“What’s your pleasure?” asked the barista, a young Asian-American woman with interesting piercings, tattoos in place of eyebrows, and a demeanor that blended I’m sooo interesting and this job sucks with I have a really cool secret life and this job is an awesome front. Her nametag read “Julie Lee: Professional 聪明的驴子?双簧管” (which I understood, roughly, as “Smart-ass Oboist”).
We ordered drinks—Tristan, black coffee; myself, something I would never normally have, a complicated something-latte-something with lots of buzzwords I picked out at random from the menu over the bar, and which prompted a brief smirk from our barista. The agents of shadowy government entities, I reasoned, were likely to be trained in psychological evaluation of potential recruits, and I did not want him getting an accurate read on me until I decided whether or not I wished to pursue his offer. (Also he was rather handsome, which made me jittery a bit, so I decided to hide behind an affected eccentricity.) The result being that he sat down with a lovely-smelling cup of dark roast and I sat down with something almost undrinkable.
“You ordered that to try to throw me off the scent, in case I was doing some sort of ninja psych-eval of you,” he said casually, as if just trying the idea on for size. “Ironically, that tells me more about you than if you’d just ordered your usual.”
I must have looked shocked, because he grinned with almost savage self-satisfaction. There was something disturbingly thrilling about being seen so thoroughly, so quickly, and so stealthily. I felt myself flush.
“How?” I demanded. “How did you do that?”
He leaned in toward me, large, strong hands clasped before him on the café table. “Melisande Stokes—may I call you Mel?” I nodded. “Mel.” He cleared his throat in a very official-sounding, preparatory manner. “If we’re going to pursue this,” he said, “there are three parts to it. First, before anything else, you have to sign the nondisclosure form. Then I need you to do some sample translations so we can get a sense of your work, and then we have to run a background check on you.”
“How long will all that take?” I asked.
Four times my salary. With possible dental.
And no Blevins.
He had set his backpack on a chair beside him. Now he patted it. “Nondisclosure form is right here. If you sign it now, I can text your name and social to DC.” He paused then, and reconsidered. “Never mind. They already know your social. Point is, they’ll have finished the background check before you’re done choking down whatever the hell it is you ordered. So it’s just how long it takes you to translate the test samples and have our guys look over your translations. But”—he waved a warning finger at me—“no fooling around here. Once you sign the form, you’re committing to do this. Unless we reject you. You can’t reject us. You’re stuck with me, for six months minimum, as soon as you sign the form. Got it? No half-assedness on your part. So maybe we just talk tonight and then you take the form with you and give it to me tomorrow when you’ve had a chance to sleep on it.”
“Where would I find you tomorrow?” I asked.
“Classified,” he said. “I’d find you.”
“I don’t like being stalked. I’d better sign it now,” I said.
He stared at me a moment. It wasn’t quite like that first moment, when we had stared and it had felt so strangely normal. This felt charged. But I wasn’t exactly sure why. I would like to think I was simply delighted to be ridding myself of Blevins and quadrupling my income all in one go. But if I am honest with myself I confess there was a definite pleasure in being Chosen by someone with such agreeable features.
“Right,” he said, after we had been staring for a couple of heartbeats. “Here.” He reached for his bag.
I read the form, which said precisely what Tristan had described, making it at once boilerplate and singular. I held out my hand, and Tristan offered me a government-issue ballpoint pen. A far cry from the slightly blood-smeared Hughes & Sons Ltd. model number 137B, Extra Fine, with which I am writing this.
As I signed the form, he leaned in closer to me and said quietly, sounding delighted with himself, “I have some of the cuneiform in my bag if you want to take a look at it.”
I believe I gaped at that. “You’re carrying a cuneiform artifact around in your backpack!?”
He shrugged. “If it could survive the fall of Ugarit . . .” There was a boyish gleam in his eye. He was showing off now. “Want to see it?”
I nodded mutely. He opened his bag and drew out a lump of clay, roughly the size and shape of a Big Mac. So that’s what had banged against the doorjamb of Blevins’s office. Marked into it in tiny, neat rows . . . was cuneiform text. Tristan handled it as if it were a football. I stared at it for a moment, disoriented by seeing something I had only encountered while wearing gloves in the workroom of a museum, now casually sitting on the table next to my coffee-like beverage. I was almost afraid to touch it; that seemed disrespectful. But within moments I had tossed such a delicate thought aside, and my fingers were caressing it. I studied the script.
“This isn’t Ugaritic,” I said. “It’s Hittite. There are some Akkadian-style markings.”
He looked pleased. “Nice,” he said. “Can you read it?”
“Not offhand,” I said patiently. Some people have a very romanticized notion of what it means to be a polyglot. But not wanting to appear lacking, I added quickly, “The light in here is too low, it will be hard to make out the forms.”
“Soon enough,” he said, and pushed it back into his bag with the same casual roughness. Once it was out of sight I began to wonder if I’d really seen it.
Tristan reached back into the bag and pulled out something else now: a sheaf of papers. He pushed them across the table to me. “You still have the pen,” he said. “Want to get started on these?”
I looked at the papers. There were seven blocks of writing, almost none of them in the Roman alphabet—even the Old Latin passage used Etruscan. At a glance I also recognized biblical Hebrew and classical Greek. The Hebrew I knew best, so I looked more closely at this one.
And blinked several times to make sure I was not imagining what I was seeing. I took a look at the Greek and then the Latin to make sure. Then I looked up at Tristan. “I already know what all of these say.”
“You’ve taken this test before?” he asked, surprised.
“No,” I said tartly. “I created it.” At his confused look, I explained: “I chose these specific samples and I wrote the translation key against which to check the students’ work.” I felt my cheeks grow hot. “I did it as a project under Blevins when I was a graduate student.”
“He sold it to us,” Tristan said simply. “For a lot of money.”
“It was for a graduate seminar on syntax patterns,” I said.
“Mel,” he said, “he sold it to us. There was never a graduate seminar on syntax patterns. We—that is, people high up in my shadowy government entity—have been working with him for a long time. We have contracts with him.”
“I would happily sign that nondisclosure form seventeen times over,” I said, “to express the depth of my sentiments toward Roger Blevins at this moment.”