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model and year of the machine, and was always a matter of centimeters, but it did not
look
like it could be done. The alley gave no indication of what lay beyond it, the casual passerby tended to do exactly that, while the truly self-confident tourist peered defiantly down the tunnel and then went away.
    On the other side, however, light from heaven poured down on a row of seventeenth-century houses, protected by wrought-iron palings, that dead-ended at a garden wall: 3, rue de Villon, to 9, rue de Villon, in a sequence whose logic was known only to God and the postman. In the evening, the tiny street was lit by Victorian gas lamps, which made soft shadows of a vine that twisted its way along the top of the garden wall. The garden belonged to number three—a faint impression of the number could be found on a rusty metal door, the width of a carriage—which was owned by the baroness Lillian Frei. She did not know her neighbors. They did not know her.
    A maid answered the door and led Morath to the garden. Sitting at the garden table, the baroness put her cheek up to be kissed. “Dearest love,” she said. “I am so happy to see you.” Morath’s heart warmed, he smiled like a five-year-old and kissed her with pleasure.
    The baroness Frei was possibly sixty. She was bent over in a lifelong crouch, and one side of her back humped far above her shoulder. She had shimmering blue eyes and soft, snow-white hair and a radiance like the sun. She was, at the moment, as always, surrounded by a pack of vizsla dogs—not one of which could Morath distinguish from another but which, as the baroness liked to tell her guests, belonged to a vast, capricious, bumptious family who lived out an unending romantic epic in the house and garden. Korto, bred to Fina, loved Malya, his daughter by the gallant and long-departed Moselda. Of course, for the integrity of the line, they could never “be together,” so, in heat, the exquisite Malya was sent to live in the kitchen whilst poor Korto lay about on the garden gravel with his chin slumped atop his forepaws or stood on his hind legs, peered myopically through the windows, and barked until the maid threw a rag at him.
    Now they stormed around Morath’s legs and he bent to run his hands along the satin skin of their sides.
    “Yes,” said the baroness, “here’s your friend Nicholas.”
    The vizslas were fast, Morath got a wet kiss on the eye and never saw it coming.
    “Korto!”
    “No, no. I’m flattered.”
    The dog smacked his forepaws against the ground.
    “What, Korto, you want to hunt?”
    Morath roughed him up a little and he mewed with pleasure.
    “Go to the forest?”
    Korto danced sideways—
chase me.
    “A bear? That would be best?”
    “He would not run away,” the baroness said. Then, to the dog, “Would you?”
    Korto wagged his tail, Morath stood up, then joined the baroness at the table.
    “Pure courage,” she said. “And the last five minutes of his life would be the best.” The maid approached, pushing a glass-topped cart with a squeaky wheel. She set a tray of pastries on the table, poured a cup of tea and set it down by Morath. Silver tongs in hand, the baroness looked over the pastries. “Let’s see . . .”
    A doughy roll, folded over itself, with walnuts and raisins. The lightly sugared crust was still warm from the oven.
    “And so?”
    “Like the Café Ruszwurm. Better.”
    For that lie, a gracious nod from the baroness. Below the table, many dogs. “You must wait, darlings,” the baroness said. Her smile was tolerant, infinitely kind. Morath had once visited at midmorning and counted twenty pieces of buttered toast on the baroness’s breakfast tray.
    “I was in Budapest last week,” she said.
    “How was it?”
    “Tense, I should say. Underneath all the usual commotion. I saw your mother and sister.”
    “How are they?”
    “In good health. Teresa’s oldest girl may go to school in Switzerland.”
    “Maybe for the best.”
    “Maybe.