But Isa did not stay in one place for long, giving particular attention to his guests from the party. The atmosphere in the room was a little tense. The party men were all facing the Palace men, but even though they were bound together by old ties of friendship, the majority of each group was pretending not to know the other. In all this, Ali Bey Sulaiman was playing his role with unerring skill. He was greeting everyone on equal terms even though he was a Palace man himself. He had been an ordinary lawyer until the Palace had nominated him for the post of justice in one of the judicial reshuffles. Not recognized as having any particular political coloring, he had become a kind of political rainbow, then, just at the right moment, had joined the Unity Party, becoming attached to the King’s retinue, from which he had risen to occupy the highest position in the judiciary. Though he was nearly sixty, he still enjoyed extraordinary good health and vigor. He was tall and had a marvelous athletic posture and his black eyes, which gleamed beneath bushy eyebrows, made him irresistibly attractive. Very early in his life he had given himself the valuable support of marrying into the Him-mat family—Susan Hanem’s family—and had then laid out his patch of earth and planted the aristocracy in his progeny.

He started laughing and joking with all his guests. “Happy occasions should bring together people who disagree about politics!” he said.

“Do you think,” Shukri Pasha Abd al-Halim whispered in Isa’s ear, “that your relative is acknowledging by that joke that the King’s men—and consequently the King himself—aren’t above the parties?”

Shaikh Abd as-Sattar as-Salhubi leaned over in their direction to hear what they were whispering and then laughed silently. “In that case,” he whispered in turn, “the parties should be above the King!” He then looked anxiously at the picture of the King hanging on the central wall of the room.

Isa smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “People are heaping curses on him quite openly in cafés.”