“That’s what I like about working here,” Derek said. “Broadway’s so stifling, so commercial. Here I can free my instrument.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You can’t get any further off Broadway than this.”

“Yeah,” he said gravely. “The vehicle needs work, but there’s something there. I’ll just have to keep digging for it. Problems, problems.” He dabbed at his brow with a neckerchief of a vile color, made more so by the stains of honest sweat. “As soon as I stomp out one brush fire, another one starts. Would you like to play Ernest?”

“I don’t think I’d be up to it,” I said.

“I’d work with you… But no, I guess not. My Ernest has a certain decency—integrity if you will—that’s rare and beautiful. But it’s hard to sustain, particularly when he doesn’t show up. Still, I’d better stick with him.”

“I understand.”

“Well,” he said, “back to business.” And he strode off, the imperator of the boards, burdened with responsibility, burning with a luminous mission.

The noise was deafening, an erratic, high-decibel fury that blasted my ears long before my eyes were close enough to identify the source. Nerve-jangling, tooth-rattling, it seared the brain pan and drowned out the farts of the generators. It shook the earth and trembled the sky, and it came from the site of the nuke facility.

The impacted flat was swarming with Assamans in their bright orange hats, raptly attentive to the spasms of sound as they went about their chores. Grady sat in his jeep at the edge of the field, his sharp and scornful eyes on the working stiffs as they toted hunks of BRIT from one unlikely place to another. He watched them with a kind of imperious complacency, the way Cheops (as Chatterton had reminded me long ago) might have observed the Israelites building his pyramid. Without a word he motioned me into the seat beside him. We drove for five minutes before he cut the engine and removed his earplugs.

Silence did not reign, but the din to some degree was diminished by distance and a propitious sirocco that blew the tumult away from us. Although the irregular beat of the discord, even from far away, was hardly restful, it was no longer deafening.

Around my head a flawless purple-rumped butterfly fluttered. A long way off the orange hats of the Assos glistened and swarmed like the helmets of a Roman battalion.

“Well. The gang’s all there,” I said.

He snorted. “You know how many of ’em are working for me?”

“Looks like, I don’t know—five hundred, a thousand?”

“A vast multitude,” he said. “Maybe a hundred.”

“What are the rest of them doing?”