Part Two — The Eastern Route · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Eight
Istanbul, Turkey — Day 11
Karam was already at the barrier when Leah came through, and she saw him before he saw her.
He stood a little apart from the crowd of drivers holding name cards, a lean man in a dark coat with a canvas bag at his feet. He was not looking at the doors. He was looking at the departures board across the hall, where a third of the lines had turned red. She had never known him to arrive anywhere after the appointed hour. She had once taken it for discipline. She had come to understand it as a private superstition. Punctuality was one of the few things a man in his position could command, and he had learned long ago not to waste what was available.
"You look like someone who has not slept since the peer review," he said, when she reached him.
"I look like someone who has done forty hours of arithmetic instead of sleeping. There's a difference, and I'm choosing to believe it matters."
He took her bag. She let him. It was a courtesy he had never abandoned, whatever she said, and she had stopped saying it.
They walked toward the doors. The terminal was crowded and quiet, as terminals are in a war. Families sat on their luggage. A soldier slept across three chairs. A woman knelt at the carrier's desk with a handful of papers and a voice that had gone past pleading into arithmetic. Two of the four airlines Leah would normally have taken here had simply stopped flying the route. The ones that remained were carrying six extra hours of detour and a surcharge for insurance. At passport control she had waited fifty minutes behind a family of eight. Nobody had complained. It was the patience of people who had learned that complaint changed nothing.
Her phone buzzed as they reached the rank. She read the message standing in the cold, and then she read it aloud, because Karam was watching her face.
"It's Ani. Clerk delivered. Name is Delnaz Panthaki. Independent historian. The archive is a household property in a town on the Gujarat coast called Udvada, registered to a trust under a family name that goes back further than the registry does. And then Vartan's added a line. Bombay clerk says every house on the street knows there is a locked room and none of them will say what is in it."
"Panthaki." Karam spoke it slowly, as he spoke any unfamiliar fact, weighing it before he allowed himself a reaction. "That is not an Armenian name."
"No. It's Parsi. Zoroastrian." She put the phone away. "They came to Gujarat from Persia, in the eighth or tenth century, depending on whom you believe. Udvada's famous in that world. It has the oldest fire in India, as they count, and a priesthood that guards who is allowed near it." She heard herself and stopped. "That's about all I know. I've read around it. I never thought I'd need to read in."
"A Zoroastrian household with a family archive and a word for keeping."
"The second family."
"Had you asked me a week ago to guess where the second family might be," Karam said, "I would have said Georgia. I would have said a monastery." He gave one breath that was not quite a laugh. "I would have been wrong in a way that explains why neither of us found them in four hundred years."
"Exactly that."
He picked up her bag. As he did so she saw that he was not looking at the queue of taxis. He was looking at the glass wall of the arrivals hall behind them, where a reflection held for an instant and moved on.
"Karam."
"Do not turn." He kept his voice at the pitch of a man commenting on the weather. "There is a man by the pillar near the exchange booth. Gray quilted jacket, a paper cup that he is not drinking from. He was at the gate when I arrived, two hours ago, and he was reading a newspaper. It was not a newspaper he could have been reading. It was in Cyrillic, and he turned its pages without reading them."
"Two hours."
"He is patient."
She kept her head still. Katz had spent fifty years teaching nervous people not to turn, and he had taught her. She found, to her faint irritation, that the lesson held. She took out her phone and held it up as though to read a map. In the black glass of the screen, tilted, she saw a pillar, a ticket machine, and a man in a gray jacket looking, with the elaborate boredom of a professional, at nothing in particular.
"One man," she said. "Or one of several."
"One that I have seen."
"Whose?"
"I do not know." He lifted the bag onto his shoulder. "A week ago I would have said that nobody in this city knew we were coming. I would have been correct. I am no longer sure that a week is the right measure."
She thought of Katz, in a kitchen, saying I intend to make one inquiry. She thought of Livnat's channel, and of a man in Pakistan with a long title who had been asked about money. A question, once asked, goes where questions go. She had not told anyone but Karam, Ani and Katz that she was flying to Istanbul. But Katz had a Director, and the Director wanted everything in writing.
"We should take the taxi," she said.
