“Why,” asked Valerie, “is it called the Hall of Fragrance?”

“Because,” bin Zaki answered, “it is washed every year. Cleanliness,” he added, “is our main forte. Although you’ll find that we have many other fortes.”

The room, large as it was, swarmed with the King’s ministers, plus a sending of chieftains from the outback. Their faces were stern with authority, accepting or yielding homage. The lees of a rather assertive beer clung to their lips.

The brew was brown and bubbly, and reeked of sorghum. Daphne, born to be bad, made a dive for it. Soon she was clinking glasses, I should say clunking bowls (which could only have been made from Grady’s magical compound), with a short splinter of a man in a sackcloth robe held loosely together by a penitential cord. He drank with an air of smug piety, but his eyes never left Daphne’s nipples, bursting like two swollen buds against the imprisonment of her tight bodice.

“Hey, Juddie,” she said to me, sloshing beer on my pants, “say hello to Reverend Lopgas.”

“Lipgloss,” he corrected her.

Other eyes were on Daphne, hungrily, as if she were some glittering passion flower. But not all; many turned to Val, the party’s matchless adornment. She stood coolly within a circle of ministers, comparing canapés. The eyes of the Sheik from the North never left her, not even when he threw back his bulgy bald skull and belted down his beer. Those eyes were cloudy and red-rimmed, like those of a nocturnal carnivore. I in turn watched him.

Gorelik had planted himself at the table, making a god of his stomach. He ran his tongue against his palate, savoring a dish he couldn’t quite identify. “Delicious,” he told bin Zaki. “Do I detect a touch of cilantro?”

“It is one of our specialties,” Shakir answered. “Baby-rat stew, fresh from the trap.” He reached out, catching the elbow of a dignitary in a Winnie the Pooh blanket. “This is Mr. Yussuf Chapouk, our rat-killer first class.”

“My wifes are fine,” Mr. Chapouk said, “and yours?”

A blood-curdling screech, feral and prolonged, burst from the trees beyond the courtyard. “What’s that?” Daphne asked.

“Monkey,” Lipgloss said.

Daphne’s eyes went soft. “Once,” she confided, “I did it with a monkey.”

Boisterous, full of imbecile rancor, General Qazwini thonked about, his pitiless eyes darting from one white face to another, wondering who next to confront with the honor of inspecting his troops. A big hand rested on the grip of the heavy weapon at his belt; again and again he’d raise it an inch from the holster and thumb the safety back and forth. Each time I’d feel my sphincter contract.

Now those flat eyes hit on Grady sipping a beer in a corner, and once more the General voiced his obsession. “I’d be delighted,” Grady answered gravely.