Finding sanctuary in his increasingly regular visits to the kindly wizard – sorry, antiques dealer – Theo befriends her. Hobie is the business partner of the dead man who, it turns out, was the uncle of the red-haired girl who, like Theo, has survived the attack.
And when, 100-odd pages after that, his new best friend actually tells him he looks like the boy wizard – ''Where's your broomstick?" "'Left it at Hogwarts,' I said" – you do start wondering what on earth Tartt is up to here. The sensation only deepens when, a few pages later, Theo gets new glasses that are, yes, "round, tortoiseshell". There he finds himself welcomed by Hobie, an eccentric but kindly antiques dealer who wears a "rich paisley robe with satin lapels" that 'fell almost to his ankles and flowed massively around him'.
Taken in by a school friend's wealthy yet emotionally chilly family on Park Avenue, and still grieving for his mother, he finally remembers to track down Hobart and Blackwell and ring the green bell. Since Theo's reprobate father ran off some months ago, he is effectively an orphan. Now, bloodied and dying, this same man presses an antique ring on Theo, which he tells him to take to a place called Hobart and Blackwell – "Ring the green bell!" He also urges him to grab Fabritius's painting, lying there frameless and unguarded, and take it home. Though Theo was stirred by the painting, he was even more stirred by a feisty red-haired girl whom he'd seen accompanying an elderly man around the exhibition. Caught in a rainstorm, ducking into a museum to take in an exhibition of old Dutch masters, she has just shown him her favourite, Fabritius's The Goldfinch – "the smallest in the exhibition and the simplest" – when the explosion hits. Theo is 13 when he survives a bomb attack that kills his mother.
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