8.

The picture gallery was just next door, and windowless. A low-hanging lightbulb simulated wintry sunshine; each of the canvases were bathed in white. There was one on each wall, and they were paired. The two blank, unframed canvases faced each other, and so did two scratchily pigmented paintings, both portraits. It looked as if the painter had tried to scrape away every other line he laid down. But this discordance was gentle; the colours pledged to settle at the touch of a hand. Xavier approached the head-and-shoulders portrait first; quite confrontationally, I thought. I could see what was making him nervous. The subject of the portrait looked as if he was somewhere in his early twenties, his clean-shaven cheeks heavy with puppy fat. He appeared to be leaning back and to the side, deliberately avoiding either the centre of the frame or the light in front of it. He also appeared to be looking at Xavier. There was merriment and malice in those unblinking sloe-black eyes. I tucked my hand into the back pocket of Xavier’s jeans, and we stood almost nose to nose with the portrait, trying to stare it down together. The man in the painting was dark haired, ruddy of skin, and bushy of eyebrow. Whichever way I tilted my head, Xavier was the only one of us I could catch him looking at. A lock of hair fell over his left eye, just like a lock of mine fell over my right eye. I’d sometimes tuck or blow the lock out of the way, but this guy would probably just have stared at you through it. The white shirt he wore was mostly unbuttoned, revealing that he either waxed his chest or hadn’t bothered to paint the hair in. I bet that was a constant—starting things you couldn’t finish, I thought. Then wondered about my confident use of the past tense, and my verdict that this was a self-portrait. One more thing: I’d seen him somewhere. One, two, three, the facts I knew.

“Was he giving you the eye like this when you were here yesterday?”

Xavier nodded. “The expression was a bit different, though. Probably just my mood.”

“Different how?”

Xavier didn’t answer.

I turned to face the portrait that was hanging on the opposite wall. It was of a father and son. Their resemblance was unmistakable, and the setting was presumably the father’s study; there were lots of books and box files, and a theremin dimly visible behind the desk. The father was seated with an arm thrown proudly around his son, who was standing and looking at him with a mixture of affection and reserve. The son was the subject of the self-portrait behind me, and in this portrait with his father he was younger still. About ten. They’d been much older when I saw them in the flesh, but I had seen them both. Five years ago.

Not together like this, smiling at each other—

Their faces loomed before me, stretched, contracted. In a whirl of black hair and blue tulle, Allegra was there, both hands beneath my elbow, propping me up and twisting me away from the canvas. If she hadn’t, I’d have staggered into it head-first.

Xavier’s back was to me, and he looked round. “Who are they?” he asked. His face showed . . . I’m not sure. Not worry, exactly. Sadness. Seriousness.

“That’s Přemysl Stojaspal,” Allegra said, pointing at the self-portrait and at the ten-year-old portrayed standing beside his father. “And that’s his father, Karel. Both painted by Přem. You seem to recognize them, Otto?”

“I’ll tell you, but tell me something first—”

“No, Otto.” Allegra was shaking her head. “I’m afraid not, mate. You don’t get on a train, put us behind schedule with a search for a jumper there’s no trace of, then get to set the pace of the questioning.”

“So you didn’t find anything. That was what I wanted to know.”

Just as it had been with the man in the fire. The one I’d rushed in to rescue. At least that was how it had seemed at the time: it felt like I had to get him out of there, I had to because nobody else could. I’d seen him in the window—a motionless figure. Přemysl. He had seen me, had given me a look of terror. I thought, Why doesn’t he run? Maybe fright had glued him to the ground, inflating his eyes and the “o” of his mouth, hollowing his muscles and pouring itself through them. He stared down, I stared up, a cupboard fell (on him? behind him?), and I ran in through the main door of the house—which was where I’d seen Karel, his father, on the stairs. The wheezing, grey-faced man, thrusting his cane further up along the banisters to try to speed his progress, the flies around him—I will always remember them as having flown out of his open jaws, even though I know that can’t have happened. The old man’s breath in my face as he pulled at my jacket and said: “My son. Please . . .” I’m not sure what he said next. I talked about this with the psychiatrist I got referred to afterwards; it’s fairly similar to Xavier wavering between readings of Ava’s sign. I think the man said, Please help my son, but I also heard Please stop my son. The psychiatrist said I might have conflated meanings into one word. Meanings that disorganised my hearing. I’d stopped the discussion there, because both of the meanings were moot; the flat was empty, and running in there didn’t help or stop anyone.

