Dear Leonard,

I’ll admit that I’ve spent the last month in frustration. This freedman has a habit of twisting any attempt to get the truth from him. I’ve spent sixteen hours with him over three days and I’m still not sure what his name is. He won’t tell me. Or he’ll tell me and then contradict himself an hour later. Every establishment that’ll serve him knows him by a different name - if they have a name for him at all. I suspect that keeping track of them would be a waste of ink at this point. At some point I just gave up and started calling him ‘Reynard’, after the trickster fox of the French. He seems to be satisfied with that.

Here’s what I can say for certain. He has a British accent, but he’s capable of mimicking other accents on the fly, so that very well may be an act. He speaks Latin and Greek fluently, and can read Arabic, Hebrew and Russian. He has at worst a patchwork knowledge of any subject I passed at the academy. He has a miraculous skill for debate - he gave me cogent and clever arguments in favor of both Kinzie and Ogden for the upcoming election, despite despising the latter fiercely. He has a stunning amount of knowledge of the Talmud for someone who swears he’s not Jewish. His knowledge of the weather and agricultural concerns could match the best farmer’s almanac, and he can identify the bones of the body by memory. I’ve exhausted every little test I could conceive to determine his academic limits, and I’ve found so very few.

In short, despite his compulsive deceit, he’s a true scholar, and what I’ve learned about the children of Anak should be reliable. After begging for two weeks straight about more information, he finally took me to a small private library he had access to. The key tome was a collection of translated Arabic writings from the Abbasid Caliphate (I believe you mentioned this to me in bed once), one of which spoke of ‘Anaq’, a country somewhere in the modern-day Ottoman Empire, and their three kings. ‘Akirum’: that’s the last king of the children of Anak, who cursed his people and left them to die. According to the scribes of Senusret, he passed through Egypt on his bitter sojourn, going south, some thirteen years after he left Anak. The Muslim doesn’t track him further, but it’s likely he passed through Ethiopia. Perhaps the scholars of Mansa Musa might help you pinpoint where he went next, now that you know the correct year.

I’d send you the book itself but, well, it turns out that there’s a difference between Reynard ‘having access’ to a library and ‘having permission to be there’. The library’s owner, one of the former trustees of Chicago, nearly walked in on us and I spent an hour stuck with Rey in a closet before we could escape. Not the worst thing - he’s not unhandsome - but infuriating nonetheless, especially since the last thing I need right now is more legal trouble! He promised to make it up for me; we’ll see if he delivers.

I do hope this helps. At the very least, I’m glad to still have a connection to you, despite it all.