The freight elevator shuddered to a halt on the third floor, and the doors parted with the reluctant groan of old steel against old steel. Eliza Vance stepped out into a corridor that smelled of turpentine, fried garlic, and the faint copper tang of old pipes. The building on Mott Street was older than her grandfather, and it showed its age in the warped floorboards and the patches of peeling paint that surrounded every buzzer. Somewhere down the hall, a radio was playing something in Mandarin, the singer's voice thin and tinny through a plaster wall.
She was looking for apartment 3B. The super had given her directions with the kind of brusque impatience that suggested he had already decided she was up to no good. She had thanked him anyway. Manners cost nothing, her mother used to say, and in a place like this, they might buy her five extra minutes of goodwill.
The door to 3B was painted a chipped maroon, and a small mezuzah had been affixed to the frame at an angle, as if installed in haste and never adjusted. There was also, she noticed, a peephole that had been replaced at some point, the new brass glaring against the weathered wood. She knocked, three solid raps, and waited.
Footsteps approached from the other side, quick and light. A chain rattled. The door opened six inches, stopped by its security hardware, and a pair of dark eyes peered out at her through the gap.
"I'm looking for Sari Wijaya," Eliza said. "My name is Eliza Vance. I think we have a mutual friend."
A pause. The eyes studied her face, then her hands, then the messenger bag slung across her shoulder.
"Which mutual friend?" The voice was warm, but careful. The accent underneath was American, but with a faint musical lift on the vowels that Eliza recognized as Indonesian.
"Mei Huang."
The chain slid free. The door swung inward, and a young woman stepped back to let her cross the threshold. Sari Wijaya was slight, with close-cropped hair and a face that seemed built for smiling but was currently arranged into an expression of polite wariness. She wore paint-stained jeans and a loose linen shirt, and her fingers, Eliza noticed, were stained with ink at the tips, as if she had been drafting patterns all morning.
"You'd better come in," Sari said. "I'll put the kettle on."
The apartment was small and bright, the morning sun pouring through a pair of windows that faced an airshaft. A drafting table dominated one corner, covered in sheets of paper and tiny colored gemstones. A jewelry box sat open on the kitchen counter, its velvet lining the color of old wine. The air smelled of green tea and fresh paper, and under that, the faint chemical scent of metal polish.
Sari gestured to a stool at the counter and filled a kettle from the tap. She did not ask Eliza to sit anywhere more comfortable. She did not offer her a choice of beverage. She set about the small ritual of tea-making with the deliberate focus of someone who needed her hands busy.
"Mei talked about you," Sari said, not turning around. "She said you were honest. She also said you were stubborn, which in her vocabulary was almost the same thing."
"I'm sorry about Mei," Eliza said.
Sari's hands stilled on the kettle. For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the faint hiss of the gas burner and the distant wail of a siren several blocks away.
"So am I," Sari said quietly. Then she set the kettle on the flame and turned to face Eliza. "If you're here, it's because you have questions. I have a job interview in forty minutes, so let's make this efficient. What do you want to know?"
Eliza took a breath. "How long did you work for her?"
"Eighteen months. I started as an intern. She taught me the business. The real business, not the one she showed the tax man." Sari smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. "Mei believed in paying people what they were worth. She also believed in keeping certain transactions off the books, for reasons that will become apparent if you keep asking questions."
"Did she ever mention a buyer? An online buyer?"
Sari's expression shifted, the wariness sharpening into something closer to concern. She pulled two mismatched mugs from a shelf and set them on the counter.
"Mei had a few of those," she said. "Collectors who preferred discretion. She ran a private channel for people who didn't want their names in any database. She vetted them herself, and she kept the records on an encrypted drive she wore on a chain around her neck."
"Did you know any of those buyers?"
"I knew of one." Sari poured the boiling water over tea leaves, and the kitchen filled with the grassy perfume of oolong. "He called himself The Collector. Mei said he bought pieces from her for years. He paid very well, and he never asked questions. She liked that about him."
