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sign of it anywhere.’
    Husseini passed him another cigarette and lit up one himself: ‘Yeah, you even came to ask me about it. I remember now . . .’
    ‘That’s right. Anyway, I turned up nothing. Nothing at all. And yet that note had to mean something. It became kind of an obsession for me. Then I got an idea. Maybe Breasted didn’t leave all his writings to the Institute. Maybe there were private collections, even though they weren’t mentioned anywhere.
    ‘I started by looking for his heirs. Thank God, City Hall records were already on the Internet by then, so it wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it might be. In the end I found Breasted’s last descendant: a fifty-year-old lawyer who lived in one of those nice old houses on Longwood, on the city’s south side. I introduced myself as a researcher and asked him about a folder that might have contained the transcriptions of hieroglyphic texts that I was interested in, without really letting him know what I was after.’
    ‘How did he react?’
    ‘Oh, he was very cordial. He said that I wasn’t the first to come looking for that transcription and that I should give it up, because no trace had ever been found of any such folder, and his great-uncle’s papers – what was left of them – had been sifted through at least a dozen times over the years, whenever someone like me chanced upon that note. He offered to let me examine his library if I wanted to try it again, but said that nothing had ever turned up. Courteous as he was, he made me feel like a real fool.
    ‘If only as a matter of pride, though, I accepted his invitation and started to look through the papers in his private library, not really convinced that it would get me anywhere. I went back the day after and the day after that, because I’m stubborn and I just didn’t want to give up. Well, I finally came upon a trail that I thought might help me to find the solution.’
    ‘Feel like eating something?’ interrupted Husseini. ‘It is dinner time, after all. I don’t have much in the house. How does desert-style sound?’
    ‘Sounds fine to me,’ said Blake.
    Husseini put some pita bread in the oven and took a pot of spicy sauce out of the refrigerator, along with some hummus, hard-boiled eggs, cheese and beans.
    ‘Do you have any beer?’ asked Blake. ‘Or are you observant?’
    ‘Not exactly,’ said Husseini, handing him a bottle from the refrigerator. ‘My mother was Maronite.’
    Blake continued his story as they ate. ‘Breasted had a lover. Her name was Suzanne de Bligny, the widow of a French diplomat from the consulate who had settled down in Minneapolis, and there was correspondence between them. I also found out that Mrs Bligny’s late husband had been stationed in Egypt, at Luxor.’
    ‘I can imagine,’ said Husseini. ‘The golden age of Egyptology! The heyday of the Hôtel du Nil, of Auguste Mariette and Emil Brugsch . . .’
    ‘Well, their letters suggested that they keenly shared these interests. I found out that Madame de Bligny had a daughter, Mary The´re`se, who married a certain James O’Donnell, an air force officer who was shot down in combat over England.’
    ‘A dynasty of widows,’ commented Husseini, placing the warmed sauce on the table.
    Blake spread some on his pita bread and added some beans. ‘It would seem so. In any case, it turned out that Mary The´re`se O’Donnell was still alive. She was eighty-five years old, and she had kept all the correspondence between Breasted and her mother. I asked her if I could consult it and I finally found the folder that I had been searching for all that time.’
    ‘And I can imagine that in the meantime you neglected everything else: departmental meetings, academic parties, student visiting hours. And your wife, right?’
    ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ admitted Blake. ‘I was so taken by this investigation that I didn’t even realize time was passing, or what I was neglecting. I didn’t stop to think that an unguarded