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gently, turning to Conrad and taking in his crestfallen face. “The first one was an accident, after all. Frank identified your band for me, told me of your circumstances. I didn’t understand at first, but after some thought I realized what a gift I had here, we have here. So I continued taking them, just to see if I could. And now it all seems clear.” He smiled broadly, delighted. “We have been brought together in a most auspicious way. I hope you will accept my offer.”
    Conrad tried to think. All he could understand of Lemuel’s words, however, was that Lemuel intended to keep Conrad’s birds on his own roof. Conrad could not imagine how this was to his own benefit in any way. But at that moment, Rose stepped out onto the roof under a Chinese parasol. She wore a coat over the toga, its white hem trailing beneath the coat like a nightgown.
    â€œDid the bird boy say yes?” she asked her father, coming to stand beside him and looking at Conrad’s birds, now Lemuel’s birds.
    â€œWell, the bird boy, as you call him”—Lemuel turned to smile at Rose—“has not said anything yet.” He replaced his hat on his head. “Perhaps I need to be plain, my friend, Mr. Conrad Bird Boy Morrisey.What I am proposing here is a quid pro quo. A fire escape and an uneven diet is no way to train a flock. I, on the other hand, have plenty of space and can provide an excellent diet. What I lack is sufficient time. My work now requires me to leave the country for some time, and there is no one to look after my birds. A boy like yourself has time in immoderate quantities.” He smiled indulgently. “If you’ll agree to help maintain my loft in my absence—this absence and others to come—I will lease to you, in exchange, sufficient roost space for as many birds as you can buy or breed yourself.” He waited a moment, then continued. “I’ll throw grain into the bargain, just to tempt you.”
    Conrad looked around and took in, for the first time, the extent of Lemuel’s creation. This loft was not the patched and cobbled affair of so many Brooklyn pigeon lofts, constructed from odds and ends, bits and pieces, salvaged lengths of chicken wire and boards hammered together. Lemuel’s loft was the work of a master architect, which Lemuel indeed was—a restorer of religious properties, in fact. The loft was a series of turrets perhaps ten feet high and capped in copper, each turret linked by a short hyphen. At a height of perhaps seven feet ran the landing board, to which each separate box had an entrance. The whole effect was a bit medieval, Conrad thought—like a walled city. And yet it was familiar in character, painted the same clean white of New England’s farm buildings, with their unornamented lines and breezy aspect. He had seen such things from the car window, when he and his parents would take a drive out beyond the city, the three of them sitting silently in the car, looking out over the calm and sunny landscape. And at the base of each turret of the loft, in hexagonal boxes, Lemuel had planted shrubs, their shapely spires fluting upward.
    Conrad imagined that seeing Lemuel’s loft from above, from a passing airplane, perhaps, or a dirigible, it would seem a chimera,something that bloomed in the mind’s eye as a fleeting vision, a trick of light, a small white town rising from the black and gaping spaces of the city, with its looming walls and shadowy crevices.
    â€œOh, say yes, Conrad Morrisey,” Rose breathed in his ear, twirling her parasol.
    â€œSay yes!” Mr. Pittilio agreed, laughing, drawing on his cigar, wreathed in smoke.
    Conrad looked at Lemuel. At his brave confidence. And though something in him whispered then that it was not so easy as they imagined, could not be so effortlessly contrived, that something other than the simple contract they suggested awaited him up there on that rooftop, he