The Glimmer Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

and prayed for the mouse’s soul.
    “Hail Mary,” she whispered. “Hail Mary, mother of Christ.”
    She stopped abruptly. Someone was coming through the undergrowth, someone who kicked his way through the leaves and roots, the roosting birds and small mammals, with sheer brute force. She dropped the lens, the candles, and the hat pin into her pocket just as Otto Klint, an eleven-year-old who had been left on the doorstep when he was just a few days old, stumbled out of the gloom. He started when he saw her but grabbed a handful of leaves to hide it.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked, and threw the leaves at her.
    “Nothing,” she replied.
    He examined her for a moment, her small face with its sharp little chin defiant in the half-light. But her eyes would not meet his.
    “What’s in your pockets, Tiny Lil?” he said, taking a few steps toward her. “I’ll tell Sister August.”
    “Nothing,” she said again, her voice rising in pitch.
    Otto held her wrists together with one hand and emptied her pockets with the other. He looked through her things briefly, then handed them back to her again.
    “Sorry,” he said briefly. “I thought you might have a cigarette.”
    Then Otto sized up the wall. It was two meters high.
    “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said.
    Tiny Lil finally looked up at him. His fair hair had been shaved after a recent outbreak of lice and his thin face looked hungry. He smiled and it seemed too generous an expression for the pared-down proportions of his face.
    “Right, then. See you later,” he said. “Little Sister.”
    Otto turned, placed one boot on the ledge, and levered himself up. With a grunt of effort, he grabbed the top of the wall with both hands and crawled over. She listened as his boots hit the paving stones with a dull, hollow thud. On the other side of the wall the streetlights came on with a flicker and a buzz. The ground shuddered as an omnibus thundered past. A bell was ringing. The birds were settling back into their nests. Tiny Lil picked up the postcard of the Virgin Mary.The black imprint of Otto’s boot covered her face. She tried to brush it off but the mud streaked and stained it. She licked her finger and rubbed and rubbed until there was only a gray smudge where the face had been.
    Luckily the photographer gave the orphanage a dozen prints of his photograph, of varying quality. When one went missing and Sister August found it in the dustbin with a single hole in the middle of the image, nobody claimed responsibility. The proof of Tiny Lil’s crime, if it had ever been found, was a grubby postcard of the Virgin Mary with Sister August’s semitransparent face stuck on.

Seven Hundred Kilometers
    Y our hat’s in my shot, madam. If you would be so kind as to shift a little to the right.” On the zeppelin LZ6’s maiden flight are forty passengers, six crates of Sekt , one moving-picture camera, and twenty reels of film. Hans von Friedrich ducks under the hood and starts to crank. Below, the world slowly unrolls: lakes like discs of glass briefly scored by the flight of a swan; a train crossing an elevated steel bridge, three ponies cantering, a girl on a bicycle who stops and waves hello, hello, hello.
    Hours later but right on schedule, here’s Berlin. Charlottenburg; the Schloss, perfect as a jewel; the zoological gardens, where elephants, zebras, giraffes all look up at this long black blot against the sun. The Tiergarten, green and soft as velvet; ladies in their boats; a brass band playing in the Englischer Garten. Then the Unter den Linden, St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, the opera house, and the university. Look there, and there. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have come out on their rooftops to watch the zeppelin’s slow descent. The airfield comes close, and closer still. Men on the ground pull on the ropes. And here to greet the LZ6 is the empress herself. Three cheers for the rigid dirigible. “Is my hat in your shot?” the lady asks. “No,