Gail nods, but it takes her aback that it is she who cannot give a straightforward answer. She closes her eyes, feels an ache in her chest, a physical pain that pulses slowly. Day by day, she thinks, the distance between them is growing, carrying them out of reach of each other.
Instead of speaking, she takes his hand, holding it carefully between her own.
That night, while she is setting the table for dinner, the phone rings, and a moment later Ansel appears beside her holding the cordless. “For you,” he says. “Harry Jaarsma, calling from Amsterdam.”
She glances at the clock. It is four in the morning in the Netherlands. She can see him in his apartment, the heavy brocade curtains, high stacks of paper obscuring the carpet. “Jaarsma,” she says, taking the phone from Ansel, watching his back as he disappears from the room. “How are you?”
He says, without greeting or introduction, “I have good news.”
“Don’t tell me –”
“It’s true,” Jaarsma says, unable to contain his joy. “Never underestimate the power of patience.”
She says the only words that come to her mind. “You broke it.”
“Indeed.”
Gail sits down. Behind her, there is a low hum in the living room, the sound of the party, Ansel laughing with her mother, Ed Carney and Glyn playing a duet on the piano. Gail’s father is standing by the window, looking into the room as if he is outside it. She puts a hand against her eyes, trying to concentrate on Jaarsma’s voice as he tells her how he had woken in the night and an idea had come to him. He had leapt out of bed, turned on his computer and typed what he guessed to be the key phrase. “I sat back and waited. Then, right in front of my eyes, the numbers began to fade away. Letters, words, entire sentences. I felt as if William Sullivan’s ghost had arrived in my office and was rudely typing upon my keyboard.” He laughs. “I must enter the remaining the numbers, but I wanted to share the good news.”
In her mind, Gail can see the first line of the diary: 5 9 24 8 26 9. Numbers fill thirty single-spaced pages, without any visible order or pattern. She has repeated the line to herself for months, 5 9 24 8 26 9, as she falls to sleep at night. She has awoken with it on the tip of her tongue.
She remembers how Jaarsma had been as excited as she was at the prospect of unlocking the secrets of Sullivan’s journal. They had met in the Netherlands some fifteen years ago, through mutual friends now only vaguely remembered. Gail had been studying in Leiden, and during their first meeting they had found themselves arguing on the same side in a heated discussion about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, about science, ethics and history. Part way through the night, he had turned to her, eyes glassy from the beer, and said, “We think so much alike. Let’s not ruin it by falling in love.” They had raised their glasses to a long and enduring friendship.
Almost immediately, Jaarsma, whose specialty was chaos theory, had worked out the structure of the code, a version of the Vigenère Square. But rather than using the letters of the alphabet, Sullivan had used the numbers 1 through 26. The Vigenère Square, Jaarsma had explained to her, combines twenty-six different cipher, or code, alphabets. So far, so good: since the mid-nineteenth century, a means had existed to unlock it. But the final level of encryption, the key word that would allow the codebreaker to determine which of the twenty-six cipher alphabets was in use at any given time, had so far eluded him. A key word of blue, for instance, would alert the codebreaker to use the cipher alphabets b, l, u and e. The key used by Sullivan was not a simple word, and the longer the key, the more difficult it was to break the code. Perhaps the key was a list, a song, an entire book. It could be virtually anything.
Two months ago, Jaarsma had called her, exhausted, saying that the effort was futile. “My computer runs for hours at a time,” he had said, “but it is lacking in that most human of traits: intuition.” He told her that he had ceased to function properly, was unable to eat or sleep. He carried the diary everywhere, studying it on the train, in his laboratory, at the dinner table. His colleagues were unforgiving. The journal was occupying him to distraction. Jaarsma and Gail had mutually decided to put the project on hold. The phone call this evening is the first time Gail has heard from him since then.
“What was the key phrase?” she asks him now, straining to hear through the noise of the room.
“It was their names. His son, his wife and himself. Just their full names spelled out. Nothing more.” After a pause, he says, “I haven’t read all the way through to the end, but I think the contents will surprise you. Her father was not the man I expected to find.” He adds, “Is that enough to persuade you to visit me in Amsterdam?”
“I hardly need to be persuaded.”
He laughs. “I’ll have the champagne ready. Congratulations on your birthday, by the way.”
The dinner progresses around her, laughter and conversation, and much clinking of glasses. Her thoughts drift in and out of the present. Over dessert, Ansel looks across the table at her, as if to say, What is it? What’s wrong? She feels, for a brief moment, a wave of claustrophobia, and she stands up and begins clearing away the dishes.
Glyn rises to help her, and the two go into the kitchen, plates and coffee cups balanced precariously. When the dishes are safely stowed in the sink, Glyn leans against the counter, her expression concerned. “Thinking about work?” she asks.
Gail does not answer right away. She reaches up to the cupboard, brings down the bottle of port, and then enough glasses for everyone. As she opens the bottle and begins pouring, she tells Glyn about Jaarsma’s phone call. Glyn is editing the documentary, a co-production for CBC-Radio and Radio Netherlands, but so far she has stayed in the background, allowing Gail time to research and gather tape. “When this project is finished,” Gail says, “I think I’ll take some time off. Sit back for a while. I’m a bit run down, is all.”
They touch glasses, Glyn’s infectious smile warming the room. “For years we’ve been planning to celebrate New Year’s on the Gulf Islands,” she says. “Why not this year? Rent a little house on the Pacific, do the Polar Bear Swim. Ansel must have vacation time coming up?”
“Yes,” Gail says, sipping her port. “I think he does.”
“You’re exhausted. The curse of the freelancer.” She reaches her fingers out, brushes a strand of hair from Gail’s forehead. “Remember Prague? We sat under the stars together, knowing we were at the start of something, some grand adventure. Were we right or wrong, back then? You and I, what a pair of romantics.”
That night, after everyone has gone, Gail leaves Ansel in the living room and goes into her office, shutting the door behind her. The curtains are open, and outside the street lamps glow, laying circles of light on the empty road.
She is surrounded by equipment worthy of a museum. Reel-to-reels, cassette recorders, record players. Lately, she has been working with Mini Discs and digital editing programs, but she cannot bring herself to dispose of the old tape, the old equipment. “They still work,” she says to amused colleagues. “They still do what we asked of them.”
She collects tape the way others collect records or rare books, safeguarding them with a feeling of reverence. She has fragments spliced together, dozens of conversations gathered on a single reel. Soundscapes, features, interviews. On days when her mind wanders, she randomly loads a reel onto the player, puts the earphones on, listens. For Gail, the devotion lies in more than the words spoken. It is the words spoken at a specific moment in time, in a particular place. A child singing in the background, a pause in the telling, an old woman wetting her lips, smoothing her dress. A man who forgets the presence of the microphone, who begins a conversation with himself. “And after that, nothing was ever the same. I wanted to go back, I needed to see him, but I couldn’t.”