It is not my intention to hyperbolize her catalog of endowments, but she also set a fine table—gourmet pastrami on rye, garnished with plenty of olives, from the Stage Door Deli. Pepperoni pizza from La Stitichezza. Dim sum from the Yellow Peril. I’d come home at night, in from the gridlocked streets with their cacophony of horns, sirens, klaxons, and all was serene with her presence. “I’m home,” I’d call, broadcasting the obvious. If in my haste to get to her I’d bang into furniture, knock over a vase or two, I’d hear not the discord of breakage but the vibrato of violins.

Happiness when sustained too long in print can rightly be construed as sappiness, and so I’ll close the Book of Val. Anyway, my precarious lease on rapture, despite all my bleating about it, was short lived.

Joseph Grady in his prescriptive threads of power—black suit, white shirt, maroon silk tie—sat behind the desk in his office nursing a double martini. The curtains were drawn, and in the tinted pallor of evening he had the secretive air of living inwardly. The hooded eyes had the questing look of a hawk, the prominent hooked nose seemed to sniff suspiciously at shadows in the still, stifling aridity of the room. Although a staunch advocate of Progress in human affairs, Joseph Grady had little faith in air conditioning.

“Have a sundowner,” he said, pouring for me from a silver and crystal carafe. “It’s time to talk.”

He got up, adjusting the drapes behind him where a needle of light seeped through. “What do you know about Assama, Iraq?” he asked.

“Nothing much.”

“That’s where Abdul al Sadr was from.”

I shrugged. “I know about Abdul. What about Assama?”

He nodded. “There’s nothing much to know. It’s an abysmally backward blob of a desert,” he declared glumly, “in abysmally backward Iraq.” He snared the martini from his desk and carted it safely to a coffee table. He eased himself into a burnished leather chair beside it.

“The Assamans need tutelage,” he went on. “It’s our duty, our moral obligation, to lend a hand. They need…” He paused, seeking the apposite phrase. “They need some kind of charismatic enterprise to revive their dead economy. They have it, but they don’t know they have it, because they’re so damned unenterprising.”

He poured himself another jolt and refilled my glass. He gulped his, vexed, as though it were medicine. “That damned sheik warlord, whatever he is, won’t allow investment capital onto his turf, not even an exploratory trade delegation.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a war going on.”

“For a while he did, but his minister of finance—that’s a hoot—fellow named Pachachi, is a fool. And your friend Abdul’s father, the stumblebum who calls himself king, is happy with handouts from the so-called coalition forces.”