Chapter Thirteen · Adam's Robe Book 3

Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 18

The immigration officer at Mumbai stamped the passport without lifting his eyes.

Nassiri had prepared for the interview. He had prepared for forty minutes of questions in a booth with a locked door, and a telephone call to the consultant's office in Isfahan that would be answered by a woman Karimi paid. He had rehearsed the name of the survey office, the name of the monument, the name of the trust. None of it was needed. The officer was young and tired and was reading his phone. He glanced at the passport, glanced at the visa, and made a mark, and said "Next" in a voice already looking past Nassiri to the family of six behind him.

Nassiri walked through the barrier into the arrivals hall. He kept his pace even. Under his shirt the cloth lay against his skin as it always did, and he felt its warmth. He told himself what he had told himself on a hill road and in a tea house at Colombo. The officer was tired. The queue was long. It was a hot morning, and the system took its mercies where it found them.

The officer did not go on the list. There was nothing to write beside his name. No one had been hurt.

The slow train north took four hours. It stopped at every halt and at several places that were not halts. At one of them a boy came through the carriage selling sliced green mango with salt, and an old woman in the opposite seat bought two pieces and gave one to Nassiri unasked. He took it. It was sour and bright, and he ate it with a faint, absurd gratitude, watching the flat land go by. There were salt pans and low hedges and whitewashed shrines at the edge of fields. The war had not seemed to reach it. Women walked on the embankments with bundles on their heads. A man ploughed with two white oxen. Nothing in the country said that a gray line of ships lay on a sea to the west, or that a city he had left was hungry.

At a halt with a crooked sign he got down. It said Udvada. He was the only person to do so.

The town was smaller than he had expected and quieter than anything he had seen in three years.

It lay along a single road that ran from the station toward the sea, with lanes going off it at angles like the ribs of a leaf. The houses were low and old, with deep verandas and tiled roofs, in the faded ochres and blues of places where paint is an occasion. There were no cars. A man on a bicycle went by with a sack of rice on the carrier. In the middle of the town stood the sanctuary that gave the place its name, behind a high wall and a gate of dark wood. A board on the wall said, in English and in Gujarati, that persons not of the Zoroastrian faith could not enter.

He read it twice. It was courteous, and it was absolute. He found that he respected it more than he would have respected a locked door.

The pilgrim houses along the road stood half empty. He counted five with their shutters closed. In ordinary years, he supposed, the believers came from Iran to the oldest fire in this country, in coaches and on foot, and filled the lanes with their dust and their songs. Now the lanes were still. Those from inside Iran could not leave, and those from across the water had stopped sailing, and the town sat in the sun with its doors open and waited for people who were not coming.

He took a room at a guesthouse near the station. The widow who ran it, in a faded sari, looked at his passport and at the title Dr. She told him that her last scholar had stayed three weeks and left owing her for tea. He paid a week in advance. She told him where the good tea was.

By noon he had found the family.

It was almost insultingly easy. He had gone into a shop that sold brass lamps and rolls of cotton. He had spoken for ten minutes to the proprietor about heritage and old houses, and had mentioned, as one makes conversation, that he had heard of an old priestly family with an archive, the Panthakis. The shopkeeper, a plump cheerful man with a ledger open before him, had not hesitated. He had pointed down the road. Second lane, the green door, he had said. You cannot miss it, but they are private people. He had said it kindly, and had asked nothing about why Nassiri wanted to know.

Nassiri thanked him. He bought a small brass lamp he did not want. Out in the street the heat came up from the stones. The warmth under his shirt did not change. He stood with the lamp in his hand and thought: A stranger in a country he has never seen asks for the one house in the town that wishes to be unfound, and is told its name in ten minutes.

It had a plain explanation. It was a small town. The family was known. A foreigner who asked politely was told.

He put the lamp in his bag and went to look at the house.

He kept away from the door. In thirty-three months he had learned that a plan works or fails less by the boldness of its approach than by the quality of the watching that comes first. He spent the rest of that day walking the streets slowly, at the pace of a visitor with a scholar's interest in Zoroastrian settlement architecture, and cataloguing the house from a distance.

