An ingenious nest of boughs was built in a tall tree, and Saeed was hoisted to his grave by eight strong and acrobatic pallbearers who passed him upward from hand to hand and branch to branch until he was high above the shadows, where the rays of the sun lacquered his flesh with a somber cobalt sheen. The sweating bodies of the pallbearers floated and swayed in the treetop like an arrangement of dewy flowers. I wore my aba.

“You’re really going to do it?” Valerie had asked as I undressed for the funeral.

“It’s a matter of respect. Don’t you think I should?”

“Do you think you should?”

I nodded. “Although Grady’ll think I’m some kind of nut.”

“Screw what Grady thinks.”

Daphne too was more than fugitively visible at the tail end of the cortege. Her head was bowed, her eyes downcast. She walked shakily, wearing corpse maquillage and a snug black dress that possibly inspired rescue fantasies in the two men who supported her, Reverend Lipgloss on one side and Qazwini on the other.

The acrobats tied the sheik safely in his swaying bier with a skein of vines. When they were done he seemed part of some intricate puzzle from which extrication was impossible.

For human beings, perhaps, but not for vultures. Directly they came and peeled off his flesh, until nothing remained but the tumbled hair and the unyielding milk-white bone. Hair and bone were collected and studied by the Number One Rat-Catcher, who served as the diviner of auguries. He also slit open a few sacrificial rats and examined their entrails for signs and omens. He scrutinized pebbles drawn from a heap, and globules of melted fat dropped into water. When he foresaw no immediate disaster—an eclipse of the sun, a thunderbolt, a freaky hailstorm like that which savaged the capital a century earlier—the funeral party became the coronation committee and Abdul was forthwith enthroned.