Paradox Read Online Free Page A

just walked aimlessly the whole time.
Actually, even if she stood banging her forehead against the corner of a
building.

Her phone rang. She pulled it from its carrier. The number was unfamiliar. She
thumbed Answer anyway. What the hey? She was an adventuress, wasn't she?

"Ms. Creed?" asked a man in a slightly Middle Eastern accent.

"Yes," she said in a neutral tone. Irrationally she started flicking
her eyes all around, studying the slow-moving tourist swarms and the busy
locals bustling past them with their usual welcoming snarls and occasional
shouted obscenities. If anyone was stalking her they probably wouldn't need to
resort to a trick like dialing her number and seeing who answered. But she also
had a well-honed aversion to taking things for granted.

"I hope you will forgive me bothering you. This is Levi."

"Levi?"

"Rabbi Leibowitz. I met you last night at dinner at the Penthouse."

"Oh. Yes. Rabbi. How are you?" Politeness, her default mode, took
over. Very few people, herself definitely included, thought of her as a
Southerner, although to all practical purposes she was, having been raised in New Orleans. She was a New Yorker through and through. She was most particularly not a
Southern belle. But the sisters at the orphanage had brought her up to be
polite, and on the whole, she was pleased with that. Unlike a great many other
elements of her upbringing.

"Oh, I'm fine, fine, Ms. Creed. And I'm terribly sorry if I or my
associates offended you last night."

"No. I wouldn't say offended is the word." She could think of
plenty others. But gratuitous meanness didn't form a major component of her
personality. She liked to think, anyway. Besides, there was something about the
rabbi's halting voice that struck a chord inside her. A quality of
vulnerability. Of innocence.

"But not too favorably impressed."

"Well…not with your associates. To be perfectly candid with you, Rabbi
Leibowitz, I hate to think of myself as giving in to guilt by association. That
said—given that you chose to surround yourself with such associates, and their
project—I formed a certain impression of you. I apologize if I judged you
unfairly. I guess I'm as subject to human frailties as anybody."

He laughed. "Oh, don't say that, Ms. Creed. And please don't judge the men
you met with me last night too harshly. They are good men, whatever their enthusiasms."

"It's good men I've learned to fear most in the world, Rabbi. Especially
the enthusiastic ones. Look, I'm willing to admit I may have judged you too
hastily. I apologize for that. Now, if you'll excuse me—"

"Please, Ms. Creed." His voice pulsed with urgency. "Hear me
out. I'm not really concerned…with your opinion of me. But I think it would be
a great tragedy if you passed on participating in this project without hearing
certain aspects of it that, that maybe got glossed over last night. And I'd
like to ask you, as a favor to me, even though you certainly don't owe me
anything, if you would at least examine my credentials online. I'm not in fact
a colleague of yours, strictly speaking—I'm no archaeologist, naked or
otherwise."

She had to laugh at that.

"I am an antiquarian, a historian, a scholar of ancient languages. I
believe this expedition could add significantly to the sum of human historical
and cultural knowledge."

"Let me ask you flat out," she said. "Do you believe in the
literal truth of Genesis?"

His laugh sounded incredulous. A lot like she figured hers would have sounded
if faced with the same question. "Oh, certainly not, Ms. Creed. Very few
educated Jews today believe any such thing. Certainly few serious scholars, of
which I flatter myself I'm one. But I ask, does that mean there cannot be
something there, on that frightening mountain surrounded by very frightening
people, that could still be worth unearthing?"

She felt her pulse quickening. The old atavistic joy of the hunt. Sneaking into
eastern Turkey, in the heart of a war zone, and climbing to a