He stood up, but she made him sit again by moving her head. She said, “Oh, Joe, I don’t mean to confuse you. There is nothing gone wrong with your radar; you are still perfectly welcome here for as long as you like.” She had stopped laughing, but amusement continued to illuminate her voice, setting the words winking at each other. “You are good for Ben, and I like you; and in three weeks I am already in the habit of your little gifts and your music every evening. In another week you will have become indispensable.”

Farrell said, “I should have a place by the middle of the month. There’s a man supposed to call me at work tomorrow.” There came a knocking, heavy and slow; it had a dull power behind it that made the whole house jar and ache. Sia went to the door.

The carving was of a woman growing on a tree like some lovely gall. She was free of the trunk from shoulders to thighs, and one knee was bent so that only her toes touched the tree; but her hair had just begun to emerge, and her hands still trailed in the wood to the wrists. Farrell fancied that he could see them, bending away as if they were shining through water. The woman had no eyes.

Farrell put the carving down as Sia came back, followed by a short man in a dirty overcoat. She passed the doorway quickly, pausing only to say, “Tell Ben I am with a client.” Her face was flushed and angry; it made her look young. The man peered into the room and flinched from the sight of him, from the sight of everything, as Farrell had once seen a hospital patient recoil, one who had been so badly burned that the least stirring of the air around her was a firestorm. The man was no taller than Sia, but his shoulders were almost grotesquely wide and thick, and he walked with an awkward, flat-footed stamp, like a hawk on the ground. Farrell had a glimpse of an overshot, downturning mouth under a stiff yellow moustache, of pale reddish skin, and of small yellow eyes vague with terror.