A slow nod.
“Because of me?”
“Because of you.”
The Jinni said, “Sayeed, will you tell me something? How does she do . . . what she does? How does she make it happen?”
Sayeed rubbed his chin, considering. “She listens to people,” he said. “She remembers what they tell her. She prays, often. She puts her faith in Christ, and His salvation.”
The Jinni sighed. “Yes, I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
“It’s not magic, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s no trick to it. It’s her own virtue. Nothing more.”
“Is it ever difficult for you,” the Jinni said, “to be married to someone like that?”
He’d expected the man to be offended, to scoff at him. Instead Sayeed looked thoughtful. “Sometimes,” he said. “She challenges me, constantly, to be better than I am.”
“And are there times when you resent the challenge?” the Jinni asked. “When you wish that, just this once, she’d let you be a little bit worse than you are?”
“Of course.” Sayeed glanced at him, a hint of amusement in his eyes. “But we’re not the same, you and I.”
“I never said we were.”
The last of the daylight was disappearing; the wood snapped in the flames. It occurred to the Jinni that this might’ve been the Bedouin life that he’d pretended to have lived: a fire at sunset, a conversation.
“What you’ve built down there,” Sayeed said. “It’s astonishing.”
The Jinni smiled wryly. “But?”
“But what will you tell people when they see it?”
“I don’t know. I never meant for it to be seen.”
At that, Sayeed looked genuinely puzzled. “Why not?”
The Jinni shrugged, uncomfortable. “Arbeely was dead,” he said. “And Chava was gone. Who else was there to show it to?”
The man had no reply to that.
For long minutes they sat in silence, their conversation run dry. Sayeed added more wood to the fire. The Jinni debated with himself, then said, “Chava sent me a message, today.”
“I’d wondered what became of her,” Sayeed said.
“We haven’t spoken in years. I didn’t know if she was still in the city. And then today, the very day when . . .” He paused, remembering that the man didn’t know about the jinniyeh, or what had caused the catastrophe downstairs. “The message said, I’m not alone. Must ask for your help.”
Sayeed contemplated this. “What do you think it means?”
He frowned, staring at his hands in the fire. “That she needs me to do something she can’t bring herself to do.”
“And will you?”
“Yes, if I decide that I must. But—is this what I am to her? An executioner, to be summoned when needed? Does she think me so callous?”
“You just said it yourself. ‘If I decide that I must.’ Would you do this without question, simply because she wished it?”
“No, of course not!”
“Then perhaps that’s why.”
The Jinni fell silent, considering this—and then cringed as a shout in Yiddish rose up from the sidewalk:
“Ahmad al-Hadid! If you’re still alive, then get down here and explain yourself this instant!”
Sayeed looked up. “What was that?”
The Jinni sighed. “Oh, just another woman who’s never liked me. Help me up, would you?”
* * *
The sidewalk at Riverside Park was still crowded with onlookers.
Out on the river, a pair of fishing-boats searched the shoreline for bodies. The policemen who’d been summoned to investigate the incident read over their witness reports, shaking their heads. A man in a gray suit. A man covered in mud. An enormous animal. A fraternity prank, or I’ll eat my hat.
Out in the river, Yossele sank through the currents and touched bottom.
He was at the edge of the shipping channel, and here the riverbed was littered with fallen freight: oil tanks, timber spars, an entire rusted boxcar. He tried to search through it all for Miss Levy, but after a few blind and stumbling minutes, his anger began to cool. Where was his master? Was she still in the Asylum? Yes, there—sitting on the floor in the lavatory, the stink of the water still in her hair and clothes. Tears were leaking from her eyes. She was crying, and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the basement, waiting to hold her.
Despondent, he sat down upon a rotten plank. Kreindel was his entire purpose. She’d called upon him to protect her—and then, when he’d obeyed, she’d rejected him. Once, this would’ve merely saddened him, as it saddened Kreindel. Now, he had the capacity to wonder how they would possibly go on from here. He was her bound golem; he must protect her, regardless of her wishes—and yet the memory of her horror was a crushing weight. What was he supposed to do?
A current pushed against him, from something moving nearby. He peered out, wiping muck and oil from his eyes. A figure was coming toward him through the water, walking along the river-bottom, stepping carefully around the debris. It was Miss Levy.
He wanted to still be angry at her—for trying to destroy him, for making him into what he’d become. But his anger seemed out of reach now, somewhere beyond his sadness. She stopped a few meters away from him, watching him carefully. The locket floated before her, on its chain. He looked at it, then up at her.
She held out a hand to him.
The policemen left Riverside Park and their fruitless interviews, and arrived at the Asylum.
They were shown to the basement, and the origin of the incident: the broken wall, the demolished storage room, its hidden alcove. They went up to the office, where Rachel Winkelman sat sobbing in a chair, and asked the girl to describe what she’d seen. She told them, and they sighed and disregarded it.
A vagrant, most likely, they told the headmistress. Seen it before. They hole up somewhere warm, start mucking about with the boilers. Probably a boy-friend of that teacher you mentioned—Levy, was it?
The image of Charlotte Levy nesting with a vagrant lover in the storage room was not one that came easily to the headmistress’s mind—but then, what other explanation was there? She’d heard Rachel’s account, and Harriet’s, too, neither of which made a jot of
