Not only were the walls lined with bookshelves and filing cabinets, but the entire floor was a maze of piles of books, arranged in different forms and sizes: some of them as high as six feet or so, some of them arranged in an almost pyramidal base.

“This is your home,” said Odessa, a question hidden in the form of a statement.

“This is my Manhattan home,” said Blackwood.

He stepped through a door into a long hallway. She counted four more doors ahead, on either side. She had been inside many New York apartments; none were arranged off a common hallway, none were this spacious.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“The building was constructed in the 1880s.”

She believed him, eyeing the detail of the European trim along the chair rail running the length of the hallway. “Right, so how long have you lived here?”

He fished a key out of his jacket pocket, inserting it into a door lock. “This was the only building this far north and west on the island then. The city has grown up around it. The park, too. The city of London has always seemed fully formed, but from here I have watched a metropolis get up on its feet rather like a new fawn. The building was constructed with electric lights already installed, powered by its own dynamo. I rather like electricity. The building went…I believe the term is co-op…some years ago. Do you know what that means?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I do not.”

This mystery evidently did not trouble him, as the key turned in the lock and he swung open the door. Another wide room, a library. The shelves bulged with aged book spines and unbound manuscripts of old, flaking paper, as well as folios and parchment scrolls. These were rare books indeed, most with Latin or French titles, like Ethici philosophi cosmographia…Mysteriorum liber primus…A Booke of Supplications and Invocations…De Heptarchia Mystica Collectaneorum…

The room smelled milky, of vanilla and almond, from the breakdown of chemical compounds in the old paper. “There is no way you’ve read all these,” she said, tired of asking him questions, always feeling off-balance.

He did not rise to her challenge. “My library travels with me,” he said.

“Travels? Where?”

“I have other residences.”

“Okay…how do you travel anywhere without a passport?”

“Mmm, yes, that, ” he said, conceding the point. “It is more trying every year.”

He opened yet another door, this one opening into what would in any normally grand residence have been perhaps a formal dining room. But here, arranged upon a long mahogany serving table and on shelves and inside locked glass cabinets on the walls, were…?

“What are these?”

“Instruments,” he said.