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moment later she too vanished, back into the church, with a swirl of her cloak; but she must have conveyed some silent warning to Edward, for we did not retrace our steps back through the alleys and streets, but instead hustled directly east to the lake, and then home by another bus, on which we huddled in the two rearmost seats, on the lake side, away from the street. On the bus he seemed distracted, but by the time we were back in our building he was himself again, bemused and attentive, and when we reported our progress to Miss Elminides, in the lobby, he was as wry and engaged as usual. In some manner I could not see he delivered a message to Miss Elminides, who sighed and said it could not be helped, and expressed her most sincere thanks for our assistance in a delicate personal matter.
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    Of course there were many other residents in our apartment building: the units went from A through F on each of the three upper floors, for a total of eighteen apartments, in which lived something like fifty people, all told, and during my time there I met nearly all of them, although there were a couple of legendary hermits, and I had to trust Edward that they actually did reside in the building, in apartments 3C and 3D, respectively; according to Edward they were brothers who hardly ever emerged, and had not spoken to each other in thirty years, despite being separated only by a thin wooden wall, through which they must have heard each other conducting a life of eerie similarity. I once said to Edward that this seemed sad to me, such proximity without intimacy, and his response was something like as far as he could tell there was an awful lot of exactly this sort of thing among human beings, more than any other kind of being; a sad thing to have to admit is true.
    I did meet the other residents, at least casually, mostly while we were getting our mail in the lobby, or in transit on the stairs, or waiting sleepily on line in the basement for Mrs Manfredi’s empanadas on Saturday mornings, and after a few weeks I was able to put stories to some of them, with Mr Pawlowsky’s quiet assistance. The Armenian librettist on the third floor, for example, was a man intent on succeeding in opera, despite the fact that his father and uncles were barons of industry, specializing particularly in classic cars, which perhaps explained the Hudson or Packard chassis in the basement. On the second floor was a tiny vibrant woman who must have been past eighty years old but had the most brilliant sizzling orange hair I had ever seen; in some way she was associated with the tremendous stuffed bronze horse in the storage area. Edward thought she had been a propmaster or animal-wrangler for a movie studio, while Mr Pawlowsky thought she had actually been an actress in old Westerns; there had been a film company shooting Westerns in Chicago in the old days, he said, over to the west side, on Argyle Street, and he was almost sure she had been an actress in the old Broncho Billy films; didn’t she look awfully like the girl who was always Billy’s wife or daughter or love interest or being rescued at the last second from a hurtling train?
    There was a man who had been a sailor, though not in the Navy, said Mr Pawlowsky; there were four quiet thin dapper businessmen, who lived two by two on the second floor, and sometimes left for work in the morning all at the same time, all dressed beautifully; there were two young women from rural Arkansas, fresh out of college and just beginning advertising careers in the city, one in perfumes and the other in shoes and boots; there was a tailor of Scottish extraction, a department-store detective, a man who had once raised cheetahs, the inventor of children’s propeller hats, and a tall man who had been a cricket star in Trinidad but who now taught remedial mathematics at a high school twenty blocks west; Edward showed me one morning how this man deftly carried a cricket bat in