Free Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

self-assured.
    “What name do you know him by?” he asked.
    She tapped the photograph. “This is a picture of the back of a man who could be anyone. I can’t see the remotest connection with the man I live with.”
    “Hmm,” he said. He extracted two more photographs from the folder. “Here is a frontal view of the man you were following to the mosque. And here’s yet another view in which I would have said you were intimate.” He saw the flash in her eyes: the shock of invasion and violation. “But perhaps they all look the same to you,” he said. He could feela power surge beginning at the soles of his feet. “You could have been a porn star,” he added lightly. He was electric with switch-flow. His nerves sucked energy from the air. He placed more photographs of intertwined bodies before her. “You know him as Mishka Bartok,” he said. “You’ve been living with him for several years, but he has a tendency to disappear from time to time. To be absent for an entire night or even longer.”
    “He’s a musician. He plays at the Marrakesh.”
    “He has another life. He’s involved with a Muslim Youth Association which has ties to Hamas and to assorted extremist groups.”
    “That is impossible,” she said. “That is absolutely ridiculous. He’s Jewish!”
    Cobb produced another photograph. “Then it’s very strange, don’t you think, that he’s so warmly received by this group of young men?”
    “Who are we kidding? Anyone can engineer that sort of photograph these days, on a computer. Mishka’s not in the least religious, and he’s not political. He’s a composer. He’s a violinist. He plays the oud.”
    “An Islamic instrument.”
    “He has a scholarly interest in the difference between Western and Eastern music. He has a post-doc at Harvard and teaches there, for heaven’s sake.”
    “That is his cover.”
    “His cover ?” She stood abruptly and knocked over her chair. She laughed nervously. “I feel as though I’ve been kidnapped by Cloud Cuckoo Land. Music is Mishka’s passion. It’s his whole life. I have never known anyone less political. I have never known anyone less connected to the real world at all. Mishka’s not like ordinary mortals.”
    “No, he’s not like ordinary mortals.”
    “Why are you doing this?”
    “He keeps disappearing for hours and days at a stretch, doesn’t he? Which is why you followed him. And now you know he goes to the mosque off Central Square. Which, by the way, was behind yesterday’s incident at Park Street.”
    “It’s the music he’s interested in.”
    “The bomber’s body has been identified. He’s another Harvard graduate student named Jamil Haddad. Haddad is an engineering student, but strangely enough, he’s auditing the same course in Persian Classical Music that your lover is auditing, and Jamil Haddad’s involvement with the Prospect Street mosque is well documented.”
    Leela, agitated, gathered up the spread of photographs as though they were contaminated and turned them face down. She slammed the palm of her hand on the white backs of photographic paper. “Who took these? Did you take these?”
    “No,” he said. “I receive and interpret the data. I don’t gather it.”
    “Who gathers it? Who took these? Who’s been following me?”
    Cobb leafed through yet more photographs in his folder.
    “Answer me,” Leela demanded. “Who’s spying on me?”
    “Your Dr. Berg is obviously spying on you.” Cobb smiled. “Which interests us greatly. We’ve got him under surveillance too.”
    He watched the impact of this information.
    “Your hands are shaking,” he said. Leela was flustered; but he had yet to make her afraid. “The question that troubles me is this,” he said. “How much of your affecting ignorance of Mikael Abukir’s true identity is real and how much is fake? How much of it is your cover?”
    “My—?” She began to laugh but the sound turned into something like a hiccup and she seemed on the