive do you think this power outage is?”

“Impossible to tell with the clouds so low. I suspect the damage is only local, though that doesn't do us any good.”

“Or any harm, either.”

“I'm not at all superstitious. But I don't care for the thing in the chimney. I'm glad it's quietened down some.” And so it had.

“It doesn't like the fellows.”

“What's the name of that cretin?”

“Mac. Our poltergeist doesn't trust him, or either of them. Maybe for good reason.”

They settled themselves in the front room, near the most public window. If Mac should come back and start opening the door, they'd holler bloody murder again, and maybe this time some neighbor struggling home in the storm would hear their cries. “What in the world do you think the thing is?” said Allegra.

“I have no idea,” said Winnie, looking away.

They sipped. Somewhere, probably down the hill at the Royal Free Hospital, Jenkins's lungs were going up and down, up and down. Somewhere farther out, in the City, perhaps his errant daughter was having a twinge, pausing in the downpour, regretting the distance from her father. “John told me,” said Allegra, “your side of the family has some pretense to descending from Ebenezer Scrooge?”

“Oh did he. What else did he tell you?”

“Don't be like that. I'm only trying to make the best of a tiresome turn of events.”

Winnie thought it better to talk about the Scrooge nonsense than about John Comestor. If she slipped and let herself think he was dead, in any way—half dead, part dead, gone as gone—she would rise up shrieking.

But how much to tell? “It's this house,” she said. “Rudge House. The Scrooge stories that got passed down the family may derive primarily from that accident of sound. Rudge, Scrooge, Scrooge, Rudge. There's a little something in the family letters about it, but most of the references, after the fact, are mocking.”

“So what kind of story is it, to be mocked or believed?”

She didn't want to say. “The builder of this house was my great-great-great-grandfather. Five generations back. A man named Ozias Rudge. His dates are—oh, I don't remember exactly, 1770s into the mid–Victorian age. He was involved in tin mines in Cornwall. He worked for a large firm—the Mines Royal or something like that—as an expert in timber supports. Something of an architectural engineer, I suppose you'd say now. There was a mine collapse, and many deaths, and Rudge lost his nerve in a big way. He came to London, took rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and set himself up in the building trade. But bad London air scared him. Fearing consumption, maybe suffering from lung ailments from his mining days, he built a country house for himself in Hampstead to take the airs from time to time. This house, at the crown of Holly Hill, of course. To which he repaired alone, a middle-aged man without a wife and family.”

“This sounds very little like Scrooge. But you have the conviction of the natural storyteller. Do go on. I'm enjoying this hugely.”

Winnie doubted that, but went on anyway. “Be patient. Ozias Rudge had designed supports for the adits and stopes of tin mines. He parried this expertise into designing structural reinforcement of old buildings, using iron beams. He must have been close to a pioneer in the field. His clients included governors and overseers of ancient institutions, churches, the older colleges, that sort of thing. Here, and in France. There was good money to be had in architectural renovation and preservation at that time, and Ozias Rudge raked it in.”

Allegra suppressed a yawn. This pleased Winnie somehow and she continued more happily. “During one particular exercise in the early 1820s, Ozias Rudge was called to Normandy—to Mont-Saint-Michel—where the walls of some crypt had begun to buckle, threatening the stability of the buildings that leaned upon it. Rudge went and did his work, and while he was gone, a business associate in London made himself overly familiar with a woman that O. R. had been courting, on and off. Rudge, on returning to England, learned the truth, and dueled with his partner and killed him. Or so it's said.”

“A horrible tale. Our ancestors were so . . . sincere. This did not win the widow back, I take it.”

“No.” Winnie was disappointed that Allegra wasn't more shocked. “But now I'm arriving at the confluence of stories. All of that is prologue. Old O. R. apparently became a curmudgeon worthy of the title Scrooge. He grew sullen and inward. He retired full-time to his country house. I mean here.”

“Yes, yes, I understand. Rudge House.”

“Maybe Ozias Rudge suffered remorse about the man he'd killed, or the miners who lost their lives in the mine collapse. Maybe he had weak nerves. Anyway, he became celebrated in Hampstead as a man who was pestered by ghosts. You can see a reference to him in the histories of Hampstead under ‘ghost stories.' The tourist pamphlets don't make the Dickens association, though. That's our own private family theory.”

“How do you work out such an association?”

“As a twelve-year-old boy Charles Dickens came to stay in Hampstead. In 1824, I think. All recollections of the young Dickens suggest that he had a lively and receptive mind. It's said that when Ozias Rudge was about fifty, a garrulous single man, probably lonely, a nutcake, he met the young Dickens and told him—as he told everyone—about his being haunted. Hampstead wasn't a large village in those days, and Rudge would have been a figure of some importance. And Dickens was always impressed by people of importance, and spent some time, especially as a young person, trying to be impressive back. We guess he may have befriended O. R., and listened to his tales of woe.”

“Shockingly thin evidence.”

“In adult life, Dickens said that the memory of children was prodigious. It was a mistake to fancy children ever forgot anything—those are nearly his exact words. So if he heard some tale of nocturnal hauntings of a guilt-ridden scoundrel, mightn't he have remembered enough of it to turn it into A Christmas Carol, twenty years or so later? It's not a very big jump from Rudge to Scrooge.”

“I see,” said Allegra. “I'm rather less convinced than I expected, frankly.”

“Well, there's the painting too.”

“The painting?”

Winnie studied Allegra to see if she was putting on ignorance. “You know, the painting in John's bedroom.”

“I couldn't say I know anything about paintings in John's bedroom.”

Oh, the coyness of it. Winnie was on her feet and feeling her way, and back with the painting in a moment. “Look at the back,” she said, “there's one bit of business. NOT Scrooge but O. R . Then look at the image and tell me if you think it's the Scrooge that Dickens imagined or a painting of a real nineteenth-century nutcase.” She glanced around for a place to hang it, and feeling feisty, she thudded into the kitchen and picked up a hammer again. She jerked at a nailhead in the pantry wall, pulling it out an inch. This time it stayed put, and on it she slung the painting of the frantic old gentleman. “Now look at it and tell me what you think.”

“Is this a quiz show? I have no opinions about this painting, nor about whether Rudge was the model for Scrooge or not. Does it matter that much?”

“I'm not saying I believe it,” said Winnie crossly. “I'm telling you what I've been told.”

“So did your grand-thingy ever mention the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and to Come?”

“Of course not. That was the sentimental invention of Dickens the storyteller. Like any writer, Dickens stole what he wanted from someone's real life and made off with it, and richly bastardized it and gussied it up. But who do you think this is? In the painting? Is it a portrait of someone unsound, or someone seriously haunted?”

“You're the astrologer—I yield to your professional opinion.”

“Don't patronize me,” she said, in a temper, “don't condescend.” She was rising, she was putting aside the teacup, she was working hard not to throw it against the wall. “Let's just put this ghost to bed, this wobble in the drains, this nonsense. Come on.”

“You mean?”

“Let's exhume it.”

There was an electric surge, but it wasn't a phantasmic event, it was the faintest tremor that occurs when the nature of a relationship shifts. Maybe Allegra didn't feel it—who could tell what she felt? Rather than compete with Allegra for the attention of John Comestor, Winnie would rather ally herself with Allegra against some third agent. “Come on, it's the ladies against the pantry, and not for the first time in history, I'll bet.”

Before long Winnie and Allegra had amassed a dozen or so tapers in a circle on the kitchen floor and windowsill and counters. The feeling began to be one of a Girl Scout campfire, the recital of a ghost story without teeth sufficient enough to bite.

“All right, you,” said Winnie to Not Scrooge but O. R . “Stand aside.” But now he looked, with his hand against the shadowy doorframe, as if he were blocking the way, keeping them from the shrieky diaphanous thing painted in the shadowy background behind him. Winnie removed the painting anyway.

“I like working with my hands.” Allegra picked up a crowbar.

“You make better mistakes with your hands than your head,” said Winnie. “I mean one does. I mean I do.” She took a hammer and a tea towel. “Okay, pantry, we're getting in touch with our inner demolition team.”

“What mistakes do you make with your head? I don't know what you mean,” said Allegra.

“It's all plot. Life is plot. Plot mistakes,” said Winnie. “What happens, and why.” She ran the towel over the surface of the wood, easily erasing the slashed sign of the cross. “In life you get at least the appearance of choice. In a book, even one I'm writing myself, the characters seem to have no choices. Only destiny. How it will work out.”

“We have no choice,” said Allegra. “We can't choose for this to be drains, or to be the ghost of your cousin. It will be whatever it is.”

“We can choose to stop exploring the minute we want,” said Winnie, “the minute it's too much for us. Poor Wendy can't—” She didn't go on. She just began to extract the nails from the vertical planking. This time the nails did not sink back into the wall.

Wendy and John in a room, high up over a dark city.

“What if it is the ghost of Jack the Ripper in that chimney stack?”

“What if it is?”

“What if someone lets it out without knowing it?”

“The curse of the mummy? The revenge threat on the tombstone of William Shakespeare?”

“What if it needs to take some time to gather its--memory--its intentionality--to remember what it had been before it died? The way a child takes so long, coming up from a nap, to wake up? Come back to itself? What if the wall opens and nothing much emerges, but an invisible something, hovering in midair: taking its time to grow and amass invisible bulk to it, remember its appetites? Like a bundle of cancer cells, taking time to metastasize into a parasitic colony?”

“You mean,” said John, “what if it has remembered its calling, and it has fastened on you as a possible victim?”

“I don't mean that, exactly,” she said. “Everything isn't about me.”

They looked down on the city at night. It might have been a huddle of medieval houses and pubs and sheds, given how the silted shadows obliterated any telltale indication of the modern age. They might have been in Hamelin, with the circuit of rats making a hangman's rope around the perimeters of the town.

“That's the nails, then,” said Allegra. “Not hard to grip, for all that; I guess your worker friends managed that much for us.” The extracted nails, some of them tooled four-sided, lay in a pile like ancient and capable thorns.

“To the boards, then,” said Winnie. She took a hammer and used it to drive the screwdriver between the uprights. The paint was old and hard, and enough layers thick that the boards resisted separation, but as soon as Winnie had managed a small purchase Allegra joined with a chisel. The top of the first board came away from its backing with a sound like dry suction. A stir of dusty plaster breathed into the hollow made by the board pulling away from the wall.

“Not a sound. Nobody home,” said Allegra.

“Not yet,” said Winnie.

“Well, let's demolish the home before it gets back, and then maybe it'll go someplace else.”

“There's not always someplace else to go,” said Winnie.

“There's always someplace else to go,” said Wendy.

Then the first board was off, set down delicately on the floor. The wall behind it, bricks laid slapdashedly, cemented with a coarse mortar.

“Surely this can't be a chimney stack?” said Allegra.

“Why can't it be?”

“Look at the joining compound. Hardly smoothed over, and full of gaps. A chimney fire should have burned this house down long ago. Furthermore, no evidence of smoke on the back of this board.”

“So you be the detective for a change. Or the novelist. What do you think it means?”

“I don't know, but there's no chimney here.”

“Of course there is, be reasonable,” said Winnie. “There are fireplaces on each of the floors below, and there's a chimney stack up top. Jenkins and Mac told me. How was the house heated and its smoke vented for two hundred years without a functioning respiratory system?”

“Well, I don't know. Let's keep going. Maybe we'll find something else.”

The second board was easier than the first, and the third easier still. Some boards had to be broken in half, and the upper and lower parts extracted with force, dislodging ceiling plaster, which was making ghosts of Allegra and Winnie, and dusting their eyes.

“None of these boards look like one another,” said Winnie, looking more closely. “Different heights, widths, and thicknesses too—you didn't notice that from the pantry side; the wall seemed smooth.”

“Meaning there were gaps, and air passages.”

“Chimney flutes. The origin of the noise.”

“Which is even more gone than it seemed before.”

“All we need is the lights back on, and someone to jump through the door and say, ‘Surprise, it's your birthday,' and balloons and cake and confetti.”

“Right. But what about the bricking of this chimney stack?”

The exposed wall was a crazy quilt of handiwork. The bricks were of uneven shapes, some laid in vertical patches suggestive of a lazy herringbone. “The one thing that could be supposed,” said Allegra, running a hand over the surface ruminatively, “is that this wall was put up hastily.”

Winnie saw she was right. The worker or workers hadn't stopped to trim excess filler with a trowel or make sure the line was true. Maybe the boards had been slapped up hastily, too, before the mortar was dry.

