She then became aware of another presence in the virtual room. She gazed about herself cautiously, not moving. The virtual presence oozed through the wall, moved through her presence like a crawling wind, exited through the far wall. A fractured glaze creeping through the fabric of computation.
Maya yanked her head from the spex and earphones. She stripped the gloves away from her swollen fingertips. She shut the machine down. Then she examined the sweat-smeared gear, regretting the vilely incriminating cloud of human DNA she had just deposited on Czech police equipment. She scrubbed at the spex a bit with her sleeve, just as if that token gesture would help anything. DNA was microscopic. Evidence was everywhere. Evidence was totipresent, the truth seething below awareness, just like germs.
But crime could not become a crime unless somebody, somehow, cared enough to notice.
She decided not to steal the handy touchscreen.
She was tired now, so she got onto a train and slept for two hours as it ran back and forth below the city. Then she walked into a netsite at the Malostranska tubestation and asked the net to find her Josef Novak. The net offered his address in a split second. Maya took the tube back to Karlovo Namesti and walked, footsore and limping, to Josef Novak’s home. The place did not look promising. She examined her civil-support map, cross-checked it twice, and then pushed on the doorbell. No response. She pushed harder and the defunct doorbell cracked inside its plastic case.
She pounded on the iron-bound wooden door with the side of her fist. There were muffled noises from the interior, but nobody bothered to answer. She banged again, harder.
An elderly Czech woman opened the door, which was secured on a short brass chain. She wore a head-scarf and spex. “[What do you want?]”
“I want Josef Novak. I need to speak to him.”
“[I don’t speak English. Josef isn’t taking any visitors. Especially not tourists. Go away.]” The door slammed shut.
Maya went out and had some chutovky with a side of knedliky. These little setbacks were very useful. If she remembered to eat every time she was locked out, shut out, or thrown out, it would keep her fit and healthy. After a final carton of tasty government-issue blancmange she returned to Novak’s place and knocked again.
The same woman answered, this time in a thick winter night-robe. “[You again! The girl who smells like Stuttgart. Don’t bother us, it’s very rude and it’s useless!]” Slam.
Another good reminder. Maya walked down the block and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil wasn’t there. Emil’s absence might have been worrisome, but she deduced from the state of his kitchen that he’d had to leave the place to eat. She scrubbed and mopped for a long time, and inoculated the studio with certain handy packets she’d acquired in Stuttgart. The studio began to reek of fresh bananas. This solid victory over the unseen world of the microbial gave Maya a great sense of accomplishment. She walked back to Novak’s in the cold and darkness, and knocked again.
A bent white-haired man opened the door. He had a black jacket with one sleeve. The old man had only one arm. “[What do you want?]”
“Do you speak English, Mr. Novak?”
“If I must.”
“I’m your new pupil. My name is Maya.”
“I don’t take pupils,” Novak said politely, “and I’m leaving for Roma tomorrow.”
“Then I’m also leaving for Roma tomorrow.”
Novak stared at her through the wedge of light in his chained door.
“Glass Labyrinth,” Maya said. “The Sculpture Gardens. The Water Anima. Vanished Statues.”
Novak sighed. “Those titles sound so very bad in English.… Well, I suppose you had better come in.”
The walls on the ground floor of Novak’s home were a wooden honeycomb: a phantasmagoria of hexagonal storage racks. Jointed wooden puppets. Glassware. Etching tools. Feathers. Wicker. Postage stamps. Stone eggs. Children’s marbles. Fountain pens and paper clips. Eyeglasses. Relief masks. Compasses and hourglasses. Medals. Belt buckles. Pennywhistles and windup toys. Some of the cubbyholes were stuffed to bursting. Others spare, a very few entirely empty. Like a wooden hive infested by some sentient race of time-traveling bees.
There were study tables, but no place to sit. The bare floor was waxed and glossy.
A sleepy female voice called down from the stairs. “[What is it?]”
“[A guest has come,]” Novak said. He reached into his baggy trouser pocket and pulled out an enameled lighter. “[Is it that stupid American girl with short hair?]”
“[Exactly, the very same.]” Novak thumb-clicked a muddy flame and methodically lit a candelabrum. Six candle flames waxed. The overhead lights blinked out. The room was immersed in deep yellow. “[Darling, send down a beanbag, won’t you?]”
“[It’s late. Tell her to go away.]”
“[She’s very pretty,]” said Novak. “[There are sometimes uses for someone very pretty.]”
There was silence. Then a pair of black beanbags came slithering down the candlelit stairs like a pair of undulant blood puddings.
Novak sat in his bag and gestured one-armed at Maya. His right arm was gone at the shoulder. He seemed very much at ease with his loss, as if a single arm were perfectly adequate and other people were merely being excessive.
Maya heaved her backpack onto the wooden floor. She sat in her beanbag. “I want to learn photography.”
“Photography.” Novak nodded. “It’s wonderful! So very real, so much like life. If you are a Cyclops. Nailed in one spot. For one five-thousandth of a second.”
“I know you can teach me.”
“I have taught photography,” Novak admitted like a man under torture. “I have taught human beings to see like a camera. What a fine accomplishment! Look at this poor little house of mine. I’ve been a photographer for ninety years, ninety! What do we have for all that hard work, the old woman and I? Nothing. All the terrible market crashes! Devaluations! Confiscatory taxes! Abolitions and eliminations! Political troubles. Plagues! Bank crashes! Nothing solid, nothing that lasts.”
Novak glared at her with resigned suspicion, gone all peasant shrewdness suddenly, protuberant ears, bristling eyebrows, a swollen old-man’s nose like a potato. “We have no property, we have no assets. We are very old people, but we have nothing for you, girl. You should go, and save everyone trouble.”
“But you’re famous.”
“I outlived my fame, I am forgotten. I only go on because I cannot help myself.”
Maya gazed around the sitting room. A unique melange of eclectic clutter and utter cleanliness. A thousand little objects on the razor’s edge of art and junk. A library of gimmickry rocket-blasted from the grip of time. Yet there was not a speck of dust in the place. Those who worship the Muses end up running a museum.
The burning candles gnawed their white cores of string inside their waxy sheaths. The white-haired Novak seemed perfectly at ease with an extended silence.
Maya pointed to the top of the honeycomb of wooden shelving. “That crystal vase,” she said, “that decanter up there.”
“Old Bohemian glass,” said Novak.
“It’s very beautiful.”
Novak whistled softly. A trapdoor opened in the wall beside the kitchen and a human arm flopped out.
The arm landed on the wooden floor with a meaty slap of five outstretched fingers. Its naked shoulder had a feathery clump like the curled marine feet of a barnacle.
The arm flexed and leapt, flexed and leapt, pogoing deftly across the gleaming candlelit floorboards. It twisted and ducked, and then tunneled with unearthly speed into a scarcely visible slit in the empty shoulder of Novak’s jacket.