"What kind of pieces?"
"Small things. Earrings, pendants, cufflinks. Things she could ship in a plain envelope." Sari handed Eliza a mug. "She started pulling back from him about six months ago. She told me she didn't trust him anymore. She said he had started asking for pieces she didn't own."
Eliza's hands tightened around the warm ceramic. "Pieces she didn't own?"
"Patterns. Blueprints. The kind of thing you'd need if you wanted to replicate a design rather than buy a finished piece." Sari's voice dropped. "She said he wanted her workshop, not her jewelry. That was when she started looking for a way out."
"Did she say why he wanted the patterns?"
"She said he was building a collection. A specific collection. He wanted pieces that matched something he already had." Sari paused, and the kettle on the stove ticked softly as the metal cooled. "She said the pieces he wanted her to copy were very old. Older than anything she had in her files. Older than anything she had ever made."
Eliza set her mug down on the counter, the ceramic clicking against the laminate. "How old?"
Sari looked at her, and for the first time, the wariness gave way to something closer to fear. "Seventeenth century, she said. Maybe earlier. She said the glass was Venetian, and the craftsmanship was unlike anything she had ever seen." She paused. "She said she thought he was trying to complete a set."
The words settled into the small kitchen, and the morning light through the airshaft windows seemed suddenly colder. Somewhere in the building, a door slammed, and a child began to cry, the sound rising and falling in thin, hiccupping sobs.
"Do you have any names?" Eliza asked. "Any idea who The Collector might be?"
Sari shook her head. "Mei kept that circle very tight. She said the less I knew, the safer I was." A bitter smile flickered across her face. "She was right about that, at least."
"Did she ever mention a name? Even in passing? A pseudonym, a handle, a shipping address?"
Sari was quiet for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the steam rising from her mug. Then she reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a small notebook, its cover stained with what looked like ink and turmeric. She flipped to a page near the back and slid it across the counter.
"This was on her desk the morning she didn't come to work. I grabbed it before anyone else could."
Eliza took the notebook and studied the page. The handwriting was small and precise, the strokes of someone used to working with fine tools. At the top of the page was a list of dates, each one followed by a dollar amount and a brief description of an item. Earrings, jade and silver. Brooch, coral. Cufflinks, garnet. And at the bottom, two entries that made her stomach tighten.
The first read: Pendant, Venetian glass, 17th c. pattern. Shipped to D.V.
The second read: Same. Returned. Pattern requested.
Eliza looked up. "D.V."
"I don't know who that is," Sari said. "I asked Mei once. She said it was a private client, and that was all she would say." Her eyes were steady on Eliza's face. "I think she was afraid of him."
The kettle on the stove ticked again, and the gas burner hissed softly as it cooled. In the distance, the child had stopped crying, and the building settled into the quiet sounds of pipes and old wood and the faint, persistent hum of the city outside.
Eliza tucked the notebook into her bag. "Did she ever say where she kept the originals? The patterns, I mean. The seventeenth century ones?"
Sari hesitated. Then she set her mug down and crossed to the drafting table. She pulled open a shallow drawer and removed a single sheet of paper, folded twice. She held it out to Eliza.
"She gave me this two weeks before she died. She said if anything happened to her, I should give it to the person who came asking the right questions." A faint, sad smile. "I think you might be that person."
Eliza took the paper and unfolded it carefully. It was a photocopy of a page from a ledger, the columns labeled in a spidery hand: Item. Date. Recipient. Price. The entries were mostly in English, but some were in a script she could not read. At the bottom of the page, a single line had been circled in red ink.
Set of seven. Owner deceased. Estate sale to be arranged. Contact D. Varellis.
Eliza looked up, and Sari was watching her with an expression that said she already knew what Eliza was thinking.
"Varellis," Eliza said.
"I looked him up," Sari said. "There's a family of that name in Murano. They were glassmakers for three hundred years. The last of them died in the seventies." She paused. "There is no record of a D. Varellis anywhere. Not in any database I could find."
