There was a pair of locks, one mounted on the latch and a second set higher up-a deadbolt. Josef selected a pick tipped with a bent parenthesis and, with a twitch of the torsion wrench, made short work of the lower lock, a cheap three-pin affair. But the deadbolt gave him trouble. He teased and tickled the pins, sought out their resonant frequencies as if the pick were an antenna connected to the trembling inductor of his hand. But there was no signal; his fingers had gone dead. He grew first impatient, then embarrassed, huffing and blowing through his teeth. When he let loose with a hissed Scheiss, Kornblum laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, then struck another light. Josef hung his head, slowly stood up, and handed Kornblum the pick. In the instant before the flame of the lighter was again extinguished, he was humbled by the lack of consolation in Kornblum's expression. When he was sealed up in a coffin, in a container car on the platform in Vilna, he was going to have to do a better job.

Seconds after Josef handed over the pick, they were inside Apartment 42. Kornblum closed the door softly behind them and switched on the light. They just had time to remark on the unlikely decision someone had made to decorate the Golem's quarters in a profusion of Louis XV chairs, tiger skins, and ormolu candelabra when a low, curt, irresistible voice said, "Hands up, gents."

The speaker was a woman of about fifty, dressed in a green sateen housecoat and matching green mules. Two younger women stood behind her, wearing hard expressions and ornate kimonos, but the woman in green was the one holding the gun. After a moment, an elderly man emerged from the hallway at the women's back, in stocking feet, his shirttails flapping around him, his broom-straw legs pale and knobby. His seamed, potato-nosed face was strangely familiar to Josef.

"Max," Kornblum said, his face and voice betraying surprise for the first time since Josef had known him. It was then that Josef recognized, in the half-naked old man, the candy-producing magical waiter from his and Thomas's lone night at the Hofzinser Club years before. A lineal descendant, as it later turned out, of the Golem's maker, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and the man who had first brought Kornblum to the attention of the secret circle, old Max Loeb took in the scene before him, narrowing his eyes, trying to place this graybeard in a slouch hat with a commanding stage-trained voice.

"Kornblum?" he guessed finally, and his worried expression changed quickly to one of pity and amusement. He shook his head and signaled to the woman in green that she could put down her gun. "I can promise you this, Kornblum, you aren't going to find it here," he said, and then added, with a sour smile, "I've been poking around this apartment for years."

Early the next morning, Josef and Kornblum met in the kitchen of Apartment 42. Here they were served coffee in scalloped Herend cups by Trudi, the youngest of the three prostitutes. She was an ample girl, plain and intelligent, studying to be a nurse. After relieving Josef of the burden of his innocence the previous night, in a procedure that required less time than it now took her to brew a pot of coffee, Trudi had pulled on her cherry-pink kimono and gone out to the parlor to study a text on phlebotomy, leaving Josef to the warmth of her goose-down counterpane, the lilac smell of her nape and cheek lingering on the cool pillow, the perfumed darkness of her bedroom, the shame of his contentment.

When Kornblum walked into the kitchen that morning, his eyes and Josef's sought and avoided each other's, and their conversation was monosyllabic; while Trudi was still in the kitchen, they barely drew a breath. It was not that Kornblum regretted having corrupted his young pupil. He had been frequenting prostitutes for decades and held liberal views on the utility and good sense of sexual commerce. Their berths had been more comfortable and far more fragrant than either would have found in Kornblum's cramped room, with its single cot and its clanging pipes. Nevertheless, he was embarrassed, and from the guilty arc of Josef's shoulders and the evasiveness of his gaze, Kornblum inferred that the young man felt the same.

The apartment's kitchen was redolent of good coffee and eau de lilas. Wan October sunshine came through the curtain on the window and worked a needlepoint of shadow across the clean pine surface of the table. Trudi was an admirable girl, and the ancient, abused hinges of Kornblum's battered frame seemed to have regained an elastic hum in the embrace of his own partner, Madame Willi- the wielder of the gun.

"Good morning," Kornblum muttered.

Josef blushed deeply. He opened his mouth to speak, but a spasm of coughing seemed to seize him, and his reply was broken and scattered on the air. They had wasted a night on pleasure at a time when so much seemed to depend on haste and self-sacrifice.

Moral discomfort notwithstanding, it was from Trudi that Josef derived a valuable piece of information.

"She heard some kids talking," he told Kornblum after the girl, leaning down to plant a brief, coffee-scented kiss on Josef's cheek, had padded out of the kitchen and down the hall, to regain her disorderly bed. "There is a window in which no one ever sees a face."

"The children," Kornblum said, with a curt shake of his head. "Of course." He looked disgusted with himself for having neglected this obvious source of surprising information. "On what floor is this mysterious window?"

"She didn't know."

"On which side of the building?"

"Again, she didn't know. I thought we could find a child and ask it."

Kornblum gave his head a shake. He took another puff on his Letka, tapped it, turned it over, studied the tiny airplane symbol that was printed on the paper. Abruptly, he stood up and started to go through the kitchen drawers, working his way around the cabinets until he came up with a pair of scissors. He carried the scissors into the gilded parlor, where he began opening and closing cabinets. With gentle, precise movements, he went through the drawers of an ornate sideboard in the dining room. At last, in a table in the front hall, he found a box of notepaper, heavy sheets of rag tinted a soft robin's-egg blue. He returned to the kitchen with paper and scissors and sat down again.

"We tell the people we forgot something," he said, folding a sheet of the stationery in half and cutting it, without hesitation, his hand steady and sure. With a half-dozen strokes, he had snipped the three-pointed outline of a paper boat, the sort that children fold from pieces of newspaper. "We say they have to put one of these in every window. To show they have been counted."

"A boat," Josef said. "A boat?"

"Not a boat," Kornblum said. He put the scissors down, opened the cropped piece of paper at the center pleat, and held up a small blue Star of David.

Josef shivered at the sight of it, chilled by the plausibility of this imaginary directive. "They won't do it," he said, watching as Kornblum pressed the little star against the kitchen windowpane. "They won't comply."

"I would like to hope that you're right, young man," Kornblum said. "But we very much need you to be wrong."

Within two hours, every household in the building had spangled its windows in blue. By means of this base stratagem, the room that contained the Golem of Prague was rediscovered. It was on the top floor of Nicholasgasse 26, at the back; its lone window overlooked the rear courtyard. A generation of children at play had, like sky-gazing shepherds in ancient fields, perfected a natural history of the windows that looked down like stars upon them; in its perpetual vacancy, this window, like a retrograde planetoid, had attracted attention and fired imaginations. It also turned out to be the only simple means of ingress for the old escape artist and his protege. There was, or rather there had once been, a doorway, but it had been plastered and papered over, no doubt at the time of the Golem's installment in the room. Since the roof was easily accessible via the main stair, Kornblum felt that it would attract less notice if they lowered themselves, under the cover of darkness, on ropes and came in through the window than if they tried to cut their way in through the door.