Part One — The Other Line · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Two
Los Angeles, California — Day 1
The assignment had come in nine days earlier, and Leah had put it off for eight.
Review requests reached her through the journal's portal with the author's name stripped out and a number put in its place. This one was Submission 4471. She refereed four or five papers a year for Near Eastern Religious Studies, mostly because a department expects its junior people to, and most of what came through was competent and forgettable. She read each the way a structural engineer walks a building. She checked what bore weight, signed off, and moved on.
She opened this one at her desk before nine, with the door shut and a coffee going cold at her elbow.
The office was a supply closet on the third floor of the humanities building, which the department called shared faculty space. It had no window. A grille above the door breathed on her in a steady, unfriendly rhythm, and from the corridor came the sound of Peter Haldane's radio, which he kept low and never turned off. The news had not changed in weeks. Another tanker boarded in the strait. Another round of talks that did not take place. She had stopped hearing it, as she had stopped hearing the vent.
The paper was a study of Sassanid court record-keeping, dry even by the standards of the genre. It dealt in tax rolls and delivery ledgers, and she had come to love that material for the reason her graduate cohort had found it tedious. Clerks did not lie the way storytellers did. A bored man logging a consignment had no reason to improve it. The author worked through a fragmentary inventory from a provincial treasury near Ctesiphon, sixth century, most of it grain and cloth and tribute on its way to somewhere more important. Then, near the end, the paper gave a whole paragraph to a single line item that had baffled everyone who catalogued the document before.
A garment, whole, without division, received of a family from the eastern hills, its provenance older than the recording of it, kept apart from all other holdings by order of the household steward.
Leah stopped and read it again. Then she read it a third time, aloud, in a low voice, to the grille.
Sassanid inventories were full of garments. Most were diplomatic gifts, the small change of a court that ran on presents. What stopped her was the phrase. The translator had put whole, without division where an ordinary scholar would have written intact or complete. A footnote on the next page explained the choice. The Middle Persian, the author said, was literally "of one weaving, with no joining in it," and every earlier cataloguer had either skipped it or called it a scribal error.
She sat back, and the chair creaked as it always did.
She had known for fifteen months that there were two. That was not what was happening to her. The night she came back from Isfahan she had written out from memory a page in a script that was not her own. Two months later, with a lexicon and a concordance and a lamp, she had translated it. The translation said, in a scribe's plain order, that the second garment was made apart from the first, each entire, each without a seam, and was not kept with the first. She had circled a word in Genesis that had been sitting in the plural for three thousand years. She had told Karam that week, and then Ani, and then Zabel, in that order, on three phone calls she still could not remember without her hands going cold. In the families' private shorthand it had become, quietly, Two.
She had known there were two. She had not known there was a trail.
Now a stranger had found a line in a tax roll that described one of them, in nearly the words she had used. The family from the eastern hills. The steward's order. Kept apart. The page in her drawer said that the second had been sent away from the first. This one, from a different century and a different language, said where it had gone and that somebody had been told to keep it separate.
She read the citation. The author had sourced the fragment to a private collection, held by descendants of the original archival family, consulted with permission, not otherwise publicly catalogued. No institution. No accession number. Nothing a reviewer could check but the author's word that the document existed.
She went back through the paper for anything else the author had let slip. There was little. The names were struck out for review and the acknowledgments were a black bar. But the prose had a tidy, slightly formal English, an English trained under British examiners, and the author wrote whilst without apparent irony. The bibliography leaned on three older catalogues printed in Bombay. One of the footnotes thanked the keepers of the household's records, who asked not to be named. It was a small phrase, and she marked it in the margin with a pencil tick, the way she marked everything she did not yet know how to use.
In four years of refereeing she had returned a dozen papers for exactly this. It was the oldest complaint in the trade, and she had written the polite note about provenance standards so often that she could do it half asleep. Her cursor sat over the decline button for the better part of ten minutes. Then she closed the portal without sending anything, took out her phone, and worked out the offset on her fingers out of habit. Beirut was ten hours ahead. It was half past seven in the evening there.
Karam answered on the second ring. He always did now. The produce business had finally given him back enough of his evenings to keep the phone in reach.
"You are calling in the middle of your morning," he said. "That is either good news or the other kind."
"I don't know which yet. I need you to read a page and tell me I'm not inventing a pattern." She forwarded the PDF while she talked and watched the little confirmation blink. "Page nineteen, the block quote. Read the line before you read anything around it. I don't want to put words in your mouth."
She heard him open the file. Then she heard the quiet she had learned to recognize over the last year and a half. Karam read everything the way he had been raised to, twice, the second time hunting for what the first had let past. It took him longer than it had taken her. Somewhere in the apartment behind him a boy's voice asked whether the soup was meant to be that color. Karam said that it was. He covered the mouthpiece badly.
"This is not a coincidence," he said at last.
"That's what I thought."
"Whole, without division. You have not published your translation."
"I haven't shown it to anyone outside the three families. You, Ani, Zabel. Not even Peter."
"I have not spoken it to anyone either." She could picture him exactly, at the kitchen window with one hand flat on the glass, as he always stood when a call turned serious. "Then no one has read us. Someone has found a page of their own and said what ours says."
"From the other end."
"From the other end." His voice slowed. "Listen to the last clause. Kept apart from all other holdings. We have said for fifteen months that the second was sent apart. This is a clerk who was told to keep it apart. He wrote down the order."
"A steward's order, sixth century, in the east." Leah heard her own voice speed up and made it stop. "It could be a ceremonial robe, Karam. A diplomatic gift. A court like that logged everything. I can name you six inventories where a single garment gets a line to itself."
"Then say it to yourself that way, and I will say it, and we will see how long it lasts."