The apartment was very quiet. The morning light had shifted, and the shadows in the corners of the room had deepened. Eliza folded the paper again and slipped it into the notebook from Sari's pocket. She would look at it again later, when she could spread everything out on her worktable at home, but already she could feel the shape of something taking form in her mind. A set of seven. Seventeenth century Venetian glass. A collector who wanted to complete a set, and a seller who had started to ask too many questions.
She took a breath and finished her tea in a single swallow.
"I have one more question," she said. "And then I'll let you get to your interview."
Sari nodded.
"The pieces Mei was shipping. The ones that matched the seventeenth-century pattern. Did you ever see one?"
Sari was quiet for a moment. Then she crossed to the jewelry box on the counter and opened it. From the velvet lining, she lifted a small pendant on a thin silver chain. She held it out so that the morning light caught it.
The glass was the color of deep water, shot through with veins of gold. The shape was intricate, a teardrop set within a teardrop, the inner one turning slowly as if suspended in something thicker than air. Eliza recognized the technique immediately. She had seen it in museums, in the glass cases of auction houses, in the private collection of a reclusive dealer in the Village who had once let her hold a piece of Venetian work and tell her what she could feel through her fingertips.
It was a perfect example of the a murrine technique, the kind of work that had been a closely guarded secret for two hundred years.
"It was a gift," Sari said. "Mei gave it to me the day before she died. She said she wanted me to have something beautiful in case things got difficult." A faint, sad smile. "Things got difficult."
Eliza looked at the pendant, and the glass seemed to turn of its own accord, the gold veins catching the light in slow, deliberate pulses. She reached out, and Sari, after a moment's hesitation, let her take it.
The glass was cool in her palm, heavier than it looked. She turned it slowly, feeling the balance of it, the precise weight distribution that only a master could achieve. It was, she realized, not a copy. It was an original.
"Sari," she said carefully, "do you have any idea where this came from?"
"Mei said she found it," Sari said. "She said she had been keeping it for someone, and when that someone stopped coming around, she decided it was time to pass it on." A pause. "She didn't say who the someone was."
Eliza turned the pendant over, and there, on the back, engraved so faintly she almost missed it, was a tiny maker's mark. A stylized V inside a circle. The mark of the Varellis family.
She handed the pendant back, and her fingers tingled where the glass had rested against her skin.
"Thank you," she said. "I think I need to do some research."
Sari took the pendant and returned it to the jewelry box. She closed the lid with a soft click and looked at Eliza with an expression that was equal parts relief and dread.
"Be careful," she said. "Whoever D.V. is, Mei was afraid of him. And Mei wasn't afraid of much."
Eliza nodded, shouldered her bag, and let herself out. The chain rattled back into place behind her, and she stood for a moment in the dim corridor, listening to the building breathe around her. The radio down the hall had gone silent. The child had stopped crying. Somewhere, a faucet dripped in a steady, patient rhythm, counting out the seconds like a metronome.
She had a name now. She had a pattern. She had a pendant that should not exist.
It was enough to start.
The subway swallowed her at Canal Street, and she rode it north to her studio in Red Hook with the pendant's weight still pressed into her memory like a bruise.
The studio waited for her the way it always did, patient and dim, the late morning light slanting through the salt-hazed windows and catching the copper tubing of her torch rig. She dropped her bag on the workbench and stood for a moment in the doorway, letting the familiar smell of soda ash and propane settle her. Three pieces sat cooling on the steel table, a commission for a restaurant in Park Slope, simple tumblers with a faint blue tint. She ignored them. She crossed to the old filing cabinet that squatted in the corner beneath a poster of Murano from 1962 and pulled out the bottom drawer, the one that stuck.
There, beneath a nest of receipts and a folded sketch of a chandelier she would never build, lay a brown accordion folder with her father's handwriting on the tab. EXPORTS, it said. EUROPE. She hadn't opened it in two years. She opened it now.