Winnie stooped down and looked at the boards again. “If there was some sort of pattern appearing on the surface of the planks, maybe it was just moisture sponging out through nail holes punched in two hundred years ago. Just a freak natural phenomenon. Or who knows, maybe the workers were superstitious, and hammered in a design of nails to represent a cross.”

“Unlikely, though I suppose possible. But that is no reason for the nails to retract themselves showily into the wall when your men Jenkins and Mac were around to witness it.”

“I witnessed it too, Allegra, and my vision is twenty-twenty. Furthermore—” She didn't continue her sentence, which had threatened to be “there's still no explanation why the same pattern would show up on my computer screen just before the power went out.” But one thing at a time.

“I feel fairly confident that there's no ghost of John Comestor back here,” said Allegra. “Not even any interestingly dirty laundry.”

“No,” Winnie agreed, “slapdash as it is, this wall has been up for a while.”

The rain. The wind around the house. Noise outside, interior stillness. Silence settling upon them, as if snow, doing the thing that snow does: erasing the margins, blunting the particularities, distorting the differences between near and far.

She had to look to see for sure; no, it wasn't snow. Just the silence that snow often implies.

If Jack the Ripper were abroad again, pale as a sheet of cellophane, would a sudden squall of snow fill in his outline, make him look like the ghosts in Saturday morning cartoons? White on white, the ghost in the snow, more visible yet still invisible.

“Damn John for his little renovations!” said Allegra suddenly, in the silence, as the darkness did nothing but deepen, by degrees almost as distinct one from its neighbor as seconds marked by a loud clock.

She looked at the bricks, and then put a hand against them. The bricks had no way of speaking to her, not like the boards oozing their blisters. Now that the boards were removed, she imagined that they had bled, that the nail holes had been small valves pumping blood. The liquor seeping in obscene drips along the warped surfaces of some long-dead tree. But there had been no blood, only paint blisters.

“If it is Jack the Ripper,” she said, “maybe after all this time, he doesn't want to come out. He doesn't want to be exhumed. He doesn't want to be called back to the only service he knew, that of ripping the throats of prostitutes, that of murdering fertile women.”

He tore out the voices of his victims when he slit their throats; that much was documented fact. The harsher truth was that he also tore the voices out of their wombs: the life stories that their unborn children would never tell. The story of the future that only children can tell back to their parents.

He wanted no future for those women. Why would he want a future for himself, now? Killed himself, maybe by suicide, his bones plastered into a fake chimney stack--

“The chimney inside the chimney,” said Winnie, getting it. “That's a fake chimney stack.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's no need for the bricks to be laid true, or for the mortar to be smooth. This is only a second skin of brick around the genuine chimney stack. That's why there's no smoke on the inside of the boards, that's why the house never burnt down due to bad flues. This wall was put up hastily, to box up whatever is in there.”

“You may be right.” Allegra sounded surprised. She didn't get up to look closer. “But we still don't know what's inside.”

Wendy would not release him upon the world; that was, perhaps, his only refuge. Perhaps he'd killed himself to keep from killing more women. Why undo his death?

But why wasn't he dead in there, then?

“I don't get it about ghosts,” said Winnie. “We all die unsatisfied. We all leave unfinished business. Only the Virgin Mother, assumed into heaven, managed to book the flight she wanted. Everyone else goes on crisis standby. What makes some figures capable of becoming phantoms, and others not?”

“Maybe it has to do with how much we want to leave unfinished business,” said Allegra. “Some days, if I'm annoyed enough, I'd like nothing better than to be struck down by a number forty-six bus on Rosslyn Hill and leave my heirs and assigns a mare's nest of unfinished business, just to punish them for being a trial to me while I was alive. Don't you want to open that wall, after all this?”

“I won't do it,” said Wendy. “I won't.”

John said, “You've come this far, and you won't?”

“No.” She wouldn't tell him her thesis about Jack the Ripper and his preference to stay in his own cask of amontillado. She didn't care to sound as if she were in any way sympathetic to a mass murderer. She revived in herself an air of business snap. “It's better to leave the possibilities as possibilities, rather than dry them up in the hot air of scrutiny. Besides, John”--looking at her watch--“haven't we a plane to catch?”

“We've hours yet.”

“I'm done with London. Let's go early and get a meal at Heathrow. It'll be better than whatever pig's hoofs they serve on Air Tarom.”

“Now you've got me pestered with curiosity. Let's just dislodge a few bricks and see.”

“I won't do it,” she said again, being in charge.

“I won't,” said Winnie. Allegra's expression was hidden in the gloom, but Winnie could almost hear the lifting of her eyebrows. “I wouldn't open that wall of brick for all the tea in China.”

Allegra sighed and turned her head. The thunder fell in flat-footed paces on the Heath a half mile off. Lightning in London was not all that common, in Winnie's experience, and the flashes glazed the room with sudden blue. Slowly the thunder, rolling a few feet this way and that, shifted its timbre, and delivered itself of a second, hollower sound, which proved to be feet on the stairs.

“Oh, God,” said Allegra.

“It's the cavalry arriving,” whispered Winnie. “It's John coming home at last.”

“It's not John. It's Mac come back.”

So it was, for he didn't bother to work the key in the lock. By the sound of it, he was setting to the door with another hammer, withdrawing the nails he had slammed in earlier. He was drunk and singing some rebel's song.

“Remove those nails and then go away.” Winnie got to her feet, thumping out to the door of the apartment, securing the chain. “Open the door for us and then back off. I'm warning you.”

Mac was musical with drink. His songs were hymns of revenge, evoking the bloody king of heaven and the bloody kings of Boyne and the bloody bull of Maeve and the bloody guns of Provos.

“We've opened the cage, Mac,” shouted Winnie over his racket. “We've got it open, we've let it out. You come in here and it'll get you.”

“I've fecking Christ on my shoulder and a fecking pecker in my Y-fronts, don't mess with me, you bloody cow.”

“Now here is someone I seriously intend to haunt,” said Allegra coldly, from behind Winnie, “if he should manage to get in here and lay a hand on us.”

“We'll kill him first,” said Winnie. “We will.”

“With what? A first edition of Trevelyan? A bootlegged tape of Callas in rehearsal, Milan, summer 1953? Maybe we could break a Waterford whiskey tumbler into pieces and slice his face off with the shards.”

“You're good, you should go on Whose Line Is It Anyway? ” said Winnie. The wood of the door began to split.

“Though I'm generally not a churchgoer,” said Allegra, “Jesus H-for-Himself Christ.”

They were backing up into the shadows of the kitchen.

“There's always the crowbar,” said Allegra.

Winnie grabbed it. A flush of something, almost glee. “Let the monsters at each other, and we'll wait on the sidelines.” Hardly believing her own behavior, she notched one edge of the crowbar into a hole in the crumbling mortar and gave a good yank.

“Help me,” she said, and Allegra grabbed hold too.

Three bricks came out as easily as books sliding off a shelf.

Mac was a buffalo, shoulder ramming against the door.

“More,” said Winnie, and the purchase was easier this time. They had to leap back to keep their feet from being rained upon by falling bricks. A candle knocked over and went out.

“We could always brain Mac and tie him up and deface him with hot wax,” said Allegra.

“This is not the time for sex fantasies,” said Winnie. “Heave. Ho.”

A third of the wall was down by the time the chain on the door gave way, and Mac lurched into the hall. He was drawn toward the light of the kitchen, hulking in the doorway, groggy with ale, swollen with fear and bravado.

“Got it,” said Winnie, and reached her hands into the revealed recess.

“Bloody what,” said Mac, belching.

“I could run for help,” suggested Allegra, “but I wouldn't leave you.”

“It's an old horse blanket, nothing more,” said Winnie.

As she pulled it out, the lights came back on. Mac blinked and Allegra hit him over the head with a piece of glazed pottery from Tuscany. He didn't fall to the ground, just said, “Ow, stop that,” and blinked again. “What old scrap of nappy is that?”

In the electric light, the thing was a sad bit of potato sacking, a shapeless turn of cloth, almost indistinguishably black-gray-brown, with some uneven seams sewn in with coarse stitches.

“That's a hundred years old if it's a day,” said Allegra, “but so what?”

“Whatever it is,” said Winnie, with relief, “it isn't John.”

“Saints be praised,” said Mac. “Jenkins lives.”

“You went to see him?” said Winnie.

“No, I just guess he lives. He was afraid it was John too.”

“Whatever was here,” said Winnie, “is gone. This is just some old trashy cloth.” She dropped it on the floor. It was not running with lice, nor especially greasy or smoky. Just dusty, dry, and old; a worker's smock, maybe, hung on a nook in there and bricked up. Maybe by accident. Maybe it wasn't what had been intended for that cavity. Maybe the body put in there—for the space was deep enough for a human corpse—had been taken out earlier.

But the room was void of any spirit but those limited shades of Mac, Winnie, and Allegra. That meant, once again, that John Comestor was still missing, someplace else.

“We'll owe you fine ladies something as day laborers, for helping the job progress,” said Mac.

He pointed at the rubbled wall. Then he fell over and passed out. “Shit, he's punctured the canvas, John'll kill me,” said Winnie, tugging the painting out from under Mac's chin before he vomited on it. There was no rip in the canvas, though. Old Scrooge/Rudge staggered away from his nightmare without regard to the indignity of being collapsed upon.

The genie uncorked was no genie, just an attractive illusion. The cryptic hammering was a loose board in a fake flue, the slashed cross on the computer courtesy of an emotional persistence of vision. The retracting nails no doubt just some other accident, as yet undiagnosed. The world shrugged itself smaller again, dying a little further.

How could you know anything for sure? The madmen and mystics of North London, hunting for significance, studied the pattern of browned oak leaves adhering to the wet pavements on Church Row. Unmask the world, rid it of theories and movements and dogmas, and what's left is something near to instinct, imagination's old curmudgeonly grandsire.

Probable-Possible, my black hen,

She lays eggs in the Relative When.

She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now

Because she's unable to Postulate How.

What stood between Winnie and the world was someone much like herself, though indistinct, and likely to remain so if Winnie couldn't see her better. But Wendy Pritzke, like most apparitions, dissolved into vagueness when more closely examined. So if, in middle age, Winnie had thought she might be due some more certain notion of how the world was arranged, she was disappointed. When she learned to take her own pulse she found she was registering Wendy Pritzke's instead.

Should Wendy jettison old-hat Jack the Ripper? Was the loss of a genuine ghost in Rudge House some sort of motion to dismiss the idea of an exhumed spirit of a fiend?

But the world couldn't map anything but itself, and sometimes not even that.

No one answered the phone at John's office. It was the weekend.

As quickly as they had united forces over a common perceived threat, Winnie and Allegra recoiled from each other, back to their natural state of antipathy and theatrical caution. Neither of them were inclined to press charges against Mac, since that might embroil Colum Jenkins in depositions, and who knew if he was either willing or up to such a thing: Winnie's phone inquiries to the Royal Free Hospital about the status of Jenkins's health had resulted in remarks neither clear nor useful. Though perhaps this was the institutional tone taken by anyone laboring under the auspices of the NHS. Winnie had no way of knowing.

Winnie got a fellow in to repair the damage to John's door, and restore the locks.

She sorted John's mail, pretending not to be looking for a letter addressed to her as she did it.

Gill, John's staffer, seemed to be on permanent sick leave or something. The several other office temps were ill-informed, rude, or lazy; they offered no clue as to John's whereabouts.

Winnie went round to Allegra's with a parcel of treats from Louis' Patisserie. She could see by the look on her face that Allegra was ashamed at having betrayed some fear. Allegra did not ask her in to sample the pastries. Am I offended? Winnie asked herself as she left, though the question inevitably contorted itself to mean: Would Wendy Pritzke be offended in an instance such as this? What does it say about her if she would? If she wouldn't?

At the height of the November storm every starkly improbable thing had seemed possible, especially with Winnie gripped in the early stages of realization that John was missing without explanation. Several days later, with Mac disappeared into the downscale depths of Kilburn High Road and Jenkins still in hospital, Winnie Rudge moved cautiously about the sunny, vacant flat, tidying up the detritus, restoring the place to a minimum level of comfort while she should care to stay, and began to concentrate, at last, on the reason she'd come to London. To tell the story of Wendy Pritzke. Well, to find it first, and then to tell it if it proved worth telling.

She ran into Britt over the racks of Cadburys at the Hampstead Food Hall.

“Still no word from John?” he asked brightly.

“Oh, is that so?” she answered, with a more fluting inquisitive upturn than his, and she shrugged as if to say, Well, there's not much more I can add if he's chosen to keep it all secret from you . And how satisfying that was, turning away before he could invent the next move.

