I explained. “But he knew he couldn’t say that. So, academic freedom or whatever.”
Tristan seemed to actually think about this as we crossed Temple Street. His type are trained to respect authority. Blevins was nothing if not authoritative. So, this was a little test. Was his straight-arrow brain going to explode?
Through all the bustle, in the golden light of early autumn, I could see the entrance to the Central Square T stop. “What’s your position?” he asked me.
“On academic freedom? Or getting paid?”
“You haven’t kicked me to the curb yet,” he said. “So, I guess we’re talking about the latter.”
“Depends on the paycheck.”
He named an amount that was twice my annual salary, with the caveat “. . . once you convince me you’re the right person for the job.”
“What will the translations be used for?”
“Classified.”
I tried to think of reasons not to pursue this lucrative diversion. “Could they somehow be justification for unethical actions, or physical violence, on the part of your shadowy government entity?”
“Classified.”
“That’s a yes, then,” I said. “Or at least a possibly. You’d have just said no otherwise.”
“That amount I just mentioned? It’s for a six-month contract. Renewable by mutual agreement. Benefits negotiable. Are we having coffee together or not?” We were nearing the turn to the Apostolic Café.
“No harm in coffee,” I said. Stalling for time, trying to wrap my head around the math: four times my current take-home pay, which would never include benefits. Not to mention that I’d be trading up in the supervisor department.
We entered the café, a beautiful old desanctified brick church with high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and incongruously modern wood tables and chairs sprinkled across the marble floor. There was a state-of-the-art espresso station to one side and—most disconcertingly, as much as I’d overcome my upbringing—a counter set just about where the altar would once have been, and a complete wet bar curving around the inner wall of the apse. The place had only recently opened but was already very popular with the techno-geek crowd from both Harvard and MIT. It was my first time in. I felt a brief pang of envy that there weren’t enough linguists in Cambridge to warrant a designated polyglot-hangout as lovely as this.
“What’s your pleasure?” asked the barista, a young Asian-American woman with interesting piercings, tattoos in place of eyebrows, and a demeanor that blended I’m sooo interesting and this job sucks with I have a really cool secret life and this job is an awesome front. Her nametag read “Julie Lee: Professional 聪明的驴子•双簧管” (which I understood, roughly, as “Smart-ass Oboist”).
We ordered drinks—Tristan, black coffee; myself, something I would never normally have, a complicated something-latte-something with lots of buzzwords I picked out at random from the menu over the bar, and which prompted a brief smirk from our barista. The agents of shadowy government entities, I reasoned, were likely to be trained in psychological evaluation of potential recruits, and I did not want him getting an accurate read on me until I decided whether or not I wished to pursue his offer. (Also he was rather handsome, which made me jittery a bit, so I decided to hide behind an affected eccentricity.) The result being that he sat down with a lovely-smelling cup of dark roast and I sat down with something almost undrinkable.
“You ordered that to try to throw me off the scent, in case I was doing some sort of ninja psych-eval of you,” he said casually, as if just trying the idea on for size. “Ironically, that tells me more about you than if you’d just ordered your usual.”
I must have looked shocked, because he grinned with almost savage self-satisfaction. There was something disturbingly thrilling about being seen so thoroughly, so quickly, and so stealthily. I felt myself flush.
“How?” I demanded. “How did you do that?”
He leaned in toward me, large, strong hands clasped before him on the café table. “Melisande Stokes—may I call you Mel?” I nodded. “Mel.” He cleared his throat in a very official-sounding, preparatory manner. “If we’re going to pursue this,” he said, “there are three parts to it. First, before anything else, you have to sign the nondisclosure form. Then I need you to do some sample translations so we can get a sense of your work, and then we have to run a background check on you.”
“How long will all that take?” I asked.
Four times my salary. With possible dental.
And no Blevins.
He had set his backpack on a chair beside him. Now he patted it. “Nondisclosure form is right here. If you sign it now, I can text your name and social to DC.” He paused then, and reconsidered. “Never mind. They already know your social. Point is, they’ll have finished the background check before you’re done choking down whatever the hell it is you ordered. So it’s just how long it takes you to translate the test samples and have our guys look over your translations. But”—he waved a warning finger at me—“no fooling around here. Once you sign the form, you’re committing to do this. Unless we reject you. You can’t reject us. You’re stuck with me, for six months minimum, as soon as you sign the form. Got it? No half-assedness on your part. So maybe we just talk tonight and then you take the form with you and give it to me tomorrow when you’ve had a chance to sleep on it.”
“Where would I find you tomorrow?” I asked.
“Classified,” he said. “I’d find you.”
“I don’t like being stalked. I’d better sign it now,” I said.
He stared at me a moment. It wasn’t quite like that first moment, when we had stared and it had felt so strangely normal. This felt charged. But I wasn’t exactly sure why. I would like to think I was simply delighted to be ridding myself of Blevins and quadrupling my income all in one go. But if I am honest with myself I confess there was a definite pleasure in being Chosen by someone with such agreeable features.
“Right,” he said, after we had been staring for a couple of heartbeats. “Here.” He reached for his bag.
I read the form, which said precisely what Tristan had described, making it at once boilerplate and singular. I held out my hand, and Tristan offered me a government-issue ballpoint pen. A far cry from the slightly blood-smeared Hughes & Sons Ltd. model number 137B, Extra Fine, with which I am writing this.
As I signed the form, he leaned in closer to me and said quietly, sounding delighted with himself, “I have some of the cuneiform in my bag if you want to take a look at it.”
I believe I gaped at that. “You’re carrying a cuneiform artifact around in your backpack!?”
He shrugged. “If it could survive the fall of Ugarit . . .” There was a boyish gleam in his eye. He was showing off now. “Want to see it?”
I nodded mutely. He opened his bag and drew out a lump of clay, roughly the size and shape of a Big Mac. So that’s what had banged against the doorjamb of Blevins’s office. Marked into it in tiny, neat rows . . . was cuneiform text. Tristan handled it as if it were a football. I stared at it for a moment, disoriented by seeing something I had only encountered while wearing gloves in the workroom of a museum, now casually sitting on the table next to my coffee-like beverage. I was almost afraid to touch it; that seemed disrespectful. But within moments I had tossed such a delicate thought aside, and my fingers were caressing it. I studied the script.
“This isn’t Ugaritic,” I said. “It’s Hittite. There are some Akkadian-style markings.”
He looked pleased. “Nice,” he said. “Can you read it?”
“Not offhand,” I said patiently. Some people have a very romanticized notion of what it means to be a polyglot. But not wanting