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room inhaled loudly, straightened his cap, placed his hands on his thighs and buttressed himself to stand after long sitting. But the stableman had been there longer—all day yesterday, all day today. He watched the other man at the counter, listening, nodding, mumbling, taking pen in hand.
What can he do that I cannot?
he asked himself, and stamped a foot against the floorboards, not in a disorderly way, but he was frustrated and discouraged, and it did feel good to express it. He thumped his boots a couple more times, under the pretense of trying to drum up warmth, which was not too far-fetched in that room. Another name was called, vaguely French-sounding. At first it made him angry, but then he told himself his turn would come eventually. What he dreamed of, of course, was a job on a church or as a mason, anything working with stone, and his hope was that his long wait would be rewarded when the hiring office matched him with the perfect job. But he couldn’t afford to be so choosy; for now any work would do.
    Perhaps, he thought, the tongue-twisting syllables of his borrowed name were simply unpronounceable to the clerk. At Barnum’s they’d called him George Jerrymerry, and he’d answered to it. He didn’t much care how the name was pronounced. It wasn’t really his, after all—just the name on the passport he carried, which listed physical dimensions close to his own. The stableman had given his own documents away to the identity vendor in Hamburg in partial payment for the Geiermeier papers, which meant someone else was probably now traveling as him. Who? he wondered. What was the real Geiermeier’s name now? Had he passed the burden of his own terrible crimes off onto the stableman, like a curse? They both had brown hair and black eyes, stood five ten, but didn’t half the world? The stableman wished he’d thought a little more about how the vowel-plagued name on his papers would be sounded out by an American tongue, but it was too late now. At least he wasn’t alone. He’d sat all day listening to squashed-sounding versions of European names—Polish, Hungarian, it was hard to tell, the way they came out. There were Germans—he’d heard Schultz, Franck and Handel called—and of course plenty of English and Irish: Evans, Jones, Callahan and even two Harrises. A small squabble had broken out over that, but soon enough the second Harris had gotten his turn and set off with a letter of reference and a certain hopeful spring in his stride. That had been hours ago.
    The stableman looked at the broad hands lying in his lap. Despite the burns, which were healing, they were good, honest hands. He wore his considerable physical strength as overtly as he could and concealed his foreignness and the unexpected contents of his mind with a quiet tongue. He knew he looked like a man who could work, but what good did that do, when the man who stood watch at the desk wouldn’t look at him? Or was there some aura of having been in the Tombs still lingering around him? In the week since the fire, it seemed no one at all had met his eye or even looked at the wide contours of his face, which had taken on a tinge of desperation of late.
    What exactly did he look like, our man? Well, with the scorching of the fire and the freezing of the weather and the chapping of his cheeks, I’m afraid his face resembled nothing so much as a scrubbed potato from the fields of the country he’d left behind, a potato that had battered around a long time in a barrel. His forehead was prominent; his eyes were dark and glimmering; his nose was straight. There was something there, beneath the tired surface of his features, that had made Beatrice take an interest in him. A certain intelligence was revealed by the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had shed his name, he had grown calluses and now blisters, but the rest was still him: the soul that animated his face, the body that sustained him, the beating of his heart, the silent