London had emerged, blinking, from the tempers and vapors of Hurricane Gretl, such as they'd been, and the bricks of damp Hampstead steamed as if with tropical aspirations. The pavements dried, the winds stilled for once, even on the Heath; the sun came out like a sissy on the playground once the bully's gone home for lunch. Unseasonable warmth. Some of the cafés dared to open their windows to the street again. Police did double-time ticketing, to make up for lost revenue during the storm days.

Mrs. Maddingly on the front steps. “He's gone missing, he has.”

“Who has?”

“Chutney.”

“Oh, dear”—with shameful brightness—“well, he'll turn up, or there'll be others.”

“Of course there'll be others, but by then it'll be another me to feed them! And the other me could hardly be expected to recognize Chutney when he comes home from his tomcatting.”

“Stick with your pills, you'll pull through.”

“Pull through what?”

Winnie didn't answer.

“And your tomcat? Back yet?” asked Mrs. Maddingly.

Wendy, Wendy. Winnie went back to particulars, doodling on the margin of a paper napkin at a coffee shop down in West End Lane. What did she know about Wendy? The name itself, she remembered, was an invention of J. M. Barrie's; the popularity of Peter Pan had launched the name into common usage. Wendy Darling followed the rude hero to Neverland. But once there, she settled, she nested. She brooded over the Lost Boys and demanded they be led back to London.

Did any of this feed into her secret mental picture of Wendy Pritzke? It might not, but she had to turn over the pieces to see if something glinted.

She walked the old haunts, thinking, waiting for a glimmer. One lunchtime she decided to take a look in the churchyard of Hampstead Parish Church and see if she could find the tombstone of the Llewelyn Davies family, the sons of which had been the Lost Boys who inspired J. M. Barrie to invent Peter Pan games, and then to write the stories down. Armed with a mimeographed map from the church vestibule, she went poking about the old section of the churchyard, noting without interest the grave of Ozias Rudge, its simple stone frugally engraved only with the names and dates: 1775–1851.

Laden with red berries, limbs of yew had been torn off by the storm, and been brought down atop the split covers of old tombs, giving the appearance of having cracked the lids.

Unable to follow the map, she wandered aimlessly, closed in from Hampstead traffic by the greened-brick walls. In the deepest part of the graveyard she came upon five sleeping bags laid out on boughs used as mattresses. Plastic sacks from a department store: Argos: Brighter Shopping . Discarded rubbish from packaged meals. A group of indigents dossing down there, though at noontime gone for the day. In the economic revival of Tony Blair's tenure, had the bums and street people to go more deeply underground?

A good woman of the church emerged from a side door and scowled helpfully at Winnie. “I am useless at following this map, I can't make out any of the coordinates,” said Winnie.

“You're looking in the wrong place. This is the map of the graveyard extension across the road,” said the woman in an aggrieved tone.

“How stupid we Americans are, I more than most,” Winnie said, more snippily than was her custom. But across the road, all fell into place. The Llewelyn Davies family was almost in the corner. On the stone memorializing the father, she read, “What is to come we know not but we know that what has been was good.” She looked down to find the details of Peter who, as she recalled, wasn't quite Peter Pan, but who could fail to be interested? His stone was a kind of postscript below his parents'. On the black granite slab she read:

Peter

Soldier M.C. & Publisher

whose ashes lie here

“Et in Arcadia Ego”

So many ways to be a lost boy.

Or Wendy, concentrate on her. A lost girl, at least lost to her author, so far.

And where the hell, by the way, was John?

She continued along Church Row. It wouldn't look like working to the IRS, but it was her professional tic. She wandered and watched, let things emerge and detach, seeing what stuck. She imagined Wendy peering down onto the countertops in the bright kitchens below street level. A plastic bottle of Fairy liquid soap, a blue and white bowl with bloated Cheerios in milk, a crust of bread for a teething child. The tired mother and the tiresome babe apparently having fled from the domestic scene, the room seemed more vacant, for the sunlight on milk beaded on the counter, than even John's apartment had.

It was a day, up and down Hampstead High Street, for the elderly to be out collecting with handheld green plastic drums. The old ones shook the coins in their cups like rattles. Ashamed at her gibe at the churchwoman, Winnie stopped and pushed a ten-quid note she could hardly spare into the slit on top. The cause was Amnesty International.

It was all of a piece, but what did it make?

She paused at a stall, thinking to buy flowers to cheer herself up. A handful of daffodils, some freesia flown in from the Continent or maybe Africa. The beefy clerk, shivering cheerily, said, “Out of acetate, luv, newsprint'll do, I daresay.”

She lapped it up, the “luv,” and smiled. It felt like the first smile since she'd arrived.

At home, the flowers looked rangier and more frost damaged than she'd noticed. They didn't enliven the place, just made it seem more funereal.

The newspaper was the Times, a health page. A photo on the top right leaped out at her. It looked like a small witch being burned at a stake. The headlines read “Eyes at Risk from Fireworks,” and the story was about casualties expected on Bonfire Night—November fifth, coming up.

But the way the Guy Fawkes figure reared back!—the flames jumping out of brambles, the sparks caught on the photographic plate as dashes and hyphens against newsprint's grimy blackness. Winnie looked. Wendy looked. How hugely powerful the image, though why, to an American eye, Winnie couldn't say.

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish to hell he'd go away.

When she had managed to buy and successfully install a new phone cord, Winnie rang Rasia McIntyre.

“Oh, yes, you,” said Rasia. “No, in fact, I admit: I have put my ear to the chimney stack more than once a day, and never again heard that distant drumming, or was it like waves?—except that once I thought I heard a cat.”

Winnie laughed. “Chutney is now bricked up inside some chimney on some other floor! Well, let him get himself out. I'm through with the ghostbusting business. I'm calling to make good on an offer of tea or something, if you can lose the kids someplace so we can talk.”

“The children are at their grandmother's in Balham, and I'm hideously busy,” said Rasia. “Deadlines and all that. Couldn't possibly make it anytime in the next twenty minutes. How's half eleven? And let's just walk; I need the exercise.”

They met by the newsstand at the Hampstead Tube station. Rasia's neck was ringed with a cherry-red scarf. A heavy shoulder bag, maybe carrying a laptop, dragged down her shoulder. She had twenty-first-century-here-we-come written all over her.

“The client called; I've a bit of work to deliver in town on my way to pick up the children. It'll mean lugging this satchel, so a long healthy walk is out. Let's have our teas and chat, and then I'll skive off.”

They settled at the cramped tables of the Coffee Cup Café a few doors down from Waterstone's. The waitress, Italian, sulked at them for ordering tea without even toast. “Did you bring it?” said Rasia.

Winnie pulled it out. In the low light of the café the thing looked even more moldery than it had at John's. But there was no odor, neither dung nor earth nor soil of any sort, which seemed odd. Only, if you put your nostrils right to it, a faint reek of applewood smoke or some such sweet fragrance, across a distance of how many years?

“Maybe a century of airing has expunged the barnyard smell; it certainly has a barnyard look,” said Rasia, “and a very coarse weave. Done by a handmade loom? It can't be very old or the threads surely would have rotted.”

“It must be at least as old as that brickwork,” said Winnie, “and while I'm no expert, the faux chimney stack looked like it wasn't done yesterday.”

Rasia puckered her mouth, a kind of facial shrug. “Doesn't do anything for me. You were expecting perhaps a holographic image from the Great Beyond? Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, help me?”

“I was expecting either the body of my missing cousin John, or—” But no, it was Wendy Pritzke who had been happily anticipating the corpse of Jack the Ripper.

Rasia lifted up the cloth. In her hands it looked bigger, like a horse blanket of some sort; it had seemed more like a worker's apron when Winnie held it. “There's no sign that a hem of pearls has been ripped out, no secret lining holding the last will and testament of anyone rich and generous,” said Rasia, “so as far as your storytelling needs go, I think you've been digging in barren soil here.”

“Oh, well.” Winnie folded it up. “I didn't expect you suddenly to have a vision or anything. You're far too modern and capable for that.”

“Oh, my family has been mystical since ages. But I've been westernized and incapacitated. The only visions I have are my bad dreams. Of Quentin loving me, rejecting me, my being angry at him, my cheating on him, anything to get his attention, even in the afterlife.”

“Which you don't believe in.”

“Right. But one can't fall back on one's knee-jerk skepticism when one is trapped in a dream.”

“The suspension of disbelief . . . How do you by-step your own ambushing memories?”

“By waking up. Sometimes with a shiver, sometimes a shout, sometimes a lump in my throat. Always to the mercy of the kids, who are better than pharmaceuticals at inducing calm, even when they're noisy and hateful. They say, Hey, it's me, it's my life, and Mummy, you have only a walk-on role, but you better do it right or you're sacked. And I have no recourse but to behave.”

“You sound like a bit player in your own life.” Which was, of course, how Winnie felt in hers, most of the time, only whoever was supposed to do the star turn was stuck in a dressing room somewhere. “By-stepping memories of Quentin through raising his kids, that's a tall order.”

“I try to forget. I fail. I don't have any imagination, really; I can't think of another man, another life; I can't get that far. When I do have a moment—like now—I think of what I know and miss. Poor Quen, with his confused smile, his little habits. You know about habits: first they seem endearing gestures and then they become maddening tics and finally they settle at being what makes a person there . What made Quentin McIntyre Quen to me. I'd rather forget him, but as I say, I've a concrete mind better suited to solving software problems than imagining any life for myself other than the one in which I'm a widow. No imagination, my teachers used to say back in Kampala.”

“A real liability, that,” said Winnie.

“We used to play poltergeist baby with Tariq,” said Rasia after a while. “I would grab Tariq by the ankles when he was lying on his back on our big bed. Quen would loom overhead like a thundercloud, saying, ‘Oh, my sweet little baby, I think I'll give him a big kiss.' Then he'd lean down, aiming his lips at his forehead, and just before he'd make contact, I would drag the baby away, along the sheets, so that Quen was just kissing the air. Tariq squealed with glee. I think of it sometimes, especially with Fiona, who never knew—”

She caught her breath.

“I think of it sometimes now, and imagine that Quen is the poltergeist father, leaning down to kiss his baby, only none of us here can tell it's happening.”

“Oh, let's go,” said Winnie, “let's go, let's get out of here.” They left the Italian waitress more tip than she deserved.

“Sorry about that,” said Rasia, “you bring it out of me, why is that? I'll be good. Anyway, a change. I've had a great idea. Let's take this old bit of sacking into a place I know near Farringdon, a tearoom where a kind of dyspeptic clairvoyant named Ritzi reads tea leaves. Let's find out what old gypsy Ritzi can pick up. It'll amuse us. I'm sorry for blubbing all the time. We'll laugh.” She tugged Winnie up the hill toward the Hampstead Tube station.

“Your meeting?”

“Not far from there. I'll go on and deliver my goods and keep on and get the kids in Balham by half two. Do come, Ritzi is a twitch and then some. There's the lift alarm beeping— Two singles to Farringdon,” she said to the cage, thrusting a ten-pound note under the bars, “hurry.”

They rattled through the dark, past the vertebrae of buried foundations, past unmarked tombs, nests of rats, conduits of wires, sewers and buried streams, the whole obscured process of the present chewing ruinously on the past.

“But you have no imagination,” said Winnie, “how can you stomach the notion of a seer?”

“It's because I have no imagination that I enjoy it. Enjoy it, nothing more. And with Quentin so obnoxiously dead, and likely to remain so, this gives me the pretense of mystical communication. It's a fix, I admit it.”

“Were you dead,” said Wendy Pritzke, “would you bother to be in touch with me through a medium?”

“As in, ‘You've got mail?' ” said John. “No, I doubt it. When I do manage to die, if there's any choice in the matter of the afterlife, I have every intention of traveling on, the farthest spot within my ability to reach.” He pointed out the window of the Tarom flight. They were high enough above the Alps to see early stars. “All those immensities of distance, all the refigured lengths of the past and the present wrapped in transparent sleeves around us. Whatever Terra Infinita I can explore, I'm there, honey, not nosing about my old haunts.”

His chin against her cheek, a cousinly nuzzle: “You're thinking about the ghosts of old victims of Jack the Ripper, trying to get home--”

“I most assuredly am not,” she said, “everything is not fiction for me.”

The stars watched, no comment.

