Qazwini stood over the man, his gun holstered but still smoking. His knife jumped out and he sliced strips of flesh down the man’s chest and peeled them off, clavicle to groin. The man tried to lie still but his body twitched uncontrollably as he sucked air. Not once during the surgery did he cry out, not even when the General cut off his penis; it was as if he expected it. Now only his eyes were alive, and the General began to work on them. He gouged out the first—all this happening faster than it can be told—and turned to the second. My trembling .38 was an inch from that dreadful socket when I fired, and the warrior finally stopped twitching.

THIRTY-ONE
THE STONE-AGE MONARCH

I closed my eyes, tired of waiting, and with nothing better to do, opened them again. I tried not to listen, although I couldn’t seal my ears.

I was in the presence chamber of the sheik. The room was covered wall to wall with rat skins sewed into carpets and stacked haphazardly, reminiscent of a warehouse in which only a rug merchant might feel at home. There were other touches, not unlike a dental office in the West. Old magazines were scattered about, not copies of Sports Illustrated or Newsweek or House & Garden, but of stroke books, their photos faded and smudged from thumbs and scrutiny over the years.

The sheik had summoned me to express his undying gratitude, so I had been led to believe. With two of his top panjandrums and his only legitimate son, I had been instrumental in averting a full-scale war with the tribe that abducted Valerie. For my dual role as guardian of the peace and warrior in the field I was to be embellished with a weighty decoration, at least the Assaman equivalent of the Distinguished Service Cross; such was the consensus of my fellow Americans. I remained skeptical. If, indeed, some sort of recognition was forthcoming, I felt it might more closely approximate the kudos accorded to Paul Revere’s horse. The local citizenry in their evening sing-alongs had already documented the valor of our little expeditionary force, and particularly Val’s stellar role as the focus of it all.

Valerie. Upon our return, she had sunk into a spiral of silence from which it seemed she would never surface. She avoided people, including me, whether to relive those long hours of captivity or to sort them out or to bury them or to discourage others from digging them up, I didn’t know. I never pressed her with questions, but she knew I was there if she wanted me. And then she started to talk, an act of catharsis that, once begun, I thought would never stop.

“Life,” she said.

“What about it?” I asked tentatively.

“Jesus,” she said, “it’s an endless trail. You never know what’s waiting to pounce.”