Chapter Twenty-Six

New Julfa, Isfahan — Present Day

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Father Manvel locked the cathedral's main door himself, at eleven, with the specific unhurried finality of a man performing a ritual he'd performed several thousand times across thirty-one years and had never once, until tonight, performed with his hands actually shaking.

"I have never done anything remotely like this," he said, leading them through the dark sanctuary by a single shuttered lantern, its light kept low and close enough that anyone glancing at the building from the street would see nothing but an old priest's ordinary evening habits. "I want that understood before we begin, Mr. Yonan. I am not a man of secrets. I have spent thirty-one years believing that the entire value of a life like mine lay in being exactly what I appeared to be, in daylight, in front of witnesses. I find I am considerably more frightened of what we're about to do than I expected to be, and I want you to know that fear, and not proceed as though I've somehow overcome it simply by being here."

"You haven't overcome it." Karam kept his own voice low, setting down the small canvas roll of tools Ani had produced from her luggage without explanation, tools whose worn edges told him, without needing to ask, exactly how many disaster sites had required precisely this kind of careful, unglamorous excavation. "Neither have I, Father. I don't think fear is the thing either of us needs to overcome tonight. I think we simply need it to not be the thing that decides what we do instead of us."

The south sacristy wall ran perhaps eight meters, unbroken stone above a low stone bench worn smooth by centuries of vestment changes and quiet clerical waiting, and Karam understood, standing in front of it with a lantern's small light throwing his own shadow huge and unsteady across four hundred years of careful masonry, that the maintenance ledger's single hurried entry had given them a wall, not a stone, and that eight meters of undifferentiated wall was, in the specific unglamorous arithmetic of what they actually had to work with tonight, considerably less certainty than any of them had let themselves admit on the walk over.

"Tell me what we're listening for," Ani said, already crouched at the wall's western end, palm flat against the stone in the same unconscious gesture Karam remembered a stranger named Hovsep supposedly making in this exact courtyard three hundred and thirty-eight years before either of them existed, though none of them, standing here tonight, had any way of knowing that.

"A cavity behind original stone reads differently than solid stone against a knuckle — duller, a specific hollow note a trained ear can catch even through considerable thickness." Karam had spent an hour before they'd arrived reading everything he could find, in the guesthouse's poor internet connection, about exactly this kind of search, and understood, saying it aloud now, how much thinner the theory sounded than it had reading it silently at a desk. "And the mortar. A reset stone from 1661 should show a seam — the original 1606 mortar considerably more weathered and darker than whatever the mason used sixty years later, if he was careful, and stone masons in this quarter were nothing if not careful."

They worked the wall meter by meter, Ani tapping in a slow, patient rhythm while Karam ran his fingers along mortar lines he could barely see in the lantern's shielded light, feeling for the specific texture difference between four centuries of undisturbed stone and whatever a resetting, however carefully matched, had left behind for a patient enough hand to eventually find — and Father Manvel stood watch at the sacristy's narrow window, glancing out at intervals into a courtyard he had walked ten thousand times and had never once, until tonight, watched with the specific coiled attention of a man genuinely afraid of what might be approaching it.

They found nothing in the first two meters. Nothing in the third, or the fourth, and Karam felt the particular exhausting despair of a search that had sounded, in daylight and in theory, considerably more findable than it was proving to be in actual practice, at eleven at night, by lantern light, with a clock neither of them could see but both of them could feel running down somewhere just outside the building's old stone walls.

Ani worked without speaking for most of that hour, her tapping settling into a rhythm Karam recognized, watching her, as the same specific patient economy she'd described in her own work on the phone months ago — the arithmetic of trucks and manifests translated, now, into meters of wall and minutes of darkness, a woman who had built an entire life out of exactly this kind of unglamorous, methodical persistence and had simply, tonight, pointed it at a different kind of crisis. He found himself thinking, crouched beside her in the sacristy's cold stone quiet, of his grandmother's own hands doing this same patient work — not on a wall, but on a ledger's careful coded entries, the same specific discipline of a person who had decided, somewhere early in her life, that patience was the one tool a family without power was always still permitted to keep sharp. He wondered, watching Ani's knuckle move along stone her own ancestor had walked away from four centuries ago without ever once being told what it held, whether she felt what he was currently feeling — the strange, vertiginous sense of two separate inheritances finally, after three hundred and sixty-five years of careful mutual ignorance, kneeling on the same cold floor together, wanting, for perhaps the first time since 1605, exactly the same thing.

It was Ani's hand that found it, at the wall's fifth meter, a section low enough that she'd had to crouch nearly to the floor to reach it — not a dramatic difference, nothing that would have caught a careless glance in daylight, but a specific dullness under her knuckle that made her go very still, and call Karam over with a single quiet word that carried, in the sacristy's held silence, considerably more weight than its volume.

"Here."

Karam crouched beside her, running his own fingers along the mortar line she indicated, and felt it — faint, almost nothing, a hairline seam where the surrounding stone's ancient, weathered mortar gave way, for perhaps forty centimeters, to something very slightly different in texture, in color, in the specific way four centuries of dust settled unevenly across a surface that had, once, been disturbed and carefully, lovingly, put back exactly as it had been.

"That's it." His voice came out considerably less steady than he'd wanted it to. "Father — I need to know, before either of us touches this stone, whether you want to be standing here for what happens next, or whether you'd rather this be something you can honestly say, afterward, you did not personally witness."

Father Manvel was quiet for a long moment, still at his window, and when he turned back toward them, something in his face had settled into a specific, unhurried resolve Karam recognized, with a small ache, from watching his own grandmother decide, more than once, exactly how much of a hard truth she was willing to carry in full view of witnesses.

"I have protected this wall for thirty-one years without ever once being permitted to know what I was protecting." He crossed the sacristy floor and knelt beside them, slowly, his old knees clearly costing him something the younger two hadn't had to pay yet tonight. "I find, now that the moment has actually arrived, that I would considerably rather see it than spend whatever years I have left wondering. Open it, Mr. Yonan. Whatever's inside that stone has waited three hundred and sixty-five years for someone brave enough, or perhaps simply patient enough, to come looking. I would like to be here when the waiting finally ends."

Karam fitted the thin chisel Ani handed him against the seam's upper edge, and felt his own pulse doing something complicated and enormous, understanding, positioning the blade exactly where a mason's careful hand had once positioned a very different tool for a very different reason, that he was about to become the first person in three hundred and sixty-five years to touch what Shushan Yonan had decided, in an act of grief and mercy neither he nor anyone now living had any way of fully understanding, the world was better off not knowing.

The first tap of the mallet against the chisel's handle rang out, in the sacristy's held silence, considerably louder than any of them had braced for — and was answered, from somewhere out in the dark courtyard, by the specific, unmistakable sound of a car door closing, close enough and careful enough that Karam understood, before either of the others had time to react at all, that whatever window they'd believed they still had left had just, without warning, closed considerably faster than any of them had planned for.