It stood at the end of the second lane, with a green door in a whitewashed wall. The wall ran round a courtyard that he could see only in fragments, through a gap where a tree overhung the top. It was a peepal, by the shape of the leaves. Beyond the tree rose the roof of a larger house, two stories, with a veranda. At the back, on the ground floor, a single window faced east. It was narrow and had shutters of dark wood. In an ordinary house a window of that width lit a pantry. This one had been placed to light a table.

The room, he thought, and could not have said why.

He sat for an hour on a low wall opposite, with a newspaper in Gujarati that he could not read and a glass of sweet tea that a boy had brought without being asked. It was a quiet watch. A woman of sixty in a gray sari came out and swept the step with a short broom, with hard, definite strokes that disapproved of dust. She looked up the lane once, at him, and he met her eyes and gave the small, apologetic nod of a stranger who knows he is in the way. She frowned and went in.

An hour later an old man came to the gate.

He was old, tall, in white, with a white beard and a stoop that had not yet defeated him. He stood in the open door with one hand on the frame and looked down the lane. It was a long, unfocused look, such as one gives from a threshold at the end of an afternoon to see what the evening is doing. Nassiri raised the paper an inch. The old man's gaze traveled slowly along the wall, and the tree, and the boy who was returning for the glass, and came to rest on the place where Nassiri sat.

It stayed there a moment. It was not suspicious. It was not anything Nassiri could name. It was merely attentive, as one is attentive to a sound in another room, and then the old man inclined his head, slightly, in the direction of the lane, and went in.

Nassiri sat quite still with his heart going evenly and the paper in his hand.

He had been seen. He doubted that he had been identified. The old man had read, surely, no more in his face than the face of a foreigner on a wall. But he knew, as one knows in the body, that a signal had passed between them that he did not understand. He felt the cloth against his ribs, steady. A priest of eighty looks down a lane at evening and sees whatever is there. He had the explanation, and it was perfectly good. He had a great many such, and they stood in a row.

He saw the other man at four o'clock.

The square at the center of the town was no more than a widening of the main road, where three lanes met in front of the sanctuary wall. There was a tree, a well with a tin roof, and a tea stall with a canvas awning. Under the awning two old men played a board game in a silence that suggested a quarrel of many years. Nassiri had taken a glass at the end of the counter, in the shade. The afternoon was at its slowest. A dog lay in the road.

A man crossed the square from the direction of the station.

He wore Western clothes, a pale shirt and dark trousers, with a canvas bag over one shoulder. He was lean, about fifty, with a long face and gray hair cropped close. He walked with the watchfulness of a man doing what Nassiri was doing. He had dressed to be overlooked, and he was overlooked, by the tea drinkers and the dog and the two old men with their board. Nassiri alone saw him.

He saw the walk.

It was a particular walk. The man carried his weight a little forward on the balls of his feet, head level, left shoulder slightly lower than the right. It was as if he had always carried a load on that side and had only lately learned to put it down. Nassiri had seen it once before, from a wall in a lane in Isfahan, on the night he turned away from an old woman's gate. That night he had found a line he did not wish to cross.

For three full seconds he held his breath.

It is not him, he thought. It is a stranger with a similar carriage. You have been alone for thirty-three months, and you see your worst outcomes in every man who crosses a square. He said it, and heard it, and set it down beside the heat and the awning and the dog. Then the man glanced to his left at a shop window, and for half a second the long jaw turned into the light, and Nassiri understood that he was not mistaken.

Karam Yonan never looked toward the stall.

He crossed the square without breaking stride. He passed within four meters of Nassiri, close enough that Nassiri could have named the brand of his watch. He looked at the sanctuary wall, and at the well, and at a boy with a cart, and went down the side street toward the guesthouses in the east of the town, and was gone.

Nassiri put his glass on the counter. His hand was steady. He noticed that, and was not pleased.

He ran the numbers. They were easy, and he disliked each one. If Karam was here, the others were here, or near. They had come ahead of any schedule that he had built from a slip of Ghorbani's and a rumor about a letter. They were moving on a strength he could not read. It meant that Karam, a produce importer with children and a formal manner, had crossed half a continent on what could only be an invitation, and that the household behind the green door had given one.