“Otto? It seems as if you’ve seen Karel and Přem before?”

“You already said that,” I muttered.

“I’m giving you another chance to answer while it’s just us. Laura’s on her way over, and there are things it’s better not to discuss in front of her. So if you know anything, Otto, it’s important to say so now. Please.”

Watching her as she spoke, I saw what I’d missed in our first encounter, when she’d mostly been listening. A current flickered across that billion-facet face; the kind generated by habitual flow between two opposing thoughts (or future events?). One troubled her, and the other got her all overjoyed. She couldn’t choose which would prevail, so she made preparations that removed her from the present and placed her one step ahead of us. But only one. She exhibited the top two characteristics I look for in those who book hypnotism sessions with me: marked inattention towards immediate surroundings and heightened sensory arousal. It’s even better (from a lazy hypnotist’s perspective) when one is linked to or caused by the other. In short, Allegra Yu was highly suggestible.

“They’re friends of Ava’s, aren’t they?” I said. “The composer and . . .”

“They were friends of mine too. Přem’s a dabbler, but mostly he ran the publishing house his father set up. Until he disappeared.”

“When was that?” Xavier asked.

“Well, the last time anybody we know of spoke to him in person was about five years ago. The summer of 2014. There’ve been e-mails and phone conversations since, mostly to do with the publishing house, but the house has had to drop him because they’re almost sure the person e-mailing and taking calls isn’t actually him, and they can’t really work with a mystery publisher, no matter how efficient. When did you see him, Otto?”

(The summer of 2014. The fire was in July.)

“Who? Přem? I’ve never seen him,” I said.

The firefighters had found no one in the flat, and the man who’d called them, the same man who’d asked me to help or stop his son, told them he was there to collect post; he said he’d known his son wasn’t at home. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said to me, but he thought it must have been something like That’s my son’s flat. I couldn’t let myself believe that that old man was lying, but it felt even less possible that he was telling the truth. And actually I didn’t need to know what kind of event I had experienced that day, as long as it was never revived or repeated.

“If only you knew how much you sound like Ava right now.” Allegra reached up, took off my sunglasses, and continued unfazed by my devil-red eyes: “That’s why Karel gave her these paintings; she kept asking what Přem looked like. She wouldn’t speak to Přem, and she’d look at a chair he was sitting in or an area he was standing in, then say there wasn’t anyone there. It got a bit creepy. I think Přem was freaked out by it as well, so the atmosphere was a bit prickly until she finally let the joke go.”

Ava had told me about playing her theremin to a vacant room. Now it sounded like she’d never stopped considering the room vacant; she’d only stopped mentioning that aspect to those who were uncomfortable with it.

Allegra paused when Xavier asked about photos of Přem. “If you give each other significant looks after I say this I’m kicking you both off the train right now, but . . . when Přem went missing, we tried to dig up photos of him, and there aren’t any.”

“Not a single photo, eh,” I said.

“Of someone who walked this earth for over thirty years,” Xavier said.

It was only the viewpoint that had changed; I’d moved my whole body, not just my head. Xavier had switched positions too. That was why the self-portrait now appeared to be looking at Allegra. Those were the reasons, the very good reasons, for the apparent alteration; Přemysl was not going to look at me next, no, no, nothing of the sort.

I copied his focus on Allegra, who was telling us: “Look, now that we don’t spend time together anymore I feel like there’s something fishy about the lack of photos as well. And other things come to mind, all sorts of niggling things I suddenly want to bother him about and have him explain away. For example, look at those paintings . . . Přem made them too. He got rid of all the others, so these are the only ones left.”

She gestured towards the two blank canvases, a narrow streak of white above each of the connecting doors.

“They’re not paintings,” Xavier said, after a moment. “Unless? We’re looking at white paint on white canvas or some similar abstraction?”