They turned left out of the Farringdon Station in Cowcross Street, whose rural name was belied by buildings of blood-colored brick in a kind of budget International style. Still, the street curved pleasingly to the right, as if cows might once have meandered that way. Looming in the sky several blocks to the east, an office block or a tower of council estates made the final statement about the urbanization of the neighborhood, in concrete graver than tombstones. Or was that the Barbican? The clairvoyant's rooms were past a Starbucks, at the top of one of the few remaining buildings that rose only two or three stories.

Ritzi, it turned out, was Moritz Ostertag, an attenuated balding man discreetly made up with powder, doused with lemon verbena cologne. He wore ratty carpet slippers, and around his neck he sported a scarf sewn over with tiny mirrors. “Rasia,” he said, hardening the a to make it Raay-seee-ya . “But you are takink care of your beautiful self! You are learnink to cope. You are haffink ze facial and ze massage, and, I am zinkink, you are beink ready to touch ze infinite.”

“I am having ze migraine and ze overdraft. Are you booked?”

“I am sensink you vill come. Naturally I turn avay everyvone.” The place was deserted, and deservedly so: it smelled of cat piss. Chutney, thought Winnie suddenly; where did that tomcat go? Ritzi Ostertag dipped and swayed around a couple of ferns, moisturizing with a mister. “I am tendink ze vegetable kingdom. Zen I am haffink ze afternoon off and succumbink to electrolysis. Ze betrayink eyebrows, you know. I am haffink to prepare for a ball tonight. I'm goink as Clare Buoyant ze Clairvoyant.”

“I'm in a little bit of a hurry. I've got the kids to collect and, Ritzi, I've brought you fresh trade.”

“Not all zat fresh,” he said, eyeing Winnie from over half-lens glasses, but she was meant to be amused, and she didn't mind.

“She'll be a challenge. Come on, don't turf us out.”

He sighed, putting down the mister and beginning to fuss with a Russell Hobbs electrical kettle painted over with runic symbols. “In ze mood for somevone new I am not beink. But Rasia, I luff you, zo I zay, as you like. You will be havink Lapsang souchong or it's out on ze street with you and your”—he looked Winnie up and down—“bodyguard.”

“I prefer Earl Grey.”

“You heard me.” He lowered some musty purple velvet drapes that looked as if they'd been cut down from prewar theater hangings. The light turned sodden and cancerous. Winnie was reminded of the bed-curtains in the Scrooge/O. R. painting, and had to suppress a snort. Did Rasia take this bozo seriously? Ritzi lit a few small pyramids of incense and disappeared behind a door. They heard him taking a piss. “It's all zis fortune-tellink, ze tea my bladder is beink tired of,” he called out to them.

Winnie was beginning to realize that this charade was going to cost her money. But since Wendy Pritzke might take it into her head to do such a thing, the cost of the experience would be deductible as a research expense on this year's taxes. So Winnie kept her mental Palm Pilot open. She noted the smells, the light, the dust underneath the radiator. The confusion of images on the walls, Buddhist, Himalayan, druidic; not a bricolage, but a hodgepodge, like a decoration from the inside of a high school locker, vintage Reefer Era.

“Tea,” said Ritzi Ostertag, indicating chairs, pointing: Sit.

Winnie looked about. The place was done up as a genuine tearoom, she guessed, with several small tables covered with paisley shawls, crowded around with unmatched chairs. One corner was fitted out with bookcases and display shelves, stacked with packs of tarot cards and incense sticks. A glass-fronted bookcase, crammed with some old volumes and pamphlets, was guarded up top by a skull and jawbone, real or plastic, jutting its toothy smile. In another corner a computer screen's e-mail display had lapsed into a screen saver featuring flying monkeys out of MGM's Technicolor Oz. Used videos, for sale or rent, were propped up on a windowsill, including The Sixth Sense, Ghost, and Blithe Spirit, as well as, for paranormal reasons indecipherable to Winnie, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes .

Ritzi bustled about, but it was a quiet bustling, setting a mood. He took a hand-lettered sign that read READING INPROGRESS:PLEASEWAITand hung it on a hook on the door, then closed the door and latched it with a hook. He disappeared, and the music emanating from the back, a techno remix of Shirley Bassey's “Goldfinger,” was replaced a moment or two later with something sounding more like Hildegard von Bingen, sorrowful monks droning in open fourths. Ritzi reappeared, balancing cups of tea on a tray while adjusting the dimmer switch adroitly with his bare elbow. A gypsy he was not, decidedly; it was apparent in the fussiness with which he prepared the tea. He was more likely a marginal scion of a wealthy German family, playing at supernatural games while dining off dividends. The accent, the more Winnie considered, was stagy too; probably he really spoke in that new Euro-English, fairly neutral, betraying little of its origins. “In silence ve drink, ve are not talkink, I am not beink colored by your remarks,” he said. “Of your silly reservations and your scoffinks your minds to be empty, pliss. Breathe in ze varmth of ze tea and zink of ze nuzzinkness of your life.”

Not hard to do, even for a skeptic. In fact, most days, hard to avoid doing.

Winnie suddenly, again, felt the absence of her cousin, and her worry for him. How she'd enjoy retelling this bit of nonsense to him, were he waiting in the wings to hear it. How far he seemed from her, wherever he was.

The room darkened still, as if Ritzi had summoned a light cloud cover over Cowcross Street. But nothing like Hurricane Gretl or its afterbirth. Just a pressing down against the light, a purring of silence. The tea did smell nice, to be sure. It also cloaked the smell of cat piss.

“Now ve finish our tea,” said Ritzi, eyes closed, drawing out his syllables, “and ve wait, and zen”—he demonstrated—“ve put our saucers upside down on our teacups, and ve turn ze cups over and zet zem down—so—cup reversed, leaves settled. Put your hands on ze cup made topsy-turvy. Leave behind your past and your future. On ve go, deeper into ze present.”

They did so. Silence. Ritzi murmured to Winnie, stage whisper, “You, breathe.”

She had forgotten for a moment, and resumed breathing.

Upon her hands he placed his greasy palms. She observed his chewed cuticles, the soft wren-colored hairs on his upper fingers glistening in what she realized was candlelight. When had he lit candles? “You come to laugh,” he said softly. “It is no matter. In laughing some muscles relax but other muscles tighten. You must stop laughing, though, if you want to listen.” She hoped she wouldn't belch out a rich imperial guffaw.

“Yes,” she said submissively, as if to a traffic cop brandishing a ticket pad.

“You must listen to yourself when you are ready to listen. Do not listen to me. You are laughing but it is a thin laughter and no one joins in.”

The flying monkeys kept winging, left to right.

“And upon the tea leaves let us look. So.” He lifted his hands and then hers, and set them down—they felt dead, paralyzed—on either side of the saucer. He lifted the cup, a nice ironstone second with a chipped handle and a pattern of blue vines running their mathematically spaced leaves up to the gold-leaf rim. The residue of tea leaves had fallen in a crescent shape.

His voice sounded different. Not inspired, not possessed, just softer, with more hesitations. His stage-German accent had fallen away, she noticed. It made him slightly less preposterous.

“You are a woman in need.”

No surprise there. What woman wasn't?

“You make pictures of things, you arrange everything; you are like a governess, pushing the wardrobe here, there, rolling back the carpet, directing the sun to fall at this angle and not at that. A stager of effects.”

She tried to still her bucking doubt, for the sake of the money this would cost.

“You move from place to place. You are allowed to do so through luck or financial success. Or maybe you married well. But I think you are, if married, not all that married. He is looking the other way. You arrange his face to turn on you; you require it. He will not look. You need the thing he will not give. You look elsewhere. You move this, you move that. You move a teacup from this table to that windowsill, to ease your heart. You move it back, studying how your heart will feel. Or maybe it is people you move. You paint people, perhaps, on canvas, on little bits of paper? You move them here and there to see how they look. To see how they make your heart feel. I think you are a painter, you paint people.” He looked up briefly, but his expression was blank.

Well, he wasn't doing so bad. Maybe you could say writing stories, even composing dreadful fake horoscopes, was painting people. But this hardly constituted telling the future; it was more like telling the present, if you could give him the benefit of the doubt about any of it.

“Here there is a window, there we find a door. A lot of water, water in all its forms. Rain and snow, oceans and tears, dew in the morning, fog at night. But not the right water. You are barren, you are void. Why are you void? This is not what you should be. Despite your age. It's not too late.”

Rasia stirred, as if she guessed just how uncomfortable this might be making Winnie, though how could Rasia know? She couldn't.

He regarded the tea leaves, as if studying a specimen through a microscope. “You are suspicious, yet you have so much to share,” he said. He sighed, disappointed in her. “You are full of life, yet you stamp upon it. You are like a sea horse, pretty but rigid, and far smaller than you know. You are only a little person, so stop worrying. As if it matters to the world what you do. It only matters to you. But it does matter, in its small way.” He smiled at the tea leaves, as if seeing the profile of a friend there. “Hello, small thing. Your name is Wendy.”

He looked up for the first time, confused. “Is that a name I should read here?”

“Very close,” said Rasia, who did not know about Wendy Pritzke.

“Or your sister is named Wendy. Is there another man? I see a dark man approaching—”

And riches, and travel, and children and horses and paintings and lovers. “We didn't come for this sort of thing,” said Winnie, alarmed at all that passed for accuracy, and the ache that her gullibility revealed to her. “We came to see if you could tell us anything about this cloth.” She found the brown throw and pulled an edge up onto the table. He recoiled.

“This is nothing to do with you, this is wild nonsense!” he said. He flicked his fingers at it, shooing. But his hands fell on it reluctantly and he closed his eyes.

“Or is it stronger than you?” he said.

“What is it?” said Rasia.

“Hush, you, you interfere with the reception.”

A clock measured out a noon's worth of bells. On the faraway street a truck backed up. Cloud continents shifted, and behind the purple hangings, light strengthened, spent itself, and delivered the room back into séance gloom. Any minute now Ritzi would bring out a Ouiji board from the 1970s and they'd contact Elvis or Madame Blavatsky or Napoleon or James Merrill.

“Is it you with the windows, the doors, the tides of the womb, or is it someone more truly done wrong?” He looked at Winnie without benefit of misty second sight, just with the usual human severity. “You do not seem the type to allow wrong done you.”

“Who ever allows it? Still, wrong is as strong as ever,” she said.

“This thing is a woman's garment.”

“Nonsense. No sleeves, no hem, no collar, no pleats? No bow or tuck or dart or filigree? It's a utilitarian wrap, a bit of sackcloth.”

“It is not a blanket for a baby—”

“I'd hate to be the baby who had to cuddle in that for a blankie—”

“—but it covered a woman's nakedness, before her life was done.”

Was she all wrong, was it not the ghost of Jack the Ripper but the spirit of one of his victims? That pretty Irish housemaid killed and her body stowed in the yawning architecture of a home under construction? But this was no woman's body, not even a black skirt and starched apron, nothing but a filthy rag. . . .

“Come back here,” said Ritzi Ostertag sternly. Winnie jumped.

“Don't go hiding in someone else's mind,” he said.

“I've had enough of this,” said Winnie. “You're telling us, what, that this is the blanket of some poor woman?”

“I'm telling you,” he said, “it is no blanket. It is her shroud.”

The door came open, the hook-and-eye lock pulled from the jamb. A fellow stumbled in, blinking in the gloom. For an instant Winnie thought it might be Mac hunting them again, but it was a larger man, with a big loden coat and a staticky stand of fine hair. “Jesus, you've gotten more secret than the catacombs, Herr Ostertag,” he said. American to the nines. “Sorry about the lock. I was leaning on your door to leave you a message.”

“The sign, you're not welcome yet, out,” said Ritzi.

“Sorry. I won't bother you. I'll just finish this note and you can call me. Unless you can just sell me something while I'm here? I'm just looking for that book listed on your Web page. That monograph on Les Fleurs des chroniques of Bernard Gui, by, oh you know, who is it. Crowther. The one about the dead clavelière nun who came back from her grave to deliver the keys to her abbess—”

“It's not for sale.”

“You advertised it.”

“I'm busy, can't you see it, I have patrons.”

“Just tell me how much. I've got cash, I'll leave it right here on the table. Sneak right out without interrupting. Excuse me, ladies, but as long as I've already barged in—”

“I sold it yesterday.”

“No kidding. How much?”

“Forty-eight pounds.” Ritzi smirked. “Now will you be leaving?”

“I'd have given you seventy,” said the newcomer. “You're not much of a fortune-teller if you couldn't see that coming. You should have updated your entry? So I wouldn't have wasted my time? Sorry, ladies.”

