“I thought it might help if I kind of hung out with them. Allayed their confusions. They don’t know what they’re doing here.”

“Let’s not forget what we’re doing here. If you knocked off this buddy-buddy crap and just nosed around a bit, maybe you could come up with a clue about their shit-bricks.”

I took a shot at nosing around, three shots, in fact. With my first two targets I used the same approach—admiration for the statues in the square. “What are they made of?” I asked Shakir bin Zaki, Minister of Information and Culture. He had no idea, he answered, and then invited my reflection on the decline of English literature since the demise of William McGonagall.

Yussuf Chapouk, champion rat-catcher, also had no idea about the mysterious fixative that so enchanted Grady, but he launched into a lather of detail about one remarkable day eight years ago when he came upon the most arresting, freaky creature of his career—a rat with one pink eye and one blue.

Turning to Abdul, a source no more unlikely than my two previous flame-outs, I began, not with a prying query but with an expression of wonder and delight in the palace sculptures, those behemoth figures whose privates went wall to wall, holding the ceiling in place—I got no further. Abdul gaped at me, his eyes glittering unpleasantly, as if he were mad Ahab and I were intent on telling him what a really cool dude Moby Dick was. “I hate those fucking things,” he told me, “those literally fucking things. Their… whadayoucallit—eroticism is a laughable embarrassment, an affront to civilized architecture. Soon as I’m… soon as I can I’m going to destroy the hell out of them—get some U.S. engineers and build a decent palace of glass and stainless steel and translucent plastics and toilets that flush.” Contempt (that could only have been meant for me) snarled his handsome face, creased his brow, twisted his mouth. “I can’t believe,” he said, “you like that barbaric shit!” And he strode angrily out of the room.

The triple failure was auspicious enough, I thought, to impress Grady with my total inadequacy in the field of BRIT detection. Once I’d reported it all to him, he couldn’t ignore the futility of assigning me to any crazy-assed quest again. And that for me constituted a thunderous triumph.

I hurried to share the good news with Grady, but he was off, I was told, at the airstrip. Waiting for me instead was an old Assaman. He bore a note from Chatterton, inviting me to drop in on him. “I think you’d be interested in seeing what we’ve been up to,” he had written.