Inside were receipts, shipping manifests, and correspondence in three languages, all of it relating to the international glass market her father had cultivated before his death. She had been through it once before, after the funeral, looking for clues to the forgeries that had nearly bankrupted the studio. She had found nothing useful. But she had been looking for the wrong thing then. Now she was looking for the Varellis mark.
It took her twenty minutes. Her fingers left faint smudges on the brittle paper. And then she found it: a single sheet, a handwritten note in Italian, dated March of the previous year, from a dealer in Murano she had never heard of. The note was brief and transactional, but at the bottom, her father had scrawled a single word in his tight, slanting hand. Pavone. He had underlined it twice.
She set the note down carefully and stared at it until the letters swam.
Her father had known the name. He had written it down. And then, five months later, he had been dead.
She reached for her phone and called the only person she trusted to ask questions without making them obvious.
Sari answered on the second ring. There was the faint clatter of beads and the hum of a soldering iron in the background. "Eliza. Did you find something?"
"I found a note," Eliza said. "My father wrote down the name Pavone six months before he died. He underlined it."
A long breath on the other end. "What does that mean?"
"It means my father was involved. Somehow. And I need to know how." She paused. "Sari, that username you mentioned. PavoneObscura. Does the name mean anything to you? Pavone is Italian for peacock."
"Pavo," Sari said slowly. "Latin for peacock. Same root. But no, I never heard Mei use it. She wasn't Italian. She was from Queens." A pause, and then the sound of Sari setting something down. "Wait. There was a buyer. She mentioned a buyer once, when she thought I was asleep. She said he collected glass, and that he used a screen name. I assumed it was just an alias. She said he'd been buying from her for almost a year. Always paying cash. Always sending a courier."
"Do you remember the screen name?"
"PavoneObscura," Sari said. "She laughed about it. She said it sounded like a villain from an opera." Another pause. "Eliza, why are you asking?"
"Because I think my father sold him something. And I think whatever he sold him got my father killed."
The silence on the line was the loudest thing Eliza had ever heard.
"Where are you?" Sari asked.
"Red Hook. The studio."
"Don't go anywhere. I'm coming to you. And I'm bringing the appointment book."
She hung up and stood in the middle of the studio, the phone still warm in her hand, and tried to remember the last time she had spoken to her father about anything other than the business. They had never been close. He had been a reserved man, more comfortable with molten glass than with his only daughter. But he had loved her, in his distant way. He had left her the studio, and all its secrets, and now those secrets were starting to surface like bodies in a thaw.
She made tea because she needed something to do with her hands. The kettle whistled, and she poured two cups, and then a third, because she had a feeling the building superintendent would turn up before long. He always did when something unusual was happening in the building. The man had the instincts of a dowser.
Sari arrived in twenty minutes, slightly out of breath, a leather journal clutched to her chest. She set it on the workbench between the tea cups and opened it to a page marked with a torn strip of receipt tape.
"This is from the week she disappeared," Sari said, and tapped the page. "Three appointments. All with the same person. All on the same street."
Eliza leaned in. The handwriting was Mei's, neat and slanted, the loops of her characters tight and controlled.
The first entry read: Wednesday, 2pm, 14 Mott Street, Apt 3C. The second: Thursday, 6pm, 14 Mott Street, Apt 3C. The third: Friday, 10am, 14 Mott Street, Apt 3C.
"Mott Street," Eliza said. "Chinatown."
"Bowery border, actually," Sari said. "That stretch where the galleries are. It used to be all lighting shops and restaurant supply, but it's been changing. There's a new wave of, I don't know, boutique whatever. High-end studios. Private collectors renting floors." She frowned. "I walked by it once. The buzzer panel only had one name on it. No super, no management company. Just initials. D.V."
The room tilted slightly, or maybe that was just Eliza's vision narrowing.
"D.V.," she said. "Lawrence Devereaux. That's who my father was selling to."
"You know him?"
