note about the episode and gave it to the security man. Don’t worry, we’re covered. No one of the old man’s description rang a bell with anyone at the mission. They said he could have been any one of a thousand religious Jews walking around. There was nothing in the contact logs fitting his description or that sort of approach.”

“Religious Jews.” Pak repeated it slowly. We looked at each other. “Maybe she was followed, too, and maybe she bumped into a religious Jew and maybe she never reported it. She wasn’t the type to fill out forms, as far as I can tell. Runs in the family, I guess.”

“Have you been doing your own research?” I was trying to remember the face of the old man on the street. It was mostly beard, so I couldn’t be sure of the rest of it.

“Her father called the Ministry to complain about you, and they told him to call me. We talked for a while, if you can call that research. What if she was approached in New York? That could have some connection to what happened to her later.”

Sure thing, I thought. The long arm of New York. “There is no way to know what she was doing. The local security man only had a chance to follow her two or three times. He thought she might have been tailed by the locals. Nothing subtle, as far as I can tell. How many relays of people in blue scarves can there be, he asked me. Each time, she lost them for a while, but they picked her up again without much trouble because she went to the same place each time, that park. Going there she’d walk using a slightly different route; but each time she took the same cab home. He was sure it was the same cabdriver, a female. I thought that might be something, but it wasn’t. When I tracked the driver down, it turned out to be a young Pakistani woman whose father had sent her to the U.S. to go to school.”

Pak nodded. “A young Pakistani woman. Sure, there must be lots of them driving cabs in New York. At least she wasn’t a Jew. Tell me, please, O, that there are no Pakistani Jews.” He paused, turning this over in his mind. Then he went on. “This driver, she told you a story, I suppose.”

“She did. I got in her cab and told her to take me to one of the train stations. She said she was bored with school and started driving a cab. She was worried because her father was coming for a visit. If he found out she wasn’t in school, she said, he would drag her home. She didn’t want to go. Why not, I asked. Because he would arrange a marriage to a man who would treat her like dirt. He might beat her. What will you do, I asked. She turned around to look at me. ‘If he beats me? I’ll kill him.’”

“Maybe she was just making the whole thing up.”

“Nope. All you had to do was to look into her eyes. This was real. She wasn’t kidding.”

Pak took a last puff on his cigarette. “Get some sleep,” he said. “You should take up smoking again.” He pointed at my cigarette, floating in the soup bowl. “Might help your jet lag.”

Chapter Six

“His name is Sohn and he’s from the party,” Pak said. The next morning, we were in my office, and Pak seemed a little ill at ease. It wasn’t unusual these days. All of us were that way—a little ill at ease all the time. Bad stories were coming in from the countryside. Here in the capital, people were disappearing from offices, food was scarce, heat was random, electricity was unpredictable and even when there was some, it didn’t last very long. No one pretended things weren’t bad, though we didn’t talk a lot about it. The question was whether we would get through it.

“Am I supposed to be impressed with his party status? Because I’ll tell you frankly, I’m not. Not these days. You know him, maybe?” As I spoke, Pak drummed his fingers on my desk. In better times, that would have meant he was impatient. Or in some cases, usually in the spring when it was possible to smell the earth again, that little gesture meant he was full of energy, ready to go for a long walk along the river. Now, more and more,