She slammed the phone down and stepped from the booth. She smiled. On the way over to him, she flopped down at a table from which three boys from military school had been staring. She moved her hand before one as if conjuring something out of his face. “O fortunate child,” she chanted. “I am an Oriental Daughter of Joy.”

When she stood they hooted for her to stay. Murnau met her halfway to his table and she gave him a hug. She was damp with sweat and a foot shorter. “If it isn’t Ulrich the Helmet,” she said.

For a while Hans had started in on her nickname game, as well. He’d called Murnau Bayard, the Knight Without Reproach.

She looked lovely, Murnau told her.

And didn’t Paul? she wanted to know. Paul sat miserably in the far corner, drawing.

She loved him completely, she lamented, and yet she dragged him into these filthy holes.

He was using a blue pencil on an oversized art pad. Hans had been so impressed with his talent and moved by his plight that he’d left a thousand marks in his will to further the boy’s training. The money had long since disappeared, only God knew where.

She still had beautiful skin. She was wearing a leather cap, and the heat made her face shimmer with perspiration. Bracelets of turquoise and tourmaline jangled from her elbows to her wrists.

What air the Romanische provided, submarine crews would have found insupportable. She pulled up a chair. Murnau pulled over another, for Agnuzzo. “Who’s that for?” she asked. “Hans?”

“I’m sorry,” she said when he didn’t respond.

Paul came over and joined them. She asked how Murnau had been sleeping. She’d written about him that his insomnia made him as dull as a block of wood and as restless as a forest animal. She had something for him, she said, and pulled from a rucksack beneath the table a leaflet advertising a lecture by a Dr. Knax on “Wanking as Mass Murder.” She was always teasing him like that.

When he asked what news she had, she told him that the day before she’d experienced a transformation into a Negress from primordial times. On her body had been printed a message in an unknown alphabet.

“The people behind us in line were alarmed,” Paul added.

She wanted to know what it was like working with Grau. She didn’t much like him, and called him the Gateway to the Occult. Still, she was curious because he was intense and secretive and provincial. His paintings had a disturbing and sinister dissociative pith to them, like Kubin’s.