The last image we had of Madame was her pixelated face on the casino's security footage, captured from three different angles.

She comes out through the doors with that fat Chinese man. He checks his watch. Madame presses herself against him. He slips an arm around her waist, and the two of them walk down the steps into Ouzo. That's it.

There is another recording, from the parking garage, though in that one Madame's face isn't visible, and the picture quality is even worse than the first. (Pete — who had smuggled the surveillance tapes out of the security room — said it was because the image had been digitally zoomed in.) A few steps before they reach a black Bentley parked in the last row of the garage, Madame parts ways with the man. She walks around to the passenger side, opens her handbag, rummages inside for a moment, then pulls out a cigarette. None of us had ever actually seen the pack, but we all knew the brand: Camel Blue Lights. She takes a few drags, then finally gets into the car, and drives out of Ouzo for the last time.

Spring said he thought Madame was smiling as she walked out.

"Look," she said. "Right here. Madame tilts her head back a little and raises her hand to her face, like she's brushing her hair aside."

Then she looked at us and asked, "Don't people smile like that sometimes?"

"The bridge of her nose would wrinkle whenever she smiled."

If we accept what Spring claimed — that Madame really was smiling — then her behavior that night does seem a little unusual. But not nearly unusual enough to make anyone suspect madness. At that moment she could have been laughing at anything: a joke the Chinese man had just told her; a memory that had suddenly come back; even a burst of gas that had escaped from one of them without warning.

The problem is that none of the cameras — mounted about a meter above her head — captured her face clearly enough for us to tell. There wasn't much to be learned from those grainy gray squares. Had it not been for Madame's freshly cut hair, which made her look almost boyish and childlike, and somehow made the whole affair even more absurd, we couldn't even have been certain the woman in the footage was really Madame.

Max was the first one to see her that night. He told us she had walked into the casino sometime around ten, maybe ten-thirty. (Later, when we checked the recordings, we found the exact time of her arrival: 10:24 p.m.) Madame had returned after an unprecedented absence of four months. We never found out why she'd disappeared.

No matter how many times we replayed the last night we'd seen her before she vanished, everything looked perfectly ordinary. She had started gambling with a few hundred dollars, and by the end of the night had walked over to the cashier seven or eight hundred dollars ahead. Essi had shown up, as usual, made a scene about Madame ruining his reputation, and then left. Kelly even said she'd been standing nearby while Madame cashed out. Madame had counted the money, smiled at Kelly, and said, "See you tomorrow."

But she didn't come back the next day. Or the day after that. Or any day after that — not for four long months.

During that time, the only word any of us received from her was a brief text message she'd sent Beverly. She said she was tied up taking care of a few things in her life, that she'd be back soon, and ended the message with the praying-hands emoji. We kept after Beverly. "You know where she lives," we'd tell him. "Why don't you just stop by and see if everything's all right?" He never agreed. "If that son of a bitch sees me" — meaning Essi — "either he'll kill me, or I'll kill him."

Max said Madame had dressed up that night — lipstick, eye shadow, the work. He said that unlike the past few years, when she'd usually come in looking distracted, offer a hurried greeting, and head straight for the gaming tables, this time she had stopped to chat with him. They'd talked for quite a while. She'd even asked about Emily and how her piano lessons were going.

When Max told her Emily had been practicing day and night for the conservatory entrance competition, Madame said, "Tell Emily to practice Mendelssohn's sonatas. One of the most influential members of the board adores Mendelssohn." Then she added that she'd make a point of putting in a good word for Emily. She probably still had the scores somewhere among the boxes in storage — or maybe in one of her suitcases — and she'd bring them over next time.

But then, as though another thought had occurred to her, she changed her mind. "No," she said. "Better let her find them herself. The search — the knocking on doors, the chasing after sheet music — is a lesson in itself." Then she told Max to cherish these days. "A few years from now, when Emily grows up, she won't call you Papa Max anymore. She won't care much for what you have to say." After a brief pause she added, "Though perhaps you'll have better luck than I did. Or maybe you raised her better."

Max said that when he asked where she'd been all those months, Madame gave him essentially the same answer she'd given Beverly — only in different words, just as vague, just as superficial — and neatly brushed the question aside. Then she reached into her handbag and pulled out a small old photograph. It showed a woman with a center part and a long ruffled skirt, seated at a piano. "This," Madame said, handing it to him, "is for the future Clara Schumann."

