Abe laughed. “Boy, you got a short memory. So, you can come or you can't come?"

"I can come.” With bells on, he could come. He squeezed Julie's leg and smiled at her. She had plenty of vacation time saved up. She could come too.

"Ah, wonderful!” Abe said. His pleasure warmed Gideon. “That's fine!"

"What's the crew like?"

"The crew…I didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?” Gideon asked warily.

"Don't be so suspicious. They're all amateurs, that's all. Old friends of yours."

"I thought the government was insisting on professionals this time."

"When we get down to the technical stuff, yes. But for the first couple of weeks it's just clean-up and preliminaries, so we gave the ones who were here in 1982 a chance to come again if they wanted to. On us. From the original nine, five came back, including your old student Harvey Feiffer. We thought we owed it to them, considering the tsuris they had before."

Tsuris was trouble, of course. Gideon's knowledge of Yiddish had grown considerably in the last ten years, for Abraham Irving Goldstein had not forsaken the accent, let alone the vocabulary, of his pushcart-peddling days. Sometimes impenetrable, often hardly noticeable, it had never completely disappeared. Whether this was a statement of identity, a whimsical eccentricity (one among many), or a plain, honest-to-goodness accent, no one knew for sure, not even Gideon. Maybe not even Abe. If anyone had the temerity to ask how it was that a world-renowned scholar, a master of seven languages, sometimes spoke with an accent out of Abie’ s Irish Rose, Abe's response was unvarying. His eyes would grow round, his forehead furrow into a million parchmentlike wrinkles. “Accent?” he would echo, astounded. “What kind accent?"