the bellboy asked.It was early afternoon, and Eli had woken up only recently; he hadn’t noticed the bellboy board the elevator. He looked up, blinking, and remembered being given directions to Club Electrolite on his first night in the city.“The girl you’re looking for,” the bellboy said.“No. Not yet.”“Where have you been looking?” the bellboy asked, just before the doors opened into the lobby.“Everywhere,” Eli said.In the afternoons he walked through Montreal with a map of the city folded up small in his jacket pocket. He walked for miles, moved in and out of the subway system, tried to look at everyone he could in case they might be Lilia. It was an effort to keep his head up, to look into the faces of passersby; his eyes watered from the cold and then his eyelashes froze, and he was forever blinking against the winter light. In the old city he walked the old narrow streets along the waterfront, stopping into a café every time he lost feeling in his feet. He left the first footsteps in pristine snow in the deserted parks; he lingered in English bookstores in Westmount and French bookstores in Mile End, on the theory that Lilia might buy books in either language and might be just as desperate to escape the cold as he was.
