Now she, too, was growing angry. “Ahmad, don’t do this. Be sensible.”
He snorted at the word, and walked on.
Washington Street was crowded with men and women leaving work, running their errands, walking to and from the Elevated. He cleared a path through them all with his heat and his stride, a flaming arrow aimed at Arbeely’s building. The Golem hurried fearfully behind. They passed the Faddouls’ coffee-house, and she cast a desperate glance through the window and caught Maryam’s eye. At once the woman put down her coffee-pot and hurried to the door. “Chava, what’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice, “but he’s in a state and I’ve made it worse. He insists on talking to Arbeely, and I’m afraid—” She broke off, not knowing what, exactly, she was afraid of.
“I’ll come with you,” Maryam said.
Together they followed the Jinni to Arbeely’s building, where he took the stairs two and three at a time, the women in his wake.
“Why is he so warm?” Maryam whispered.
“I wish I knew,” the Golem murmured back.
Arbeely’s door was shut. “Arbeely,” the Jinni called, “it’s me. Let me in, I’ve had an idea.” The women came up the stairs behind him. His eyes narrowed when he saw Maryam, but he said nothing.
“Ahmad,” they heard, faintly, “it’s not the best—”
But he’d already opened the door and was through it.
Arbeely sat at the kitchen table in his dressing-gown and scarf, a letter in his hand. He looked up, startled, as the Jinni entered, followed by the two women. The Jinni placed his model upon the table, and without preamble launched into his story: the steel, the slag, his sudden revelation that buildings didn’t have to be square, they were only square because everyone had decided they must be, but what if they could change that, what if . . .
But Arbeely seemed hardly to be listening. His gaze slid from his partner to the Golem. I could’ve hidden it from him, he was thinking. Maybe even from Maryam. But not you. And she knew, then, that the letter in his hand was from his doctors, and that it began with the words We regret we must inform you. She felt the flush of fever upon the man’s skin, and the growing pain inside his bones. Saw exhaustion, and resignation, in his eyes.
The Jinni had stopped talking. He looked blankly from Arbeely to the Golem. “What is it?” he asked.
Behind her, Maryam had covered her mouth with a hand.
Silently Arbeely proffered the letter. The Jinni took it, read its first line—and the paper burst into flames.
Everyone jumped. Maryam rushed to Arbeely’s side. The Golem grabbed the letter and carried it to the sink, smothered the flames beneath the tap.
By the time she’d turned around, the Jinni had vanished.
12.
The lace-makers were the first of the Amherst’s tenants to leave.
It was November, the year stretching remorselessly toward its end. Arbeely was feverish and weak, often asleep. Doctors appeared on occasion, felt his forehead and took his pulse, and left again. Maryam came daily, and sat at his bedside whether he knew she was there or not. Others came, too, when he was lucid: shopkeepers, church members, neighbors. They spoke a few words, shed quiet tears, squeezed his hand.
One man was conspicuous in his absence.
For weeks the Jinni had been locked in the Amherst, hard at work. He’d ripped out the supply room’s neat racks of bars and ingots, and in their place there stood a mountain of iron ore, delivered by truck and poured in through the window. The front door was locked, the showroom curtains closed. The ’phone, which at first had rung without cease, now sat with its receiver dangling. His forge, his tools, his plans, his solitude: everything he needed, he told himself, was here, inside the Amherst.
One morning, he was in the process of tearing down the showroom’s walls when a knock sounded at the stairwell door. He ignored it—but the knock came again, more loudly, amid a buzz of female voices. “Mister Ahmad,” one called, “we’re from upstairs. Please, it’s important.”
At last he opened the door to find dozens of lace-makers gathered in the stairwell. They apologized for the interruption, but it was an hour past their starting time, and neither of the business’s owners had arrived to unlock the doors. Mr. Arbeely, they said, had the only spare key.
Arbeely’s desk still sat in its usual place, next to the remnants of the showroom. The Jinni opened its drawer, and was faced with his partner’s life rendered in ephemera: pencils and drawing-compasses, postage stamps, cough drops, unopened packs of shirt-collars. Blindly he rooted through it all, until he’d found the key.
The lace-makers milled together on the second-floor landing as he unlocked the door and pushed it open on its track. The factory was dark, the giant looms silent. The owners’ offices were at the far end, where an odor of stale smoke lingered in the air. The office safe stood open, its shelves empty. Nearby was a charred metal wastebasket, a layer of ash at its bottom.
“But it’s Saturday,” one girl said, disbelieving. “We’re supposed to be paid today.”
The women all began to talk at once. One girl, taking matters into her own hands, went out to the floor and broke open the boxes of lace curtains and pillow-cases. She rolled these into bundles, and began parceling them out to the crowd. Another girl walked the looms, cutting the cones of fine cotton thread off their spindles. The key to the third floor was found, and before long the entire operation had been stripped of everything the women could carry: spools of lace the size of cheese wheels, boxes of needles and bobbins, magnifying glasses, embroidery scissors, reams of the company stationery. The biscuit-bakers and cigar-makers gathered on their landings to watch as the women marched out the door, their arms laden with goods, scraps of lace fluttering over their shoulders. A little while later the creditors arrived and hauled