“Abstraction?” Allegra said tiredly. “No. Just tell me what’s in the paintings.”

I looked up and to the left, swivelled, then looked up and to the right. I saw white unbroken by even the faintest hint of an outline. Perhaps there was something notable about the smoothness and density of texture, but that wasn’t something you could say was “in” the paintings.

“Why don’t you just tell us?”

“No, you have to say it. Look at the one to the left and talk. Just say whatever comes into your head.”

I surrendered first: “OK, but all I can see is an axe about the length of my arm with a ribbon tied into a bow around the handle. What . . . ?”

Allegra grabbed a fistful of her own hair and nodded.

Xavier stared up at the canvas too, closed his eyes tightly, opened them again and said: “Sorry, but I can’t see that the axe is sketched in grayscale, but the ribbon’s ruby red—”

“Wah,” I said. Because even after hearing his description and my own, all I saw was a white canvas . . . and, it seemed, an image that had utterly bypassed my eyes and flowed straight into words.

“And to the right?” Allegra said. “You can’t pause. Keep looking and keep saying what you’re thinking.”

“But, Allegra, what devilry is this?” Xavier said, eyes probing the canvas from corner to corner. “Does everybody you ask to look into this white box tell you it’s an utter blank in the centre of which is a gamine brown woman with an ecstatic smile and her hands in the air like she’s conducting a chorus of angels and they sound so good she’s dropped her baton?”

I faced the second canvas dead on. White light bounced off white material, and this is what I told Xavier and Allegra: “This is a white canvas. There isn’t a single gap in the white, it’s forceful in its very flatness, so how can Ava be layered on top with this downright exuberant finger-painted effect, playing an invisible theremin . . .”

Xavier made a confounded, delighted clucking sound in the back of his throat. He took a photo of each of the blank canvases, and Allegra and I leaned over his phone as he zoomed in and zoomed out again. The white got grittier when he zoomed in, but that was all.

“Yeah,” Allegra said. “I wish I’d asked Přem how he made these paint-less paintings. I think I held back because I thought I wouldn’t understand visual artist chat. Now I know I should’ve insisted he give me a term or something I could research. Because being left behind with works like this makes me wonder who he really was. Mind you, I didn’t wonder when I was with him. I felt like I just knew. This is a bloke I went to galleries and fashion shows with, and there’d be a stir when he showed up, like, Oh, it’s Přem . . . finally. He didn’t really do nights out, and he wasn’t on social media, but maybe he set out to perform some of its functions? On a day out we’d stop in at ten or eleven places before he went home. It was kind of like a culture crawl . . . he’d describe everyone he introduced me to as a beautiful mind. In a way he was too much of a super connector and hyperactive man about town to get caught on camera, d’you know what I mean? I’m getting sad that I keep saying ‘was.’ At least the paintings are a good likeness.”

She had some photos of the elder Stojaspal in good health. Karel at the beach, laughing with his feet buried in the surf. Karel in a sound studio with headphones on and pen in hand, taking notes on what he heard. Karel and Ava with forks crossed, fighting for the last meatball in a pasta bowl. She held her phone up against Karel’s side of the father-son portrait and put the painter’s representational accuracy beyond doubt.

There was a commotion at the doorway that connected the gallery carriage to the postal-sorting carriage; Allegra’s hand tightened on my arm while Xavier went to see what was happening. He came back with Laura, two chairs, and many exclamations.

“Laura De Souza,” he said, to me, to Laura, to the air. “What . . . why . . . how are the two of us travelling together again?”

Laura set down her own two chairs and gestured to us to sit. She had a folder tucked under her arm. “That’s what I’m wondering. What could he possibly be doing here, the little train schoolboy all grown up? Ordinarily I’d be happy to see you, but we really can’t have disruptions right now, and disruption does seem to travel with you, I’m sorry to say.”

“We doubt the reunion is a coincidence,” Allegra said, as she handed out round lollipops. We all took one.

Xavier and Laura spoke in French for a while. I caught “ton père” and “Limoges,” and Laura beamed momentarily before returning to English:

“Listen, gentlemen, before we start the train up again, we need to show you something. And if there’s anything you need to tell us afterwards, please come clean.”