"I know of him. He was a minor collector, or so I thought. He came to the studio twice when my father was alive. I met him once. He was charming. He bought a small piece, a paperweight, and he asked a lot of questions about provenance." She paused, the memory surfacing with the smell of her father's pipe tobacco. "He asked about Italy. About connections in Murano. I thought he was just being a polite enthusiast."
Sari was watching her with a steady, unreadable expression. "And now you think he was building a network."
"I think he was. And I think Mei found out about it. And I think she was trying to get out." Eliza set down her tea. "I need to go to that address."
"You're not going alone," Sari said flatly.
"I wasn't planning to ask you to come."
"Good. Because I was going to insist."
They were halfway to the door when the buzzer from the downstairs vestibule rattled through the studio, a harsh mechanical bark that echoed off the concrete walls. Eliza crossed to the intercom and pressed the talk button.
"Yeah?"
"Vance, it's Sal. Let me up. I got something for you."
Sal was the building superintendent, a grizzled man of about sixty with a face like a weathered catch and a pronounced skepticism about anything he couldn't fix with a wrench. He had worked the building for twenty-three years and knew every tenant's habits, including, apparently, hers.
She buzzed him in and listened to his boots on the stairs, heavy and deliberate, each step accompanied by a faint wheeze. He appeared in the doorway a moment later, holding a small cardboard box and looking profoundly uncomfortable.
"This was left for you," he said, and thrust the box at her. "Yesterday. Down at the front desk. I forgot to bring it up."
She took the box. It was light, and there was no return address. Only her name, printed in a clean, small font: ELIZA VANCE.
"Who delivered it?"
"I don't know. It was just there when I came in. The night guy didn't see anybody." Sal shifted his weight, his eyes darting to Sari and then away. "You expecting something?"
"No," she said.
"You want me to wait?"
She almost said yes. Then she looked at the box again, at the neat printing, at the absence of a stamp or a postmark, and decided she did not want an audience for whatever was inside.
"I'll be fine, Sal. Thanks."
He hesitated, plainly torn between curiosity and the desire to escape. Curiosity won, barely. "You sure? I can stick around. I got nothing till four."
"I'm sure. But if you hear anything strange, you'll be the first to know."
He grunted, evidently satisfied with this sop to his protective instincts, and withdrew. His boots creaked on the stairs again, descending.
Eliza set the box on the workbench. Sari moved closer, and they stood over it together, the studio very quiet except for the faint ticking of the pipe behind the wall.
"Well," Sari said. "Open it."
Eliza opened it.
Inside, nested in a bed of white tissue, was a small glass bird. It was no more than two inches tall, exquisitely formed, with wings half-spread and a head tilted as if listening. The glass was a deep, clear green, the color of sea glass, and the craftsmanship was unmistakable. It was a Varellis piece. She could tell by the proportions, by the way the glass had been worked, by the faint internal striations that only the old Murano masters knew how to create.
She lifted it out with both hands, and her breath caught.
On the underside of the base, engraved in a script so fine it was nearly invisible, were three words: FOR MY DAUGHTER.
"Eliza," Sari whispered. "Your father's handwriting?"
Eliza shook her head. She didn't trust her voice. The bird was light in her palm, and it caught the light and threw it back in shifting shades of emerald and jade. She had never seen this piece before. She had never seen any piece like this in her father's collection.
But she knew, with a certainty that settled in her chest like a cold stone, that her father had made it. The style was unmistakable. The proportions were his. Even the way the wings were set, that particular angle of arrested motion, was something he had done in a dozen pieces she had watched him make as a child.
Someone had sent her a message. And the message was not a gift.
It was a confession.
"Eliza," Sari said again, and this time her voice was sharp. "Look at the tissue."
Eliza looked. Beneath the tissue, pressed into the cardboard, was a small square of paper. She lifted it out and unfolded it.
