“Who’s Lipgloss?” Grady asked. Abdul’s words had managed to shake his steely composure. If this Lipgloss had infiltrated the country, despite the ban on foreigners, he was there for financial gain, and what was to be gained in Assama other than the evacuative biodegradables that Grady had set his heart on? Had this Lipgloss beaten RAT to the draw?

“The Reverend Dewey Lipgloss,” Abdul said, “is an American evangelist. He’s still in Assama, so far as I know.”

The identification did little to assuage Grady’s fears. He knew that commerce followed the flag, the flag of the Church Militant.

“This Lipgloss,” Grady said, “he taught English for purposes of conversion? He converted the people to Christianity?”

“You might say they converted him. Dewey’s a badly lapsed Christian. As for my father, he was particularly keen on the English language because of the publications the Reverend Lipgloss brought into the province.”

“You mean before the man lapsed? Like the Bible, religious tracts?”

“Oh, nothing like that. You see, when I was a little boy, Dewey would repair periodically to Beirut or Damascus, for the hell of it, so to speak, or as he put it, to restore his wasted tissues…”

Lipgloss always returned from his sojourns with periodicals unavailable at home. Stroke magazines, like Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, all of them immensely appreciated by the King. His favorites were Photoplay, Silver Screen, those dealing with film, their pages adorned with stills of all those fetching ladies. He spent a lot of time writing to them in their own language, although the letters were actually penned by Dewey to the old man’s specifications. He proposed marriage and offered an extravagant dowry of junk jewelry showered on him by European engineers and geologists in their passage through Assama. His quarry numbered many a dish; their magical, lyrical names, like velvet on the tongue, conduced palpitations and heavy breathing. Over the years they expanded, it seemed, into a cast of thousands from which only Lassie was excluded.

“Any of them bite?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Abdul said, “although some studio publicity flacks sent him glossy eight-by-tens of half of them.”

The King’s addiction to goddesses never diminished. When the Sheikha, Abdul’s mother, died a few months after the birth of her only child, the King refused to elevate any of his ninety-seven concubines to share his throne, still hoping that some knockout, however belatedly, would claim his jewels.

“So give him a movie star,” Abdul repeated.

We were properly stumped. Then Valerie said, “I think I might know somebody…”

Daphne Titsworth squinched up her moss-green eyes and pulled at a twist of yellow hair, unaccustomed as she was to public thinking.