None of us remembered the details very clearly, but Max said most of the tables hadn't even been operating that night. It had been an ordinary Monday, business as usual — meaning slow. With all the rumors circulating about the imminent collapse of the state retirement and pension system, the casino had grown even quieter than usual.

He said Madame smelled faintly of Hennessy, as she always did after stopping by McKenzie's for a shot or two before coming over to Ouzo. What struck him was something else. Instead of hurrying to the tables, as she normally did, that night she'd wandered through the casino as though she'd come simply to enjoy herself, like a tourist who has just stumbled upon the place, not a regular who knew every inch of it better than her own backyard. She strolled from table to table, greeted people, lingered to watch games, exchanged a few words here and there. She wandered around so long that by the time Max had turned to welcome the next group of customers, he'd lost sight of her somewhere behind the rows of slot machines.

When all was said and done, with the nurses at his sides and his walnut stick lethargically tapping the cobblestones and fading away, all that was left for him to say was, "The quick brown fox…" trailing off in a deep sigh heaving from his chest.

This was no cliffhanger. We all knew what would happen to the fox. He would jump over a dog — a lazy dog — and vanish. Just like Abbas did.

It's not easy to explain vanishing divorced from magic. Then again, maybe there was magic involved. Abbas was always fond of the occult. At his lavish parties, he'd often amuse his guests — an odd mix of art-world luminaries, washed-up politicians, random friends and acquaintances, and once a confused rabbi — with sleight of hand and amateur card tricks. So it wasn't entirely out of the question that he might have pulled off one last trick. That all these years we'd unknowingly been part of his show, waiting for the grand reveal. Will it ever come?

The first person to report Abbas missing was a Life magazine reporter. He had contacted Maggie — Abbas's assistant-turned-his-confidant-turned-wife-turned-caretaker (and likely his sole beneficiary) — to schedule an interview. She agreed, on one condition: the conversation must be kept under 23 minutes.

"That's oddly specific," said the reporter with an invisible grin and a dusty question mark.

"Not when your short-term memory dictates it," said Maggie.

Twenty-three minutes were all Abbas could retain — conversations, events, videos of airplanes landing on tarmac. The rest would slip away, seeping through the white matter of his brain into some unknowable black hole, forever outside science's reach.

But when the reporter called back — exactly one minute before their scheduled time — he couldn't reach Abbas. "Abbas was gone," the institution informed him.

Gone? Gone where? "Was he discharged?"

No. Abbas was in no condition to be discharged — not anytime soon. He would need to remember things for longer than 23 minutes to be let out into the free world. And it would take longer than that — considering his slow pace, his bad back, and the eroded hip he wouldn't surrender to surgeons — to get through the labyrinthine corridors, down two flights of stairs (he was afraid of elevators, anything that moved vertically, of the y-axis really), past the manned lobby, and across the courtyard into the real life beyond.

By the reporter's count, it would take at least 35 minutes for a man like Abbas to leave the institution. His memory would've failed him long before then, leaving him stranded mid-escape, perhaps beneath the old weeping willow, shivering and confused, wondering what the hell he was doing outside in the freezing cold of the New England January.

"What's more," wrote the reporter in his hastily researched and vaguely self-pitying column, as if lamenting his lost interview with the famed photographer, "to get out, Abbas would have needed more sophisticated language skills than the one sentence he carried as a catch-all tool for self-expression: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'"

It had all started with an old Yashica camera she had found in her uncle's bookshelf when she was thirteen. It was an Electro 35 rangefinder in gray and black, with a manual focus and a 45mm lens that made her feel calm when she turned it back and forth. The camera was behind the dusty volumes of Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov and Camus, past an unopened pack of Steadler pencils, a handful of rusty bullet jackets her uncle had brought as souvenirs from the war, and several stacks of cigarette packets neatly lining up the backside of the shelf.

