“Is it?” she said evenly.
“Yes. Also, it’s nonsense. Professor Helen Watt, who’s so English her resting pulse is a negative number, is at this moment putting on pompoms in anticipation of celebrating the last document’s release. She’s making a human pyramid, in fact, all by herself.”
Patricia didn’t blink.
“But if you get something out of the impregnable English thing,” he said, “I’ll go with it.”
“Awfully game of you,” she said.
“Quite,” he said.
Neither of them had budged an inch from the desk. They stared at each other.
“Did we just make friends?” he said.
From the tables of laboring students around them, he heard a few snickers.
“I mean, is that how you people do it?” he continued. “Bully each other to a standstill—then buy each other a pint? Is that what I’ve been missing all this time in England?”
She raised her glasses again, and looked out at him from beneath them.
“Silly me,” he said. “I’ve been skipping the bullying part.”
She considered. “Try it without shortcuts next time,” she said.
“I don’t think I will,” he said. “I’m not a very patient person. Besides,” he added, “I rather enjoy how unnerved English people get when you tell them you like them.”
Like a drop of soap in oily water, the words scattered gazes in all directions—Patricia’s fled back to her computer, and the students on either side of him who had been surreptitiously staring a moment earlier now studied their manuscripts with renewed fervor.
“Well,” he said to the silent room. “I’m glad we had this heart-to-heart.”
Back in Helen’s office he set down his bags. Without a word he pulled the new toner cartridge from his bag and replaced Helen’s old one.
“Thank you,” she said faintly.
With a nod of acknowledgment, he took out his laptop and printed his transcript of the rabbi’s letter. He set it on her desk. “Here’s a tear-jerker for you.”
She took the paper in a wavering hand and studied it a moment. Then she set it down beside her computer—carelessly, he thought, as though she weren’t much concerned about its contents. Her gaze returned to her window.
Now that he looked at her properly, he saw she sat stiffly, and was wearing a heavy sweater despite the warm April afternoon. Briefly it occurred to him to be worried about her. Then again, how many times had he sat in her office, searching her distant expression for signs that she appreciated or even recognized a gift he’d just brought her? It had always been this way with Helen, and always would be. This, evidently, was the full extent of the friendship she cared to offer.
“Can you find the e-mail address of the Amsterdam Jewish archive?” Helen’s voice sounded thin, though whether from disappointment or fatigue he couldn’t tell.
“Sure, why?”
“Let’s see if they have the final copy of this.” She spoke almost gingerly, as though trying not to bite down on something sour in her mouth. “They’ve got the best-documented seventeenth-century Jewish community in Europe, and this letter is addressed to one of its prominent rabbis.” She swallowed. It took a long time. “For once,” she said, “we might be able to track down the second copy of one of HaCoen Mendes’s letters.”
He searched for the address and spelled it out for her; laboriously she typed it. Twice she had to backtrack and begin again, her index finger heavy on the delete key. Without meaning to, he drifted behind her to watch. The process was mesmerizing: words struggling to take shape on the screen. With effort, Helen moved past the salutation.
Then, backtracking once more, she accidentally deleted all she’d written.
She rose silently from her chair, stepped to the side. With one hand she gave him a vague wave. Swiftly, he took her place. Using the sort of formal phrases she might, he composed a query to the Amsterdam Jewish archives, signed with Helen’s name. As he worked she breathed softly over his shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “That will do.”
The chime of the departing mail sounded in the office. He stood.
“Well,” she said, resuming her seat. “The last letters.” Then, surprising him, she added, “I’d hoped for more proof.”
He nodded. Without more evidence, their conjectures about Farrow were fool’s gold.
She was staring at him.
“What?” he said.
She shook her head, as though to rid herself of a fly.
Christ. “Helen Watt,” he said, enunciating like a schoolteacher.
Reluctantly, as though confessing an intimacy she wasn’t sure she wanted to part with, she said, “There’s something about the Florence letters.”
“Meaning what?”
“Why,” she said, “is there no other record of the Sabbatean crisis in Florence?”
“Because most records don’t survive 350 years,” he said. “It’s more surprising when we do have evidence of something than when it’s missing.”
“Yes,” said Helen, “but why don’t we have any of the letters from the rabbi’s student in Florence, whereas we have other letters the rabbi received?”
“I’m not following you,” he said.
“At one point, after the rabbi has come under pressure to stop using her as a scribe, the letters stop for a while. Then, a while later, they start again with these missives to Florence. Perhaps, don’t you think, she was invited to scribe for the rabbi again only because the Sabbatean crisis in Florence demanded it?”
“It’s possible,” he began. “But there could be a hundred reasons for that gap in the letters. Ill health, documents lost in a fire, a voyage to—”
“And don’t you think,” she interrupted—and there was now something explosive in her manner, “that being barred from learning might give a young woman with enough hunger for education—enough love of the work of thought itself—sufficient incentive to invent a Sabbatean crisis?”
Now he knew she wasn’t well. Helen Watt, in full possession of her faculties, would have torn this logical leap to shreds, and sought a more likely explanation. Something was wrong with her today. Or maybe it had been for a long while.
And she hadn’t finished. “You know the Masada story, of course,” she said. Slowly she pointed. Her finger, half bent at each knuckle as if she were unable to straighten it, hovered; then aimed itself, trembling, at the picture above the mantle.
“I know the story.” As did anyone who ever attended a synagogue Hebrew school.
“How do we know what happened up there?” said Helen. Her finger still wavered in the direction of the sketch.
“You mean on Masada?” Aaron blinked. “It’s in Josephus. The Jewish War.” But as he spoke, he realized for the first time what a foolish answer this was.
“Yes, and how did Josephus know?” continued Helen. “He wasn’t on Masada, he was with the Roman army. When he arrived, the Jews had already committed”—she pursed her lips—“glorious martyrdom. Or, as the Jews’ leader described it, a final act of kindness.”
He dug in his memory. “Something about women who hid?”