“Can you get anywhere else from here?” Denton gave a phony laugh.

“I can’t get my bike in there.”

“You have a point.” Denton looked behind him at the backseat of the sedan he’d rented. The kid was getting wetter by the minute.

“I’ll just go. I only have to take in the mail.”

“Is that all? Why don’t I just drop it off for you? I pass the post office on my way out of town.”

The boy’s face struggled between the sheer appeal of the offer and his sense of duty. “But how would I get the basket back?”

“No problem.” Denton put the car in park and got out. He unstrapped the wicker basket from the boy’s bike and dumped the contents onto the passenger seat of his car—a few dozen letters and a small package. He put the basket back on the bike. “There. Now you can get back to the library. It looked pretty cozy in there.” He smiled, holding a hand over his head to keep off the rain.

And that was how it happened that Denton found himself driving up the lonely road from the Hebrew Academy of Syracuse—in the presence of maples and aspens and nothing else—with Rabbi Schwartz’s mail on his passenger seat.

To his credit, it did not occur to him to look at the mail until he was halfway back to town. And then it was only after a glance to see if the mail had gotten wet (it had) and another glance, curiously, to see the address on the topmost letter, and then, looking around guiltily in his rearview mirror to confirm that no one was there, he sidled off the road and began to look at the mail in earnest.

So it wasn’t as though he had planned and plotted. He hadn’t had the idea in his mind, even, when he’d offered to help the boy. How could he? He hadn’t known what was in the basket. And he certainly hadn’t known that among the bills and personal letters of the students he would find a letter from Rabbi Schwartz himself, a letter addressed to an antique dealer in Zurich, which piqued Denton, stirred visions of tweezers and tomes, a letter that, as fate would have it, had been dampened by the rain and had a corner on the back flap that was puffed up enough to insert a finger and that, with minimal tugging, opened without any ripping at all.

Yes, I am interested in the manuscript pages of Yosef Kobinski that you describe and will meet your price of $15,000 for the nonexclusive rights and the physical document.

Why was it that for Denton Wyle, the important forks in his life were never consciously chosen? That fate was always a brick wall he ran into while drifting about aimlessly like a leaf in the wind? He was a seat-of-the-pantser, a blind pup rooting around for the teat, rooting and rooting.

And somehow he always found it.

2.2. Aharon Handalman

Aharon Handalman kicked off his slippers and pulled the heavy binder into bed with him. Hannah was reading something, hopefully (he gave her the benefit of the doubt) some novel of the uplifting sort appropriate for a rabbi’s wife.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re worse than Yehuda with his homework.”

Aharon grunted and settled in, fluffing the pillows behind him. He cracked open the binder, pencil at the ready in his pajama pocket.

The binder contained printouts of all the Kobinski arrays, keywords circled. There were nearly four hundred of them now. Some of the words circled were from the encyclopedia entry—Eleazar Zaks, Brezeziny, The Book of Mercy, Auschwitz. But none of them told Aharon why Kobinski was there, why he should be sprawled like “Kilroy was here” all over the holy Torah.

Also, it was unfortunate, but the computer could only look for the words you told it to. And since he still didn’t know much about Kobinski, the only thing left was to eyeball the array like a word search. This was not a skill a Torah scholar had much need for, as things normally went.

Hannah leaned toward him. “What is this?”

“It’s my work, Hannah.”

“It’s Torah code, yes?” She lay against his shoulder.

He moved the binder a little to the right, away from her. “Hannah, please.”

She stayed where she was, gazing up at him with a slight crease between her eyebrows. “Why is it you never want to talk about your work?”

Her tone—a little hurt, a little too serious—surprised him. He turned his head on the pillow to look at her more closely.

When he’d married Hannah, she’d been very young, eighteen, the pretty daughter of an Orthodox rabbi. Aharon didn’t know all the details, but there had been some danger; she had met the wrong kinds of friends, shiksah friends. Her father had seen in Aharon the makings of a proper son-in-law, and the marriage had been arranged quickly.

That was not to say they’d forced Hannah. In those days Aharon drew more than his share of feminine glances, and he’d been passionate in his courtship. How many hours of Torah study he’d wasted daydreaming about her then! He’d said to her, “You’re going to be my wife and that’s it.” She was a satisfactory wife, except, perhaps, for a little rebellious streak—nothing to get excited about, certainly, but it could be a nuisance.

“Hannah, this is Torah study,” he said, with great forbearance.

“You can’t tell me a little? How is your work going, Aharon? You never tell me anything.”

He sighed a complaint. He didn’t want to have this conversation. He wanted to look at the Kobinski arrays. He had so little time with them as it was.

“How are things at the yeshiva?”

“Everything’s fine. Everything’s good.” His eyes were wide, his tone satirical. “They still have young men there, you know. And how are things at home, Hannah? How’s the oven—working well?”

“So what is this? New research? It looks interesting.”

He looked at the ceiling in a mock pleading gesture.

“Please, Aharon. I see no one but the children all day. I need something else to talk about. I feel I hardly know you anymore. You always shut me out.”

“Shut you out? What is this ‘shutting you out’? You have your work and I have mine, and that’s it.”

But it was an automatic response. It was actually tempting to speak of it, to tell someone about the Kobinski arrays. For some reason, he’d never had a friend among other rabbis at the yeshiva. And Binyamin was the only student with an interest in the codes, his only confidant. Also, maybe telling her a little would get her off his back so he could get back to work. Yes, this was also true. It certainly was not because in her eye there was a look that meant business.

He filled her in, briefly, on their discovery of the Kobinski arrays and what the encyclopedia had to say about him. “So now we have to analyze the arrays, see if we can learn why they’re in the Torah. And that’s what I’m doing, Hannah. So now you know. Congratulations.”

He pulled the heavy binder back up on his stomach, but he snuck a glance at her to gauge her reaction.

There was a smile on her lips that was rarely there these days. She lay back on her pillows with an air of contemplation. “That’s very interesting.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

“You should learn more about Kobinski, as much as you can.”

“Naturally.”

“Since he died in Auschwitz, you should visit Yad Vashem.”

Aharon grunted. “I have better things to do than that.”

“Where will you start then?” She turned on her side to face him.

“I start by studying these arrays, which is what I’m trying to do.” He focused again on the second page, a frown between his brows.

“What do you do with the arrays?” she asked, more tentative now. She sat up to look over his shoulder again.

“Hannah!”

Her face darkened into her rebellious pout. “So looking at some Hebrew on a page, only a man can do this?”