The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
winter vacation. He was to fly from Boston to Berlin. Three days later from
Berlin to Moscow. Five days after that to Tehran. From Tehran he would go
to Riyadh, then to Amman, then to Baghdad, then to Jerusalem by some
other means, because the next leg would take him from Jerusalem to Bombay,
then to Los Angeles for a brief stopover, and then back to Boston.”
“The grand tour,” Joe joked.
“Indeed. Quite an adventure for an aging professor, wouldn’t you say?”
“What was he doing?” I asked.
The professor held up a finger for silence and dug into the litigation
box again. “Items two through six: passports. Estonian, Russian, Dutch,
British, and Iranian. Joseph, can you tell me whether the United States permits
dual citizenship with any of these countries except for the Netherlands
and Great Britain?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Correct. We don’t. Presumably, then, these passports—which are completely
blank, as you can see, without even a photograph or a name—could
well have been intended to replace, rather than augment, his American identity,
which, as we have discovered tonight, appears to have replaced his
Estonian identity. And so on back, perhaps.”
“So on back?” I echoed. “How old is this guy? I mean, how many people
can you be in one lifetime?”
“Now that is a fascinating question. Joseph tells me that the medical
examiner who performed the autopsy on Jaan reported an abnormal lack of
wear on his organs.”
“Yeah, but what’s that prove? And the coroner died, remember; never finished
the autopsy. He could have been just saying something off the top of
his head, you know? Long day, take a peek, get to it tomorrow. Haven’t called
whoever replaced him; maybe he found something, but this ...I don’t see
what it means.
“Perhaps nothing. But this particular claim—that his organs seemed in
unusually fine fettle—seems more compatible with close observation than
a lack of observation, does it not? If the coroner were lazy or performing a
hasty or incompetent autopsy, surely he would have assigned Pühapäev’s
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