Chapter Twenty-Two

Los Angeles, California — Present Day

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Her mother called at five in the morning Los Angeles time, which meant three in the afternoon in Isfahan, which meant, Leah understood before she'd even found the phone in the dark, that whatever had happened had happened in broad daylight, in front of neighbors, in the specific unhidden way that frightened her considerably more than a nighttime visit would have.

"Auntie's fine," her mother said first, in English, the same rushed reassurance Leah remembered from a year and a half ago, worn now into something closer to reflex than comfort. "She's fine, Leah, she's shaken but she's fine. But this was different from last time. I need you to understand that before I tell you the rest of it, because I have spent the last hour trying to decide whether telling you at all makes things better or considerably worse, and I have decided you deserve to make that judgment yourself instead of me making it for you."

Leah sat up fully, the last year and a half's worth of careful, hard-won distance from exactly this kind of call collapsing at once. "Tell me."

"They asked about a man. Specifically — not general questions this time, Leah, a name. Yonan. They asked whether your aunt knew the name, whether a visitor matching a description had come through the quarter recently asking about the cathedral, whether she had heard from you about any of it." Her mother's voice was doing the thing it had done last time, sliding into the accent thirty years of Glendale had mostly smoothed away. "One of them showed her a photograph on a phone, Leah. A man, Lebanese by his passport photo apparently, standing outside the Church of the Holy Savior. She didn't recognize him. She told them so, honestly, and I believe they believed her, because they left after twenty minutes this time instead of six hours. But Leah — they knew to ask about a specific man, in a specific building, days after he was apparently actually there. That is not a general sweep. That is someone who already knew exactly what they were looking for and was using your aunt to confirm it."

Leah closed her eyes, understanding with total, sick clarity that she was looking at the photograph in her own memory before her mother had finished describing it — Karam, at the cathedral gate, in a photograph someone had taken without either of them ever suspecting they were being watched closely enough to be caught in a frame.

"I need to speak to her." Leah was already moving, already reaching for the second phone Cho had set up for exactly this kind of call, the specific practiced urgency of a woman who had promised, eighteen months ago, that the next time this happened she would not simply absorb the news secondhand and call it protecting anyone. "Mama, please. I know it's not how we usually do this. I need to hear her voice."

Her aunt came on the line four minutes later, and Leah understood, hearing her — a voice she had heard perhaps a dozen times across her entire life, warm underneath the current fear in a way that made the fear itself land harder rather than softer — precisely why her mother had hesitated to tell her at all.

"Zepur Auntie." Leah said it in Armenian, the words still slower than she wanted them to be, worn from disuse the way her mother had once accused her of letting the whole language go worn. "I am so sorry. I am so sorry this reached you, and I need you to know that whatever they asked, whatever they think you might know, none of it is your fault, and none of it should have ever been permitted to come near your door."

"I am an old woman, Lianna, not a fragile one." Her aunt's voice carried, underneath the fear, something Leah recognized immediately as her mother's own particular steel, one generation further along. "I told them the truth. I do not know this man in the photograph. I have never met him. This seemed to disappoint them considerably more than it should have, for people asking an honest question and receiving an honest answer." A pause, and when she spoke again, something in her voice had shifted, careful, direct. "But I will tell you what I did not tell them, because I did not trust their faces enough to give it to strangers standing in my own kitchen. I recognized the church behind him in that photograph. I have walked past that wall my entire life, Lianna. My own grandmother used to tell me, when I was a girl small enough to believe every story an old woman told me, that something important was kept somewhere inside it, and that we were never, under any circumstances, to go looking for it ourselves. I always assumed it was simply a story old women tell children to keep them from climbing on cathedral walls. I am considerably less certain of that this afternoon than I was yesterday morning."

Leah sat with that for a long moment, the specific vertigo of discovering that her own family's private oral tradition had been standing, unexamined, directly beside the mystery she'd spent a year and a half chasing across three countries.

"Auntie. I need you to be very careful for the next few days. I need you to consider staying somewhere else, with family, somewhere further from that quarter, just until —"

"I have lived in this house for fifty-one years, through a revolution and two wars and considerably more fear than a photograph on a stranger's phone, and I am not leaving it because a frightened girl in Los Angeles asked me to." Her aunt's voice had gone gentle again, the fear folded back underneath something steadier. "I will be careful, Lianna. I will lock my door and I will not open it again for men with photographs. But I will not leave the one thing in my life that has never once, in fifty-one years, asked me to be anything other than exactly where I already was. You understand that, I think, better than your mother gives you credit for. I have heard, in the careful way you've been asking your questions this call, a woman who has learned exactly the same lesson about staying somewhere on purpose."

Leah found she had no answer for that, and did not try to construct one, and let the silence hold instead, the specific silence of two women three generations and one ocean apart finally understanding something about each other neither had fully said out loud before.

Katz found her twenty minutes after the call ended, the way he had found her in a different hotel corridor eighteen months ago, and did not need to ask how she was, because her face had already told him.

"They photographed Karam," she said, before he could say anything at all. "At the cathedral gate. They already knew enough to ask your specific question — whether Yonan meant anything to her — which means whatever this is, it stopped being a sweep the moment Nassiri walked that perimeter, and became a targeted effort to confirm a connection he already suspected." She looked up at him, and heard her own voice do the thing her aunt's had done, fear folding itself into something steadier underneath. "I did the thing I promised myself I'd do differently this time. I called her directly. I heard her voice instead of just my mother's account of it, and I made her the offer to leave, and she told me no, in almost exactly the words you used with me the last time this happened — that a house you've stayed in on purpose, through everything, is not something fear gets to take from you on a stranger's schedule."

"She sounds like a formidable woman."

"She is." Leah felt something in her chest that had been braced, for a year and a half, against exactly this kind of conversation, finally, quietly, settle rather than break. "Ronen — we need to get word to Karam. Tonight, not tomorrow. If Nassiri has a photograph specific enough to show my aunt, he doesn't just suspect Karam is looking at that wall. He knows it, and I don't think either of us should assume he intends to wait for permission to start looking himself."