A photograph. Black and white, slightly grainy, printed on cheap paper. It showed two men standing in what appeared to be a warehouse, surrounded by crates. One of the men was her father, twenty years younger, his face unlined, his hair dark. The other man had his back to the camera. But on the back of his hand, just visible at the edge of the frame, was a tattoo. A small black bird, stylized, its wings spread.
The same shape as the glass bird in her hand.
She set the photograph down very carefully, as if it might detonate.
"Sari," she said. "I think I know who killed my father."
"And I think I know who has my brother."
They looked at each other across the workbench, across the glass bird and the photograph and the cups of cooling tea, and the studio seemed to contract around them, the walls leaning in, the light dimming as a cloud passed over the sun.
The glass bird watched them with its head tilted, listening to everything they did not yet say.
The afternoon had gone flat and grey, the light pressing thin through the windows of the studio, when Eliza finally stirred. She had been sitting on the stool for the better part of an hour, the photograph and the glass bird both on the workbench in front of her, and Sari had not pressed her. She had simply moved about the studio, tidying tools, refilling the kettle, putting the room in order as if order were a kind of comfort she could offer.
Now Eliza stood.
"I need to go back to the building," she said. "Mei's building. The one she was staying in. I need to talk to the super."
Sari looked up from the edge of the workbench where she had been wrapping the glass bird in a square of flannel. "Now?"
"Now, before I lose my nerve."
Sari nodded slowly, and folded the cloth over the bird, and tucked it into the padded pocket of her jacket. "I'm coming with you."
"Sari."
"Don't." Sari's voice was quiet and very firm. "I have been sitting in studios waiting for two days. I am done waiting."
They took the train uptown, and then across to the Diamond District, and the whole way Eliza could feel the glass bird against her ribs through the flannel and the jacket and the silk of her shirt, the weight of it unreasonable, as if it were trying to anchor her to something.
The building was a narrow six-story walkup on West Forty-Seventh, with a fire escape zigzagging down the front and a street-level flower stall leaning against the wall. Eliza pushed through the front door into a vestibule that smelled of dust and Lysol, and found a bell on a worn wooden ledge with a hand-lettered sign above it that read SUPER in faded black ink.
She pressed the bell.
A long moment passed. Somewhere in the back of the building a radio was playing talk, a voice rising and falling behind a wall. Then a door opened at the end of the hall, and a man emerged, wiping his hands on a rag. He was perhaps sixty, stocky, with a head of close-cropped grey hair and a face that had been weathered by decades of cold air and poor sleep. He moved with the careful economy of a man who had learned to do ten things at once and resented every one of them.
"Yeah?" he said, approaching the vestibule. "You ringing me?"
"I'm looking for information about a tenant," Eliza said. "Mei Lin Huang. Unit 4B. She disappeared three days ago."
The super stopped. He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes small and sharp in his weathered face. "Who are you?"
"My name is Eliza Vance. I'm a friend of the family. I've been asked to help find her."
"Family." He repeated the word as if tasting it. "What's left of the family don't seem too worried. Nobody's filed anything. Nobody's called me."
"They're afraid."
"Afraid." He said the word flatly. "Yeah. Okay. What do you want to know?"
"Anything you can tell me about the days before she left. Did she have visitors? Did anything unusual happen?"
The super considered this. He leaned against the wall of the vestibule, and the radio talk from the back of the building grew momentarily louder, a voice saying something about interest rates, and then dimmed again. He smelled faintly of sawdust and tobacco, an old combination, the kind that clung to a man who had worked the same building for thirty years.
"Three days," he said. "Yeah. I remember three days. She was in and out, mostly out, didn't see much of her. But two nights before that, the night before she vanished, I had a run-in with her."
"A run-in?"
"Argument. In the lobby. She was coming in, I was going out, and there was a man with her. Tall guy, suit, carrying one of those silver briefcases you see on television. The expensive kind. He was standing too close to her, and she didn't look happy about it. I said something, told them to keep it down, it was after eleven. She gave me a look. He didn't say a word. Just looked at me like I was a piece of furniture."
