“All bearing this family crest?” I asked, pointing to the blurry stamp.
“That is the core of the collection. Others we collected on our own.”
“Well, that would challenge certain assumptions about the nature of reality that I did not even know I had.”
“We want you to translate all of them and extract the common core of data,” said Tristan.
I looked at him. “I assume there’s a military purpose.”
“Classified,” he said.
“If I have a context for translating, I can do a better job of it,” I protested.
“My shadowy government entity has been collecting documents of this nature for many years.”
“By what means?” I sputtered, both fascinated and dismayed to learn that a well-funded black ops organization was competing against academic researchers in such a manner. That sure explained a few things.
“The core of the collection, as you’ve been noticing, is from a private library in Italy.”
“The WIMF.”
“Beg pardon?”
“The Weird Italian Mother Fucker,” I said.
“Yeah. We acquired it some time ago.” His face twitched and he broke eye contact. “That’s not true. I was just being polite. We stole it. Before other people could steal it. Long story. Anyway, it gave us plenty of leads that we could follow to acquire more in the same vein. By all means fair and foul. We now feel we have a critical mass that, upon translation, might yield a sense of what precisely ‘magic’ was, how it worked, and why there are no references to it anywhere after the mid-1800s.”
“And you wish to have this information for some kind of military purpose,” I pressed.
“We wish to have one person do all the translations,” Tristan said, firmly not answering my query. “For three reasons. First, budget. Second, the fewer eyes, the safer. Third and most important, if the same person processes all the material, there is a greater chance of gleaning subtle consistencies or patterns.”
“And you are interested in those consistencies or patterns why, exactly?”
“The current hypothesis,” Tristan continued as before—that is, without actually answering me—“is that perhaps there was a worldwide epidemic of a virus that affected only witches, and magic was literally killed off. I don’t think that’s it, but I need to know more before I offer an alternate hypothesis. I have my suspicions, though.”
“Which are classified, right?”
“Whether or not they are classified is classified.”
The documents were many, but brief; most were fragmentary. Within three weeks, working alone at my coffee table, I had produced at least rough translations of the first batch of material. During that time I also gave notice, apologized to my students for abandoning them before they’d even gotten to know me, moved out of my Harvard office, and managed to reassure my parents that I was still working, without telling them exactly what it was I was doing. Meanwhile, Tristan was in communication with me at least twice a day, usually appearing in person, occasionally calling and talking to me in the most oblique terms. Never did we email or text; he did not want anything said between us to be on record. There was something rather swashbuckling, if unsettling, about the need for such secrecy. I had no idea what he did with the rest of his time. (Naturally, I asked. You can guess what his answer was.)
Our dynamic was singular, unprecedented in my life certainly. It was as if we had always been working together, and yet there was an undercurrent of something else, a kind of charge that only comes at the beginning of things. Neither of us ever acted on it—and while I am the sort who rarely acts on such things, he is (while extremely disciplined and upright) the sort who immediately acts on such things. So I attributed the buzz to the excitement of a shared endeavor. The intellectual intimacy of it was far more satisfying than any date I’d ever been on. If Tristan had a lover, she wasn’t getting the real goods. I was.
At the end of the three weeks, when he came to my apartment to receive the last (or so I innocently thought) of my translations, Tristan glanced around until he saw my coatrack. He studied it a moment, then took my raincoat off of its peg. It was late September by this point and the weather was starting to turn.
“Come on, we’re going to talk at the office,” he said. “I’ll buy you dinner.”
“There’s an office?” I said. “I assumed your shadowy government entity had you working out of your car.”
“It’s near Central Square. Carlton Street, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the Apostolic Café. How’s Chinese sound?”
“Depends on the dialect.”
“Ha,” he said without smiling. “Linguist humor. Pretty lame, Stokes.” He held my coat out. I reached for it. He shook his head and glanced down at it. Giving me to understand that he was not handing it to me, but offering to help me put it on—a gesture much more common in 1851 London than it was in that time and place. Some low-grade physical comedy ensued as I turned my back on him and tried to find the armholes with my hands. What a weirdo.
Carlton Street was the poor stepchild in an extended family of alleys and byways near MIT, where scores of biotech companies fledged. Most of the neighborhood had been rebranded into slick office complexes, with landscaped parks, mini-campuses, double-helix-themed architectural flourishes, and abstract steel sculptures abounding. Tristan’s building, however, had not yet been reclaimed. It was utterly without character: a block-long two-story mid-twentieth-century building thrown together of tilt-up concrete slabs painted a dingy grey that somehow managed to clash with the sidewalk. There were a few graffiti tags. The windows were without adornment, all of them outfitted with vertical vinyl blinds, all dusty and askew. There was no roster of tenants, no signs or logos, no indication at all of what was within.
Laden with bags of Chinese food and beer, we approached the glass entrance door at dusk. This building was one of the few places on earth that not even twilight could improve upon. Tristan slapped his wallet against a black plate set into the wall, and the door lock clicked, releasing. Inside, we moved between buzzing fluorescent lights and matted industrial carpeting, down a corridor past several windowless doors—slabs of wood, dirty around the knobs, blazoned with signs bearing names of what I assumed were tech start-ups. Some of these had actual logos, some just cutesy names printed in block letters, and one was just a domain name scrawled on a sticky note. We walked the entire length of the building and came to a door next to a stairwell. Its only distinguishing feature was a crude Magic Marker drawing of a bird, seen in profile, drawn on the back of a Chinese menu blue-taped to the wood. The bird was somewhat comical, with a prominent beak and big feet.
“Dodo?” I guessed.
Tristan made no answer. He was unlocking the door.