She remembers how Jaarsma had been as excited as she was at the prospect of unlocking the secrets of Sullivan’s journal. They had met in the Netherlands some fifteen years ago, through mutual friends now only vaguely remembered. Gail had been studying in Leiden, and during their first meeting they had found themselves arguing on the same side in a heated discussion about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, about science, ethics and history. Part way through the night, he had turned to her, eyes glassy from the beer, and said, “We think so much alike. Let’s not ruin it by falling in love.” They had raised their glasses to a long and enduring friendship.

Almost immediately, Jaarsma, whose specialty was chaos theory, had worked out the structure of the code, a version of the Vigenère Square. But rather than using the letters of the alphabet, Sullivan had used the numbers 1 through 26. The Vigenère Square, Jaarsma had explained to her, combines twenty-six different cipher, or code, alphabets. So far, so good: since the mid-nineteenth century, a means had existed to unlock it. But the final level of encryption, the key word that would allow the codebreaker to determine which of the twenty-six cipher alphabets was in use at any given time, had so far eluded him. A key word of blue, for instance, would alert the codebreaker to use the cipher alphabets b, l, u and e. The key used by Sullivan was not a simple word, and the longer the key, the more difficult it was to break the code. Perhaps the key was a list, a song, an entire book. It could be virtually anything.

Two months ago, Jaarsma had called her, exhausted, saying that the effort was futile. “My computer runs for hours at a time,” he had said, “but it is lacking in that most human of traits: intuition.” He told her that he had ceased to function properly, was unable to eat or sleep. He carried the diary everywhere, studying it on the train, in his laboratory, at the dinner table. His colleagues were unforgiving. The journal was occupying him to distraction. Jaarsma and Gail had mutually decided to put the project on hold. The phone call this evening is the first time Gail has heard from him since then.

“What was the key phrase?” she asks him now, straining to hear through the noise of the room.

“It was their names. His son, his wife and himself. Just their full names spelled out. Nothing more.” After a pause, he says, “I haven’t read all the way through to the end, but I think the contents will surprise you. Her father was not the man I expected to find.” He adds, “Is that enough to persuade you to visit me in Amsterdam?”

“I hardly need to be persuaded.”

He laughs. “I’ll have the champagne ready. Congratulations on your birthday, by the way.”

The dinner progresses around her, laughter and conversation, and much clinking of glasses. Her thoughts drift in and out of the present. Over dessert, Ansel looks across the table at her, as if to say, What is it? What’s wrong? She feels, for a brief moment, a wave of claustrophobia, and she stands up and begins clearing away the dishes.

Glyn rises to help her, and the two go into the kitchen, plates and coffee cups balanced precariously. When the dishes are safely stowed in the sink, Glyn leans against the counter, her expression concerned. “Thinking about work?” she asks.

Gail does not answer right away. She reaches up to the cupboard, brings down the bottle of port, and then enough glasses for everyone. As she opens the bottle and begins pouring, she tells Glyn about Jaarsma’s phone call. Glyn is editing the documentary, a co-production for CBC-Radio and Radio Netherlands, but so far she has stayed in the background, allowing Gail time to research and gather tape. “When this project is finished,” Gail says, “I think I’ll take some time off. Sit back for a while. I’m a bit run down, is all.”

They touch glasses, Glyn’s infectious smile warming the room. “For years we’ve been planning to celebrate New Year’s on the Gulf Islands,” she says. “Why not this year? Rent a little house on the Pacific, do the Polar Bear Swim. Ansel must have vacation time coming up?”

“Yes,” Gail says, sipping her port. “I think he does.”

“You’re exhausted. The curse of the freelancer.” She reaches her fingers out, brushes a strand of hair from Gail’s forehead. “Remember Prague? We sat under the stars together, knowing we were at the start of something, some grand adventure. Were we right or wrong, back then? You and I, what a pair of romantics.”

That night, after everyone has gone, Gail leaves Ansel in the living room and goes into her office, shutting the door behind her. The curtains are open, and outside the street lamps glow, laying circles of light on the empty road.

She is surrounded by equipment worthy of a museum. Reel-to-reels, cassette recorders, record players. Lately, she has been working with Mini Discs and digital editing programs, but she cannot bring herself to dispose of the old tape, the old equipment. “They still work,” she says to amused colleagues. “They still do what we asked of them.”

She collects tape the way others collect records or rare books, safeguarding them with a feeling of reverence. She has fragments spliced together, dozens of conversations gathered on a single reel. Soundscapes, features, interviews. On days when her mind wanders, she randomly loads a reel onto the player, puts the earphones on, listens. For Gail, the devotion lies in more than the words spoken. It is the words spoken at a specific moment in time, in a particular place. A child singing in the background, a pause in the telling, an old woman wetting her lips, smoothing her dress. A man who forgets the presence of the microphone, who begins a conversation with himself. “And after that, nothing was ever the same. I wanted to go back, I needed to see him, but I couldn’t.”

Before going to bed, Ansel knocks on the door of her office, pushes it open. “It’s your birthday,” he says, casually. “Surely you can take the night off.”

She saves the document she is working on, then turns to face him. “Jaarsma broke the code,” she says. “That’s what he called to say.”

His eyes light up, happy for her.

“I’ve decided to go to Amsterdam. I set aside part of the funding for this, the plane ticket and travel, hoping everything would turn out.”

She can see him wanting to say something, to argue against her going. Her response begins to take shape in her mind, I have to do this. I need to be away. But he does not fight her. Instead, from where he stands, he wishes her good night, then closes the door softly behind him.

Alone again, she opens files, then closes them once more. She thinks of another love affair two decades before, the feel of another man’s hands on her body, the pull of desire. All this, a lifetime ago. At twenty-one, Gail had begun graduate work in the Netherlands. There, not even halfway through her M.A. in history, she took a leave from the University of Leiden, gave up her apartment, and travelled east. She was restless, tired of reading about realpolitik, about her thesis topic, Japanese militarism in the 1930s, anxious to make something concrete of her life. And she was in love. A floundering, impossible affair. The man, a professor of languages, was handsome, brilliant and married. So she cut her ties and applied for a visa to the Eastern Bloc.

By spring, she was living in Prague, in a tiny two-room flat, working afternoons in a haberdashery. Her roommate, Glyn Madden, was a radio producer. At thirty-six, divorced and at loose ends, Glyn had sold her house in Wales and gone off in search of adventure, which, they both agreed, had proven to be more elusive than it first seemed. They traded books between them, drove across the border to Germany in search of English-language novels, came home with strange, tattered copies of Karl May westerns. They walked at dusk, joyous, alive, up to the Prague Castle. The apartment they shared was in Na Kampa, and at night they sat at the window, staring down at the miniature heads gathered around the café tables. They took turns changing the records on Glyn’s turntable: Abbey Road, Joni Mitchell, REM.