Toward the end of the evening, one of the cooks came all the way into the doorway of the solarium and discreetly caught Cynthia’s eye. There was a phone call for her, which had for some reason been transferred to the kitchen; she took it in there, while all the servers turned their backs and acted soundlessly busy. Remarkably, it was Irene calling again; but before Cynthia could politely defer her, she interrupted to say that her father’s health, now that he was comfortably installed in the hospice, had taken a precipitous turn, such that rather than wait until later in the week as planned, Cynthia had better fly down there as soon as she possibly could.

There was no way, not even after Jonas shamelessly dragged his parents’ name into it, that Margo the gallery owner was going to give up any contact information for Joseph Novak. She kept telling Jonas that she had been in the business for thirty years, as if that explained anything. But then Jonas had a brainstorm: he recalled Margo’s mention, at the art fair, of the brother in Kenosha. There were a lot of Novaks in Kenosha, as it turned out, but he finally dialed the one he was looking for, and after that it was a simple negotiation. Arthur Novak didn’t care who the money came from. You could tell from the merriness in his voice that he just couldn’t have been more tickled to have stumbled into this world of rich idiots who forever needed new things to waste their money on.

When Jonas asked for his brother’s address, though, Arthur hesitated a moment. “You do know what he was locked up for, right?” he said.

The sudden caution in Arthur’s voice spooked Jonas into fearing that he might change his mind about the whole thing. “Sure,” Jonas said, “I know all about that.”

“Well then,” Arthur said, and he gave Jonas the address. Jonas didn’t mention the jail business to Nikki-she was freaked out enough as it was by his “infatuation” with Agnew and this whole notion of making him a gift, in effect, of an artist so far out on the margins that even Agnew had never heard of him.

“I’m thinking ahead,” Jonas said. “I mean I’m genuinely interested in the subject, and I’m sort of in Agnew’s favor right now for whatever reason and I want to capitalize on that. I can get a jump on a master’s thesis this way.”

“What the hell difference does it make,” she said, “how fast you do it?”

He shrugged. Maybe it was a way of closing the gap between him and her. But in the end the impulse was so strong that it didn’t really matter to him what the reason was. Two days later he rented a car and drove into Wisconsin. Nothing but brown fields and broken stalks surrounded the highway, until some strange concern would rear up out of nowhere-a liquor wholesaler, a John Deere dealership, a Church of Latter-day Saints-and then disappear in his mirror. When it got to be a reasonable hour he started dialing Novak’s phone number, but Arthur Novak had told him not to expect his brother to answer necessarily, and he didn’t. Jonas never let it go past five or six rings for fear of antagonizing him. He held the printed directions against the steering wheel with his thumb as he drove.

He was almost there-going too slowly, bent over the steering wheel to stare up at the street signs as he passed them-when his cell phone rang. “Who is this,” the voice on the other end said, “why do you keep calling me and hanging up?” and Jonas felt a chill go through him. “Your brother gave me your number,” he said. “I’m sorry to have called you so many times, I was just trying to get a hold of you. My name is-”

“Why don’t you just leave a damn message?”

A perfectly sensible question, and it both relaxed Jonas and disappointed him a little to think that he was dealing with someone a little more reasonable than he’d imagined. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Anyway, I called because”-he saw the sign for Novak’s street out the window, but decided to circle the block a few times and keep talking-“I called because I’m, I’m someone who’s interested in art, and I’ve seen some of your drawings and I think they’re really great. And I just happen to be in town today-I live in Chicago-and I was hoping I could meet you and maybe see some more of your, of your work.”

There was a very long pause.

“Joseph?” Jonas said finally. “Are you there?”

Nothing. No way the call could have been dropped-he was only circling the block. Jonas saw the number 236 on a tattered-looking row house and realized he was right outside Novak’s door. He was starting to think he’d made a terrible mistake-not in seeking out Novak in the first place, but in the impetuous way he’d handled it. Strange to feel yourself the object of someone else’s paranoia. And here he was, staring at the artist’s windows.

“I’m hungry,” Novak said.

“What? You’re hungry? I’m kind of hungry too. Do you want to go out and eat something?”

Silence.

“Or do you want me to bring some food,” Jonas said, “when I come over?”

“Arby’s?” Novak said-a little softly, but sounding more interested now.

“Sure,” Jonas said. “I’ll get some stuff from Arby’s and come over. Is there an Arby’s near where you live?”

Novak hung up. Jonas rolled his window down, looking for someone on the street he could ask where the Arby’s was. But the streets were pretty empty this time of day, unless maybe they were like this all day. He could sort of see it from Novak’s point of view: if the voice knows where I live, then why wouldn’t it know where the Arby’s is?

Dawn chartered a plane from Teterboro and rode along in the limo; poor thing, she was constantly tearing up-mostly out of a kind of terrified remorse that she had almost screened out a call that came from her boss’s father’s deathbed, but also because she had lost her own father to cancer when she was in high school. In the limo she asked, in a tone that was businesslike yet tinged with hope, whether Cynthia needed her to come to Florida. Cynthia put her hand on Dawn’s discomposed face and told her that her only job, for the next day or two or however long it would be, was to apologize convincingly on her boss’s behalf to the dozens of people whose appointments to see her would now have to be postponed indefinitely-an easy enough job if Dawn had been free to explain what it was that had called her away, but Cynthia, for privacy’s sake, had asked her to please come up with a different story.

The plane was still being fueled when they got there, so the limo sat on the tarmac for a while. The horizon was just starting to lighten. Dawn fell asleep against her shoulder. Cynthia saw the pilot pass bleary-eyed in front of their windshield, trying to button down his collar with one hand while holding a Diet Coke.

It would have been nice to have her family around her now, but their pursuits were spread all over the world, and so she sat in the main cabin alone, save for an attendant who mostly tried to stay out of her sightline behind the bulkhead. Jonas wasn’t answering his cell. Maybe he was in class; anyway, she could certainly send the plane up to Chicago for him if there was any need. She’d spoken to Adam while she was packing-too emotional to calculate the time difference-and just as she’d expected he offered to fly back right away, but there was no point. The work he was doing was too important. And it sounded like her father might be dead anyway by the time Adam could get to Fort Myers from Shanghai; but she knew that if she said that out loud she would burst into tears that would cause him to fly back immediately anyway, so she settled for telling him that she loved him and would keep him posted.

She hadn’t brought anything to read, and there was too much cloud cover even for a look out the window. She supposed that this was a time when one might naturally think about the past. Up to now she’d been able to keep herself moving and thus hover above whatever it was that she should be feeling. But going over her father’s failings, their little moments of disconnected joy-this seemed too much like eulogizing him, hurrying him into the grave, and she resisted it. Instead she found herself wondering what was the last really great advance, in terms of speed, in human transportation. The jet engine? What was that, a hundred years ago? Why did it take just as long to get from New York to Florida now as it had before she was born? What kind of sense did that make? But if she was thinking of it now, chances were excellent others had already been thinking about it for a while: work was being done somewhere, somebody needed an angel.