Laura looked at Allegra, to see if she had anything to add. Allegra only shrugged, so Laura took a photocopied document out of her folder and handed it to Xavier, who drew his chair closer to mine so that I could read along with him. It was the Last Will and Testament of Karel Stojaspal as filed on August 31, 2014. The name of the executor was unfamiliar, but Ava Kapoor was the sole beneficiary—for her kindness to my son, he’d written. And her inheritance of his property, investment portfolio, status as musical copyright beneficiary, everything, was dependent on her undergoing a psychiatric evaluation that confirmed her as being of wholly sound mind on her thirtieth birthday. Should that condition not be met, half of the proceeds of Karel Stojaspal’s estate were earmarked for such medical treatments as Ava Kapoor might require for the rest of her life, and the other half would go to the institutions that had moulded him: the Prague Conservatory and the Royal Academy of Music.

For her kindness to my son . . . the son not mentioned by name. Whenever it felt like I was about to make an outburst, I silenced myself with my lollipop.

Laura leaned forward, hands on her knees, gaze like a drill, going from Xavier to me, then back to Xavier. “Guys, help us out here. Just under five years ago, after the reading of this will, Ms. Yu over there managed to convince Ava Kapoor that living together on this train would be the best way of making sure she could meet the sanity requirement.”

“Such a sinister condition to make,” Allegra said slowly. “Almost like a threat. Ava doesn’t have any kind of psychiatric record. There’s just some sort of even keel she’s on. When she’s moody, it’s moderately moody. She did take it really hard when her dad died—they were so close. But the grief didn’t drag her downstream. I think she was ready to go, but whatever it is that grounds her wouldn’t budge. So after a while she went, Ugh, I’ll just have to stay here with you lot, then. Karel was around for all of that, but maybe he was thinking the worst of the grief would hit later, or that it would all just build up? I can’t work out why else he’d do this. Cut Přem out altogether and arrange the rest the way he did. But that’s how it happened, so the next steps were up to us. We put our heads together and drew up a list of factors that heighten vulnerability. So we’d know what to avoid until Ava’s thirtieth. I promised her four years and eight months in which she wouldn’t be hungry or lonely or paralysed by finances, wouldn’t have too much or too little to see, learn, and do. I promised she’d get to work on her train and get to share it, let strangers enjoy it without having to have anxiety-ridden conversations with them . . . because somewhere along the line we realised that communication was the thing we really had to address. We had to limit it. Talking to strangers can be riskier than it is rewarding; even people who know each other well talk at cross purposes and derange each other’s perceptions.”

“Sanity and consistency of perception are the same thing?” Xavier asked.

He’d struck a point on which they were unanimous: Laura said, “Of course it is,” and Allegra said, “Yes!”

“. . . And with all those precautions in place, at the end of those four years and eight months . . . payday,” I said.

Allegra gave me a very slight wink. “It should’ve been simple. And it might still be. Wednesday’s the big day. We’ll all have to have some champagne together before we drop you off in Boughton.”

Laura began to speak but trailed off as a sound that had been in the distance for a while now made itself distinct from the hubbub of maintenance team conversation outside. A pitch perfect rendition of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby.” It wasn’t louder than the other voices calling out to each other, but it was the kind of sub-sound you wanted to shake out of your head. The whistler moved along the side of the train, and the song isolated itself within the ear, quivering just above the white noise you hear when you try to listen to your own pulse.

Then, without a break in the whistling, Bang, bang, bang, the carriage wall jumped.

Bang—Přem’s self-portrait skipped up the wall and clattered back down. Don’t worry, baby . . .

The four of us scattered, swearing our heads off. Xavier followed Laura back into the postal-sorting carriage while I followed Allegra into a dormitory carriage that was mostly navy blue linen and bunk beds. Allegra pressed walkie-talkie controls in what seemed like an arbitrary sequence, and we all but squashed our noses against the carriage windows as we sought out the best view of the ground directly in front of the gallery carriage. There was a fire extinguisher rolling around beside the track, and two members of the maintenance team sprinted our way and retrieved it. Allegra’s walkie-talkie connected her to several crackly voices; she reeled off names and questions, but the replies were more or less the same: it had been so quick nobody had seen anything. One of the walkie-talkie voices, belonging to someone named Eric, was able to confirm that the fire extinguisher was empty, but that was all the information he had. Everybody was of the opinion that we should get moving again as soon as possible. Allegra assured them we’d be off in half an hour, tops.

