Chapter Six

Los Angeles, California — Day 8

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Leah woke at ten to six to a phone lit with two messages, and she read the shorter one first.

Call me when you're up. It's Mumbai. It had come from Ani at midnight, Los Angeles time, which was half past one in the afternoon in Chennai. There was nothing else in it. Ani wrote the way she did sums, in the fewest figures that would carry the result.

The second message was from Margaret Lin. It had arrived at twenty to six and had the stately grammar of a woman editing a journal from a Toronto office with a window onto a quadrangle. She did not intend to be rushed by anyone's urgency but her own.

Dear Dr. Sarkisian,

Source-verification concerns are always taken seriously, but I should tell you that the author has already raised, independently, an unusual request about attribution. She has asked that her name and affiliation be withheld from any published version beyond a general acknowledgment, "independent scholar, Mumbai." She cites family sensitivities around the source material, not anything in the scholarship itself. I do not love it. It is not disqualifying on its own. I would like to understand your concern before I decide how to handle hers.

I should add that on receiving your note she wrote to ask one thing only: whether the reviewer has a special interest in the phrase or in the family. I told her that I did not know. Perhaps you will tell me what to say.

With regards,

Margaret

Leah read it twice, standing at the kitchen counter in her socks, with the coffee she had not yet made still in its tin. The first time she read it for what it said. The second time she read only the last paragraph, and her hand tightened on the edge of the counter.

The phrase or the family. The author had not asked what the reviewer wanted, or who she was, or why she doubted a source. She had asked, in seven words, which of two doors the reviewer was standing at.

It was a question that could only come from someone who knew there were two doors.

She made the coffee. She made it badly, because her hands were not entirely steady, and while it dripped she did the arithmetic. It was a quarter past six in Los Angeles and a quarter to eight in the evening in Chennai. A reasonable hour. Ani would be home from the office, perhaps eating, perhaps standing at her kitchen window with a phone against her shoulder. She would answer on the first ring, because she had sent the message at midnight and had been waiting since.

She did.

"You're up," Ani said.

"I'm up. I'm standing in my kitchen in my socks. Tell me about Mumbai."

"No. You first." There was a clink of cutlery and the scrape of a chair. "I've been sitting on this for four days and I want to hear your end before I say mine, because if I say mine first I'll start fitting yours to it, and I'd rather not. I'm a numbers person. I like my data uncontaminated."

Leah almost laughed. "All right." She set down the cup. "A week ago I got a peer-review manuscript. A Sassanid inventory fragment, near Ctesiphon, sixth century. One line item describes a garment. Whole, without division. The Middle Persian is glossed in a footnote as of one weaving, with no joining in it. The garment came from a family in the eastern hills, and a steward ordered it kept apart from everything else."

She heard Ani stop chewing.

"I've never published the phrasing of the page, Ani. Not in print and not aloud, except to you and Karam and Zabel. And here's someone who's reached for almost the same words in a footnote about a clerk's tax roll. I called Karam. He said the same. I broke anonymity through the editor. I didn't get a name." She picked the cup up and put it down again. "I got this morning's email instead."

She read it aloud. She read the whole of it, including the last paragraph, and when she had finished she heard nothing at all on the line. It was not the silence of a bad connection. It was the silence of a woman holding perfectly still.

"Read me the part about attribution," Ani said. "Just that."

"Independent scholar, Mumbai. Family sensitivities around the source material."

"Now I'll read you mine." Paper moved. "I am an independent historian working with a private family archive of my own."

"Independent."

"I have come across a reference, old and unverified and possibly nothing at all, to a second tradition of custody." Ani's voice was level. "Distinct from, but related to, whatever your family's foundation is understood in certain circles to be quietly connected with. And the signature, Leah. Mumbai."

"That's one woman."

