Chapter Twenty-Two · Adam's Robe Book 1

Tel Aviv, Israel — Present Day

Her mother called at four in the morning Tel Aviv time, which was six in the evening in Glendale, which meant nothing had waited for a decent hour on either end, and Leah understood that before she'd even found her phone in the dark, because her mother did not call. Her mother sent voice memos, warm and unhurried, things that could be listened to whenever the day finally allowed for them. A call at this hour, from this woman, was already its own complete sentence before either of them said a word.

"Auntie's fine," her mother said first, in English, too fast, the specific rushed order of a person who had learned, delivering hard news before, that you led with the reassurance even when the reassurance wasn't quite true yet. "She's fine, Leah, she's home, she's fine. But two men came to the house yesterday. From the ministry — Ettela'at, she thinks, though they didn't show papers she understood well enough to be certain. They asked about you."

Leah sat up fully in the dark hotel room, every trace of sleep gone at once, the phone pressed hard enough against her ear that she'd feel it later. "Asked what about me."

"Your work. Your travel. Who you've been meeting, what you've been researching, whether she's spoken to you recently and about what." Her mother's voice was doing the thing it did under real strain, sliding half a register lower, the accent she'd spent thirty years softening for American ears coming back unguarded. "They went through her computer. They took her phone for six hours and gave it back and didn't explain why. She's seventy-three years old, Leah, and two strangers stood in her kitchen asking her to account for a niece she hasn't seen in person in four years, and she had no idea — no idea at all — what to tell them, because none of us know what you're actually doing over there. You told me a research trip. You told me a grant."

"Mama—"

"Don't." It wasn't sharp. It was worse than sharp — it was frightened, plainly and completely, in a way Leah had heard from her mother perhaps three times in her whole life. "I am not asking you to tell me the truth right now, on this phone, at this hour. I am asking you to understand what it looked like from my sister's kitchen table. Whatever you are actually doing, it has a shape big enough now that it reached her, and she has never in her life done anything except keep a house and love her family and stay exactly as quiet as three generations have taught her it is safest to stay. She did not choose this. None of them chose this."

Leah closed her eyes. Somewhere down the hall, through the thin hotel wall, she could hear Katz's own line ringing once and going quiet, which meant Cho had already found out, which meant this had already stopped being a private family matter roughly the moment it started.

"Is she safe now," Leah said, because it was the only question with an answer she could actually use.

"For tonight. Nobody has come back a second time. That is the entire extent of what 'safe' means for a family in that country right now, and you know that better than any of us, apparently, since you seem to have built a career out of knowing exactly that kind of thing about people who are not us." Her mother's voice cracked, once, on the last word, and steadied itself with visible effort. "I need you to tell me you're going to stop whatever this is."

"I can't tell you that."

The silence that followed lasted long enough that Leah checked, twice, whether the call had dropped.

"Then tell me it's worth it," her mother said finally, quietly, in Armenian this time, the language sliding into the space English had apparently stopped being able to hold, "because I have spent thirty years teaching you to be careful with what you claim as yours, Lianna, and I would like, before I hang up this phone, to understand what you have decided is worth more than your aunt's kitchen table."

Leah answered her in Armenian too, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit counting, the words coming slower than her mother's, worn from disuse rather than absence, and found, saying them, that something in her chest that had been braced for years against exactly this kind of conversation finally, quietly, let go. "I don't have the words for what it's worth yet, Mama. I promise you I will, when this is over, and I promise you I will not let it cost Auntie anything more than a frightening afternoon if there is any way at all in my power to prevent that. That's not nothing. I know it isn't everything you're asking for."

Katz found her twenty minutes later in the hotel corridor, still in yesterday's clothes, and did not ask how she was, which she was grateful for, because she did not yet know the honest answer.

"Cho's already working it," he said. "There are channels — not many, and none of them fast, and I won't pretend to you that any of them are certain. But there are people whose entire job is quietly making sure an old woman in Isfahan doesn't become collateral in someone else's war, and Cho has already put your aunt's name in front of every one of them she has access to."

"How did they even find her. We've been careful. You taught me to be careful."

"You have been careful." He said it without hedging, which she needed more than she'd expected to. "Beirut wasn't. Not because either of us did anything wrong there, but because Bourj Hammoud is a neighborhood that reports everything interesting to someone, eventually, and a foreign academic asking pointed questions about a specific old family in a specific old ledger was always going to be interesting to somebody with a reason to pass it along to Tehran. I should have accounted for that risk before I ever took you there, and I didn't, because I was thinking about the ledger and not about who else might be listening while we read it."

"That's not the same as your fault."

"No," Katz agreed, and something in his face, for just a moment, went somewhere she recognized from the one time he'd told her about Malko Yonan's raised hand disappearing into a crowd. "It's worse than fault. It's the specific thing I told myself, forty-seven years ago, I would never let happen to another family because of a choice I made. I have now made it twice, Dr. Sarkisian, four decades apart, and I would like you to understand that I am not offering you comfort right now. I am telling you the truth because you have just earned the right to hear it plainly, the same way I wish, more than almost anything else in my life, that someone had told it to me plainly in 1979."

Leah sat down on the corridor floor, back against the wall, because standing had stopped feeling like something she could keep doing convincingly. "I keep thinking about Karam. Handing us his grandmother's book. Trusting us with the one thing his family had left, and I didn't once, sitting in that room, let myself really imagine what it would cost someone still inside the country if we got this wrong."

"You're imagining it now." Katz lowered himself down beside her, slower than she'd ever seen him move, an old man's carefulness rather than a spy's. "That's not nothing either. It's the difference, I've come to believe, between the kind of person this work is allowed to use and the kind it eventually breaks. You get to choose which of those you're going to be, Leah. Nobody gets to choose it for you. But you should choose it today, clear-eyed, with your aunt's kitchen table actually in the room with you — not the version of this work you signed up for nine weeks ago, before any of it had a real address."

"And if I choose to keep going."

"Then we keep going considerably more carefully than we have been," he said, "and we accept, both of us, that careful was never actually going to be enough to make this cost nothing. It was only ever going to make it cost less than it could have." He was quiet for a moment, watching the same stretch of hallway carpet she was. "I would still make the same choice again, for what that's worth. I would simply like, this time, to have been honest with myself about the price a little sooner than four decades after paying it."