He paused, and pulled at a callus on his palm.
"Then they went upstairs. The elevator's been broken since March, so they had to take the stairs, and I could hear them going up, her voice and his, but not the words. Maybe twenty minutes later he came down alone. I was in the basement, doing the boiler, and I heard the front door open and close. I came up and looked out the window, but I didn't see him on the street. Gone, like that."
"The silver briefcase," Sari said. "Are you sure it was silver?"
The super turned his gaze to her. "I know silver when I see it. I been in this building thirty-one years. I seen a lot of briefcases. That one was silver, and it wasn't cheap."
"Did you get a look at his face?" Eliza asked.
"Enough. I seen him. I didn't get a good look. Late, lobby, half-dark. He had a long face, that's all I remember. Long and pale. Wore a hat. One of those homburgs, or maybe a fedora, the kind old men wear, except he wasn't old. He moved like he knew where he was going, though. Confident. Like the building belonged to him."
He stopped. He was looking past them now, at the street door, as if he could see through it to the sidewalk outside.
"There's something else," he said. "The day after she disappeared, the day I found the door open, I went up to clean. Standard stuff. Trash, towels, the works. There was a glass on the nightstand. Tumbler, heavy-bottomed, the kind you see in bars. There was a ring of something at the bottom. I sniffed it. Gin. I dumped it out, washed the glass, put it back. But I remember thinking, she didn't drink gin. She was a tea girl. I never once smelled alcohol on her in the two months she'd been here."
Eliza felt the air in the vestibule grow very still.
"A glass," she said.
"A glass," the super repeated. "One glass. Like someone had poured her a drink and then left. Or like she'd poured one for herself, which I don't believe."
"Did you keep the glass?"
"What am I, a museum? I washed it and put it back. The tenants don't need to know I went through their rooms. They don't need to know anything, except the heat works and the water's hot."
"Did you touch anything else in the apartment?"
"The window. I opened it. The room smelled closed up, like nobody had been in for a day, and I wanted air. There was a breeze. It moved the curtain. And I thought I heard something, on the fire escape, but when I looked there was nothing there."
He looked back at them now, and his eyes were sharp.
"Why are you asking me all this? What's going on? Is she in trouble?"
"We think she might be," Eliza said carefully. "We think she might have seen something she shouldn't have. Something that got a man killed last week."
The super's face did not change. He looked at her the way a man looks at a thing he has known for a long time and never expected to be asked to name.
"The glass man," he said. "Over in Soho. That was you?"
"It was my father."
"Your father. Jesus." He was quiet for a moment. "I read about it. The papers said it was a robbery."
"The papers were wrong."
He looked at her for a long time. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a ring of keys, and began to sort through them with a thick forefinger.
"Unit 4B," he said. "You want to see it?"
"I want to see it very much."
"It's a mess. I haven't cleaned it since. I've been waiting for someone to come. The family, the police, someone. Nobody came."
He selected a key and held it out to her, on his palm, the way you might hold out a coin to a child.
"Be careful with it. It's the only one I have."
Eliza took the key. The metal was warm from his hand, and heavier than it looked.
"Mr...."
"Kowalski," he said. "Eddie Kowalski."
"Mr. Kowalski. If anyone comes asking about her. About us. You didn't see us."
"I didn't see you," he agreed. "I never see anyone. That's the trick in this job. You don't see, you don't know, you don't have to answer questions."
He stepped back from the vestibule door, and gestured them toward the stairs.
"Top floor. The elevator's been broken since March, I told you. Mind the third step, it squeaks. And lock up when you're done. The key goes under the mat when you leave. I don't want it."
He turned and went back down the hall, and the door closed behind him, and the building was quiet.
Eliza and Sari stood in the vestibule for a moment, looking at each other.
"A glass," Sari said.
"A glass," Eliza said.
They climbed.
