“Well,” he said. “Any luck?”

“None, I’m afraid.”

“And bloody awful weather for hunting wild geese, isn’t it?” He added sugar to his tea, buttered a slice of bread. “Where’d you go today? More of the same?”

I nodded. “Travel agencies, employment agencies. And I went to half the rooming houses in Russell Square, and I suppose I did have a bit of luck. I found the last place she stayed before quitting London. She had a room around the corner from the museum. The dates fit; she checked out on the sixteenth of August. But she left no forwarding address, and no one there had any idea where she might have gone.”

“It seems hopeless,” Julia said.

That seemed a concise summation of the state of affairs – it seemed quite hopeless, and I was beginning to wonder why I had let myself be panicked into making the trip in the first place. One reason, of course, was the emotional state of Mrs. Horowitz. Alarm is contagious, and the woman was profoundly alarmed. But it was also true that Phaedra’s letters did nothing to dispel this alarm. There was the last letter from England: I can’t tell you much for security reasons, but I have this fantastic opportunity to travel through lands I never even hoped to see. I wish I could tell you more about it. And a postcard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, mailed from Baghdad and with an indecipherable date with this chilling scrawl: Everything’s gone wrong. Am in real trouble. You may never hear from me again. Hope I can mail this. Evidently she had been in so much trouble that she had neither pen nor pencil; the message was in charcoal.

I don’t remember what I told Mrs. Horowitz. I calmed her as well as I could, then took Minna back to the apartment, disconnected the telephone, and worked nonstop on the thesis for three days and two nights.