Only one element had dampened his enthusiasm and threatened to nullify the undertaking: when he had assembled his band of brothers and told them of the move, Mainwaring had blurted, somewhat uncharacteristically, “Fuck that shit.” Thus the rebellion began.

Only Gorelik had remained loyal. The others, each in his own fashion, had echoed Mainwaring, who decided to write his memoirs, but definitely not in Southern Iraq. Norman Baker retired to live quietly, he hoped, with his daughter and her brood in New Jersey. George Desmond had no immediate plans, but he did have family, money, and a modest pension from Harvard. Henri-Jacques Treblant became a cultural attaché at the French Embassy in Washington. Zygmunt Wolenciewicz took his hauteur to Hollywood, where, through the good offices of an ex-colleague at USC, he got a job as technical advisor on an epic about Hiawatha.

Now old Chatterton sprawled contentedly in his bucket seat, his dreadful bulk oozing over the aisle on one side and Grady on the other, popping peanuts by the peck. He even offered to share a few with Grady and me while gently he waved an arm to brush away an orbiting fly. It veered toward Grady, changed its mind, and landed on the back of the seat in front of him, rubbing one tentacle against another. And then Grady’s newspaper slammed down on it, and the fly became a bottle-green, custard-yellow blob.

“Why’d you have to do that?” Chatterton was furious. “That fly had as much right on this earth as you have. It had its own spark of divinity.”

Grady leaned forward until his nose was an inch or two from the gruelly corpse. Elaborately he said, “I humbly beg your pardon, Lord Beelzebub.”

Chatterton looked up at me. He said, “It’s hard to like some people, isn’t it?”

But his glower subsided and quickly his distemper receded. Nothing could derail his dither of delight at the prospect of dominoes and other such lumps dancing in southern Iraq.

“It’s certainly,” he said, “felicitous that Assama has given us a home. These people have much in common with fourth-dynasty Egypt, when Cheops built his great pyramid twenty centuries ago.”

I thought I noticed the slightest flicker of doubt—possibly of refutation—crossing Grady’s face, but his features maintained their armor of impassivity, which encouraged Chatterton to go on. “They both had a flare for spectacular architecture, each in their own way. The Nile dwellers developed their pyramids while the Tigris-Euphrates crowd was into gigantic beehives.”

He was just warming up. “Both regions,” he pointed out, “built cities, shared traffic and wealth…”

I might have added that they also shared pestilence and disease, but of course I didn’t. Uninterrupted, Chatterton’s solo continued, “They developed doctrines and idealogies…”

Along with, I might have added, wide-ranging incompetence and obstinate confusions.

“Each had great periods of conquests…”

“And chaos,” I heard myself say.