"We should take two."
They changed taxis twice and crossed the Grand Bazaar on foot. She did not ask what he was doing. She had learned to trust him in his element, and his element, it appeared, was any city where a man might lose another man in a crowd of people buying things.
The first driver was a heavy man with a rosary on the mirror. He drove with one hand and talked with the other. He talked about prices and the war, and about a cousin in Bursa who had lost a business when a container was held at a port for forty days. He said that the ferries were still running, that it was an outrage, that nothing in this country would be allowed to stop. Karam answered him in Turkish that was slow and perfectly correct. Leah sat low in the back seat with her bag on her knees and watched the road in the mirror. Three cars back, a gray sedan with a dented fender kept the distance of a driver who has been told to.
"The Grand Bazaar," Karam said to the driver. "The northern gate."
"Closed to cars, effendi."
"Then the nearest corner of it."
They left the taxi at a crowded junction and went in through an arch where a boy was selling tea from a brass tray. It was cold and dim under the vault, and the smell was of leather and roasted nuts and old carpet. Karam did not hurry. He stopped at a stall that sold scarves and took one down, and held it to the light with every sign of a man contemplating a gift for his daughter. Then he paid the stallholder too much, in lire, and said a few words in an undertone, and the stallholder smiled, and nodded toward the back.
"What did you say to him?" Leah murmured.
"That my wife was coming up behind me and would be angry about the price."
"I'm not your wife."
"He did not ask." Karam folded the scarf over his arm. "A stallholder who is told that a customer's wife is coming expects a woman to appear. He will not remember what the woman looked like. He will remember that she appeared."
He led her through the back of the stall, a curtained space smelling of dust and tea, and out through a narrow door into a lane no wider than her shoulders. They walked it quickly. Behind them, in the main vault, voices rose and fell. Leah did not look back. The lane gave onto a courtyard, and the courtyard onto a street of brass-workers, where a hundred small hammers were going at once and the noise was like rain on a tin roof.
It was in that noise, in the middle of a street she had never seen, that she let herself breathe.
"You have done this before."
"I have spent my working life in markets, buying from men who did not wish to be followed to their suppliers." He gave her the scarf. It was dark red, with a border of small gold flowers, and a good deal too expensive. "Put it on. It is cold, and you have come to Istanbul to buy gifts. It will make you invisible."
"It'll make me look like a tourist."
"That is what invisible is."
She laughed. She had not meant to. He looked, for a moment, almost shy.
They took a second taxi at the edge of the brass street, and a third at the quay where the ferries came in. When at last they reached a narrow house above a carpet dealer's shop, in a lane full of delivery scooters, neither had seen the gray sedan in forty minutes.
The rooms above the shop were smaller than she had expected. A desk, two chairs, a secure line on a shelf, a window that gave on a wall of drainpipes and a strip of sky. The man who had rented them was a friend of Katz's called Orhan, who was, Karam's note said, away visiting his sister. A kettle sat on a gas ring. There was a tin of tea and a plate of dry biscuits, and under the plate a card in careful English. Be at home. The carpet man downstairs knows nothing and sells nothing. Do not buy a carpet.
"He is thorough," Karam said.
"He's Katz's idea of a friend."
She dropped into a chair. She was aware, all at once, of every hour she had not slept. The room smelled of wool and tea and old wood, and the noise of the scooters came up through the floor like a distant argument.
Karam made tea. He did it as he did everything, correctly and without comment, and set a glass at her elbow and sat down across the desk. He had taken off his coat. In the thin gray light from the drainpipe window he looked exactly what he was. He was a produce importer from Beirut who had left his children with a neighbor and flown to Turkey to write a letter.
"The trust's accountant telephoned me twice yesterday," he said. "Routine, he said. Nothing about a compliance review is routine now. A transfer we have made a dozen times without incident was flagged for enhanced review, as Ani's was. I spent an hour on the telephone with a polite man in a call center, persuading him that a produce importer paying a research consultant in Mumbai was not evidence of anything more interesting than it appeared."
"Did it work?"
