Chapter Five

Los Angeles, California — Present Day

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She let him into her office because she wanted to see what he'd say when the door was closed, not because she'd decided anything yet.

It was not much of an office — a windowless converted supply closet on the humanities building's third floor that the department chair called shared faculty space and that Leah, in nine semesters of using it, had never once had to share, because nobody else adjuncting three sections a term for less than a parking permit's worth of dignity wanted it either. She cleared a stack of ungraded midterms off the second chair without apologizing for it, which she noted, afterward, was itself a kind of tell — she had decided, somewhere in the walk from the hallway, that this man was not someone she needed to perform competence for. That was either a good instinct or a very bad one. She hadn't worked out which yet.

He sat the way he'd stood, unhurried, hands loosely folded, and let her look at him for a moment before he spoke, which she also noted, because most people filled a silence like that out of nerves, and he clearly wasn't filling it for that reason.

"You said you'd read my dissertation."

"Chapters two and four. Twice." He said it without the performance of impressiveness people usually attached to a claim like that. "Chapter four is where you cite the Beirut fragment."

"The fragment I said, in a footnote, I could never fully verify, and that my advisor described in the margin as 'charming.'"

"I read that margin note too. Whoever scanned your dissertation for the library archive didn't crop very well."

"That's not an answer to the question I haven't asked yet, which is who you are."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

She waited. He let her.

"Fine," she said, when it became clear he was going to make her ask directly rather than volunteer it, which she also filed away, because it told her something about how he operated that she suspected he'd meant to tell her. "Are you Mossad?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

Something in his face moved that wasn't quite a smile, the same almost-smile from the hallway, and she understood, watching it, that this was as close as she was going to get to a straight answer for a while, and that she was going to have to decide what she thought about that before she decided anything else.

"I'm not going to help you," she said, and meant it, or meant to mean it, which at that point in her life had started to feel like roughly the same thing. "I don't know what you think this footnote is worth to you, but I've spent nine years being very carefully told that this material doesn't matter to anyone with actual institutional power, and now someone with actual institutional power walks into my office and it suddenly matters, and forgive me, but that's not vindication. That's just a different kind of person deciding when my work is useful."

"That's fair."

"I'm not finished. If this is about a family — a real family, somewhere, connected to whatever you think that fragment came from — then you should also know that the last time an institution with resources went looking for a story inside a community that's already survived more than its share of institutions with resources, it did not go well for the community. I'm not interested in being the polite academic face on an extraction. I've spent my whole career trying not to be the person who does that, even by accident."

He didn't argue with any of it. That was, she would think later, the single most disarming thing he could have done, because she had braced for him to argue.

"You're not wrong to say any of that," he said instead. "I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. I'm going to show you something, and then you can decide whether you still feel the same way, and if you do, I'll shake your hand and leave, and you'll never hear from me again. I mean that."

He took a single folded sheet of paper out of his jacket — not a phone, not a tablet, paper, which struck her as either old-fashioned or deliberate, and she suspected, watching him, that with this particular man there was very little daylight between those two things — and set it on the desk between them without unfolding it.

"Before I show you this. Your dissertation. The fragment you couldn't verify. Do you remember the phrase your source used for the object itself? Not your translation of it. The phrase, in the source dialect, before you rendered it into English."

She did remember it. She had spent four years with it. She could have recited it in her sleep, had, in fact, on at least one occasion her ex-husband had found more endearing than she'd meant it to be.

She said it.

He unfolded the paper and turned it around so she could read it, and it was the same four words, transliterated in a slightly different hand than hers, sourced — the header line told her, in the clipped, unbeautiful language of an intelligence transcript rather than the language of a manuscript catalogue — from a signals intercept dated four days ago, cross-referenced to a case file opened in Tehran in January of 1979.

Leah read it twice. She had the specific, vertiginous sensation of a scholar encountering, for the first time in her career, a piece of evidence that had not been filtered through a single other set of hands before reaching her — no editor, no translator, no committee deciding what it was allowed to mean — and underneath that, colder, the sensation of a private, unverifiable thing she had carried for nine years turning out to be neither private nor unverifiable at all.

"Where," she said, and heard her own voice come out flatter than she meant it to, "did this come from."

"A shipping communication. Sanctions corridor, the Iranian side of the Caspian. Somebody used that phrase to describe cargo they didn't want handled roughly." He watched her while he said it, not unkindly, the way she imagined he'd watched a great many people receive news they hadn't been ready for. "It's the exact phrase a source used in Tehran, forty-seven years ago, describing an object his family had kept hidden for longer than either of us can comfortably do the math on. He used it to me personally, the night before I lost him."

"An object."

"I think you already know what kind of object, Dr. Sarkisian. I think you've known what kind of object since you were twenty-six years old and a committee told you it was charming that you'd built a career on it."

She sat back. The chair, which had come with the office and predated her tenure in it by at least two department chairs, creaked in the specific way it always creaked, and she found the ordinariness of that sound almost funny, in the particular way things became funny to her exactly at the point they stopped being manageable any other way.

"You understand this is insane," she said. "You understand that if I stood up in a faculty meeting and said the words I think you're about to make me say out loud, they would finish the job my dissertation committee started."

"I'm not asking you to say anything in a faculty meeting."

"There's a war on. An actual, ongoing, people-dying war, in the exact country this family's descendants would have — " She stopped herself, aware of the shape the sentence was taking before she finished it, aware that somewhere inside the last ninety seconds she had stopped arguing about whether this was real and started arguing about what it would cost her to be involved in it, which was not the same argument at all, and which meant, whether she'd admitted it to herself yet or not, that the first argument was already over.

"There is," he said quietly. "Which is exactly why I'm not going to pretend to you that any part of this is safe, or simple, or that I can promise you it ends well for everyone whose name comes up. I've made that mistake with a family once already. I'm not going to make it with you by lying about the stakes."

Leah looked at the folded paper on her desk, at four transliterated words in a stranger's handwriting that matched, syllable for syllable, a fragment she had carried alone for nine years like a secret she wasn't sure she was allowed to have, and felt the particular vertigo of two entirely different fears standing in the same doorway at once — the fear of being wrong about this, which had governed most of her adult life, and the fear, much newer and much worse, of being right.

"I want to see the rest of the file," she said. "Not the summary. Whatever you actually wrote down in 1979."

"That's not a yes."

"No," she agreed, in something close to his own flat cadence, and heard, underneath it, the dry crack of humor she reached for whenever the alternative was admitting how frightened she actually was. "It's worse than a yes. It's curiosity. I've never once in my life been able to talk myself out of that."

For the first time since he'd said her name in the hallway, Ronen Katz allowed himself something that was, unambiguously, a smile — small, tired, and entirely without triumph in it, the particular expression of a man who had won something he took no pleasure in having needed to win.

"Sof sof," he said, and did not translate it, and this time, she noticed, he didn't try to hide that he'd said it, either.