She took the camera home and managed to hide it from everybody for the next four years. She learned about framing, lenses and compositions by playing around with it and reading the occasional magazines she stole from the newsstands and smuggled under her school uniform. It took her only three months to learn the basics. Never one to care much for food or snacks, and lacking the drive to buy with her allowance the extra-curricular books encouraged by the school, she would religiously set aside most of her monthly budget for buying film rolls and having them developed at Mr. Niyakan's photo store — the selection of this store was an arduous process, as it had to be within reasonable distance from home, preferably on her daily route to and from school, so as not to stir her mom's suspicions and spare herself the inevitable "where have you been"s, yet not so close that it could jeopardize her hush-hush enterprise if, on a Friday afternoon, her father set foot in the store to pick up his own family photos and casually heard from Mr. Niyakan that he could also pick up the "other rolls."

After a while, she settled on a routine. She would buy two rolls at a time. Always in pairs — it was all she could buy with her meager budget — always Fujifilm. This latter was purely an aesthetic decision, reached after poring over photography magazines and interrogating the friendly store owner, if the store was not too busy (it rarely was), and he was in a good mood (he usually was). She had, of course, experimented with other brands. At the time, there were only two others in the market: Konica, the cheapest of the bunch, which came in pale blue boxes and always delivered the most life-like colors, especially in the portraits she took of stray cats, school kids, and occasional kind and photogenic passersby, but whose films were oversensitive to hot temperature and direct sunlight, making it impossible to capture Tehran's long and bright summer days; and Kodak, with its lovely yellow packaging and vivid, almost cartoonish colors which made for perfect outdoor photography ("did you do any retouching on these?"), but when the developed photos came out of the white paper packet — with the elegant blue stamp of the Niyakan name calligraphed on top — she could always detect a hint of reddish hue spread across the glossy surface, a fact which Mr. Niyakan always refused to accept, blaming it, half-jokingly, on her poor vision and lack of sleep, before settling on his favorite scapegoats, the store's bad lighting and his son Behrooz: "I must've told this boy to fix these damn lights like a hundred times already, but he doesn't listen. Not one time has he listened to me. Has his big head in the clouds, always, always… Behroooooz!"

She would go through the rolls in a few days, and each time had to suffer through several weeks of merely looking at the photos with a mixture of fascination and disgust, exploring the neighborhood and planning for her next shots. Later, when she learned how to develop the films herself in a makeshift darkroom she had set up in the corner of their unused basement, she would go through rolls like a ravenous rabbit through an unmanned garden.

When a few years later her mother found the camera wrapped in an old winter shawl and tucked away at the back of the bottom drawer of her closet, she had already won, under the alias Sepideh Baraheni, a few minor awards in local photography competitions. By then, nobody cared anymore; the original owner of the camera, her dear Uncle Kaveh, had been dead for nearly five years. Her father never cared one way or another about her hobbies and was satisfied so long as she did not do anything to distract him from whatever he was busy with at the time — a new model airplane, a new atlas to translate, an intriguing new CNS abnormality worth exploring. The last hurdle was her mother, who, after years of admirable resistance and sidelong glances, had at last succumbed to the idea that her only child, prized and pampered as she was, was not to become yet another doctor in the proud tradition of the Kolahdooz family. To her mother, she was many things at this point, all variations on a familiar theme: "a disappointment," "too far gone," "hopeless," "a disgrace." Whatever the coloration of the day, though, it always concluded on the same familiar notes: "Listen to me, I have torn a few shirts more than you" — a coda she would soon learn to accompany in a mocking tone, like an out-of-tune viola, much to her mother's irritation. After a while, her mother gave up and watched in silence, but not without an occasional doleful glance, as she prepared for Konkoor, the National Entrance Exam, to enter art school.

After the secret was discovered, the story made its way through dinner party conversations and social gatherings, a chronology of how she had found the camera and kept it "under wraps" — a bad pun her older uncle Kourosh, with an expectant grin, always liked to make — all these years. Throughout the years, the story got embellished with new twists and turns and, like an ancient myth getting bulkier and more convoluted with each creative retelling to a new generation, was expanded to include impromptu details ("by the way, did you know that…") and hefty appendices ("Kourosh, you have to tell him the backstory of how she…").

When I heard the story on our first trip back to Iran, it had already taken the form of a well-rounded epic, told to me, in a post-Nabokovian structure, by a handful of unreliable narrators who were all gathered at her grandfather's house in the north of Tehran to meet this new stranger who had the audacity to have, without asking for their permission, proposed to their beloved Golnaz.