Grady took up the workers’ delinquency with Pachachi, his straw boss, who suggested the application of a thicker stick. He approached other ministers who, he thought, had some clout; thus he learned that they had their own grievances, with little time and less inclination to tackle his. And yet their rebuffs were tinctured with envy, and that odd commingling added to the stress. Racism was the fundament, a loose and loaded cannon rumbling across a slippery deck, threatening to crush and destroy everything in its path at any uncertain moment.

From the day our plane first put down on their unpropitious soil, the ministers had been divided in their attitude toward us, and particularly toward Abdul. Some of them, like Pachachi, welcomed him, anticipating in his enterprising presence an increase in their prestige, while others feared the erosion of ancient values. They saw that their fiefdom was soon to be torn between the robust inertia of the sheik, their champion of the past, and the diligence of his son, that paradigm of the future. They saw in Assama’s predicament a singular opportunity to thrive or (unthinkable alternative) to languish, reduced to insignificance as political bastards on the doorstep of the palace.

Much was at stake and the time for decision was short. For there was something in the hot, combustible air, something beyond the flummery and the infighting of officialdom, an aura of disaster that presaged the approaching storm, an expectation of doom about which I was but minimally aware. It was remote yet immediate, unreal yet insistent, as if the ministers, like friars of some mysterious faith, held an inscrutable secret they would not share with the rest of us. But secrets have a way of spilling out convulsively, given a little time, and so it was with this one.

* * *

That night I woke with a start. The man standing over me continued to knead my shoulder. “The sheik wish to see you,” he said.

“In the middle of the night?” My voice was raw with fatigue.

“Now,” the man said. “Please, you come.”

I slipped out of my rat-skin bed, interrupting the sweet quiet rhythm of Val’s breath. She said, “Wha…?” and went back to sleep, and I staggered to my feet.

The town was silent, the street empty under the pallor of a high full moon as I floundered toward the palace. My mind was floundering too, in lockstep with my body. What the hell could he want of me? In his presence chamber two weeks ago he had mentioned, possibly out of politeness, that he’d like to renew our acquaintance, but, Jesus, at four o’clock in the morning?

The palace was brightly lit. Swiftly I was ushered down a long and narrow corridor I had never seen before to the royal bedroom, its walls and vaulted ceiling forming a tent of light, billowy wool.