She sounded a little loopy. “At first,” she went on, “I thought they’d be after you know like gang rape, but they weren’t in the least interested. They behaved like little gentlemen, never laying a hand on me—maybe they were afraid of repercussions if the boss wacko ever found out. Even when I got rough with them, kicking or scratching, they just grinned.”

She flicked a bug off her blouse. “But on the other hand,” she said, “they wore a hole in me. They were one bunch of mean mothers, charm sure gave them the slip, a wad of wrecking balls. They put a gag in my mouth, tied me to a tree, ran me over rocks, Jesus, I thought I’d never be able to whistle again. When I put on the brakes or just collapsed, they’d drag me along like a kid pulling a busted toy.”

A tremorous sigh. She wrinkled her nose. “And they were a little rank,” she said, “all the time hawking and spitting, God, it looked like rice at a wedding. And they stank, Jesus, worse than the curs in town, like a pack of hyenas farting upwind.”

She shuddered. “The worst thing about it was not what those guys did, but Qazwini blowing that poor bastard to bits, and using a knife on him.” A wobbly shake of her head. “That Qazwini, he was like a… a fanged vampire released from a coop who hadn’t been fed blood for a while.”

Her face twisted into a hard grin, spreading her lips without parting them. “But that’s the way it goes, right, Charley?”

She seemed to harbor no hatred, no grudge, no deep resentment against her oppressors. She even apologized for them. “I don’t mean to put the knock on those guys,” she said. “I guess they only did what they had to do. And what did it all amount to but a long walk in the sandbox? Maybe I’m making too much of it.”

Thus she dislodged the horror of it all. No irreversible damage had been done. She did not intend to mope around anymore, pondering the cruelty of fate. She had found her way back into the daily flow of Assaman life. Or so I thought, and so did she.

From somewhere beyond the alcove came the unmistakable gasps and whines and kabooms of coitus—Saeed al Sadr and Daphne at it again. The sounds of their frolic diminished, gave way to five minutes of lost whispers, muffled laughter, occasional coughing, and then the sheik appeared, clad in a bathrobe of many colors, Chatterton’s gift.