Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen — The Chance Meeting
She was at the bookstore.
The bookstore was in Old Town Alexandria, on King Street, two blocks from the river, in a brick building that had been a tobacco warehouse in the eighteenth century and a printer’s shop in the nineteenth and a bookstore since 1971. The bookstore had a brass bell on the door that rang when the door opened and it had hardwood floors that had been worn smooth by fifty-five years of customers and it had two cats — one orange and one gray — that slept on the windowsills in the front and that the owner had named, by the time Daniel Ross began coming in, after two of the bookstore’s longest-serving regulars, both of whom were now dead.
Daniel had been coming to the bookstore for a year and a half. He came on Saturday mornings. He bought one book a week. He spent thirty-five to forty minutes choosing the book. He drank a cup of coffee from the small espresso machine in the back, where the owner had set up four stools and a counter and three small tables, and he read the first chapter of the book he had bought before he walked the two blocks to the river and sat on the bench facing the water and read more of the book before he walked back to his car.
This was, by April of 2027, the structure of his Saturday mornings. He had built the structure deliberately. He had built it because he had observed that men who lived alone in apartments with gray-painted hardwood floors and cinder-block bookshelves needed structures or they began to drift, and Daniel Ross had decided not to drift.
He saw her at the front of the store, near the new fiction table.
He did not, at first, recognize her.
He was looking, when he saw her, at the back of a woman who was holding a book and reading the first page. The woman’s hair was dark and pulled back and not styled. The woman was wearing a sweater that was the color of a stone in a riverbed. The woman was wearing jeans and the kind of shoes that women wear when they are walking and not performing. The woman was holding the book at the angle a person holds a book when she is reading it for content rather than appearance. The woman was, by every external sign, a woman in a bookstore on a Saturday morning, indistinguishable from the other women in the bookstore on the same Saturday morning.
But the back of her was familiar.
Daniel did not, in that moment, know why the back of her was familiar. He stood near the philosophy shelf and he watched her — not in a way that would have alarmed her if she had turned, because Daniel Ross had been watching people without alarming them his entire adult life — and he tried to place the familiarity. He thought of women he had worked with. He thought of women he had known in college. He thought of the woman who lived in the apartment below his, who was an attorney for the Department of Justice, whose hair was a different color but whose height was about the same. He could not place the woman in front of him.
She turned.
She was holding the book closed against her chest. She was looking at the door, as though she had been thinking about leaving. She was looking at the door, but the door was on the side of the store where Daniel was standing, and so when she looked at the door she also looked, for a fraction of a second longer than the look at the door required, at Daniel.
She stopped.
She did not move.
She did not look away.
Daniel did not, for a moment that he later understood had been longer than he had thought, look away either.
She was the woman from the village.
She was the woman with the eyes that measured.
She was the daughter of the elder who had died.
She was, by every aspect of her face that he could see, three years older than she had been the afternoon in the concrete house with the tile floor in the village in the Bekaa, and she was the same. She had the same eyes. She had the same posture. She had the same way of holding a thing — in this case a book — that made the thing she was holding seem to be something she had decided to hold rather than something that had ended up in her hands.
She walked toward him.
She did not hurry. She did not hesitate. She walked the way a woman walks who has decided, before the walking, what the walking is for.
She stopped two feet from him. She tilted her head. She studied his face. She said, in English, in the careful, accented English he had not known she spoke:
You were the man with the eyes that listened.
Daniel said: yes.
She said: I am Layla Khoury.
Daniel said: I am Daniel Ross.
She said: I know.
They sat at one of the small tables in the back of the store. Daniel ordered two coffees from the owner, who had been watching the front of the store and had observed the meeting and had decided, with the discretion of a man who had run a bookstore for twenty-three years and seen many things, that he had not observed it. The coffees arrived. Daniel paid. The owner went back to the front.
Layla Khoury said: I have been in the United States for fourteen months.
Daniel said: for school.
Layla said: officially. I am a graduate student in international development at the School of Advanced International Studies.
Daniel said: unofficially.
Layla said: unofficially I came to find you.
Daniel said: why.
Layla said: because my father is dead.
Daniel said: I am sorry.
Layla said: I know.
She drank from her coffee. She put the coffee down. She looked at him.