"That's one woman. She's hedging the same bet twice." Ani let out a breath, long and slow. "I told myself it might be two women who'd each decided to be cautious in the same city about the same subject. It's the only way I could keep the sums from coming out the way they came out. Two Mumbai historians with a private archive and a fear of being known. The probability's tiny. I'm a numbers person, I told you."

"She wrote to me through an editor and to you through a front door."

"And she wrote to us in the same week, without knowing we talk." Ani stopped. "Or she knows we talk. That's what I can't decide. Does she know the two families are in touch, or has she just picked two doors at random and hoped one would open?"

"She asked the editor whether I was interested in the phrase or the family."

"That's someone who knows there are two doors."

"That's what I thought."

Neither spoke for a moment. Outside, in the courtyard of Leah's building, someone dragged a recycling bin across concrete. A helicopter went over, low and loud, toward the hills. The morning news would have a line about it, and the line would mention the strait.

"There's a word she uses," Ani said, "that I haven't been able to put down. Custody."

"It's in your email."

"It's the family word. Karam says it. You say it when you're being plain. Zabel uses it as if she's invented it. The scholars in your field say provenance or ownership. Journalists say possession. She picked the one we use among ourselves." A pause. "Is it possible she has a family word too, and it happens to be the same?"

"It's possible." Leah closed her eyes. "There's a phrase in the footnote of the paper, too. She thanks the keepers of the household's records, who asked not to be named. It's a small thing. I marked it with a pencil tick on the first day because it's odd for a scholar to use keepers. A scholar says custodians or archivists."

"Keepers."

"Yes."

"We say keeping. In the family. Zabel says it in Armenian, but it's the same word." Ani's voice had dropped. "Leah, I think her family keeps a charge."

Leah said nothing. She had thought it, in the dark of her office, on the first day. She had put it away because she disliked how much she wanted it to be true. Hearing it said by someone else turned it from a hope into a fact, and she found, to her surprise, that she was afraid.

"Say the rest," she said.

"There's no rest. That's all of it. A woman in Mumbai who has a paper and an archive and a word." Ani exhaled. "And Vartan's chasing a registry clerk, who wants a fee, who says he'll have the name in three days. I've told Vartan to pay the fee and ask nothing else. So I have a name in three days and a family the day after, and a tourist visa for you and Karam in a week if the consulate isn't in a mood, which it will be."

"That's too slow."

"It's the speed there is."

Leah opened her eyes. "Ani. I have to tell you this, and I want you to hear it plainly."

"You've got your Katz voice on."

"Nassiri's alive." She said it quickly, as one pulls a bandage. "Katz had a flag light up two days ago. Somebody filed a visa application in the name Ardalan, to Sri Lanka, through an agent in Colombo. It's the first trace of him in seventeen months. He's alive and moving, and I don't think it's a coincidence that he surfaces the same week a stranger writes to both of us. I told Karam last night. He said he was beginning to arrange his life."

She had expected a cry. She had expected, at least, an intake of breath. Ani gave her neither. What she heard instead was a small sound, a chair leg moving on tile, and then a long silence in which she could picture exactly what Ani was doing, standing at her kitchen window and running the calculation.

"How long's he had?" Ani said at last.

"I don't know. A week on us, Katz thinks. More."

"And Katz's own side?"

"Katz has a director now. A woman named Livnat. She's asked for everything he knows, in writing, daily." Leah rubbed her forehead. "I don't think it's malice. I think it's a building that sees an asset, and Katz is the one man who can tell her it isn't."

"So three parties are going to the same door. Us, Nassiri, Glilot."

"Four. If you count the woman at the door."

"Five," Ani said slowly, "if you count whoever she's afraid of."

It was the first time either of them had said it, and it sat on the line between them like a stone.

"Let me do the sum." Ani spoke more quietly now, and Leah heard the pencil. "A woman in Mumbai who has a secret she hasn't told anyone, and she's decided in the last two weeks that the risk of reaching out is worth taking. Why? People don't break a silence for a footnote. Some event made her. I'd put it at, what, seventy percent that she's frightened. Not curious. Frightened. Of Nassiri, perhaps, though she can't know his name. Of someone like him. Of someone who's found her."

