Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

She had made dozens of preliminary sketches and a two-by-three cartoon of the mural, which she now set about transferring, by means of a simple grid, to the largest of the room's walls. It was tricky work laying out the guidelines on the walls with the yardstick, first the horizontals, moving the stepladder across from left to right three feet at a hop, then the verticals, easy enough at the bottom but flirting more and more dangerously with wobbliness as she drew nearer to the top and was forced to go up on tiptoe. It required far more patience than she possessed, and several times she came close to abandoning the grid and just trying to sketch the thing out freehand on the wall. But she reminded herself that patience was a cardinal virtue in a mother-God knew her own mother had had little enough-and kept to her careful plan.

By ten o'clock, she had finished laying out the guidelines. Her shoulders ached, and her neck, and her knees, and she felt that before she started in on transferring the gridded cartoon to the wall she would go for a walk around the block, for a sandwich or a cigarette. She might run into Joe; he ought to be through with his show by now and on his way up to meet her. So she pulled on her coat and took the elevator back down to the lobby. She walked up to the corner of Seventy-ninth Street, where there was a late-night grocery.

Later, Rosa would imagine that, like a cat or a spirit camera trained on a dying person, she had seen her lost happiness at the instant of its passing. As she was paying for her Philip Morrises, she happened to glance down at the Sunday papers stacked in front of the counter, bulldog editions hot off the press. In the upper-right-hand corner of the Herald there was an extra, boxed in red. She read it five times, with all her heart and attention, but the tiny amount of information it conveyed never increased or-then or afterward-made any better sense. The ten lines of tentative, bland prose said only that a boat filled with refugees, many from Central Europe, most if not all of them believed to be Jewish children, was missing in the Atlantic off the Azores and believed lost. There was no mention, as there would not be for several more hours, of a U-boat, a forced evacuation, a sudden storm tearing in out of the northeast. Rosa stood there for a moment, her lungs filled with smoke, unable to exhale. Then she looked up at the storekeeper, who was watching her with interest. Evidently something quite engrossing was going on in her face. What should she do? Was he still at the Trevi? Was he on his way up to the Josephine, as they had planned? Had he heard the news?

She drifted out to the curb and fretted for a moment longer. Then she decided she had better just go back to the apartment and wait for him. She was sure that he would eventually come looking for her there, whether in ignorance or grief. Just as she was coming to this decision, however, a taxicab pulled up and let out an elderly couple in evening clothes. Rosa brushed past them and climbed into the back of the cab.

"The Trevi," she said.

She sat in a dark corner of the taxi. The light came and went, and in the mirror of her compact, her reflection was intermittently brave. She closed her eyes and tried to recite a snatch of Buddhist prayer her father had taught her, claiming it had a calming effect. It had little apparent impact on her father, and she wasn't even sure she had the words right. Om mani padmi om. Somehow it did make her feel calmer. She said it all the way from Seventy-ninth Street to the curb outside the Trevi. By the time she stepped out of the cab, she had pulled herself fairly together. She came into the severe marble reception hall, with its icy chandeliers, and went up to the desk to inquire. From the lobby came the somehow baleful laughter of the famous fountain.

"The magician was a friend of yours?" said the clerk with an unaccountably hostile air. "He cut out hours ago."

"Oh." It hit her like a blow. He was supposed to come up to the apartment after the performance. The fact that he had not done so meant that something terrible had happened to him. And in its wake, in possession of this knowledge, he had not wanted to see her. "Are they-is anyone-"

"There's the bar mitzvah boy now," the clerk said, pointing to a skinny little kid in a three-piece pink suit lolling on one of the watered silk couches in the lobby. "Why don't you ask him?"

Rosa went over, and the boy introduced himself as Stanley Konigsberg. Rosa told him she was looking for Joe, that she had some very bad news to give him. Oh, she had some wonderful news, too, but how would she ever be able to tell him? He would think she was trying to make some horrible equivalency, when it was only one of the monstrous coincidences of life.

