“Chairs,” hisses Teacup, and gesturing leads a number of them bustling from the room. Cherrycoke screws a cover onto the junction box. Jim sets to cleaning his trowel.

Next through the doors, Wu Song, soft white shirt buttoned up to his throat, tattoos at his temples blurred by stubble. A rumble rises behind him and he steps to one side, out of the way of Lustucru and Teacup and Herwydh and Fildhine, guiding a dozen or more wheeled chairs into the room, spinning and turning and pushing the thunderous ballet into place about the table.

“What,” says Melissa. Sat on the floor beneath the dust-glazed window in her motorcycle jacket, and leaned beside her a greatsword in a bulky scabbard of iron and dark wood and grey felted wool, the faceted pommel at the end of its long hilt laid up against a murky pane. “It’s not like he’s a hundred and seventy, a hundred and sixty, and lying there, looking like that.”

Big Jim snorts, laid back against the pillows piled at one end of the high thick mattress, wrapped in a corduroy kilt, bare ankles crossed. “I’m as quick as you’d seem to see me,” he says.

“I mean, you’re the guy. You’re the reason we have the Shanghai tunnels.”

“Hardly,” he says, and the merest shake of that big head.

“No, I mean, that’s so cool!”

“They were never as extensive as the tales would have it.”

“I took the tour. I’ve been down there, you know?” Leaning forward, hands on her knees, “Jim Turk’s a legend,” she says. “Shanghaied a fucking wooden Indian. Found a basement full of guys dead from drinking ether, or formaldehyde, or whatever, and hired ’em all off to a captain before they were cold! You’re saying you did that?” but the shake of his head’s more vehement, “No,” he’s saying, “that were the doing of Bunko Kelly, and I’ll not have that bounder’s sins totted up in my ledger.”

“Now why, mon lapin,” a voice slinks from the darkness, “would you want to go and look like that?”

The Starling smiles at herself. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“You never sleep, do you,” that voice, purringly close.

“Sometimes I do.” The Starling looks over her shoulder, away across the basement where the darkness is relieved by a dozen candles flickering before a bed, about a nest of cushions and bolsters laid on the floor, wraps and spreads and Turkey rugs and nestled among them two sleeping heads, the hair of them spread over pillows, black curls, bright floss. To one side a high-backed wing chair where Costurere sits drowsing, a snuffer in one relaxed hand, and Aigulha curled at her feet. The Starling turns back to the mirror. Over her other shoulder the shadows unfold a striking nose, a chin, a wicked, painted smile. “Do you find beauty, tiresome?” that voice, from those lips. “Pleasure, to be passé? Is that why you sink back to this, like a warm bath?”

“I am only ever what I want to be,” says the Starling.

“Minty,” he says, laughing himself as he hauls her off the pole, “come on, come on!” Staggering away from pool to pool of streetlight slipped over arms clutched about each other’s shoulders, pushing shadows out behind them, shadows that bobbing shrink to be swallowed by stumbling feet as they pass beneath the lamp above to seep out then before them, wavering, reaching, yearning for the return of darkness, “Lenny!” she yelps, and they laugh.

A house barely bigger than its garage, clad all about in pale blue siding, an enormous tree in the front yard of it that dapples streetlight into moon-bright coins spread over grass and sidewalk, pinking the finish of the pickup in the driveway, the late-model sedan on the grass. “Home sweet home?” she says, dragged behind, “on Lenny Street?”

“Avenue,” he says, with a tug, but she won’t step off the sidewalk. Hoisting a bottle in his free hand he waggles it, “Fuck you,” she says, companionably, reaching for it. Taking the step. “Fuck you, Moody.”

Open the door on shouts and gunshots from a big screen television there before the picture window, bursting with digital explosions, a bulky cargo plane heels over crumpling wing, in the foreground ducking a couple of agents in tactical gear, guns up, “Whoa!” a guy on the couch, leaned away from the guy in the middle, controller in both hands swung wide, thumbs wildly twiddling knobs, “Shit!” and the guy on the other end of the couch clapping, “God damn! That was epic!”

“Danny Moody!” says the man in the leather recliner, “back so soon.”

The book established Whitehead’s intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn’t too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author’s choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all?

From the canvas sack he pulls a handful of cloth rags, a scrub brush, a small clay jug, a large, anonymous squirt bottle, a smaller spray bottle that says Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, Orange Clove, and a pair of yellow gloves. From the paper bag he slips a plastic takeaway dish still vaguely steaming. Giorgio’s, says the label pasted on the clear plastic lid of it. 5/15. Opening the refrigerator, he sets it carefully within, the fridge light washing over him, his blue jeans, blue denim jacket, his close-cropped iron hair, winking away as he soundlessly closes the door.

Then, tugging on the yellow gloves, taking up the scrub brush and the squirt bottle, the Anvil Pyrocles sets to work.