No response.

“Don’t move,” Andras said, and staggered to his feet. He turned and ran out of the room, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to Vago’s office, and opened the door without knocking.

“Lévi, what on earth?”

“Eli Polaner’s been beaten half to death. He’s in the men’s room, ground floor.”

They ran downstairs. Vago tried to get Polaner to let him see what had happened, but Polaner wouldn’t uncurl. Andras pleaded with him. When Polaner dropped his arms from his face, Vago took a sharp breath. Polaner started to cry. One of his lower teeth had been knocked out, and he spat blood onto the concrete.

“Stay here, both of you,” Vago said. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

“No,” Polaner said. “No ambulance.” But Vago had already gone, the door slamming behind him as he ran into the courtyard.

Polaner rolled onto his back, letting his arms go limp. Beneath the velvet jacket his shirt had been torn open, and something had been written on his chest in black ink.

Feygele. A Jewish fag.

Andras touched the torn shirt, the word. Polaner flinched.

“Who did it?” Andras said.

“Lemarque,” Polaner said. Then he mumbled something else, a phrase Andras could only hear halfway, and couldn’t translate: “J’étais coin…”

“Tu étais quoi?”

“J’étais coincé,” Polaner said, and repeated it until Andras could understand. They’d caught him in a trap. Tricked him. In a whisper: “Asked me to meet him here last night. And then came with three others.”

“Meet him here at night?” Andras said. “To work on those plans?”

“No.” Polaner turned his blackened and swollen eyes on him. “Not to work.”

Feygele.

It took him a moment to understand. Meet at night: an assignation. So this, and not the girl back in Poland, the would-be fiancée who had written him those letters, was what had prevented him from showing interest in women here in Paris.

“Oh, God,” Andras said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll knock his teeth down his throat.”

Vago came through the door of the men’s room with a first-aid box. A cluster of students crowded into the doorway behind him. “Go away,” he shouted back over his shoulder, but the students didn’t move. Vago’s brows came together into a tight V. “Now!” he cried, and the students backed away, murmuring to each other. The door slammed. Vago knelt on the floor beside Andras and put a hand on Polaner’s shoulder.

“An ambulance is coming,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

Polaner coughed, spat blood. He tried to hold his shirt closed with one hand, but the effort was beyond him; his arm fell against the concrete floor.

“Tell him,” Andras said.

“Tell me what?” said Vago.

“Who did this.”

“Another student?” Vago said. “We’ll bring him before the disciplinary council. He’ll be expelled. We’ll press criminal charges.”

“No, no,” Polaner said. “If my parents knew-”

Now Vago saw the word inked across Polaner’s chest. He rocked back onto his heels and put a hand to his mouth. For a long time he didn’t speak or move. “All right,” he said, finally. “All right.” He moved the shreds of Polaner’s shirt aside to get a better look at his injuries; Polaner’s chest and abdomen were black with bruises. Andras could hardly bear to look. Nausea plowed through him, and he had to put his head against one of the porcelain sinks. Vago pulled off his own jacket and draped it over Polaner’s chest. “All right,” he said. “You’ll go to the hospital and they’ll take care of you. We’ll worry about the rest of this later.”

“Our plans,” Polaner said, touching the crumpled sheets of drafting paper.

“Don’t think about that,” Vago said. “We’ll fix them.” He picked up the plans and handed them carefully to Andras, as though there were any chance they could be salvaged. Then, hearing the ambulance bell outside, he ran to direct the attendants to the men’s room. Two men in white uniforms brought a stretcher in; when they lifted Polaner onto it, he fainted from the pain. Andras held the door open as they carried him into the courtyard. A crowd had gathered outside. The word had spread as the students arrived for morning classes. The attendants had to push their way through the crowd as they carried Polaner down the flagstone path.

“There’s nothing to see,” Vago shouted. “Go to your classes.” But there were no classes yet; it was only a quarter to eight. Not a single person turned away until the attendants had gotten Polaner into the ambulance. Andras stood at the courtyard door, holding Polaner’s plans like the broken body of an animal. Vago put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come to my office,” he said.

Andras turned to follow him. He knew this was the same courtyard he’d crossed earlier that morning, with the same frosted grass and green benches, the same paths bright-wet in the sun. He knew it, but now he couldn’t see what he had seen before. It astonished him to think the world could trade that beauty for this ugliness, all in the space of a quarter hour.

In his office, Vago told Andras about the other cases. Last February someone had stenciled the German words for filth and swine onto the final projects of a group of Jewish fifth-year students, and later that spring a student from Côte d’Ivoire had been dragged from the studio at night and beaten in the cemetery behind the school. That student, too, had had an insult painted on his chest, a racial slur. But not one of the perpetrators had been identified. If Andras had any information to volunteer, he would be helping everyone.

Andras hesitated. He sat on his usual stool, rubbing his father’s pocket watch with his thumb. “What will happen if they’re caught?”

“They’ll be questioned. We’ll take disciplinary and legal action.”

“And then their friends will do something worse. They’ll know Polaner told.”

“And if we do nothing?” Vago said.

Andras let the watch drop into the hollow of his pocket. He considered what his father would tell him to do in a situation like this. He considered what Tibor would tell him to do. There was no question: They would both think him a coward for hesitating.

“Polaner mentioned Lemarque,” he said. It came out as a whisper at first, and he repeated the name, louder. “Lemarque and some others. I don’t know who else.”

“Fernand Lemarque?”

“That’s what Polaner said.” And he told Vago everything he knew.

“All right,” said Vago. “I’m going to talk to Perret. In the meantime”-he opened his architectural vocabulary book to the page that depicted the inner structures of roofs, with their vertical poinçons, their buttressing contre-fiches, their riblike arbalétriers-“stay here and study,” he said, and left Andras alone in the office.

Andras couldn’t study, of course; he couldn’t keep the image of Polaner from his mind. Again and again he saw Polaner on the floor, the word inscribed on his chest in black ink, the plans crumpled beside him. Andras understood desperation and loneliness; he knew how it felt to be thousands of miles from home; he knew how it felt to carry a secret. But to what depths of misery would Polaner have had to descend in order to imagine Lemarque as a lover? As a person with whom he might share a moment of intimacy in the men’s room at night?

Not five minutes passed before Rosen burst into Vago’s office, cap in hand. Ben Yakov stood behind him, abashed, as though he’d tried and failed to prevent Rosen from tearing upstairs.

“Where’s that little bastard?” Rosen shouted. “Where is that weasel? If they’re hiding him up here, I swear to God I’ll kill them all!”

Vago ran down the hall from Perret’s office. “Lower your voice,” he said. “This isn’t a beer hall. Where’s who?”

“You know who,” Rosen said. “Fernand Lemarque. He’s the one who whispers sale Juif. The one who put up those posters for that Front de la Jeunesse. You saw them: Meet and Unite, Youth of France, and all that rubbish, at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, of all places. They’re anti-parliament, anti-Semitic, anti-everything. He’s one of their little stooges. There’s a whole group of them. Third-years, fifth-years. From here, from the Beaux-Arts, from other schools all over the city. I know. I’ve been to their meetings. I’ve heard what they want to do to us.”