"I think he already knows," Stanley Konigsberg said. He was a squat boy, small for his age, with crooked spectacles and coarse brown hair. The suit was incredible, trousers trimmed with white braid, pockets and buttonholes with white frogs, precisely the color of humiliation itself. "Is it about that boat that sank?"

"Yes," Rosa said. "His little brother was on it. A boy about your age."

"Jeez." He fidgeted with the end of his brown necktie, unable to make eye contact with Rosa. "That explains it, I guess."

That explains what, Rosa wanted to ask him, but she stuck to the more pressing question. "Do you know where he went?" she said.

"No, ma'am, I'm sorry. He just-"

"How long ago did he leave?"

"Oh, two hours at least. Maybe even more."

"Wait here," Rosa said. "Will you wait here, please?"

"I guess I kind of have to." He pointed to the doors of the Trevi's ballroom. "My parents aren't finished arguing."

Rosa went to a pay telephone and called Sammy and Joe's apartment, but there was no answer, and that was when she remembered that Sammy had gone out of town for the weekend with Tracy Bacon. To the Jersey shore, of all places. She was going to have to try to track him down. Next she had the operator call the superintendent of the Josephine, Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey grumbled and warned her not to make a habit of it, but when she told him it was urgent, he went up and checked the apartment for her. No, he said when he returned to the phone, there was nobody there, and no note. Rosa hung up and went back to Stanley Konigsberg.

"Tell me what happened," she said.

"Well, I mean, I guess he was upset, but nobody knew. I mean, everybody else was pretty upset when they heard. My uncle Mort works for the J.T.A. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It's a wire service."

"Yes."

"So he came in and told us the news, he heard it first."

"Did you see Joe leave, Stanley?" said Rosa.

"Well, yeah, I mean, yes, everybody did."

"And he seemed to be upset?"

Stanley nodded. "It was really quite strange," he said.

"What happened?" said Rosa. "What was strange?"

"It was all my fault," Stanley began. "I guess I was kind of nudzhing him, and he kept saying no, no, no, so then I went to my father and he said he'd give your friend another fifty dollars, and he still said no, so then I went to my mother." He winced. "After that, I guess he didn't really have any choice."

"Any choice about what?" Rosa said. She put her hand on Stanley's shoulder. "What did you want him to do?"

"I wanted him to do an escape," said Stanley, twitching as she touched him. "He said he knew how. Maybe he was just joking, I don't know. But he told my mother okay, he would. He said I was a nice kid and he would throw it in for no charge. But there was only about a half hour before he was supposed to go on, you know, so he had to rush it. He went down to the basement and got a big wooden packing crate that something, I think it was a filing cabinet, came in. And also a laundry bag. And a hammer and some nails. Then he went and talked for a while to the house detective, and he said no. My father had to go and give him fifty dollars, too. Then it was time for him, your friend, Joe, to go on. He did his show. He was really good. He did some card tricks, and some coin tricks, and he did some tricks with apparatuses. A little of everything, which is hard, which I know, see, because I'm a magician too, kind of. Most of them, when you see them… they have a specialty. Like I just do mostly stuff with cards. Then after maybe a half hour he, your friend, got us all to stand up, and we had to leave the ballroom, and he brought us down here. Over to that." He pointed to the fountain out in the lobby, an exact replica of the famous one in Rome, all tritons and seashells and blue-lit cataracts. "Everyone. I think it was on the way down that Uncle Lou must have told him about the ship, you know, sinking and all, 'cause when we got down here he looked, uh, I don't know. Like his mouth was kind of hanging crooked. And he kept putting his hand on my shoulder, like he was leaning on me. Then some waiters brought in the bag and the box. The hotel detective came over and put him in handcuffs. He got in the bag, and I got to tie it myself. We put him in the box, and I got to nail it shut. We dropped him into the fountain. He told us if he didn't come out in three minutes to come in after him."