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against it.”
    â€œNo way, that’s like extremely will power-y. It’s totally ­brutal.”
    Surrendering to cramped conditions, Marta slid the folders away and scanned articlettes in a throwaway newspaper—pausing only to savour “caustic and insolent,” an evocative phrase serving to sum up and pillory a far-off artist.
    For the final ten blocks Marta stared out at the familiar retail corridor of the route.
    3 .
    T he squat fact of Undre Arms was mood leavening every afternoon Marta approached the apartment building’s proud coat of arms stenciled black, green, and gold on the glass of each entrance door. Years ago she’d substituted a set of hairy tradesman’s arms lifting cinderblocks for the twin lions, oak leaves, and ersatz-medieval shields, and those imaginary armpits greeted her now.
    Dating from 1969 , the three-story shoebox came from an engineer’s office with no taste for Age of Aquarius embellishment. Marta’s forecast called for its numbered days. Homely touching on forlorn, the greying stucco and mildewed patches could be foolproof lures only to developers, whose search-and-destroy vision ranked low-rise apartment blocks as bygone low-density no-nos that should be converted into high-density, small footprint profit.
    Compared to any of the recently erected city condos selling for obscene dollars per square foot, Undre Arms stood out as a spacious bargain; even with the scurrying, paper-devouring silverfish insurgents that bred in drains or beneath floorboards and never failed to startle, Marta fondly called the place, and its ample closets stuffed with books, home. She expected to linger there until making the epochal, adult leap to home ownership, a leap practically inevitable and yet so momentous—the daredevil’s inaugural skydive or the suicide’s posture on a building’s top story edge—that with thoughts of the awesome expenditure she continuously pushed the date forward.
    Marta’s parents firmly believed in squirreling away for the unavoidable rainy day. Every time the real estate topic arose she’d wonder if that fateful hour had dawned. Delaying the decision again, she foresaw being pushed out: arriving on a Thursday and finding an unwelcome letter crammed under the door that announced the building’s sale and imminent date with a wrecking crew: “Vacate the premises immediately.” No doubt the owner’s son, eyeing a future of conspicuous sports car consumption, would thrill at the stock phrase.
    After settling—voicemail checked, mail read, take-home work filed, a dish of no-fat yogurt eaten—Marta dedicated a few minutes to the computer, checking campus email one final time before halfheartedly Googling name combinations, beginning with “Hester Stanhope biopic.” She found little, and nothing of value.
    Evidently no Amelia Earhart, Elizabeth I, or Virginia Woolf, Lady Stanhope warranted no big budget, no public relations underling paid to stimulate advance interest, and not even a compulsive blogger unleashing pre-production trivia. As for “Jakob Nugent Lora Wilkes” and the production company, the information was likewise scant.
    Marta imagined local production companies laboured under such penny-pinched operating costs that they claimed notice only with a film festival debut. Less charitably, she supposed the Stanhope project might be a made-for-a-specialty-television-network movie and so destined for justified invisibility from the moment it was okayed. Or worse, she feared, the screenwriter might have disinterred The Nun of Lebanon —the biography’s revelation about Stanhope’s doomed love affair barely scandalous when published in 1951 —and converted the woman’s life into cloying syrup, all emotional anguish and tearful au revoirs with exotic backdrops.
    Marta admired the long dead aristocrat’s instinct for adventure, not to mention the willingness