The little group strolled down the hill, basking in the last failing warmth of the evening sun. Arkady was having trouble squaring the living breathing fact of Gavi with the traitor Osnat had described to him. Indeed, Osnat herself seemed to be having a hard time making the edges match up.
Meanwhile, Gavi seemed naturally to gravitate toward Arkady, until what had begun as a group venture turned into a private tour of Gavi’s little kingdom. Arkady knew that the seeming casualness must be carefully scripted, but it didn’t lessen the flush of pleasure he felt when Gavi bowed his head to listen and turned those dark, burningly serious eyes on him.
It was that intensity rather than any physical resemblance that reminded Arkady so strongly of Arkasha. Gavi was far more controlled and subtle than Arkasha. The fires were banked and smoldering and masked behind a façade of self-deprecating humor. But looking at him, Arkady still had the same feeling he’d had about Arkasha: that he seemed more alive and less defended than it was safe for a person to be.
The goats had names. Gavi introduced them formally, one by one, as if he were presenting Arkady for the approval of a staid group of society matrons. Arkady had never seen a mammal close up other than humans, dogs, and cats. He looked at the geometric perfection of their hooves, met the measuring gaze of their golden eyes. “They’re perfect,” he said. “Just like ants are perfect.”
“Well, I think they are.” Gavi bent to scratch one of the more assertive goats behind her tricolor ears. “There used to be wild goats here, can you imagine? And ghizlaan. What’s ghazaalin English? Oh. Well, there you go. I guess they really did come from here.” He sounded wistful. “I would have liked to meet a gazelle.”
“Maybe we’re still learning to live without all the other species we used to share Earth with,” Arkady said. He paused, struggling to find words for an idea that, if not new, was at least new to him. “I some-times think that we—the Syndicates, I mean—evolved because humans have made themselves so alone in the universe that the only way to belong again was to belong to each other.”
Gavi gave him a sharp, appreciative look that reminded him painfully of his first conversations with Arkasha. “I like that,” he said after considering it for a moment. “I never saw it that way. I’ll have to think about that a bit. Thank you.”
And so it went. By the time they’d fed the goats and the chickens (another marvel!) and walked the perimeter with Dibbuk dancing around them like an electron orbiting its atom’s nucleus, Arkady had fallen completely under Gavi’s spell.
Every now and then, he would surface—from listening to Gavi’s tales of the hidden lives of goats and chickens and sheepdogs, or from telling Gavi about ants—and think, Why am I telling these things to a perfect stranger?
But it was no good. Caution and suspicion rang hollow against Gavi’s questions, Gavi’s fascination, Gavi’s enthusiasm, Gavi’s knowing and determined innocence.
“So, Arkady. Cohen and some other people you don’t know have asked me to talk to you about Novalis. Especially about what happened to Bella. Do you understand why we’re so interested in her?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Is there anything you don’t understand? Any questions you’d like to ask? Anything you’re worried about? Anything I can help you with or explain to you?” Gavi had put the charm on hold, Arkady realized. Now he was all cool, competent, dispassionate professionalism. There was something almost courtly about his change in demeanor; as if he were warning Arkady that it was time to get his guard up and put his game face on.
“Uh…I can’t think of anything at the moment.”
“Okay. No hurry. If you think of anything later, really anything, feel free to stop me and ask. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“First let’s set the ground rules. I know a number of people have been asking you questions lately, some of them not very politely judging from the state of your hide. In fact, you look like you’ve been through hell. So let me tell you right now that you’re not going to get any of that from me. This interrogation—and it isan interrogation; we can leave the we’re-all-just-friends-having-a-chat act for amateur hour—this interrogation is going to be tedious, and probably long, and certainly annoying. But that’s all it’s going to be. I don’t deal in violence. I deal in information. I hope the information you give me will be true, but if it’s not…well, lies are information just like truth. And anyway”—a brief flash of the nonprofessional smile here—“you won’t lie to me, because I’ll catch you out at it sooner or later, and that’ll just be embarrassing for both of us.”
And then, with the jokes and self-deprecating smiles and humorous asides that Arkady would come to see as the very essence of the man, the interrogation began in earnest.
Gavi’s interrogation method, if you could call it that, was simply to take Arkady through his story, again and again, questioning, probing, asking for details, dates, names, endless clarifications. And all the while Gavi listened, crossing his legs and arms, hunching his back and nodding sympathetically, seeming to shrink in upon himself until there was nothing on the other side of the table but those liquid black eyes. It was as if Gavi were effacing himself—becoming the bare idea of a listener—in order to let Arkady’s vision, Arkady’s memories, Arkady’s version of Novalis, take over their shared universe.
And then he would step in—never obtrusive or confrontational, just curious—to ask the question that would pull loose a new thread of memory, open up a new set of questions, recast past words in a new and revealing light, narrow down meanings and implications and insinuations until every word of Arkady’s story possessed the crystalline clarity of a mathematical equation.
If Arkady had still been trying to sell Korchow’s carefully crafted lies, the effects would have been devastating. As it was, however, it seemed like wasted effort.
“I’m not lying to you,” he finally blurted out. “I’m asking for your help. What can I do to make you believe me?”
“I already believe you,” Gavi said, backing up the words with one of his defenseless smiles. “You had me after the first five minutes. But I also happen to think that Moshe was right”—they’d worked their way around, through, and out the other side of Moshe by now—“You know a lot more about Novalis than you think you do. To be honest, I’m hoping that if I can just keep working you through the story, turning the whole thing over, looking at it from fresh angles, you’ll get one of those aha!moments and we’ll be able to pull some of the things you don’t know you know out into the light of day. Make sense?”
“I guess so…”
“But what?”
“I thought of a question I want to ask.”
“Ask away.”
“Are you Absalom?”
Gavi froze for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and gave Arkady a sideways look that was at once amused, challenging, and appreciative.
“No. But I can’t offer you any proof of that. And besides”—Gavi’s lips twitched in a crooked, pained little smile, and again Arkady felt the sharp pang of loss that hit him whenever he saw Arkasha in the other man—“I’m a notoriously talented liar, so you can’t trust me anyway.”
“Do you know who Absalom is?”
“No. That’s also true, by the way.”
Arkady smiled in spite of himself. “And also unprovable?”
“Yeah. It’s a real stinker, isn’t it?”
Arkady looked at Gavi across the table for a long moment. Gavi looked back, a faint smile playing around his lips, his eyebrows raised ever so slightly in an unspoken question.
“I like you,” Arkady said.
“I like you too. But I’m still going to do my job. So don’t get to liking me too much. Just in case…”