I find Genevra at her desk. “I need you to run a name,” I say.

After Germany was unified in the nineties, the United States returned the Berlin Document Center, the central repository of SS/Nazi Party records that had been seized by the U.S. Army after World War II... but not before microfilming the whole damn thing. Between the Berlin Document Center and the information that came to light after the breakup of the USSR, I know Genevra’s bound to unearth something.

That is, if there’s something to be unearthed.

She looks up at me. “You spilled coffee on your tie,” she says, pulling a pencil out of the bird’s nest of frizzy yellow hair piled on top of her head. “Better change it before your date.”

How do you know I have a date?” I ask.

“Because your mother called me this morning and told me I should push you out the door with brute force if you were still here at six thirty p.m.”

This doesn’t surprise me. No cable, Ethernet, or FiOS system is as blisteringly fast at spreading news as a Jewish family.

Remind me to kill her,” I tell Genevra.

“Can’t,” she muses. “Don’t want to be roped in as an accomplice.” She grins at me over her glasses. “Besides, Leo, your mom’s a breath of fresh air. All day long I read about people who craved world domination and racial superiority. By comparison, wanting grandchildren is sort of sweet.”

“She has grandchildren. Three, courtesy of my sister.”

“She doesn’t like the fact that you’re married to your job.”

She didn’t much like it when I was married to Diana, either,” I say. It’s been five years since my divorce was final, and I have to admit, the worst thing about that whole experience was having to admit to my mother that she was right: the woman I believed to be the girl of my dreams was not, in fact, right for me.

Recently, I ran into Diana in the Metro. She’s remarried, and she’s got one kid and another on the way. We were exchanging pleasantries when my cell phone rang—my sister, asking me if I was going to be able to make it to my nephew’s birthday party that weekend. She heard me say good-bye to Diana, and within the hour, my mother had called to set me up on a blind date.

Like I said, Jewish family network.

I need you to run a name,” I repeat.

Genevra takes the paper from my hand. “It’s six thirty-six,” she says. “Don’t make me call your mother.”

I stop back at my desk to grab my briefcase and laptop, because leaving without them would be as foreign to me as leaving without my arm or leg. I instinctively reach for the holster on my belt to make sure my BlackBerry’s there. I sit down for a second, and Google Sage Singer’s name.

I use search engines all the time, of course. Mostly it’s to see if someone (Miranda Coontz, for example?) is a complete whack job. But the reason I want to find information on Sage Singer is her voice.

It’s smoky. It sounds like the first night in autumn when you build a fire in the fireplace and drink a glass of port and fall asleep with a dog on your lap. Not that I have a dog or port, but you get what I mean.

This, if nothing else, is proof that I ought to be running out the door to go to that blind date. Sage Singer’s voice may have sounded young, but she is probably in her dotage—she did say, after all, that this Josef Weber guy was a friend of hers. Her mother had recently died, after all, probably of old age. And that husky rasp could be the mark of a lifelong cigarette addict.

The only Sage Singer in New Hampshire who pops up, though, is a baker at a small boutique café. Her berry tart recipe is in a local magazine as part of a summer cornucopia piece. Her name appears in the business listing of the newspaper heralding the opening of Mary DeAngelis’s new bakery.

I click on the News link and find a video from a local television station—one uploaded just yesterday. “Sage Singer,” the reporter says in a voice-over, “is the baker who crafted the Jesus Loaf.”

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21