“Zis mornink ze entry I am updating. You should haff rung first and saved yourself ze trip. Pliss, sir, vill you leave?” The accent was getting embarrassing. Winnie couldn't look up for fear she'd lose it.

The customer didn't seem to notice, or mind. “You always have good stuff,” he said. “I don't know what deposit libraries you steal from. I don't ask questions and mum's the word anyway.” He unfolded a piece of paper from a coat pocket. “What about Recherches sur les phénomènes du spiritualisme, the 1923 edition out of Paris or even the first English edition, 1878?”

“I don't haff a catalog,” said Ritzi, “in my brain. I haff to look and you'll haff to come back. Tomorrow.”

“May I browse? Is this your new stock over here? Any back-room stuff? Anything on the Londonian Society of Psychical Research of the last century? I mean, sorry, the nineteenth century? I keep forgetting we're twenty-first now. You can't teach old dogs new calendars.”

“Ze sign said closed,” said Ritzi, “and now I am beink closed. Everyvone, out. You, don't bring zat shroud back. It is for me too upsettink.”

“You didn't read my leaves,” said Rasia, getting up.

“I am beink knackered. Your friend is too obscure, her aura is wounded. My eyes are hurtink. And zat fabric! Who can be concentratink? Besides, with you, it's alvays Quentin, my Quentin . Too redundant. Brink me a new ghost, like zis lady, or go find another psychic.”

“What do I owe you?” said Winnie, glad to be sprung from this. But he wouldn't take a penny.

“Not if zat's involved,” he said, brisking his fingers at the chimney cloth. “Vhatever's involved with zat is too much for me. I don't vant to get involved. Out now, pliss, I'm tired, my head aches. Am I puttink on a performance here?” He slammed the door on all three of his visitors, and they filed down the steep steps to Cowcross Street, newly bleached by the next spilled cargo of sunlight.

“Well,” said Rasia. “Satisfied?”

Winnie could only laugh, but it was a fake laugh of sorts; she waved Rasia toward the Tube stop, saying, “Next time let's smoke some peyote and try to contact some archangel or shaman or bodhisattva that way.” She didn't want to get back in the underground, not yet. Rasia threw air kisses and disappeared. Then Winnie realized the other customer was lurching along behind her, nearly beside her.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I aborted your session.”

“I didn't care for what I got, but what it was, I got for free, thanks to you,” she said. “I guess I owe you.”

“The sign said closed and I didn't mean to trespass. Did I really break that lock? I don't think I did. Did I? I'm not exactly the Incredible Hulk.” He laughed at himself. “The Unremarkable Hulk, more like.” He wasn't blubbery, but he was—Winnie considered the right word—portly. It was nice, for a moment anyway, to be sharing a sidewalk with a man who looked as if he could bounce the Ghost of Jack the Ripper into the gutter if it possessed the cojones to come sidling by.

A small rain hit them, on a search-and-drench mission; the other side of the street stayed dry and even sunny. “Shoot, I dropped my Old Navy rain hat,” he said, riffling his sparse hair so it looked like a stand of baby beach grass. “We'll have to go back.”

“You'll have to go back,” she said. “We're not together.”

“He won't open the door to me. Please, it's my favorite hat. I'll buy you coffee afterward.”

“I'll do it on the condition you buy me no coffee and we go our own ways immediately after.”

“Deal.”

But Ritzi, seeing it was them, said, “Go avay, vhat is zis, conspiracy? I don't vant to zee zat shroud again! I'll ring ze police and haff you arrested. I'm closed for business. I'm plucking.” He slammed the door.

“No hat,” she said.

“What shroud?” said the American man.

“It's still raining, would you like to borrow said shroud in lieu of your missing hat?”

“I'd rather coffee. Reconsider?”

A few doors down from Ritzi's they found a tiny lunch place. It was nearly deserted but for an ancient slope-stomached waitress who warbled “You're too seraphic to go out in traffic” as she made her way from the back.

“A full cream tea. Two of them,” declared the beefy man.

“We do fresh sandwiches. Egg mayonnaise, prawn and avocado, minty lamb, cheese and pickle, chicken tikka. On your choice of sandwich bread, bap, ciabatta, or foccacina.”

“No cream teas in central London?”

“You poor ducks, we don't. Not since the Blitz. The cows ran away.”

“I didn't know anyone said ‘ducks' anymore.” He was charmed.

“Only to Americans. They like it and tip healthily.” She performed a moue for them, betrayed no surprise when they opted only for tea, and she hobbled away humming.

“Irv Hausserman,” he said.

“Opal Marley,” she replied.

“Delighted, et cetera. How's that guy as a psychic, by the way?”

“You should try him yourself and see.”

“Had I done so, he'd have said, ‘You will leave your hat behind, and I'll sell it back to you for forty-eight pounds plus VAT.'”

She laughed. It was a relief to laugh about nothing much. “What secrets were you there to see if he could sniff out?”

“None. I'm tedious and I have no secrets. I just wanted to buy something. He deals in out-of-print stuff, ephemera, most of it schlocky and awful, but good things with some historical interest come his way, too, so I look in whenever I'm in town. He's a shrewd bargainer. I bet he still has the pamphlet I want. I'll have to go back tomorrow and he'll say he spent the afternoon hunting up another copy for me. Then he'll charge me a hundred pounds for it, saying it's in better condition than the one he just sold. Can't blame him.”

He was from the University of Pittsburgh, history department, an associate professor, still pretenure because he'd come into the field late after a career as financial officer of several high-tech start-ups that skyrocketed and tanked one after the other, before he had the chance to bail. History a much more sober and safe environment.

“Your field?” she said.

“Western medievalism, English, Frankish, Norman, from the time of monks to the time of parliaments. Roughly. Kids take my courses wanting to do papers on The Name of the Rose and the Brother Cadfael mysteries. When I point out that Brother Cadfael's worldview is decidedly post-Freudian, they think I'm defaming the dead of long ago. In the student guidebooks I get high marks because I give them high marks—grade inflation is contagious. But I can't sell my old-fashioned notion, my pre-postmodern notion of history. I still think history is really the study of how we change, even how human psychology changes. Not how universal and interchangeable we all are across the ages. And you?”

She dandled her spoon in the slurry-colored tea and considered the public relations campaign. She had no reason to mistrust him. So why had she started out with an alibi? Instinct? Neurosis? And it wasn't an alibi, it was a lie: call it what it was. A habit that was getting more and more entrenched. Why couldn't she shuck it off? A question she might have asked Ritzi Ostertag.

“Recovering from a broken marriage,” she said.

“Oh, that.”

“Not to worry.” She hastened to extemporize her way out of danger. “Not broken in the traditional sense. Really, just frayed a little. He's having a rest cure at a ranch in Arizona and I'm on my own for two months. The damp of English winters is just exactly what he can't stand. It's Jack Sprat and his wife; he can breathe no mold and I find dry sunny heat stultifying and it makes me drink gin at tenA.M .”

“So the happy medium is . . .”

“Ritzi Ostertag,” she couldn't resist, “a happy medium, or gay anyway.”

He blinked. She suspected he was willfully not following. She didn't blame him; she was being feeble. “I was taking him this cloth I found,” she said, trying for honesty of some sort. “For a lark, and because I'm bored.”

“Because you miss your husband.”

“I do.” She looked him in the eye in case he was getting ideas.

But he was looking fondly at her, fondly and without any predatory gleam of interest. “Don't worry about me. I admire people who stick by their spouses.”

“Meaning you don't?”

“Meaning nothing of the sort. May I see the cloth?”

She drew it out. In this atmosphere it looked more brittle, filthy, more barnyard.

He looked at it closely, as if he could read a language in its warp and weft. Then he pushed it away. “I don't know anything about cloth.”

“Some historian you are.”

“It looks old,” he said. He laughed. “I'm a better historian when it comes to reading books than reading artifacts, I admit it.”

“What's your particular field?” she said. “Your professional idée fixe?”

“Aspects of the supernatural in medieval thought. How Christian concepts of the supernatural derive in part from origins dating back to late antiquity. How the scribes and bishops encountered Roman and Teutonic myths and legends, and grafted them in a crafty local way upon Hebraic and early Christian theology and lore. How incompatible some of that lore was, how the Church used it anyway, that line of goods.”

“Why aren't you engaged in a history of, oh, cooking pots? Or the migration of nomadic populations? Of course your field is the occult. Naturally, supernatural. Everything is, these days. I'm feeling quite paranoid.”

“Nothing odd in the supernatural as a field of interest. Nor in our sharing the interest. We did meet in a clairvoyant's salon, after all.”

“But what do you believe of it?”

“You mean would I go to have my palm read, my I Ching thrown? My fate in the cards, the tea leaves? The crystal ball? Balderdash. Balderdash, idiocy, poppycock. Stuff and nonsense. You want more? Codswallop. I hardly even believe in the Internet. I can't get my head around ley lines and crop circles and such.”

“Makes you good at your job, then. The appreciative skeptic. Publish much?”

“Too much, in the wrong journals.”

But she realized she didn't want to talk about publishing. “I have to go.”

“You believe in some of it, or you wouldn't have been there,” he said to her. “It's okay. People believe in different things. Some people believe in dreams and voices. I think dreams and voices are important, but primarily as a way your psyche has of getting your own attention, that's all.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“If I had, I'd have to be a believer, and you already know I'm not. Of course I haven't. But people in the Middle Ages thought they did, all the time.”

“Maybe their innocence allowed them to see what our eyes are clouded to.”

“More things in heaven and earth, et cetera. Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“I have to go,” she said again. “Our meeting was an accident and I don't read significance into it. I'm not looking for a dalliance while my husband is recuperating with a pulmonary ailment in Scottsdale. Thanks for the coffee. I'll leave the tip.”

“You look as if you've seen a ghost,” he said. “I didn't mean anything by the questions. Hell, I wouldn't know a ghost if it stopped and asked me for directions.”

The day was nice. She walked all the way back up the hill to Hampstead, thinking of anything except for the catalog of ghosts scrolling in her head. Medieval, Jack the Ripper, some Irish housemaid he might have killed, the ghost of Marley, the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and to Come.

The ghost of old Scrooge himself, bequeathed to the world by Dickens, and still haunting it.

The ghost of old Ozias Rudge, hovering about Rudge House?

The Either/OR of it.

No, she was not thinking about ghosts, not at all. The day was bright now, clouds sent scudding southeast toward the lowlands, France, and beyond that the Alps, the Tyrol, the great Danubian plain. All this clutter, this nonsense, swept with the biggest broom, cobwebs torn from the sky. Exercise always made her mind cleverer. The sun a merciful tonic, the November brightness a bromide.

They landed in Bucharest long after dark. The Alps behind them, physically and mentally, bunched and puckered in slow silken ripples of stone and snow. The airport was in a state of construction, or demolition, or both. Arriving passengers had to step over slabs of stone left higgledy-piggledy, had to avoid staggering into electrical wires that snaked out of unfinished walls.

John took her by the elbow--she was tired, the seats had been lumpy and the food poor--and as she began to fret, he rose to the occasion. He loved the obstacles of the third world, the wooden-handled seals thumping down into the passport, the self-importance of two-bit officials, the smell of open drains. The world seemed realer to him there.

“This place is total mayhem. Everything's in the most ghastly state,” he said gleefully. The driver was waiting with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He pulled out of his belt two other cigarettes, straightened them, and offered them around. He had a lovely gap between his teeth. His eyes for that matter were broadly spaced, and even his nostrils seemed an inch apart. And bovine in temperament as well as physique. He drove as if he'd only been behind a wheel for several hours, which they later learned to be true; his brother had been arrested, and so he'd got the keys and taught himself to drive on the way to the airport. His name was Costal Doroftei.

He took them to the best restaurant in town and pushed them in the door, announcing that he would wait outside while they ate. They were the only diners in a large square Second Empire room badly in need of refurbishing. Doroftei drifted back in from the sidewalk almost immediately, realizing he hadn't told them exactly where they were. The Capsa Restaurant. He pulled out a chair and joined their meal. John was thrilled, remembering characters in Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy eating there. Wendy decided that the fictional characters had apparently consumed everything in the country worth eating. The waiter, answering their question about the best item on the menu, lavishly described something that sounded like Muscat Otonel, turkey and mushrooms in sweet white wine, but just as in a cheap movie, he concluded the description by admitting the chef hadn't any left. All he could offer, really, was soup made from cow's stomachs.

“We don't need to eat, we're full from airline food,” said Wendy firmly.