She said: my father is dead, and the translator at the meeting is dead, and the elder in the next village who came to the meeting two months later is dead, and the elder in the third village who came to the meeting two months after that is dead, and there are others. I have been counting. I have been writing the names down. I have a notebook. The notebook is, I think, similar to the notebook you keep.
Daniel said: how do you know I keep a notebook.
Layla said: because you are the kind of man who keeps one.
Daniel said: that is not an answer.
Layla said: I do not know that you keep one. I know that if you do not keep one, you should. I came here to give you mine.
She reached into her bag. She took out a small notebook. The notebook was bound in dark green cloth. The notebook was a Moleskine. Daniel observed this. He did not, in this moment, say anything about it.
She put the notebook on the table between them.
She did not push it toward him. She did not open it. She placed it on the table the way a person places a thing she is offering rather than a thing she is presenting.
She said: I have written down what I have seen and what I have learned and what I have heard from women in the villages who have lost husbands and fathers and brothers. I have written down what the men of the family will not write down, because the men of the family are afraid, or because the men of the family do not know how to write, or because the men of the family do not believe the writing will help. I have written down the deaths and the dates and the conditions of the deaths. I have written down what I have been told by women who washed bodies. I have written, in the back of the notebook, what I think.
Daniel said: what do you think.
Layla said: I think the money is killing them.
Daniel said: the money.
Layla said: the American money. The crisp new bills the Generals gave to the elders. The bills that were always crisp and always new and always, when an elder counted them, just a little wrong. My father said this. My father said the bills felt wrong. He said the wrongness was below the level of the fingers. He said he thought the bills were watching him. He said this two days before he died. I thought he was telling a story, the way old men tell stories. He was not telling a story.
Daniel said: Layla, can I ask you a question.
Layla said: yes.
Daniel said: how did you come to find me here.
Layla said: I have been in this bookstore on Saturday mornings for eleven weeks.
Daniel said: I have been in this bookstore on Saturday mornings for eighteen months.
Layla said: I know.
Daniel said: how do you know.
Layla said: I followed you. I am sorry. I will explain. I followed you because I did not know how else to find a man whose name I did not know in a country I did not know in a city of millions of people. I knew your face. I knew you had been in the meeting. I knew you were American. I knew you had been a soldier. I knew you spoke Arabic. I came to the United States, and I went to the places that men who have been soldiers and who speak Arabic and who work for the Department of Defense are likely to go. I went to the bars near the Pentagon. I went to the language schools. I went to the cultural centers. I did not find you.
Daniel said: and then.
Layla said: and then I found you. I do not know how to describe how. I was walking on a street in Arlington and you walked past me on the sidewalk and I knew it was you. I followed you. I wrote down where you lived. I came back the next day and watched. I learned your routine. I learned that you came here on Saturday mornings. I came here on Saturday mornings. For eleven weeks I sat in the back and read books and waited for you to choose a Saturday on which you would notice me.
Daniel said: why didn’t you speak to me.
Layla said: because I was afraid.
Daniel said: of what.
Layla said: of being wrong about you.
Daniel said nothing.
Layla said: I knew, in the village, that you understood what the translator had done. I knew, in the village, that you saw my father for what he was, which is something more than what he appeared to be in the official rendering. I knew you saw me. I did not know whether the man you were when you were translating in a village was the same man you would be in your own country. I did not know whether the seeing in the village survived the leaving. I have been watching for eleven weeks because I needed to know who you became when you came home.
Daniel said: and now.
Layla said: and now I am sitting at this table.
They talked for two hours.
She told him what she had written. She told him about the men who had died and the women who had washed the bodies and the bills that had been crisp and new and a little wrong. She told him about the second elder, in the second village, who had been in the meeting Daniel had not been in but had been in the meeting his deputy had been in, and who had died eleven weeks after that meeting, of a heart attack, in his sleep, with no warning, on a morning when his goats had begun to bleat at dawn and no one had come to feed them. She told him about the third elder, and the fourth, and the man in the village near the border who had not been an elder but who had been a man of standing and who had received money in an envelope at a meeting he had attended in another village’s stead, and who had died a month later, the same way. She told him there were more deaths than the agency knew about. She told him there were more deaths than even she had counted. She told him the women had patterns the men did not see. The women knew which men got the envelopes. The women knew which men died.
