After 20 years as a plumber, Erich Rodick had never heard radiators as noisy as Mrs. Ecaterina Zina’s. They were steam radiators, which frequently get noisy when the hot steam meets the condensed water. Erich went to start bleeding them off, but Mrs. Zina insisted, in her old-country accent, that he could not remove any of the liquid from the radiators today. “It won’t hurt the radiator any, and if too much water comes out we’ll fill it back up,” he told her. “No,” Mrs. Zina insisted, “you do not understand.” These old Romanian ladies were very particular, Erich knew, from long experience. Mrs. Zina, for instance, only wanted a Romanian plumber. As if an Italian or Puerto Rican couldn’t crack open a pipe with a crescent wrench. And try telling her about basic physics. Radiators banged because of excess steam, but Mrs. Zina wouldn’t listen to him. She was rambling about how much better the soil was in the old country, how richer and more life-sustaining. She leaned in, and told Erich that she had brought a box of such soil over from Romania. And then raised her eyebrow. The banging of the pipes interrupted the plumber’s thoughts: it sounded like a prisoner rattling his cage bars. Prisoner… in a flash, Erich connected the elements of the story – Romania, box of soil, a trapped mist -- and leapt away from the radiator, from the thing inside it. Mrs. Zina nodded at him. “I brought him here, many years ago, when he had power over me. I tricked him into entering the pipes as steam to check a leak, and I trapped him. Now you understand?” Erich came back the next morning at daybreak. Inside his tool box, among the o-rings and plumber’s putty, were some wooden shims for propping up uneven radiators. They looked for all the world like sharpened stakes.

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