Doroftei took them on a night tour of the capital. It was lucky that the peace dividends hadn't been paid yet in outposts as far as Bucharest, because the streets were almost empty of cars. This meant Doroftei could swerve and veer as he tried to master the controls, endangering only the few pedestrians unlucky enough to be scrambling home on this very cold night.

“You'll remember every scrap of this,” said John, delirious with joy as they nearly felled an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow full of old clothes.

“That's precisely what I'm afraid of,” she said.

By the time Winnie had reached Hampstead, she was panting, and she had to stop at a café and get a cold drink. She made a note to herself of things yet to do before ducking more fully into the Jack the Ripper novel. She would go over to the Royal Free and check on Colum Jenkins; by now he must be up to visitors. She would tell him that Mac was dangerously wacky and that anyway he had disappeared and never returned. She'd try John's office again for the umpteenth time.

And then she'd have done what she could, and the hell with him. She'd clock on to her work, and begin to roam about Angel Alley, Thrawl Street, Brick Lane, with the ghost of Jack the Ripper in her mind. With luck her narrative mind would waken and seize what it could.

A few days in the big city were more than enough. An hour would have been more than enough, really: she was eager to get going. But they had to follow the schedule as given them.

At last, though, they were out, begun on their motoring trip, circling in, nearer and nearer. Gas queues on the road. Some of the pollarded trees whitewashed with lime, to shoulder height, like lanes in rural France. Doroftei singing Christmas carols to them, because the snow began to fall. Heading toward Brasov. On the highway the snow seemed as gray as the bread. Once off the road, though, on rural stretches, it whitened: snow dense and heavy on the ground, as if heaved in by winds from the very heart of the Siberian steppes.

“On to Poiana Brasov. Is the plan,” said Doroftei. “Means Sunny Clearing. Weariness and monotony to disappear. We rest and wait.”

“I don't want to wait,” said Wendy, “why must we?”

“Is the plan,” said Doroftei. “Trust me.” He smoked the way you would if you were hoping to die of lung cancer by morning.

At the front door of Rudge House, the estate agent was just letting another couple in. “Oh, a neighbor,” he said, and hustled them through the entranceway before Winnie had a chance to queer the deal, intentionally or by accident.

“Oh, it's you again,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “Would you come in here and look for Chutney?”

“I don't have an inkling of how to find a cat, I'm afraid,” said Winnie.

“That's all right, he doesn't have an inkling of how to be found, so you're made for each other,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “It would be a kindness.”

“I do have work to do,” Winnie said, as if she did—well, she did, if she'd get around to it—but she let herself be led into the old woman's rooms, which if anything looked more disheveled and captioned than before. WHEREAREYOU,CHUTNEY? said one note. I MEANIT,COMEBACK, said another. THEDAMNPILLSsaid a third.

“Sit down,” said Mrs. Maddingly.

“I'll stand,” said Winnie, after she noticed each chair had an instruction taped to its seat: SITor HEREor DON'TFORGET TORESTONCE IN AWHILEIT'SONLYTHURSDAY.

“What do you think?”

Mrs. Maddingly looked perched on a notion, Winnie thought, like someone badly wanting a drink with an olive in it. Winnie tried to be patient. “About the cat? I don't know. Have you any ideas?”

“Ideas I have plenty of, but ideas!” She waved her hand, as if perfectly aware how demented she was becoming. “It's fur and claw I want, not ideas!”

“The other cats are around, I guess?”

“Around, I guess, yes, I'd say they were.”

Winnie neither saw nor heard anything of them, but the distinctive house smell was recently refreshed, even ripe.

“Did you look outside?”

“He's not an outside cat,” said Mrs. Maddingly with sudden irritation. “How many times have I to remind you?”

“Has he died, maybe, under a piece of furniture?”

“I wouldn't know. But what a shame if he has done.”

“All cats die. Do you want me to bend down and look?” Considering the poor housekeeping, she was somewhat afraid of what she'd find, but once embarked on a mission of charity it was hard to justify changing course.

“I know all cats die,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “I'm not a fool. But if it was his turn I wish he'd warned me. I'd have given him a message for Alan.”

“Oh, Alan?” The husband, that's right. “What message?” Winnie was on her hands and knees, looking under a cherry sideboard. No cat. Several dropped bottles of pills, though. She left them there; they could be years old, and poisonous by now.

“I'm afraid if I go in hospital, matron will cut my hair,” said Mrs. Maddingly.

“You won't go in the hospital. Why should you?”

“I'm an ailing old lady and it'll happen sooner than I think. But what if they cut my hair?” She began to cry. Jesus.

“You'd still look fine even if they did. Though they won't. They don't do things like that.”

“They might,” she said. “And then I'd die of shame, probably, and go to heaven or—Brighton—or wherever Alan is, and he won't know me without my hair!”

“Please, they won't touch the hair.”

“You'll tell them?”

She gritted her teeth. “Yes. Should I look in the other rooms?”

“If you like,” said Mrs. Maddingly doubtfully, drawing her sweater the tighter about her shoulders, as if afraid Winnie was about to propose a full-body search.

Winnie began to push doors open and disturb stacked sections of cold air, in rooms where the windows weren't true in their frames or the heating was broken. Eddies of lavender-scented chill, in shadowed alcoves and heavily curtained rooms. She thought she saw the tip of a whisker, but really she couldn't see anything much. And not having met the other cats, anyway, how would she recognize Chutney when she saw him?

Winnie felt a certain sympathy for poor dead Alan, blearily trying to identify his shorn wife as she came through Processing with the streams of hundreds of thousands of other old geese.

“I don't suppose he'd come if I called?” said Winnie. “Chutney? Kitty?”

“I address him all the time,” the old woman called from the front room. A cork came sucking out of the throat of a bottle.

Then Winnie saw him, a flash in a Victorian mirror in the gloom of the old gal's boudoir. Calling it a mirror was rash: it was a genuine looking-glass, for sure. The glass was beveled, frosted, and etched. In its smoky backward recitation of reality Winnie caught just the flip of a tail. An eye like a nugget of smoldering bronze. She saw a sliver of feline sneer without seeing anything as recognizable as a small, perfect mouth with its small darts for teeth. It was like the Cheshire Cat—the smile without the cat, the attribute without the subject. Free-floating disdain.

Then it was gone.

“Oh, sweetheart, come out,” said Winnie. “What are you scared of? Your old mama out there is going bonkers with grief. Come on.” She raised her voice. “You'll have some tinned fish or liver, something with a smell?”

“Not for me, thank you, I've had my elevenses.”

“I mean for the cat. Here, kitty kitty kitty.”

Mrs. Maddingly didn't answer. Perhaps she'd forgotten what Winnie was doing. “Oh, well, I suppose another little drop won't hurt, if you must,” she was saying to herself. The sound of sherry pouring gluggily.

“Here, kitty,” said Winnie.

She switched on a bedside lamp; the bulb, all ten watts of it, flickered. She angled the shade, a cone of cinnamon-colored cardboard, to try to get more light. Something twitched. A sliding heap of old-lady housedresses or nightgowns, their nylon surfaces whispering against one another. “Come on, you cat; no sense scaring the poor thing out of her mind. God knows she's half there already.” Yeah, she and who else? Winnie thought to herself: Here you are being jittery about a housecat?

Fearing a slicing claw, Winnie picked up a walker that the old woman no doubt used to get out of bed. She touched the laundry with the leg of it. Then she reached and tugged at a hem. The top garment lifted up at an angle, caught on something unseen. With a crusty ripping sound, it came away. A clot of dried sherry or some other more intimate fluid, patching one garment against another? The far edge of the next garment rippled; the cat was backing up underneath.

She said a poem to stiffen her nerves.

"Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?

I've been to London to visit the Queen.

Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?

I frightened a little mouse—"

She stifled a gag as she peeled back the top nightgown.

Two, then three cats came to light, blood matting their fur to the nightdress below. Each one had wounds about the head or neck. They'd been chewed at. And they'd been dead long enough to stiffen. The smell was atrocious.

“Oh, Christ.”

The nightgown twitched some more, and the living cat beneath it flexed and complained in a voice more alto than, in Winnie's experience, was customary for a cat. She held the walker in front of her, ready to poke its rubber-tipped feet into the animal's face should it attack her. Then she whisked away the garment. The cat was a burnt persimmon color, like ancient orange rind. It looked twice its size, hissing, its back a wicket of radiating spikes.

She tried to speak in a level voice, as if a cat could care whether she screamed or not. “Easy, boy, what's gotten at your poor friends?” Chutney, if so it was, launched himself into the air. Despite herself Winnie raised the walker, in foolish terror; she batted the cat away. He fell back, wailing piteously or with venom, and spat. He drove his head into the neck of one of the cats, decking himself in its blood and gop, and before Winnie could see what had happened, the cat had disappeared. Just like that? She held the light up, breathing heavily. No—she wasn't that delusional, not yet—the cat had squeezed itself behind a jutting bit of wainscoting, and squirreled himself into the rubble of ancient lath and deteriorated plaster.

“Mrs. Maddingly,” said Winnie. “I think I found your other cats. And I hate to break the news to you but I think they're dead.”

“It's not them I'm worried about,” she answered. “They're all safely accounted for. It's my darling. Have you laid eyes on him?”

“He's orange? I believe I have. We'd better get rid of the corpses.”

Mrs. Maddingly shuffled in. She peered at them. “Surely they're just sleeping?” she said. “They do enjoy a nice long snooze, you know. Cats are like that. They sleep all day. I hear them up and cavorting at night, once I've gone to bed and turned the lamp down.”

“They're done cavorting, I'm afraid.”

“Well, they've been done cavorting for some time; they've been fixed for years, all of them,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “And a good thing too. Proper ladies they were. Look at them, all resting in peace.”

Mrs. Maddingly braced herself with a sip of medicinal something and took herself off to the kitchen to locate a hand broom and a dustpan.

“I do find all that hard to believe,” said Allegra Lowe, when Winnie had taken herself in hand and called her to make further inquiry into news about John. “Are you suggesting that Chutney killed his companions?”

“I have never heard of a cat killing another cat,” said Winnie. “Have you?”

“It's vile, and I've a customer at the door,” said Allegra, as if Winnie was making it up, and rang off.

Winnie had moved the construction tools to one side and put John's kitchen as much back to rights as she could. When she went to the Royal Free Hospital to ask about Colum Jenkins, she was told he had been checked out by a family member several days earlier. The staff refused to divulge his home address. “But he was all right?” Winnie said.

“He'd not have been released otherwise,” said the clerk.

“Well, hopeless cases, you know. Sending someone home to die. That sort of thing,” said Winnie apologetically, before wandering off.

Given the peculiarities of life in Rudge House, the slain cats, the increasing dottiness of Mrs. Maddingly, it was beginning to seem entirely of a piece that Winnie's cousin was missing with no forwarding address. But what was there to do about it? Winnie made the place her own as best as she could. Reluctant to turn on her laptop, she set herself small exercises each day, trying to jump-start the story of Wendy Pritzke and her obsession with Jack the Ripper. Though as she headed in the Tube toward Aldgate one bitterly damp day, a tourist pamphlet advertising Jack the Ripper sites tucked in the inside pocket of her coat, it did occur to Winnie that Wendy Pritzke seemed to have left London.

Winnie didn't believe in writing as channeling, in any sense. She was a hack, a journeyman, a slogger. Yet usually she could prod a character into her consciousness by insulting it a bit, challenging it to respond. Not so on this trip. Like John Comestor, Wendy Pritzke appeared to have disappeared, just at the time that the thing, the shred, the shroud, had been exhumed, unhoused. Wendy was farther out already, in the hinterlands of Romania, for all she knew.

Still, work was work. Maybe some torrid bit of local color, some sleight-of-vision coincidence, would reveal Wendy Pritzke or her intentions, or the thing that threatened her, in what was left of Ripper London. Winnie felt increasingly dubious, but this was her work. She couldn't be doing nothing.

The Metropolitan Line train terminated at Aldgate. She was decanted into one end of a suburban shopping mall that seemed to burrow in the right direction, following the line of Whitechapel High Street above and heading toward Commercial Street. Winnie wasn't looking for much, not an exposé of Jack the Ripper, certainly not a real ghost, but a bit of charming overlap, the kind of thing that in someone else's hands might make an amusing New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece. Anything could be a germ. Anything could hot-wire a fever. Only when the fever took over was there a story.

But though she'd set her sights on Thrawl Street, because she loved the name, she began to lose heart once she emerged from the glassy fluorescence of the shopping mall into the gritted streets above. Commercial Street seemed largely Pakistani, as far as she could make out.