When we returned to the gallery car, the wall was still again. Xavier and Laura were already seated and wearing matching expressions. They’d settled on belligerent relaxation.

“What was that . . . ?! Any ideas?”

Xavier spread his hands, and Laura shook her head. Allegra sat down too, punching in one more walkie-talkie code that linked her to Ava.

“Everything OK, beb? Over.”

Ava answered with her mouth too close to the microphone; the syllables hissed themselves into gravel, and we didn’t catch what she said. But we did hear a snatch of theremin music a moment later; we might’ve found her song choice witty and reassuring if we hadn’t just heard it whistled a few seconds ago.

Allegra said: “Ava, I’m coming over. Over!”

There was more hissing, then a laugh came through. “Allegra, I’m just practising . . . Did it sound that bad? Let me have some time to tinker with it. Over.”

Laura grabbed the walkie-talkie. “It . . . wasn’t bad, Ms. Kapoor. You don’t worry either; practice to your heart’s content. Over and out.”

Allegra stood up, sat down, then stood up again and circled our chairs, chewing her nails. Laura closed the channel, stuck the device in the pocket of her jeans, and said to Xavier and me: “Wednesday is indeed the big day. And the doctor’s boarding the train tomorrow to make the assessment that has to be submitted to the executor. We need a calm and quiet atmosphere. No more pulling the emergency cord for no discoverable reason.”

To the carriage wall she said: “And no more whistling and fire extinguishers!”

She put a hand over her own heart for a second before continuing. “Ms. Kapoor has spoken with Dr. Zachariah weekly ever since she took up residence here, and the doctor jokes—at least I hope it is a joke—that Ms. Kapoor maintains sanity to an abnormal degree. But we can’t rest on our laurels yet. The problem is that four years, seven months, and twenty days of the best laid plans can come to absolutely nothing over the course of twenty-four hours.”

“Ah. Er . . . it’s true that complacency’s no good,” Xavier said, “but it really doesn’t seem like you have to do any more than you already have. We’ll just stay out of everybody’s way until we’re home. Believe us, we have no disruptive intentions.”

Laura asked: “Are you sure?” at almost exactly the same moment Allegra did. Laughing nervously, each gestured for the other to elaborate first.

“It’s just that ever since you two joined us, Ms. Kapoor has been . . . skittish,” Laura said.

Allegra smiled. “Maybe in your opinion, Ms. De Souza. Let’s see what the qualified and experienced psychiatrist says.”

“Ms. Yu . . . are you forgetting that we’re back to the songs for Přem again, from midnight ’til five? That one song in particular . . . the one that sounds like part of a soundtrack for a TV special on abusive relationships. If Dr. Zachariah observes all that and still decides Ms. Kapoor’s doing well, then we’ll need to find a more credible assessor pronto.”

“Just out of curiosity,” Allegra said, “I know we aren’t friends and you’re just here for work, but have you left the neutral observer zone, Ms. De Souza? Are you actively hoping that Dr. Zachariah won’t confirm Ava to be of sound mind?”

Laura twirled her lollipop around inside her mouth while she thought about this.

“No,” she said. “Over the years I’ve become biased in the other direction. I hope Ms. Kapoor does inherit. I think she would make the money behave correctly. And I like you, Ms. Yu. I know that left to your own devices you would have used these years to write music instead of chauffeuring your girlfriend around by train.”

“I’ve been doing both without too many issues, thanks,” Allegra said stiffly.

“But you are not happy with the music you write nowadays. You compare it to what you were doing before, and it is the same, almost exactly the same . . . you are unable to add anything or to blend anything in. Well, you made that choice of your own free will, so I won’t embarrass you anymore. I’m telling you I like the way you have been keeping the terrifying promises you made to Ava Kapoor. I’m telling you this even though it’s unprofessional to do so, since it’s true that I’m not here to like anybody.”

