Chapter Eight

Beirut, Lebanon — Present Day

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Leah had forgotten, in the year of phone calls and scanned photographs and the particular flattening effect a screen had on even the most careful transcription work, how much smaller the actual ledger was than she'd let herself remember — small enough to sit closed in both her hands, the leather cover worn soft and dark at the corners by four centuries of exactly this kind of handling, and she found, taking it from Karam's hands across his kitchen table on a Tuesday morning with his children safely delivered to school and a pot of coffee going cold between them, that some part of her had spent a year unconsciously inflating it into something closer to the size of what it actually meant.

"You look like you're greeting an old friend," Karam said, watching her turn it over once in the light before opening it. "I used to think my grandmother did the same thing with it, until I understood, much later, that she wasn't greeting it. She was checking. Every single time, for sixty years, some part of her expected it to have changed, or to have finally been taken, and every single time it hadn't, and I don't think the relief of that ever once stopped costing her something."

"I'm not checking." Leah opened it to the marked page, the cut stubs still visible along the binding's inner gutter exactly as she remembered them from a year ago — four thin vertical remnants where whole leaves had once been, sliced close and clean, professionally, by someone who had known exactly how to remove pages from a bound book without damaging the binding around them. "I'm working. There's a difference, and I promise you I'll tell you the moment I stop being able to hold onto it."

They had spent the first three calls of this new arrangement, over the previous week, simply comparing notes — what Rostami's fragment had said, what Ani Manukian's initial cautious outreach through Sheikh Hadi's own network had begun, carefully, to suggest, what Katz's desk in Tel Aviv was quietly turning up about a disgraced colonel's sudden interest in a Beirut import business that no longer technically existed. This was the first morning either of them had actually sat down with the primary object itself since the danger had a name attached to it, and Leah felt the particular electric stillness she associated with real research, the kind that had nothing to do with the war closing in around the edges of it and everything to do with four hundred years of careful handwriting finally being asked the right question.

"Talk me through what you see," Karam said, pulling his chair around beside hers rather than across from her, close enough that she could feel him leaning into the same angle of light she was using. "I've looked at these stubs a thousand times in my life and never once understood what I was looking at beyond something is missing here. You look at them like they're still saying something."

"They are." Leah drew her finger along the gutter, not touching the vellum itself, tracing the air just above it. "Look at the stitching pattern around the stubs — see how tight and even it stays, right up to where the cut starts? Whoever removed these four leaves did it with the book still bound, carefully, probably with a fine blade worked flush against the spine, and they did it without disturbing a single other gathering in the whole book. That's not someone in a hurry. That's someone who loved this object enough to remove four pages from it without damaging anything else it was carrying." She turned back one leaf, to the page immediately before the cut, running her finger down the final line of cramped, careful script. "And here — this is what I actually wanted to show you in person, because I didn't trust myself to describe it properly over a photograph."

At the very bottom corner of the page, small enough that a careless reader would take it for an ink smudge, sat a single word in a hand slightly different from the entry above it — smaller, quicker, written at an angle that suggested it had been added after the main text, in the cramped space left at the foot of the page.

"A catchword," Leah said, watching Karam's face for the moment of understanding and finding, instead, patient confusion, which she'd half expected and found she didn't mind explaining. "Scribes did this for centuries, across almost every tradition that bound books by hand — you write the first word of the next page here, at the bottom of this one, so that whoever's binding the loose gatherings together can check they're assembling the pages in the right order. It's a binder's aid. It has nothing to do with the content itself, usually — it's just insurance against a mistake in the workshop."

"Usually," Karam repeated, and Leah heard, in the single word, that he'd already understood where this was going before she finished saying it.

"Usually, the catchword just repeats whatever the next page's first word already was. Boring, mechanical, not evidence of anything except careful bookbinding." She looked up at him. "But this page's catchword doesn't match anything on the page that follows it now, Karam. Because the page it was actually written to match isn't there anymore. Whoever cut these four leaves out took the page. They didn't — because they couldn't, not without unbinding the entire book and redoing every gathering after it — they didn't erase the one word a scribe had already written down here, four centuries ago, promising what came next."

Karam went very still beside her, the specific stillness of a man doing arithmetic he had not expected to be doing this morning.

"What does it say."

Leah angled the page further into the light, and read it to him slowly, the way she'd learned to read difficult early modern hands aloud when she wanted to be certain she wasn't imposing a guess onto genuine ambiguity — not fast, not confident, sounding out the shape of each letterform before committing to the word it made.

"Manuk."

The name sat in the kitchen between them for a long moment, meaning, as far as Leah could tell from Karam's face, absolutely nothing to him at all — which was itself information, she understood, watching him turn the word over with the specific frown of a man searching an inheritance he'd been told, his whole life, was complete, for a room he'd never once been told existed.

"I don't know that name," he said finally. "Not from my grandmother, not from anything she ever told me, not from any story anyone in this family has passed down about who we are or where we came from before Beirut. And Leah — if there is one thing I would have expected my grandmother to make absolutely certain I knew, it would be every name that ever mattered to this family's history. She was not a woman who forgot to mention things by accident."

"Then maybe she didn't forget." Leah closed the ledger gently, the cut stubs settling back into their four-century absence, and found herself thinking, unbidden, of Shushan — a name she did know, faintly, from the ledger's earliest entries, a girl's careful hand maturing across sixty years of the same book into an old woman's — and of the specific, deliberate violence required to remove four pages from a bound manuscript without damaging anything around them. "Maybe somebody, a very long time ago, decided this particular name was too dangerous, or too painful, or too something, to let travel any further down the family than the page it was written on. And maybe whoever that decision belonged to didn't realize that a catchword doesn't ask permission before it tells the truth."

Karam sat with that for a long moment, and then, quietly, in the specific tone Leah had learned over a year of phone calls meant he was about to say something he'd been circling for a while without quite letting himself land on it, said: "Someone else already knows this name is missing. That's what you told me on the phone. Someone who isn't us."

"I don't know yet whether they know the name itself. Only that the gap exists, and that whoever's asking has real reasons to want it filled." Leah looked at him — at the particular tired steadiness he'd carried since she first met him, the same steadiness she suspected he brought to nine-year-old sweater arguments and produce deliveries and every other ordinary Tuesday a man like him had spent a year learning to hold alongside an extraordinary one — and found, saying the next part, that she meant it considerably more than the professional register she usually reserved for exactly this kind of admission. "I think we find him first, Karam. Whoever he was, whoever's left of his line, wherever four centuries took them. Not because I think we're entitled to your family's missing pages more than anyone else is. Because I think you deserve to know why your grandmother spent sixty years protecting you from a single word, before somebody who never met her decides that word for you instead."

Karam looked at the closed ledger for a long moment, and then, for the first time since she'd arrived that morning, allowed himself something that was almost a smile.

"That," he said, "is the first time in a year you've sounded less like a scholar and more like family. I find I don't mind it nearly as much as I expected to."