Thrawl Street, Angel Alley, Gunthorpe Street. Women turning to prostitution because of poverty, homelessness. All the dangers, all the huge lonelinesses, all the appurtenances of love with none of the affection. Martha Tabram mutilated, stabbed thirty-nine times after the “cheap and quick knee trembler” her friend Pearly Poll reported to the police. All that tumbling of organs onto the ground, all that simple need for cash so that a woman could spend a night sleeping on a mattress out of the wind.

Sadly, Thrawl Street had nothing much to say to Winnie, or nothing of use. It seemed to have been subsumed into a housing estate of red brick and nicely slanting roofs. From doorways bloomed the ghosts of curry past, present, and yet to come. Midday, the place was largely deserted, and there was no kernel, no starter yeast. The whole district was airy and desolate.

Loneliness collapsed into her. She wandered by Indian take-away and discount footware storefronts, feeling Jack the Ripper dissolving, the mystery of his indecency beyond either her power to call it up or to dismiss it. She gave up, feeling as if in abandoning the lookout for the ghost of Jack the Ripper, she was putting her dim Wendy Pritzke at greater risk. But Winnie knew nothing else to do. She went back to Hampstead.

That night she made herself a strong drink and set herself the mental task of remembering John's friend's name. When she woke up she had it: Britt Chalmers. Listed in the directory, hurrah. Chalmers, Girdlestone Walk, Highgate. She waited till a respectful 10A.M . on a Saturday morning and woke him up.

“Oh, so sorry,” she said jollily. “I always assume if people don't want to be awakened by the phone these days they turn the ringer off or pull the connection out. But there you are. While I've got you, Britt, I need to know where John Comestor is.”

“Who is this?” he said groggily.

“It's Winifred Rudge. We ran into each other some days ago at the Café Rouge. John still hasn't shown up and there's all sorts of funny business going on here.”

“Oh,” said Britt. “Yes, I remember. Well, I'll be little help to you, I'm afraid. The man runs his affairs with the secrecy of MI-5. I'm sure he's not half as full of derring-do as he'd like us to believe. He's probably planting a herbaceous border at some hideaway cottage in the Cotswolds. How long are you going to stay?”

“A while yet.” She felt stiff and faintly paranoid, for he was hiding something from her, she could tell it and not prove it. She continued. “Quite a while, I guess. Or maybe not. I've got MI-5 in my blood too, I suppose. We're cousins, after all.”

“Yes,” he said. “Right. Well, then.” He rang off.

“Rice here.”

“Malcolm Rice. This is Winnie Rudge.”

“Yes. Oh, yes. You're still here, or have you gone away and come back already?”

“Still here. Look, I hate to seem a busybody, but I'm running out of ideas. It's closing in on two weeks and there's still no sign from John, no word, no phone call. Has he been in touch with you?”

There was a long pause. Winnie imagined the older man studying his cuticles, trying to remember his brief. “Miss Rudge, do you think he's avoiding you?”

“I hardly think that, Malcolm.” She used his Christian name like an insult. “What possible reason could he have for doing that?”

“Oh, far beyond me even to speculate. He just doesn't seem like the type of fellow to get in trouble of a serious nature. You haven't overlooked some note? You didn't scribble the dates in your diary wrong?”

“Should I go to the police? I don't want to get involved in raising suspicions about him at work.”

“It is not my business to say what you should do or not do, Miss Rudge. If you'll excuse me, I've guests in the lounge. There's nothing more to say. Don't bother to ring again; if I've anything to tell you, I'll take it upon myself to be in touch.”

I'm making a nuisance of myself, she thought. But what else can I do?

She rang Rasia. She got a child on the phone who with some prodding admitted his name. “Tariq.”

“Tariq McIntyre,” said Winnie. “May I speak to your mommy?”

“No,” said Tariq. He breathed asthmatically, waiting.

“Please?”

“She's not here. She's—” More breathing. “Out.”

“Oh. Who's minding you?”

“Navida.”

“I see. Well, would you remember to tell her that I called?”

“Tell her what?”

“I mean, tell her I rang. Winnie. Can you remember? It's okay. I'm the one who came and we listened to the sounds in the closet? Your mom said sometimes she heard a cat there. Oh, you don't hear a cat anymore, do you?” She had a thought, of Chutney breaking through the shared wall, and coming into the McIntyre flat, and doing to the poor McIntyre baby what it might have done to Mrs. Maddingly's cats. It was a stupid, silly thought, but it wouldn't go away. “Is there a cat in your flat? Have you seen a cat? Don't go near it. Are you alone? Let me speak to Navida.”

“You can't.”

“Oh, it's important. Let me speak to Navida.”

“You can't. She can't.”

“Why not?”

“She's in the loo.”

“Oh. There's a baby, where is it?”

“With Mum.”

“Tariq. Tariq. Listen. Have you seen a cat in your flat?”

Tariq did a young person's version of the same sort of quiet rumination that Malcolm Rice had done. As if humoring her. “Well . . .”

“Tariq, yes or no?”

“Sort of a cat.”

“Tariq, answer me. Yes or no.”

“I don't want to talk to you anymore,” he said. He rang off.

She walked around the block and knocked at the door. Navida and Tariq wouldn't let her in. Allegra Lowe came to the window and looked up from the kitchen, her hands all covered in plaster dust. With a huff of derision she disappeared and then a minute later opened the front door. “It's you; are you becoming some sort of squatter around here?”

“Oh, I know you'll think I'm bonkers.” She spoke quickly because she knew that the words would certify her as a lunatic, and she couldn't help it. “I'm worried that old Mrs. Maddingly's cat has found a way to burrow through the walls and get into your side of the house. Have you heard anything? Any yowling?”

“There's only one thing yowling, and it isn't pretty.”

“Oh, stop, just stop it. You didn't see those cats laid out. Let me in, Allegra. Those kids are home alone up there.”

“Winnie, if you don't mind my being blunt, it's none of your concern.”

“It's absolutely of my concern and I do mind your being blunt.” She was ready to take offense at everything. “Will you just let me pass? I'll be only a moment up there.”

But before they could come to a scuffle, Rasia came trodding along on the pavement, the baby in a Snugli and the computer weighing down her shoulder. “Hello, a party,” she said. “Just what I need after a long day.” But her face was clouded and the baby whimpering.

“Hardly a party, ” said Allegra, and stomped away, slamming her inside door.

“I can't ask you in, I've left the little ones alone and this one needs a change of nappy. Another time?”

“Rasia, have you seen a cat in your apartment? An orange cat? Have you heard it mewing in the walls the way you did a week or two ago?”

“No cats,” said Rasia, “and no time. Please, Winnie. I have to close this door.”

“Just tell me for sure. I'm not being silly.”

“I'm going to close the door now.”

There seemed no place else to turn. Winnie had folded the shroud into as regular a stack of cloth as she could, given its ragtag edges, and sprinkled it liberally with moth flakes. Then she'd tucked it in a plastic John Lewis bag and knotted the handles together. The parcel gave off no sinister reek of presence. It was just an old potato sack someone had hung on a nail, no matter what Ritzi Ostertag had said.

She sat at the kitchen table in the vacant flat, writing Wendy, Wendy, Wendy Pritzke, unable to find her.

Already through Ploisti, and Cimpina, and Sinaia, those pretty cities only a string of memories from Bucharest to Brasov. How quickly could memories be set in place, how firmly erased?

In each town that they stopped for the night, Wendy and John had requested separate rooms, as befits cousins, though they were stepcousins really, not blooded. After suffering separately the cold dribble that passed for a shower, they met in Wendy's room. She sat on the calcified mattress, which was made up with sheets and blanket in the usual manner, but also wrapped all round with a clean white sheet in which a central shape had been cut, so the blanket from beneath showed through as a lozenge of wool the color of horsehair.

She sipped her gray vodka and cut her lip on a chip in the glass.

“So we're here,” said John.

“We're here,” she answered, “bleeding and all.”

“You're all here?”

“Meaning?”

“You're not chasing Jack the Ripper in your mind?”

“My job is to be here. We've left that fancy far behind. This is real.”

“Are you scared?”

“Only very scared, not very very scared.”

“It'll be more than all right. It's the beginning of everything good.”

“Don't say that.” She kicked off her shoes and lay back on the bed, not so much relaxing ostentatiously in front of him, but trying to work out the kinks in her lower spine from a day spent in the rackety car driven by Doroftei.

“I saved some bread from lunch, are you hungry?” he said.

“The bread is grayer than the vodka.”

“You have to keep up your strength.”

“More vodka, then, dear thing.”

He came to the edge of the bed and perched briefly on it, his rump making a pull in the sheet, a ripple of cotton. How could the Romanians get their linen so white when their flour was so ashen? She'd hardly eaten a thing but crackers since arriving.

She hoped he wouldn't stay on the bed, and he didn't, because Doroftei knocked on the door and he jumped up guiltily. Though there was nothing to be guilty about, nothing; there never had been.

“On to the holiday hour,” said Doroftei. He had rubbed something like motor oil in his hair, and his shirt was rakishly open to the second button. “Such good time to enjoy, you tell everyone in U.S. and U.K., they all coming to Sunny Clearing, Poiana Brasov, and being happy.”

“Do we have to be happy tonight?” she said in a low voice, but John had been the one to hire the driver, through connections at his work; he couldn't allow Costal Doroftei to think them bored or uninterested for a moment.

“How many more nights have we?” John asked. “Let's just go look and see.”

Once again she called John's office. She tried the main number this time.

“Who may I say is calling?” said the receptionist.

She mumbled, something sounding more like Wendy Pritzke than Winnie Rudge.

“I'm having a hard time catching that,” said the woman. “With what firm, please?”

“Pritzke Enterprise,” said Winnie.

“I see. Just a minute, miss.” Winnie was put on hold. “I'm sorry, Mr. Comestor is out of the office indefinitely.”

“When will he be back?”

“I've no more information at present on Mr. Comestor. Please try later.”

“When will he be back? I haven't got all day to keep ringing—”

She called Rasia.

“Look,” said Rasia, “I know you're having a hard time of it. But I'm beyond frantic. You frightened Tariq rather badly, do you know that? I don't want you calling and scaring him, or Navida.”

“You should let me finish, Rasia. I know it sounds goofy, but that cat is on the loose somewhere in the building. This isn't my imagination. I saw those cats it killed.”

“Cats don't kill cats,” said Rasia. She sounded as if she thought Winnie had done it. “Please don't call me for a while. I have a new account and it's taking all my spare time.”

“Just one thing: promise me if the cat comes through the wall, you'll leave, you'll clear out.”

“Come through the wall like a ghost? Like your old Christmas Past? As they say on the American sitcoms, sweetheart: Get a grip.” She rang off.

All of London seemed in collusion to do one thing: Hang up the receiver on her. brmmmmmmmmmmm.

“Oh, this is like Miami Beach or something.” The building was mostly concrete, like a convention center, though it had a spun sugar application of wooden eaves and painted fretwork, a nod to Bavarian chalets. The parking lot was largely empty, even on a Saturday night. Still, choking with laughter about seeing the Sunny Clearing at night, Wendy was not prepared for how lovely the walk was. Once out of the lot, they wound about on a snowy path over which freshly cut pine boughs had been spread. Their boots crushed the needles, and each step blossomed with resin scent, expressive of Christmas. The stars leered and leaned, brighter than any in London or Boston, almost pushpins, almost three-dimensional. John took her hand.

“A Christmas to remember,” he said.

“Nowhere near Christmas yet,” she said, legalistically.

“Yes, but as much like as to stand in for it.” He meant for the Christmas they would never share together. She nodded.

“Oh,” said Doroftei, “this is sweet goodness; all that's missing is pussy.” He smiled unapologetically at Wendy, who felt as if she were supposed to nod and agree. But she was suddenly shy.

The walkway led over a wooden bridge. Small white lights were looped around the posts and struts of the bridge. The stream below was mostly snowed over, though there was a glassy jingle as of ice bits caught in a bottleneck.

She wanted to stand in the snow, on the pines, surrounded by lights, on a nine-foot bridge, under Romanian stars, all night long, and keep it as a memory. She didn't want to move forward to where she could hear a pulsing antiquated disco beat ready to drum the atmosphere into a pulp.

“As good as Christmas,” she allowed to John.

She was at a loss; how often did that happen? London usually felt full and redolent of the past, so saturated with atmosphere that one could sometimes hardly breathe—now it felt airless. Should she just go back to Boston, give up on the idea of a novel about Wendy Pritzke? Why not just bolt? Shrug off any remaining responsibility about home renovations in a property that didn't even belong to her, order a minicab, head for Heathrow, hit the bar for a glass of something with a lemon rind or a pickled onion in it.

