Chapter Eleven · Adam's Robe Book 1

Beirut, Lebanon — Present Day

Karam Yonan opened his door already knowing who they were, which told Leah, before he'd said a single word, that Father Yousef had called ahead — or that Bhatti had, which seemed, on reflection, considerably more likely, and considerably less kind.

He was somewhere in his forties, broad through the shoulders in the way of a man who'd spent years loading his own cargo rather than paying someone else to, with a face that held itself very carefully neutral right up until his eyes moved from Leah to Katz and stopped there, and something in his neutrality simply gave way.

"You're him." It wasn't a question, and his English carried the particular flatness of a man translating his own rage into a language calm enough to survive saying it aloud. "The young Israeli. My grandmother described you so many times I used to think I'd made you up as a boy — the officer who told them at the church gate that he'd get them all out, and then didn't."

"I got four of them out," Katz said. He did not step back, and he did not raise his hands, and he did not, Leah noticed, offer a single word in his own defense beyond the bare fact. "I did not get your great-grandfather out. I have never once told myself a version of that night where the second half of that sentence doesn't outweigh the first."

Karam held the door for a long moment, long enough that Leah understood he was deciding something considerably larger than whether to let them inside, and then he stepped back, and said, in a voice gone suddenly, exhaustedly quiet, "My grandmother forgave you before she died. She told me that too, more than once, usually right after telling me the part where she never wanted to see your face again. I never understood how a person held both of those at once for forty years. I'm not sure I understand it now. But she's not here to decide what happens in this room anymore, so I suppose that leaves it to me."

The apartment above his shuttered warehouse held the specific, layered clutter of a life built twice — Lebanese business ledgers stacked beside a small brass censer that had clearly traveled further and survived worse than anything else on the shelf, a framed photograph of a woman Leah understood, without being told, was the grandmother, taken somewhere that was almost certainly not Beirut, in clothes that were almost certainly Tehran, 1978, in a life that had not yet learned what was coming for it.

Karam made tea because his hands needed something to do, and told them, in fragments that came out of order the way grief always came out of order once a person finally let it, what his grandmother had told him across a childhood spent mostly in her care after his own mother died young — that the household had planned the escape for weeks, that her father had insisted the object leave the city before any of them did, that on the last night he had simply not come to the meeting point, and that nobody, in forty-seven years, had ever been able to tell her with certainty whether he'd been taken, or killed in the street chaos outright, or made a choice, at the very end, that the rest of his family was never meant to know the details of.

"She kept something," Karam said, finally, setting his cup down without having drunk from it. "A book. Small — I always thought it was a prayer book, growing up, because she treated it like one, kept it wrapped, never let me touch it until I was already a grown man with my own children to worry about losing. She told me, more than once, that I would know when it mattered that I finally read it, and that until then, my only job was to keep it safer than she'd been able to keep her own father." He looked at Leah for the first time with something other than wariness. "You're the reason it might finally matter. She said, near the end, that someone would come one day who could actually read it. I didn't believe her. I've believed a great many things my grandmother told me over the years and that one always felt, if I'm honest, like the one closest to a fairy tale."

He brought it out wrapped in the same undyed linen the ledger in Ch7 had used to wrap something else entirely, which Leah noted with a small, private ache she didn't have room to examine yet — a small leather-bound book, its spine cracked with handling rather than neglect, pages gone soft and dark at the edges from a century or more of hands that had opened it carefully and closed it just as carefully every time.

She read the first legible page in silence for nearly a minute before she trusted her own voice.

"It's the same cant," she said. "The same family hand, carried forward — I can see at least four different hands in here, four generations at minimum, each one taught by the one before. This isn't a copy, Karam. This is the actual ledger. Or most of it — some pages are missing entirely, cut out rather than lost, which tells me someone, at some point, decided certain entries were too dangerous to keep even in code." She turned two more pages, working the older, more formal hand of an entry that predated anything she'd yet seen, and felt her pulse do the thing it had done in the archive room in Tel Aviv, the thing she suspected it was simply going to keep doing for as long as this case lasted. "There's a location reference here. Distances, landmarks — a riverbed, a rail survey marker that shouldn't exist yet in the era this entry claims to be written, which means someone updated the description more recently than the entry's own date, probably to keep it useful as the landscape changed. It's not complete. Whoever cut those pages out took something we need with them. But it's close. This is the closest anyone has been in fourteen centuries."

Katz had not moved from where he stood near the window, and when Leah finally looked up at him, she found him watching Karam rather than the book, with an expression she had not yet seen on him in six days of learning his face — not guilt exactly, though guilt was still there, underneath, the way it always was with this man. Something closer to grief that had, for the first time in forty-seven years, been allowed to have somewhere to go other than back into himself.

"Your grandmother," Katz said quietly. "The last time I saw her — the four of you, in the truck, at the crossing. She was holding her daughter's hand so hard I thought she'd broken something. I've thought about that grip more times than I could count you a number for. I never knew if it was to keep your mother calm, or to keep herself from turning around and going back for him."

"Both," Karam said. "She told me it was both. She said she never forgave herself for not knowing, in the moment, which one she was actually doing." He picked the teacup back up, finally, and drank from it, and something in his shoulders came down half an inch, the particular release of a man who has been carrying a question for a great many years and has just been handed, if not an answer, at least confirmation that someone else had carried it too. "You should know I'm not doing this for you, Officer Katz. I'm doing it because she kept faith with a dead man for forty-seven years without ever once knowing if it meant anything, and I would like, before I'm the one who's gone, to find out that it did."

"That's the only reason either of us should be trusted with it," Leah said, and meant it more than she'd meant almost anything she'd said in this case so far.