He lay back on his pallet. His eyes smoldered. His breath came in shallow little bursts, as if it were pumped from a defective bellows. He looked smaller than life, meager. Standing over the bed was Abdul. Beside him was Zun, the big-handed gnome who had attended my award ceremony. He was visibly moved, stunned, as if he were witness to the irreparable collapse of his country.

“…natural-born casualties, all of them,” the sheik was raging in his delirium. “They’re carriers of greed, bred for trouble,” he went on in a dull rasp, “parasites who prey on all living things.” He paused, gasping, the eyes burnished by fever, the flesh desiccated, the color of timeworn cork, the parchmenty skin of a mummy.

He saw me. “I’m dying,” he said. It was less a statement than an apology. With difficulty he refocused his eyes on Abdul. “I want you,” he said, “to get the foreigners out of here. I think your friend Judd will help you. I want your promise…” He looked up pleadingly at his son. Not a line in Abdul’s face responded; he wore a mask of numb inscrutability. The old man reached out. His fingers tugged feebly at the sleeve of Abdul’s Brooks shirt. Abdul said, “I promise.” The hand fell back on the bed.

After that, silence and the surdy whisper of the oil lamps as the epilogue of Saeed’s life trickled out of him. With some effort he managed to maintain his great dignity despite the dark spittle that ran down his chin, despite the diarrheic plasma that fouled his lower body. Zun wiped the pollution from his mouth and his limbs. Then the rattle of death in the shriveled throat signaled the end to the people waiting, listening behind the curtained portal of the airless room.

The messenger appeared, and Daphne ran in sobbing.

“I killed him,” she wailed.

“Be quiet,” Abdul said.

“It’s my fault,” she insisted. “I overfucked him. And he was so good to me.”

The ministers, when they filed in, were solemn, although their grief lacked the extravagance of Daphne’s. They declared Saeed officially dead when a naked fourteen-year-old girl was placed on the bed beside him and he didn’t raise a finger or anything else. The honor had been offered to Daphne, showing on the part of the funeral committee an exquisite sensibility for her feelings, but she balked.

“Jeez,” she said to me, chewing on a lock of hair and twisting the frames of her glasses, “do I have to? I mean, I’ve climbed in the kip with a midget, Siamese twins, a Shetland pony, and once a duck. But a stiff…?” She shuddered. Zun led her away.