Nothing called for her to come back to Boston, that was part of the problem. And the only thing really urging her to stay was the fey though ineffectual parasite that had seemed to infect Rudge House.

So she found herself, a few days later, back at the door of Ritzi Ostertag's place in Cowcross Street. A heavy tide of patchouli couldn't disguise a smell of roach spray. If an exorcism were needed, of any sort, Winnie deduced, either ectoplasm or vermin, Ritzi Ostertag probably wouldn't be up for the job.

Ritzi looked up from the cash register where he was writing out a receipt to a weeping young woman from the Caribbean. “Four times a day rain or shine until ze full moon,” he said, handing her a paper sack. “And zen ve'll see vhat ve'll zee.” He rolled his eyes at the sight of Winnie, but with a toss of his head he indicated: Sit, ve vill talk .

She tried to melt into the background, but the background was occupied by that American historian, Hausserman. She was surprised how quickly she remembered the name. He was leafing through an old dusty volume whose pages were deckled on side and bottom, and touched with gold on the top. “Oh, you,” he said. “If you've come to buy this early-nineteenth-century Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, you're out of luck. Dibs. But there's a duplicate Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age by Lecouteux as a consolation prize.”

“I'm here to have my fortune told,” she said.

“Professional research or greedy for knowledge in a Faustian sense?”

“The silence of the confessional obtains, I believe. None of your beeswax, as we used to say in Simsbury, Connecticut.”

“I understand.” He nodded with a parody of British courtesy derived from Merchant Ivory films, and turned his attention back to the page.

“What are you looking for?” She didn't want to engage him, but she couldn't help herself.

He gave her a wink. “Our dear Ostertag may be flighty but the boy does deliver the goods, I'll give him that.”

Ritzi came over. “I can't be seeink you now,” he said to Winnie, “I can't be givink myself over to ze spirit vorld.”

“I'll wait till you finish this sale. I can wait.”

“You're in hurry,” said Ritzi.

“No I'm not.”

“You are, you just are not yet knowink it.”

She let out a laugh that sounded too much like a high squeal. Then she shrugged. Irv Hausserman closed the book and he negotiated a price. A number of soft pale notes changed hands and Ritzi wrote up the exchange, and wrapped the book lovingly in a length of white muslin, and again in brown paper and string.

“What a pleasant surprise to run into you again,” said Irv. “Opal, isn't it?” He nodded his good-byes, and left whistling, shunting the book lovingly from arm to arm. She hated to see him go, but she couldn't think of anything to say that would keep him.

“Now.” Ritzi Ostertag began the flourishes and flounces of his act. “A new lock on ze door so zis time ve are not beink interrupted. I am knowink you vill return. Zat cloth has got you wrapped.” Or had he said “rapt”? “I believe I tell you you are not to be brinkink it back.”

“Yes, you told me not to.”

“But you disobey Ritzi and brink it.”

“Yes.”

“Good. I am vantink to look at it more closely.” He made hurrying motions, shaking his hands. She sat down and unwrapped the thing once again.

Though he seemed determined to keep up his accent this time, Ritzi Ostertag didn't attempt mood lighting or a medieval music soundtrack. He turned several desk lights on and sat down at a table like an Antwerp jeweler with an eyepiece studying an old diamond. “Such strong—I don't know—associations I am gettink,” he said. “It is strange. Bitter as radish is bitter.”

“Is it haunted?” said Winnie.

“A piece of cloth? How can a fragment of cloth be haunted?”

“How could a house be haunted, or a forest, or a person's dreams? I don't know. Is it?”

“Not my area of specialization. I half no talent at zuch zinks. But I can zense a great—somezink. Some Schreck .” He closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers very gently on the fabric. He was like a wine connoisseur proving his prowess over a mystery vintage. “I can tell you very little about zis, but somezink about yourself comes through. I zink zis is about you, but I can't tell.”

“This cloth can't be about me. I merely helped find it.”

He took long, deep breaths. “Oh, ze poor somezink. Vhatever it iz. You or it, or did I say last time it vas a she-thing? Yes, I zink it vas.”

“You think it was . . . ?”

“The shroud of a young voman.”

He opened his eyes. His hands had been roaming as if over a keyboard, and they stopped. He looked more closely, and held the cloth up. “Damn zese bad eyes,” he said, “gettink old is no fun. Vhat is zis?”

“I don't see anything,” she said.

“I can feel it. I zink I can see it. Yes, look, if you hold ze cloth so zat ze light falls against it like so—a pattern. Do you zee? A letter, perhaps, a numeral? Vhat is it?”

She could not see it at first, but then she thought she picked up a pattern of glazed threads with matted-down hairs, as distinct from the surround of coarser threads. She was hardly surprised. That same symbol, a cross with a zigzag slash through it. Four or five inches high, perhaps painted with wax, or a pigment whose color had long since faded, leaving only a residue of binder.

“What does it mean?” she said.

“Ask somevone else, not me,” he said, “but it is feelink stronger to me zan ze rest.”

“What precisely do you mean?” she said.

“As a pepper soup is heartier zan a banana soup. Don't interrupt.” His hands moved slowly, reading like Braille, but stopped nowhere else, until, with eyes closed, his fingers roamed the cloth to its hem, reached a few inches, and touched her fingertips. She sat there, frightened and angry.

“Vhat do you vant?” he asked her, more like a doctor than a priest.

“I am not getting through, anywhere,” she said. “I am a writer whose character has left her; I don't even know where she went. If this is a block, it's a first time for me. I can't get her on the page, I can't see her in my lazy mind's eye before I go to sleep. I can't find my cousin, who has disappeared. I am afraid to admit that my cousin's house is mildly haunted by whoever it was who was wrapped in this cloth. I have a mad notion that one of my ancestors was the prototype for Charles Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge, the one who suffered all those visitations by ghosts. I don't know if he was mad, or fanciful, or psychotic; I don't know if I am finding myself the same. Nothing is connected. Nothing makes sense. I am not getting through anywhere.”

Ritzi sighed. “I don't know about writer's block. Ze only kind of writer's block I haff is in signink my name to bank checks vhen my bills come due. I can't make myself do it. But such blank valls, zere is so little to attach. Vhat haff you done to yourself?”

“So I've dyed my hair,” she admitted, “only against a little gray.”

“No, not zat,” he said. “Am I gettink you or am I gettink some whiff of ze shroud-phantom?”

“If you can get a whiff of anything over your industrial-strength patchouli, I'm surprised.”

“You hold me off, more zan you need,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked at her clinically. Once again the accent fell off. “I may be a silly old bore but I'm not a fool, you know. I can tell you've had some doings with astrology somehow. I can tell that making fun of people is your professional strength and your living grave.”

“I asked for a reading of the future, not the present,” she said.

“You keep yearning to go east, but you're either going too far or you're not going far enough,” he said. “You are not finding the right—destiny. Destination. It is not the Balkans. You're misled. Go nearer or go farther.”

“It was a character of mine who was going there. Not me.”

“Whoever this is,” he said, moving his hand back to the nearly invisible scar of marking on the edge of the cloth, “wants to go back, but like you—cannot. It is a problem of getting through. She has lost the way to get through. She needs help. Who will be her helpmeet?”

After dropping thirty pounds into a brass scale held by a grinning Hanuman figure, Winnie made her way downstairs to Cowcross Street, thinking: What a bravura performance that was. He took what she gave off about herself—her intensely divided and lonely self—and made of it a story about a ghost who was equally indigent. He ought to go into fiction writing, why not? Maybe they should collaborate, and together they could find out what had happened to Wendy Pritzke.

But had she ever mentioned the Balkans to him? To Rasia? How did he know?

Irv Hausserman was waiting for her at the corner. “Sorry,” he said, “I know this seems like stalking, but by now my curiosity is piqued. Did Mr. Ostertag tell you that you would run into me again in the near future, like half an hour or so?”

She wasn't happy to be waylaid, but it was better than seeing no one, since she seemed to have ostracized herself from every figment and figure she knew, in her mind and out of it. “He said my ghost has a hard time getting home.”

“You have a ghost. A personal one? How leading edge of you. Is it lost?”

“It's all bunk, I know. Once upon a time I wrote faux horoscopes and made a healthy living at it; anyone with a semblance of an imagination can do it. But there's just enough creepiness in the whole thing to make me very sad.” She told him about the finding of the cloth in her family home, and about the pattern daubed on the edge of the cloth.

“You're sure you saw that insignia on the pantry boards? On your computer screen?”

“Oh, once something happens, who can be sure of anything? I thought I did, but I am modern enough to mistrust my senses. Clearly I'm overwrought with worry over my cousin, and pretending not to be.”

“Why bother to pretend? Why not be overwrought?”

“I can see things that aren't there,” she said. “I guard against that.”

“Like ghosts?”

“Like conspiracies. Like plots. Like narrative plots, I mean, but also like paranoia. I'm not superstitious but I am suspicious.”

“Give me an example.”

“Can't. I don't know you well enough; you might cut me off entirely. There, that's suspicion for you, see? And I—” She did not say, I like you, nor, worse, I need you, or someone.

“Oh, go ahead. There are only so many sentences you can stop in midstride before you yourself stop in midstride.”

She tried to smile wanly at that, but it was too true to ignore. “All right. Let's leave aside all the business of a haunting. The ghost of Jack the Ripper, the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghost of Ozias Rudge, the ghost of some poor murdered housemaid from the early nineteenth century.” He had heard none of this before; he bravely refrained from flinching. She rushed on. “I'm a hack and I'm slightly haunted by my own professional skills—it's an occupational hazard. I accept that. I can't get through to my main character and so my novel is stalled. I accept that. I accept that I'm driving the neighbors crazy. Even the dotty old bat on the ground floor has begun to avoid me. Fair enough. But why do I get the feeling that my cousin's disappearance is a conspiracy against me?”

“So that's really what you're overwrought about.”

“Overwrought implies hysteria. I'm not overwrought, I'm just wrought. I feel as if his office is hiding something from me. The whole thing makes me feel paranoid, and then the world is all—oh—a shrill lemon color, a place without comforting shadows, or without clear lights. I can't think of the metaphor. Music has no charm to soothe this wild beast.”

“Sounds like depression to me.”

“Yes, doesn't it?”

“But could you be right? That there is a conspiracy?”

“You met me at a professional clairvoyant's,” she reminded him. “Doesn't that suggest I'm a bit fringy? You're there buying your tools for academic research, I'm there getting a seer's evaluation of a horse blanket? Why shouldn't I be delusional too?”

They had walked out of Cowcross Street and meandered along, aimlessly heading deeper into the City. Finally, she repeated, “I'll prove it to you, if you like,” as they paused on a street corner, unsure whether they were continuing together, but not ready to press on, nor to break off.

There was a phone box on the corner. “I could call and be put off. You could see that. If you need proof.”

“Well, if you think it's a conspiracy against you,” he said, testing her, “I could call. Let me. Shall I?”

“Why not? What is there to lose?”

What was there to lose?

He had coins and dropped them in. She told him the number by heart. The connection took a little while to make. She stood, struggling with all manner of perturbations.

Was there anything in the literature that ascertained for certain that Jack the Ripper was male? Could the Ripper have been a woman? Why would a woman kill other women? And if Jack the Ripper was a woman, could this shroud have been hers?

“Yes, I'll wait,” said Irv Hausserman. He leaned against the Plexiglas edge of what passed for a phone box—a boxless phone box, these days—obscuring the advertisements of hookers and lady companions and their phone numbers and special talents. The edge of Ripper territory, still served by prostitutes all these decades later.

She didn't want to appear too eager. She looked at a full-color advertisement of a dominatrix, a card about four by six, affixed to the glass with gum tack. The woman was laced into a corset of black leather. Her color was high and her eyes were hidden by a bar of black ink put in by the printer's studio. On either side of the photo her services were listed. Psychological Manipulation. Strict Discipline. Inescapable Bondage. Fetish Enhancement. Intense Torment Scenarios. She carried a riding crop like a cowgirl about to enter a bullpen. The typeface was Ye Olde Gothick.

What if this were Jenkins's daughter, her eyes hidden behind that privacy-protection device? What if Jenkins stopped to use this phone and saw her? Would he recognize her? Would he dare to call the number?

“So what's the deal?” she said belligerently, poking Hausserman in the shoulder.

“They said to hold the line,” he answered, “they're putting me through.”