She laughed, once, and was surprised to find that it shook.
"Who else has this?" he asked.
"The author. The editor. Two or three board readers, probably. And me."
"And Katz?"
She had known he would ask. "Not yet."
He was silent, and she let him be. It was one of the things she had come to value in him, that he did not fill a pause to make himself comfortable.
"If I call Katz, it becomes a lead," she said. "Leads go into files. He has a desk now, and a budget, and the files have readers I've never met. I don't want this in a folder until I know whether it's real."
"You are afraid of the readers."
"I'm afraid of what happens to a lead once it's in a folder." She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. "Is that stupid?"
"No. It is correct." Karam spoke the word as he spoke every judgment, as if setting a weight on a scale. "Verify first. Then tell him. He will be angry for a day and will understand for a lifetime."
"I'd have to break anonymized review."
"Tell the editor you have a source-verification concern. That is not even a lie."
"It's the least dishonest thing I'll have said to that woman in three years," Leah said, and heard in his breathing a sound that was nearly a smile.
"Call me when you have a name," he said. In the background Elie began a speech about the soup. "I must go. There is a submarine in the colander."
"Go."
She put the phone face down on the desk and sat looking at nothing.
She taught at eleven. It was a lecture on the transmission of a sixth-century legal text, and she gave it competently, from notes, while some part of her went on thinking about the steward. A student stayed behind afterward to ask whether the department would sponsor a travel grant for a conference in Istanbul. The conference had been moved online twice. The flights, he said, were a nightmare. Half the carriers had stopped overflying the region, and the ones that still did added six hours. She said she would look into it. She did not think he should plan on Istanbul.
In the corridor she met Peter Haldane coming out of the mailroom with an empty mug and the look of a man defeated by the coffee machine. He had a long gentle face and a habit of tilting his head when he listened, which made students confide in him against their better judgment. He was the one colleague who had read the monograph. He had come to her door with it held against his chest and stood a long time without speaking. He had never asked what lay behind it.
"You have the look," he said.
"What look?"
"The one you get when a footnote has bitten you." He held the mug up like a lantern. "Anything good?"
"A Sassanid inventory with an unverifiable source."
"Ah. The bane of our existence." He peered into the mug. "Send it back."
"I'm thinking about it."
"You are not. You are thinking of the larger question, and the inventory is the excuse." He said it mildly, the way he said most things, and then looked at her a moment longer than the joke needed. "If it is the larger question, my door is a door."
"I know, Peter."
"Good." He went off toward the stairs, and she heard the radio start up again behind a door down the hall. A newsreader said the word blockade in a flat voice, as she had said it every hour for weeks.
Back in the closet she found no reply from the editor. She had expected none. She had not yet written.
The email took her forty minutes. The editor was a precise woman named Margaret Lin, who edited the journal from a university in Toronto and whose emails were models of warm, unyielding procedure. Leah wrote three sentences. They said that a submission on her desk rested a central claim on an unverifiable private source. They said that she wished to test the source before recommending a decision. They asked for the author's contact details under the journal's source-verification exception. All three sentences were true. She read them twice. She had read everything twice since the day a single footnote taught her what it cost not to.
She sent it. The portal told her the message had been delivered. She felt, absurdly, as though she had stepped off a ledge and found the ground a long way down.
By seven the corridor had emptied and Peter's radio had gone quiet. She sat in the lamplight with the vent clicking and did what she had done every night for fifteen months in one form or another, which was to check herself.
She took the printed translation out of the drawer. She kept it on paper, not on a drive, because there were documents she did not trust to a network she did not control. It was one sheet. It was folded in three and softened at the creases from handling. She laid it on the desk beside the PDF. Under the lamp she read her own cramped lines, and then the clerk's line, and then hers again.
Not the same one divided between them, but two, made separately, each entire, each without a seam.
A garment, whole, without division. Kept apart.
She had been afraid that she was reading them the way a tired person reads, with the answer already chosen. For years she had wanted a piece of paper to say anything large, and a mind that has wanted that long can make a bus timetable say it. She had trained herself against that, in the way one trains a bad knee. She read the lines slowly and without hope. She read them as a stranger would.
They said what she remembered. Not the same words, not the same century, not the same hand. The same shape. One object, made without a join. One of two. Kept away from the other, by someone who had been given an order and had not been told why.
Her phone buzzed on the desk, and she nearly knocked over the lamp.
It was only a news alert, a tanker, a number, the word escalation. She looked at it for a moment, as at an acquaintance who has arrived at the wrong party. Then she turned the phone over.
Somewhere past the dark glass of the closet door the building had begun its night noises. She thought about a clerk in a provincial treasury, long dead, who had been told by a steward to write one line and put it in a separate place. She thought about the family from the eastern hills, whoever they were, who had carried their charge across a country and handed it to people they trusted to keep their mouths shut. She thought, as she had learned to, about all the ways she might be wrong.
Katz had taught her three questions for any lead, in the flat, patient English he kept for lessons. Who gains if it is false? Who could have known what it says? What else would have to be true? She wrote them in pencil in the margin of a printout and answered them one by one. Nobody gained that she could see. A paper like this earned a handful of citations and a line in a bibliography. As for who could have known, the answer she kept arriving at was nobody, which was the answer that frightened her.
The third question was the one that kept her in the chair. If the clerk's line was real, then a family in the eastern hills had once held a garment, and somebody had given it on. People do not hand an object down fifteen centuries without leaving other paper behind them. The author had found one sheet of it. There would be more.
Then she folded the translation back into thirds, and put it in the drawer, and sat a while longer with the clerk's line on the screen.
It was past nine when she finally closed the laptop. She had meant to leave at six.