The "Do Not Disturb" sign had been on the doorknob for three days.
Alice Monaghan stood in the carpeted hush of the thirty-third-floor corridor and counted. Three days was more than the standing rule allowed. The rule was two. The housekeeping manager, a Mr. Bayne who wore ironed cuffs even on Sundays, had been quite particular about the rule when Alice had started the year before last. On the second morning one looked politely away. On the third morning one knocked. On the fourth morning one used one's passkey.
This was the fourth morning.
Alice was twenty-eight years old and had been married nine weeks. Her husband, a gunner's mate on the USS Nashville, was somewhere in the South Pacific that she did not, when she tried to locate it on the map in the lobby, find reassuring. She had her mother's rosary in the pocket of her uniform apron, where it had been every day since Pearl Harbor. She touched it now, briefly, as she had learned to touch it, the way a smoker touches his pack.
The thirty-third floor smelled, as it always smelled, of hot radiator and cold piety. Mr. Tesla ARTIFACT 091 required that the corridor runner outside his door be vacuumed in the direction toward the stairwell and not toward the elevator. Mr. Bayne, who had the ear of the management, had arranged it. The nap of the carpet, when she bent to check, was obedient.
Alice took a breath, knocked three times, and waited three counts — Mr. Tesla also required counts of three — and knocked again.
Nothing.
She put her ear close to the door. The radiator hissed inside. Below the radiator, beneath the hiss, there was a second sound. Very faint. She had heard it before, in the hallway outside Room 3327, on nights when she worked late and the corridor was empty: a low, subaudible hum, as if something behind the wall was thinking.
She used the passkey.
The room was as she had always found it. The narrow iron bed, the washstand with its seventeen-napkin stack (she had counted once), the small writing desk under the window piled with leatherbound notebooks. The birdcage by the radiator with its door hanging open, as it had hung open for the eleven years Mr. Tesla had lived in the hotel. The pigeon feed, in its tin, on the sill.
Mr. Tesla was on the bed.
He was fully dressed. Black suit, white shirt buttoned to the throat, cuffs creased. His white gloves were folded on the pillow beside his head. His hair was combed and parted as he liked it. His eyes were open, looking at a point in the ceiling that was, Alice saw, directly above her.
His hands were folded on his chest. Between his hands, like a prayer book that had been set down mid-reading, was a small leather notebook ARTIFACT 002, closed, with a ribbon marker hanging out of it.
She knew — she had known, the moment she opened the door — that he was dead. His chest did not move. The air in the room was the air of a room in which no one had breathed for some hours. She knew it the way one knows these things.
What she had not expected was the light.
The lightbulb in the overhead fixture was on. It had not been on the night before; she had turned it off herself at six. It was on now. And as she watched, holding the knob of the door behind her for a steadiness she did not quite feel, it pulsed, once — dimming almost to the filament, brightening again — and then steadied.
Alice crossed herself. The rosary in her pocket was as warm as her own hand.
She backed out of the room. She did not turn her back on him. She closed the door on the hush and the hum and stood for a moment in the corridor breathing, and then she took the stairs. Three flights at a run, and then the service elevator the rest of the way, because her knees were not going to carry her the full thirty-three.
In the basement she told Mr. Bayne. Mr. Bayne telephoned the management. The management telephoned the hotel physician, a Dr. Corbett whose hands were wet when he shook Alice's, as if he had just washed them. Dr. Corbett rode up to thirty-three without speaking and came back down ten minutes later and pronounced Mr. Tesla dead of coronary thrombosis.
Alice, who had been told to remain, sat in the chair outside Mr. Bayne's office with the rosary in her lap.
At eleven o'clock the first men arrived.
There were four of them and they filled the hallway. Overcoats, wet at the shoulders; a cold rain had come on while Alice was waiting. They did not remove their hats. The smallest and oldest of them, a man in his middle forties with hollow cheeks and a mouth like a closed seam, took out a leather wallet and showed Mr. Bayne a card.
"Walter Gorsuch," he said. "Office of Alien Property. I am to take possession of the premises and their contents under Section Fifty-A. You will show us to the room."
Mr. Bayne began to say something about Mr. Tesla's American citizenship. He had been an American citizen, Mr. Bayne said, for forty-five years.
"Fifty years," Alice said, without meaning to. "It was fifty. He told me. He was a particular man about fifties."
