“Yes.”
“How did it go?”
“No luck at all.”
She was pouring the tea when her brother joined us. He was in his early forties, some ten years older than Julia. His guards’ moustache, which added several years to his appearance, was a recent addition; he’d grown it for his role in a farce that had opened a few weeks ago in the West End, and planned to shave it off as soon as the play closed. From the reviews it seemed that this would happen rather soon.
“Well,” he said. “Any luck?”
“None, I’m afraid.”
“And bloody awful weather for hunting wild geese, isn’t it?” He added sugar to his tea, buttered a slice of bread. “Where’d you go today? More of the same?”
I nodded. “Travel agencies, employment agencies. And I went to half the rooming houses in Russell Square, and I suppose I did have a bit of luck. I found the last place she stayed before quitting London. She had a room around the corner from the museum. The dates fit; she checked out on the sixteenth of August. But she left no forwarding address, and no one there had any idea where she might have gone.”
“It seems hopeless,” Julia said.
That seemed a concise summation of the state of affairs – it seemed quite hopeless, and I was beginning to wonder why I had let myself be panicked into making the trip in the first place. One reason, of course, was the emotional state of Mrs. Horowitz. Alarm is contagious, and the woman was profoundly alarmed. But it was also true that Phaedra’s letters did nothing to dispel this alarm. There was the last letter from England: I can’t tell you much for security reasons, but I have this fantastic opportunity to travel through lands I never even hoped to see. I wish I could tell you more about it. And a postcard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, mailed from Baghdad and with an indecipherable date with this chilling scrawl: Everything’s gone wrong. Am in real trouble. You may never hear from me again. Hope I can mail this. Evidently she had been in so much trouble that she had neither pen nor pencil; the message was in charcoal.
I don’t remember what I told Mrs. Horowitz. I calmed her as well as I could, then took Minna back to the apartment, disconnected the telephone, and worked nonstop on the thesis for three days and two nights. I speeded things up by fabricating most of the footnotes. Karen Dietrich paid me my thousand dollars. I cashed her check while the ink was still drying, put the bills in my money belt and the belt around my waist, threw things into a flight bag, boarded a reluctant Minna at Kitty Bazerian’s in Brooklyn, considered and rejected risking a direct flight to London, and caught – with less than ten minutes to spare – an Aer Lingus jet to Shannon and Dublin.
The British government has my name on several lists, and I had a feeling they might give me a hard time. The Irish also have me listed as a subversive – I’m a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – but they don’t make a fuss about that sort of thing. Since most people are trying to get out of the country, they’ve never been able to take illegal entry very seriously.
But all I saw of Ireland was the inside of Dublin Airport. I had breakfast there before catching a BEA flight to London. You don’t have to show a passport to get from Ireland to England. The flight was routine, except for the casual regurgitation of several babes in arms, and in due course I was in London and on my way to Nigel Stokes’ flat in Kings Cross.
And I was still there. I had corresponded with Nigel over the years and met him once in New York when a play of his made a brief appearance on Broadway. He was a fellow member of the Flat Earth Society and had been working for years to build an elaborate true-to-scale two-dimensional globe, a project I greatly admired. Julia didn’t. She thought the whole thing was madness. Nigel damn well knew it was madness, and took great delight in it.
And now, pouring us each a second cup of tea, he said, “This is madness, you know.” But he wasn’t talking about the shape of the earth.
“I know.”
“It’s bad enough looking through haystacks for needles, but you don’t really know that it’s a needle you’re hunting, do you? I was thinking about that letter, Evan. Somehow I don’t think a travel agent-”
I nodded. “I’ve been keeping busy, that’s all.”
“Quite. And employment bureaus – oh, that’s possible, of course, but somehow I don’t think you’ll have much luck. It’s rather a case of going around Robin Hood’s barn, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I agreed.
Julia drew up a chair and sat down between us. “Have you thought of going to Baghdad?”
“That’s ridiculous,” her brother said. “Where would he begin looking in Baghdad?”
I closed my eyes. He was right – it would be quite pointless to try looking for Phaedra in Baghdad. And Julia, for her part, seemed able to read minds, because I bad been thinking of doing just that, ridiculous or no.
Nigel stroked his moustache. “Perhaps I’ve been seeing too many films, but – Evan, let me see that letter again, will you?” I quoted it to him by rote. “Yes, I thought so. You know, I get the impression of some sort of cloak-and-dagger operation here, don’t you? Spies and such, midnight rides on the Orient Express. What do you think?”
“Mmmm,” I said neutrally. The same thought had occurred to me, but I had tried to suppress it. Some time ago I found myself working for a nameless man who heads a nameless U.S. undercover operation. I’m not being coy – I don’t know his name or its. Since then he’s been under the impression that I work for him, and now and then I do. For that reason, thoughts of cloaks and daggers come to mind rather more often than they ought to, and in this case I had discounted them.