The ice in the alley was glacial; she could feel its peaks and valleys through the soles of her shoes. At the end, Dartmouth Street again. She turned right. The men followed. They would go to Marlborough Street and find the man’s house. “Almost there,” she declared. Then the man said, in front of a small building with a heavy glass and oak door, “We’ve found it, we’re home.”

“I thought you said Marlborough Street,” said Sadie.

“Near,” he said. “Near Marlborough Street.”

“Where are your keys?” asked Jack.

They held him up by the crooks of his elbows as he tried to find his pockets by chopping at himself all over with the sides of his hands. But then he lurched at the door and said, “Sometimes,” and pushed the door open. “Thought so.”

Late night, a marbled alcove, three steps up. The marble did its work, awed the people. They fell quiet.

After a moment the man said, in a wondering, deciding whisper, “Top floor.”

He doesn’t live here, Sadie thought. We are trespassing. She could not say so.

The elevator was old, with an iron accordion gate, and could fit only one person at a time, a rocket to the moon in a silent film.

“All right,” whispered Jack to Sadie. “You put him in. I’ll run up and call for the elevator. Then you come next.”

Jack went up the stairs light-footed as he could. He thought he might love the strange young woman he’d met just outside a puppet, on the coast of a puppet, in the harbor of a puppet, and as always with women he was trying to decide how much to lie about and how much to be disconcertingly truthful about—he’d never hit the right cocktail in his twenty-seven years on earth—panting now, at first he’d been ahead of the elevator and he heard it gaining on him, a capsule full of drunkenness, so he took the stairs two at once—it felt impossible—and ended up with time enough to stand at the top and wait. Jack didn’t want to see the man’s apartment: he imagined a depressing disaster, vivid in his mind because he himself might end up in such a place, piles of magazines, empty glasses with the merest tint of drink left in, a veil of intoxication over everything. The lights in the hallway were on. Lights blazed in hallways around the clock in America. Forget the streets of gold. Here came Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett in a Members Only jacket. By the time he got there he seemed to have forgotten where he was going.

“Oh, good, it’s you!” he said to Jack, full-voiced, catching his finger in the accordion gate. “Son of a bitch.”

Then Sadie ran up the stairs, too. The two men waited for her at the top, as though she were a bride at a wedding.