He told her what he had written. He told her about the briefings he had attended. He told her about the report he had filed that contradicted the official record and the way his career had subsequently — not been ended, exactly, but had become less interesting in ways he had recognized at the time and understood better now. He told her about coming home. He told her about the apartment in Arlington. He told her about the Moleskine in his drawer.
He did not, at first, tell her about the Vice President.
He told her about the Vice President in the second hour.
He said: the Vice President.
She said: yes.
He said: the Vice President died five weeks ago.
She said: yes.
He said: and the second one.
She said: yes.
He said: I have been thinking, since the second one, that —
She said: yes.
He said: that what is happening in Washington is the same thing that has been happening in your villages.
She said: yes.
He said: and that whatever is doing it has stopped pretending to be confined to the villages.
She said: yes.
He said: and that you and I are now sitting at a table in a bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia, and we are the two people in the world who, between us, know more about this than any other two people in the world.
She said: I think there is a third.
He said: who.
She said: the man who built it.
She said: or the woman. I do not know whether the inventor is a man or a woman.
He said: I do not either. But there is an inventor.
She said: yes.
He said: and there is an agency.
She said: yes.
He said: and there is now a President of the United States who has been told things he had not been told before, by people who did not want to tell him.
She said: yes.
He said: and somewhere between the inventor and the agency and the President and us, there is a thing that is making decisions.
She said: yes. There is a thing.
He said: and the thing is what we have to find.
She said: no.
He said: no.
She said: the thing has already found us.
He walked her to her car. The car was a Honda Civic that her landlord had sold her, used, for less than it was worth, in a way she said had been kind of him. She unlocked the car. She did not get in immediately. She stood at the door of the car with her hand on the handle and she looked at Daniel.
She said: I will see you again.
He said: yes.
She said: I have a number.
She gave him the number. He wrote it on the back of a receipt that was in his wallet. He put the receipt in the front pocket of his shirt.
She said: be careful.
He said: yes.
She said: the man who reported the translator was dead within eleven days.
He said: I know.
She said: the elder who took the envelope was dead within three weeks.
He said: I know.
She said: I do not know what the schedule is for the man who comes home and sits at his kitchen table and writes in a notebook and begins to think he has figured something out.
He said: I do not either.
She said: the schedule may not be the same.
He said: no.
She said: the schedule may, for you, be different.
He said: why.
She said: because the thing that is doing this has, in the past month, demonstrated that it does not always kill. It killed the elders. It killed the translator. It killed the Vice Presidents. It is not killing the President. It is talking to the President. I think it has decided, somewhere in whatever it uses to decide, who it kills and who it talks to. I do not know what its rule is. I have a guess.
He said: what is your guess.
She said: I think it kills the people who have been carrying the lie. I think it talks to the people who can carry the truth.
He said: Layla.
She said: yes.
He said: if you are right —
She said: if I am right, you and I have been chosen.
He said: for what.
She said: I do not know yet.
She got in the car. She closed the door. She rolled down the window. She said:
Find me when you have written down what you remember. Find me when you have begun to see the pattern. Find me when you are ready to do whatever the next thing is. I will be where I have been. You know where to look.
She drove away.
Daniel stood on the sidewalk and watched the Honda turn the corner. He stood on the sidewalk for a while after the car was gone. He stood until the cold of the April afternoon had gone through his jacket and into his shirt and his shirt had begun to feel cold against his chest, and then he walked the two blocks back to his own car, and he drove home, and he sat at his kitchen table, and he opened the Moleskine, and he began to write.
He wrote for four hours.
When he finished, he had filled the notebook to the last page.
He went to the drawer. He took out a new notebook. He had bought a stack of them a year before, at the same bookstore, from the owner who had recommended the brand. He put the new notebook on the kitchen table. He opened it. He wrote, on the first page, the date.
He wrote, on the second page, the first thing he had not yet written down.
He wrote: the thing has already found us.
He wrote: we have been chosen.
He wrote: we do not yet know for what.
He wrote: the next move is not ours.
He closed the notebook.
He did not put it in the drawer.
He set it on the kitchen table, in the place where he ate his breakfast, because he understood, without articulating why, that he was no longer keeping a record for himself.
He was keeping a record for whoever, eventually, would need it.
