Finch knows many of the people in the building by name. A kind of survival strategy. Strangers mean danger. Like a leftover slogan from the old days when Hoegbotton gangs purified their neighborhoods of the “F&L scourge,” and F&L gangs returned the favor. He doesn’t know how safe his presence makes those around him, but he does his best. Tries to notice what’s going on. Likes to believe he is doing what his father would’ve done.

The crumbling sign on the roof still reads “otel Mur t.” Crows nest in it.

Sometimes Finch hides behind the sign.

Peers out across the skyline, toward the bay, from its shelter.

His apartment was on the seventh floor, but Finch ignored the dirty marble stairs and the stubborn elevator. Followed the wormy carpet into a darkened courtyard instead. A snarl of bushes and long grass along the path. At the center, a ragged vegetable garden of tomatoes, carrots, squash. Didn’t know who tended to it. He turned left, pushed open the first door, took familiar steps down into the dark two at a time.

Bottom of the stairs. Finch turned right, faced a door at the end of a stub of hallway.

Rebecca Rathven lived there. He could hear the sounds of water, the slap of fish surfacing, coming through the air ducts. Mixed, sometimes, with Rathven’s cackling laugh as she read something funny in her books. On a quiet night, the odd sounds traveled as far up as Finch’s floor. Finch liked the sounds. And he liked Rathven. Found her useful. Found her interesting. Sometimes in a sinister way.

Who takes a flooded basement as an apartment in a hotel full of empty rooms?

Finch knocked. Heard footsteps. A pause. An appraisal through the peephole.

She was used to visitors, but still cautious. People came to Rathven for information from the past. They came to her if they’d lost the thread. They came to her to talk. Why? Finch, like most people, had books, but Rathven had a library.

That library changed with every visit. Rathven kept shifting the stacks against the inroads of the river. People who owed her favors helped her create barricades of wooden beams and homemade sandbags. He’d told her to move, to go higher. But the effort, all of those books … she said she would, but she hadn’t yet. Might never.

The door opened wide enough for Finch to smell soggy pulp. Trying to save the unsalvageable. A wavery yellow light crept into the hall. Rathven’s long face appeared, tilted up at him. Startling white skin, almost translucent. Looked at times like something broken. Then like something strong. Dark hair shot through with lighter strands. Thick black eyebrows, hazel eyes, high cheekbones, thin lips curled in a smile. Blue dress and brown sandals. Finch could never tell her age. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Had never found a way to ask.