"You think she knows he's coming."

"I think she knows someone's coming. I think she's heard it somewhere and has chosen to ask first." The pencil stopped. "Which means she's the only one of us who's ahead of the story."

Leah did not move. In the gray light from the window her reflection looked back at her from the dark glass of the oven door, a woman in a bathrobe with a cup in her hand and her hair in a state. She thought of the first page of Shushan's ledger, and of four centuries in which the families had told no one. Why then? Whoever breaks a long silence has seen a reason first.

"Ani, we can't move at the speed a consulate moves."

"We can't move at any other."

"We can meet in the middle. Istanbul. Karam and I fly out in three days, and you and Vartan send us whatever the clerk finds. We write to her together." She heard the phrase as she said it, and knew it was right. "Not your letter and not mine. Both families, on one page. If she's frightened, the first thing she reads from either of us should be a page she can't mistake for a trap."

"Both families on a page." Ani said it slowly. "That's never been done."

"No."

"My mother would have called that a large sentence."

"It's a large thing we're about to say."

The pencil began again. "Three days. I'll tell Auntie. She'll say yes, and she'll say it as if she'd thought of it." A short laugh, warm and unsteady. "I'll put Vartan on the line. He's been hovering by the door for ten minutes pretending to look for a stapler."

There was a scuffle, a muffled complaint, and Vartan's voice came on bright with injured dignity.

"I was looking for a stapler. There's a stapler somewhere in this office and it's an outrage that it can't be found." A beat. "Hello, Leah. I hear we're a bad dream in someone else's sleep."

"Roughly."

"I've told Ani the clerk wants twenty thousand rupees, which I'll pay, and a letter on the trust's paper saying we're a charity, which I won't, because I'm not going to be the man who shows a Bombay clerk our letterhead." His voice lost the brightness. "I'll have the name in three days. I think I'll have the family the day after. Leah. If there's an archive, there's a keeper, and if there's a keeper, there's an argument. I know families like ours. Somebody in that house doesn't want the door opened."

"I know."

"Good. I wanted you to know it before you booked a flight." He passed the phone back, and his voice sank to a murmur Leah could barely make out. "She's been up since five."

"I heard that," said Ani.

They said their goodbyes. Leah stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and the coffee cold on the counter and the light coming up pale over the building across the courtyard. She was aware, standing there, of the plain shape of what lay ahead. A visa she did not have. A flight she could not afford. A friend in Beirut who would leave his children with a neighbor and a cousin in Chennai who would pay twenty thousand rupees to a stranger. A colonel in motion. A director reading a daily report. A woman in a city on the other side of the world, afraid, who had asked in seven words whether anyone was listening.

She answered Margaret first. It took four minutes. Please tell her that my interest is in the phrase, in the first instance, she wrote, and that I would like very much to write to her myself, if she is willing. I can say nothing yet that I could not say to a stranger. I can say that I mean to deal with her honestly. She read the second sentence twice. The words in the first instance did a great deal of work, and she let them. She sent it before she could improve it.

Her phone buzzed against the counter. It was Karam, and he had written, as he always did, in complete sentences.

I will come. I have sent a message to Nadia. She has not replied. Madame Salwa has said that she will keep the children for ten days, and has asked whether I intend to be eaten by a bear. I told her that Istanbul is not known for bears.

Leah laughed out loud in her empty kitchen. It was the first time in a week.

She took a legal pad from the drawer and uncapped a pen. At the top, in her small neat hand, she wrote Dear Dr., stopped, and crossed it out. She had no name to put after it. A salutation with a blank in it announced that the writer had come to the door without knowing whose it was.

Instead she wrote, To the keeper of the household's records.

She looked at it for some time. Then, below it, she began.