The agent with the card turned his face to her for the first time. It was an ordinary face. It occurred to Alice then, in a cold small way, that there was nothing ordinary behind it.
"Fifty years," he said. "Thank you, miss. The room, please."
They went up.
Alice, because Mr. Bayne was in a state and because Mr. Bayne thought of her as reliable with men who did not smile, was sent with them. She stood in the corridor while two of them went into 3327 with a set of trunks they had brought up in the service elevator and the fourth stood by the door.
The agent with the card — the one who had given his name as Gorsuch — went to the desk and sat down.
He opened the leather notebook that had been lying between Mr. Tesla's hands.
He read for what Alice, from the corridor, thought was about ten minutes. She could see him through the partly open door. The top of his head was bald and very pale, and the lamp on the desk gave the pale the color of an old wax candle. He did not turn the page rapidly. He held each page for a long moment, reading as if he were reading something in a language he barely knew. Once he looked up. He looked at the ceiling, where the bulb hung. He looked at the ceiling for perhaps twenty seconds without moving. Then he looked back at the notebook and turned the page.
At what was perhaps the last page he stopped.
He stopped and his hands went flat on the desk. Alice saw his hands go flat on the desk and her stomach moved the way it had moved in the doorway of the room when she had seen Mr. Tesla on the bed. She was not a woman who knew very much, she thought later, telling her mother the story over the kitchen table on Ninety-Second Street. But she knew the difference between a man reading and a man struck. Gorsuch had been struck.
He sat at the desk for a long time with his hands flat. Then he lifted them, and he closed the notebook, and he put the notebook into his inside jacket pocket and buttoned the jacket over it. And then he called to the agent by the door — the name was Halloran — and he said, very quietly:
"Everything. I want every scrap of paper. The safe. The birdcage if you have to. I want the pigeon feed. I want the goddamn napkins."
Halloran said, "Sir — what exactly are we looking for?"
Gorsuch opened the desk drawer and took out, apparently at random, one of the other notebooks that were stacked there. He opened it. He did not read, this time. He turned it so Halloran could see the page.
Alice, from where she stood, could not quite see the page.
But she could see Halloran's face.
Halloran was a fair-haired man of perhaps thirty-five with the build of a boxer who had gone comfortable around the middle. His color, in the corridor light, had been ordinary. When he looked at the page it was not ordinary anymore.
"A weapon," Gorsuch said. "We are looking for a weapon."
He turned the notebook back toward himself and looked at the page again. Alice, nearer now because her feet had carried her three steps toward the door without her permission, could see it. It was a pencil sketch of a tower. A lattice of timbers climbing to a spherical dome. Beneath the sketch, in a slanting hand, the letters were formed with the careful deliberation of a man who had been taught to write by a priest:
And below that, underlined twice:
The lightbulb overhead pulsed.
Gorsuch's eyes lifted to it.
"Oh, no," he said. Very quietly. As one says it who has understood, a minute too late, that one was never going to be in time.
Alice, afterward, told her mother that she had backed the three steps she had come forward, that she had reached into her apron pocket, and that she had held the rosary so hard that the wooden beads left a pattern on her palm that she could still see two days later. She told her mother this, and she told her mother what the lightbulb had done, and her mother — a woman born in County Mayo in 1881 and who had crossed an ocean as a child in steerage and who had raised four children in a walk-up on Ninety-Second and who was, consequently, almost impossible to frighten — listened with both hands around her teacup and did not speak for a long time.
Then her mother said, "Alice, darling. Do you remember when I told you never to pray for the dead by name?"
"Yes."
"Do you remember why."
"Because naming them draws them back."
Her mother nodded. She did not drink her tea. She set it down.
"Alice," she said, "I would not, if I were you, say the name of that man ever again. Not in this kitchen and not in your bedroom and not in the chapel. I would not even think it very hard. Do you understand me."
And Alice, who had not cried in the corridor and had not cried when she told Mr. Bayne and had not cried on the long cold walk home, cried then — in her mother's kitchen, with the teacup cooling between her hands, for a man she had brought eighteen napkins to every morning for a year and a half and whose name she was not, in this life, going to say again.
Upstairs, in the room she now shared only with her rosary, the lightbulb in the ceiling flickered once.
She did not look at it.
She lay down in her clothes and she pulled the blanket over her head and she counted, three and three and three, until she slept.