She has already answered them, he thought. She wrote before I came.

It did not alarm him. It humbled him. He had assumed that he was running ahead. All this while he had been walking behind.

He stayed where he was. Following would reveal that he had a reason to follow, and he would not pay that price for a certainty he could not confirm without paying it. He paid for the tea. He walked back to the guesthouse on the far side of town by the long way, past the station and the closed pilgrim houses, with the brass lamp knocking against his hip in his bag. He never once looked behind him.

In the evening he washed.

The bathroom of the guesthouse was a concrete cell with a tap and a bucket and a drain in the floor. He took off the cotton shirt and then, as he did once in a few days and never for longer than he must, the cloth. It came away from his skin like a hand being withdrawn. He stood in the dim yellow light of a bulb with it across his forearm and was cold, abruptly, to the bone, as he was always cold in these minutes. It was the stone floor, he told himself. It was a bare body in an unheated room.

He washed his face and chest and arms. He rinsed the cloth in the bucket, quickly, as one dips a flag in a stream. It took the water, and gave it back, and when he lifted it out and shook it the surface was dry. Not damp. Dry. It lay across his arm weightless and faintly warm. He looked at it for a long moment, under the bulb, with the tap dripping into the bucket.

A fine weave, he told himself. It sheds water. Some fabrics do.

He put it on, and the warmth came up through him like a tide coming back to a beach, and the cold was gone as if it had never been.

He sat on the bed afterward with the notebook open on his knee. He wrote nothing. He read the short column at the back. Soltani. Ghorbani. A conscript. A child's mouth. It was not long. He had been cautious, and the list was short.

He thought of what he had come to offer. He had thought of it on the dhow and in the tea house and on the train, and it had not changed. It was not a demand and it was not a plea. Rostami had pleaded, dressed in conviction, and had died proving that it altered nothing. Nassiri meant to bring the household a plainer thing: the fact of what he had done alone, on a mountain, and what he had learned doing it, which no comfortable distance had taught either family in four hundred years. He could not tell whether a household built around being watched would recognize that for what it was. They might see in him exactly the man their doctrine existed to guard against.

He thought, I will find out honestly, in my own time.

Then, lying down fully dressed, with the lamp off and the fan turning above him in the dark, he thought of a long jaw and a level head, and of Karam passing within four meters of him without looking round. In my own time, he thought again. It sounded, now, like what people say when they have run out of it.

Karam felt it too, crossing the square that afternoon, though he could not have said afterward what had touched him.

It was at the back of the neck. A stillness at the edge of the tea stall's shade had registered, for half a second, as more deliberate than the ordinary stillness of a man drinking tea in the heat. He kept walking. He had learned to trust such a feeling and also to distrust his certainty about what it said. He went on at the same pace toward the guesthouse where Leah was waiting, and made the quiet calculation that had kept him functional through a war he had not asked to join. Not yet a threat. Worth mentioning. Not worth stopping for.

He mentioned it an hour later all the same, at the small table in their room where Leah had spread out the last of Vartan's plan.

"There was a man at a tea stall in the square," he said. "Nothing happened. Nobody approached me, and nobody followed me that I could confirm. But the way he stood made the back of my neck do what it used to do at a checkpoint I did not trust. I have learned not to dismiss that feeling because I cannot name a reason."

Leah looked up. He watched her do the sum he had already done. Three parties. One small town. A household that had no idea how many kinds of attention its decision to speak had drawn.

"Nassiri," she said. It was not quite a question.

"I do not know. I did not see his face. A half-second of instinct is not an identification." He folded his hands. "But if it is him, then he is already here. Ahead of Vartan's timeline and ahead of anything we planned. I think we must assume the worse version of that, because the comfortable version has been wrong already."

Leah was silent a long moment. The plan on the table, which had looked sound five minutes before, looked suddenly much less so. She reached for her phone without seeming to decide to. Ani first, then Katz.

"If he's here," she said, half to Karam and half to the room, "then we don't have six more days to arrive carefully together." She began to type. "We have however long it takes him to decide how he wants to knock."

She finished the message and read it over. It was five words long.

We don't have six days.