To Xavier and me, Laura said: “I shouldn’t get attached. The money situation is quite serious. Ms. Kapoor has borrowed quite a lot of money on her inheritance expectations. Money to live off, and money for the work she’s doing on the train . . .”

“There are companies that would lend that much based on this?” Xavier asked, raising and dropping the photocopied will.

“Ruthless ones,” Laura said, and Allegra added: “With cutthroat interest rates.”

Laura shrugged. “Et voilà, I travel with them, I send reports to my boss in Hong Kong. In theory I assist with keeping Ms. Kapoor on an even keel because that is the best way to guarantee my boss gets his money back, but it makes me feel like we’re on some sort of sanitarium train, humouring the patient. So whatever, I don’t hasten to dampen Ms. Kapoor’s spirits when she laughs loudly, unlike some . . .”

“I think I see,” I said, before Allegra could return the volley.

“So do I,” Xavier said. “Sorry if we’ve somehow made Ava skittish.”

Allegra repeated that we hadn’t done that, but Laura listed the various passengers they’d picked up and dropped off over the years. Xavier and I were the thirteenth pair of honeymooners . . .

I waited for Xavier’s interjection that we hadn’t actually got married. He delivered as expected. We’re both curious about his unerring pursuit of transparency there. (He says he doesn’t quite understand it himself.) Maybe some part of Xavier Shin savours the uncomfortable pause as the other person tries to decide what to ask or say, not ask or not say. For my part, I’d argue that a pinch of unexpected information might well make otherwise formulaic exchanges more real, but in this case the outcome tends towards more awkwardness than there needs to be . . .

Anyway, I’m not saying I dislike it. Xavier’s brief and obstinate amendments remind me of all the trouble we two took to discover our intentions towards each other. In the absence of progeny, or a belief that subjecting each other to a legal and economic contract guarantees us anything we really need from each other, what was the simplest and strongest sign of our bond? After all the hinting and the ranting and the silences both gentle and fearsome, what a relief it was to discover that, in the case of X and O, all it comes down to is being known by the same name. Even if that is an overestimation of our ability to keep up with whatever shenanigans life has in store for us . . .

Laura raised an eyebrow. “So this isn’t a honeymoon to you?”

The question was directed at me, along with an unimpressed stare. Allegra duplicated the stare. It looked as if they’d made up their minds which Shin was the commitment-phobe who’d thrown his spanner into the honeymoon works.

“We’re calling it a non-honeymoon honeymoon,” I said, in my firmest, most upbeat, and hopefully image-rehabilitating voice.

Laura shrugged and continued her discourse on passengers. Couples usually weren’t a bother, though more than once she’d questioned the wisdom of allowing certain other parties onboard. Most recently she’d looked askance at the thirteen exorcists of assorted denominations and belief systems who had all been summoned to a single address in Morpeth, Northumberland. “. . . And I said to Allegra, is this a train or a Tower of Babel?” But even that hadn’t been a problem; Ava hadn’t seemed at all unsettled and had particularly relished the notes and drawings they’d left in The Lucky Day’s guestbook. No spooky serenades, until us.

“Ms. De Souza’s the skittish one,” Allegra said. “I am too, these days.”

“Because of him . . . Karel’s son?” I asked. “He didn’t contest the will?”

“No, he didn’t. By the time the will was read, we hadn’t seen or heard from him for months. Karel’s mate Zeinab, the executor, says Přem knew about the will and that he really, really, really wasn’t happy about it. Half of me reckons that if Přem was alive, he’d have contested the will, or at least attended Karel’s funeral. The other half of me reckons Přem would wait until Ava was within spitting distance of the inheritance and then spit all over us.”

Allegra crouched down between our two chairs, Xavier’s and mine. She took my left hand, and she took Xavier’s right hand. “Otto and Xavier Shin, I have no way of telling whether either of you are lying. You could be a pair of brilliant actors with those all-this-is-completely-new-to-me looks on your faces. And I’ve put such a strange bubble around the three of us, Ava, Laura, and me, that I don’t know if we’re going to be able to live in the real world again after this. But please. Before we get going again, I need you to either swear to me that you have nothing to do with Přemysl Stojaspal, or just take your stuff and get off the train right now.”