The stairs were narrow, the banister loose, the wallpaper a faded cabbage rose that had been fashionable forty years before. On the third step the wood gave a long theatrical groan, and Eliza stepped over it quickly, the way you step over a sleeping dog. The air grew warmer as they rose, and carried a faint trace of cooking from one of the lower floors, garlic and oil, and beneath that the older smell of the building itself, plaster and wood and the particular staleness of a place that had been lived in by a thousand different people.
The door of 4B was at the end of a short hall on the top floor, beside a window that looked out over a roof of tar and gravel and the backs of awnings. There was a small landing, just wide enough for two people, and a single bare bulb in a fixture overhead that did not appear to be working.
Eliza fitted the key into the lock. The tumblers turned with a muffled click, and the door opened inward onto a room that was small and still and lit only by the light from the hall window behind them.
She stepped inside. Sari followed, and pulled the door nearly closed behind them.
The room was exactly as Mei had described it in the brief letter she had left, a sparse furnished studio with a single bed, a small table, a chair, a kitchenette in the corner, a narrow closet. The bed was made with military precision, the corners tucked, the pillow centered. There was a book on the nightstand, a paperback with a cracked spine, the cover too faded to read. There was a pen beside it.
There was no glass.
Eliza went to the nightstand and crouched, and opened the drawer, and found it empty except for a few paper clips and a small twist of blue thread. She checked the kitchenette, the cupboards, the shelf above the sink. No glass. No tumbler. No ring of dried gin at the bottom of anything.
"He said he washed it and put it back," Sari said.
"He said a lot of things."
The room was very quiet. The curtain at the window was still, and the air had the closed-in quality Kowalski had described, a kind of held breath. Eliza moved to the window, and looked down at the fire escape. The metal was old, painted grey, the paint cracking in long curls. She could see the rungs descending all the way to the alley below, and at the second-floor level, a door into the building's back stairwell.
"He heard something on the fire escape," Eliza said. "The day after she disappeared."
"And saw nothing."
"And saw nothing."
She turned back to the room. She stood for a moment in the center of it, looking at the bed, the table, the chair, the places where a person had sat and slept and waited. The room had the particular sadness of a place abandoned, not by choice, but by force. There was no sign of a struggle. There was no sign of anything at all. The room had been smoothed over, every surface wiped clean, every corner considered. Whoever had been here last had been careful. They had not been hurried.
Eliza looked at the window again, and then at the floor, and then at the curtain.
She crossed to the curtain and pulled it aside.
There, on the sill, caught in the fold of the fabric, was a single thread. Dark. Fine. The color of dried blood, or the color of a blackbird's wing.
She pinched it between her fingers and held it up to the light, and the thread caught a faint gleam, and she knew.
"Silk," she said. "A silk thread. From a coat lining, or a jacket. Someone stood at this window and watched the fire escape. Or watched for the fire escape."
Sari came to stand beside her, and looked at the thread in Eliza's fingers, and then at the sill, and then at the window.
"He came back," Sari said quietly. "The tall man. He came back to make sure the glass was gone, and to make sure the room told no stories. And he left one thread. The one thing he didn't see."
"Or the one thing he didn't care to see," Eliza said. "Threads are nothing. A thread doesn't speak."
She released the curtain, and it fell back into its fold, and the room was as still as it had been.
They stood for a moment longer. There was nothing more to find. The room had been emptied of its secrets, and the only secret left was the one in Eliza's hand, a single dark filament, no longer than a fingernail.
She folded it carefully into the corner of the handkerchief she kept in her jacket pocket, and pressed the fabric flat against the silk of her shirt, and felt the small cool weight of it settle there beside the weight of the glass bird, the two of them riding against her ribs, the bird and the thread, the confession and the proof.
They left the key under the mat, as Kowalski had asked, and went back down the stairs, the third step groaning under their weight, and out into the street, where the late afternoon had turned the color of weak tea and the flower stall on the corner was shuttering for the day.
Sari pulled her jacket tighter around herself, and looked at Eliza, and did not speak.