Now that it was free of living people, I could see all the details. The doorknobs were indeed all hands—shaped in fists and handshakes and open palms and every other permutation—each one different from the next. The brass banister, at the top, was the crook of an elbow, as if you were taking someone’s arm on a slippery sidewalk. I realized that the tube of it was bumpy because it was a series of different biceps cast in one long, undulating line.

The light fixtures, hanging in clusters from the ceiling, looked like the bulbs were made of grapes. I peered at one and saw that it was an eyeball, with a pale iris and an opaque white pupil, held to its cloth-covered cord of ivory silk, braided with tiny, irregular veins of red and blue, with a grommet made from a golden coin.

The transoms above each door, to let in light from the atrium, were, like Max’s office, smooth slabs of semiprecious stones. The edges where the stone met the wood were ever so slightly beveled, like they were gigantic pieces of jewelry in the setting of a door. Max’s office was rose quartz, and the other doors on the third floor (which I didn’t dare open) glowed, backlit by their own glass ceilings. There was rusty carnelian, Caribbean-blue apatite, chartreuse brazilianite; the second floor had transoms of paper-thin jade, pear-tinted heliodor, and crystalline Egyptian faience. One door—the one next to my painting, for the library—had a cage transom, laser-cut brass patterned in tiny hexagons, same as the ones on Marlin’s fuzzy prints.

My palm fit seamlessly into the outstretched brass hand of the knob. When it turned, in a handshake, I found the library exactly as it had been before.

The catalog appeared to be alphabetical by movement. Each shelf was sleek and full to the brim, though here and there a book had been removed. At each hole in the collection, I tried to figure out who or what was missing, if it was only the books I’d seen in Max’s office, but my knowledge simply wasn’t complete enough to guess the names that had been taken out.

I started browsing. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for—I was enjoying the search, waiting for something to catch my eye, for something to jump out and tell me, This is what to do!

On impulse I took out catalogs from recent exhibitions on the early abstract painter Clyfford Still, the Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, and the medieval painter Giotto di Bondone, a fourteenth-century muralist who worked at the beginning of the Renaissance and was mentioned in Dante’s Divine Comedy.