Laura beamed at us. “If you stay, and you do anything else that might bother Ms. Kapoor, you boys will be locked up in our holding cell.”

Xavier and I crunched our lollipops as we took this in. It was too Good Cop, Bad Cop for words.

“I swear we don’t have anything to do with—er—him,” I said. “We’ll go along with you quietly from now on. Let’s not keep that doctor waiting . . .”

I punctuated all this with reassuring nods, and Allegra nodded each time I did. Still holding Allegra’s hand, Xavier told her the bubble she’d been building wasn’t that much stranger than life in the real world.

“For instance,” he said, “I know a guy who only claims to know how to say ‘hello,’ ‘goodbye,’ ‘thank you,’ and the days of the week in Czech. But in his sleep, he’s fluent.”

“What kind of things does he say?” Laura asked.

“It’s sort of a cascade, really. But there is one recurring chant. ‘Pojd’ blíž . . . pojd’ blíž . . . ’”

“What’s that in English? Do you know?” I asked, somehow. Not sure how, what with my mouth having dried up all of a sudden.

Xavier leaned his shoulder against mine for a moment. “I checked. It means ‘Come closer.’”

“And do you—I mean, did you? Go closer?”

“Yeah,” Xavier said, “but he’d elbow me out of the bed. It wasn’t me he was talking to. Anyway, we’ll be out of your way now.”

The whistling began again as we were leaving. I looked back at Laura, who was saying, “No . . . no, no no no,” as she glanced at the wall, then at the floor. The whistler couldn’t really have stretched out full length between the train and the track, couldn’t be pushing the notes up out of their lungs and through the floor beneath us, but that’s exactly what it sounded like. Don’t worry, baby . . .

Xavier was already back in the postal-sorting carriage. He looked at me over his shoulder. “Aren’t you going to do something about this?”

Don’t worry, baby . . .

Behind us Laura and Allegra stomped on the linoleum, Allegra’s trainers sparkling as she raised thunder.

“You try if you want,” I said, shaking my head and brushing past him. He grabbed my arm and pushed me back into the gallery car, so hard I almost lost my footing. “Sort this out, Otto,” he said.

The connecting door closed, and I pressed the button to open it again. The lightbulb rocked back and forth, splashing shadows across the walls of the gallery car. Xavier stood in full sunlight, resting his elbow on the corner of a wooden letterbox, and he won our staring match easily.

He didn’t repeat himself—not aloud, anyway, but I still muttered, “As you command . . .”

Don’t worry, baby . . .

Just the chorus, and the whistler was giving it everything they had.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I said. He said he wouldn’t, the door closed again, and I turned back to Laura and Allegra. They were beside themselves with baffled fury, but their stomping had become rhythmic. I suppose that’s what happens when you keep it up long enough . . . rage turns into a soft-shoe shuffle. I walked around them, calling their names until they looked at me, then, locking eyes with Allegra first, I held my right hand up, my index finger touching my thumb, and I began to whistle in time with our unseen entertainer, in a lower note so that a harmony sounded through the carriage. As below, so above. Allegra was much better at whistling than I was, so it was a relief when, after about three seconds, during which she looked more likely to burst into tears than give in and be mesmerized, she took up the notes and ran with them.

Don’t worry, baby . . .

When I broke eye contact, she lifted her gaze to the blank canvas that we said we’d seen Ava in. Laura took longer to enlist. About fifteen seconds. She was badly off-key, but dedicated.

I’d guessed that the whistler was more of a soloist than an ensemble player, and he proved me right by abruptly dropping out once we’d whistled our way through one more chorus.

Don’t worry, baby . . .

I never have anything up my sleeve except for the utterly fraudulent authority with which I assure you—yes, you—that you’ll get through this, whatever it is, and everything will be better. We both know nothing’s all right, but when I tell you it will be, you take it. If you don’t, it’s because you’re holding out for another outcome altogether.