The Le Roy was an unsalvageable shambles by now, and the Robinson fantasia that Farrell tried next came out equally as muddy. He gave up on tunes for the evening and went back to sixteenth-century finger exercises. They gave him the comfort of doing something fluently and room to think about the short man and the other frightened people who came to visit Sia.

She always referred to them as her clients—there was no surer way to anger her than by calling them patients. Farrell had rather expected them all to be pouty undergraduates, but they turned out to range from lawyers to parking-lot attendants, from a dance instructor to a paramedic to a retired policeman. A few seemed almost as withdrawn as Suzy McManus; most passed Farrell on the stair in a smiling frenzy of control. The night visit was in itself no surprise; Sia kept office hours of a sort, but Farrell had quickly grown used to the voices in the next room, crossing each other from all sides of his sleep—Sia talking in her voice that always made him dream of the ocean, the seabird misery of the travel agent, and the headwaiter’s hoarse complaining. Farrell could tell them apart in his sleep, by sound, if not by sorrow.

Now, plinking his thirds and fifths and listening to the sound of the yellow-eyed man’s voice, he knew that he had never heard it before. It was deep and slow, almost drawling, and it spoke English with a sprung, halting rhythm that put a dance step in the middle of the few recognizable words and made them stumble over weak vowels at the end. And Sia’s voice, when she answered was full of the same limping music, as powerfully soothing as the man’s was fear-tattered, but no more comprehensible to Farrell, nor less disquieting. He changed his mind about tunes, and began on Mounsiers Almaine as brightly as he could; but the lute voice in his lap sounded to him now like a third stranger singing upstairs.