"Eventually. It always eventually works. It simply costs an hour each time, an hour it did not use to cost." He said it without bitterness, the flat accounting of a peace made long ago with the tax a war levies on the people who did not start it. "We will not be able to fly to Mumbai and knock on a door. Every step of this, the money, the travel, the telephone, will move more slowly than we want, and more slowly than whatever is moving toward her."
"Katz thinks Nassiri has a week on us." Leah rubbed her eyes. "Maybe more. He doesn't need banks. He doesn't need a research visa that takes ten working days. He needs a passport that isn't flagged and a border that will let him through, and he's had seventeen months to find both."
"Then we do not try to outrun him."
She looked up. Karam had turned his glass a quarter turn on the desk. There was in his stillness the quality she had seen at the worst moments of nearly three years, not panic, never panic, but a narrowing, his focus drawn to a point.
"He can move faster than we can. That is a fact, and I will not pretend otherwise. But there is one act that he cannot perform." He laid one finger on the desk. "He cannot offer her family what our history may be worth to them. An honest account, from the only other people on earth who have kept a charge of this size as long as they have. If she is frightened, and Ani believes that she is, then she is frightened of someone like him. We cannot reach her first by being faster. We can reach her first by being a different kind of arrival."
"The letter."
"The letter." He drew a pad toward him. "Both families on one page. That was your idea, and it was correct."
"It's the part that scares me."
"It should." He uncapped a pen. "It has never been done."
They worked through the afternoon, in longhand, as Leah had learned to trust over nearly three years for anything that mattered. The pen was Karam's. The pad was Orhan's. The light moved across the drainpipes and went from gray to yellow to a thin dusk the color of weak tea.
They began with the salutation, and it took them an hour.
"Dear Dr. Panthaki," Leah said. "We have the name now. It would be strange to write to the keeper of the household's records when we know who she is."
"We know her name because a registry clerk was paid." Karam looked at the page. "Is that not worth saying?"
"In the first line?"
"In the first line. It is the first honest thing the letter can do." He turned the pen. "We will say that we found her name by paying a man in Bombay, and that we are sorry to have done so. If she is afraid of being found, she should know, at once, how it was done. Someone who learns later what she was not told does not forgive the omission. She forgives the finding."
Leah wrote it. We have your name because a registry clerk was paid for it. We are sorry. We would rather you heard that from us. She read it back. It was ugly and exact and, she thought, true, and she left it.
The second paragraph was harder. They had to say what they were. Neither wanted a word that a stranger might read in the wrong light. The vocabulary of what they kept was a vocabulary of objects and bundles and wrapped shelves, and none of it could go on paper. Karam wrote a family that has kept a trust for four hundred years. Leah wrote three families. He crossed out trust and wrote a charge. She put entrusted in its place. They went back and forth like this for forty minutes, and the page filled with crossings-out, and the room grew darker.
Karam read each draft back to her in the formal English he used for documents. Leah cut. Each round she took out whatever sentence sounded more like an argument than an offering. Slowly, the letter shrank. The adjectives went first. Then the history. Then every sentence that began with we believe.
"What do we ask?" she said, at last.
"Nothing." Karam laid the pen down. "That is the whole of it. We ask for nothing. We tell her that we are people who keep a charge, that we have reason to think that she is one of us, that someone dangerous may be looking for the same door, and that we would like to meet her in a place of her choosing and tell her, in person, everything we know. We do not ask her for an answer. We do not ask her to confirm."
"She'll want to know what we want."
"She will wonder. That is not the same as asking." He folded his hands. "The ones who ask what we want are the ones who will not be told. She has a right to wonder, and she has the right to take her time. We are the ones who are late."
It was dark when they finished. Four paragraphs, neither of them fully loved and both of them trusted. Leah read it through in the light of the desk lamp, slowly, from the beginning. The last line said, Whatever you decide, we are grateful that someone else has been keeping faith. She had written it last. She had not known she meant it until she read it.
Karam folded the final page. He did it in thirds and then in half, with the economy of long practice. She watched his hands and thought, without knowing why, of an old woman in Beirut who had taught him to fold paper in just this way.
"Four hundred years," he said, "and this is still the only tool either family has ever really had."
He laid the folded page on the desk between them, in the light of the lamp.
"Not the object. The handwriting."