“Five’ll get you ten it’s bad news.” She was in her office, a corner of our hut where spread out around her were the stacked and scattered substance of Lipgloss’s gleanings—twenty-some years of notes and observations of Assama’s people. The notebooks Val had finished were stacked neatly in columns. She chose a beer-stained tablet from a haphazard pyramid and opened it. Five minutes later, as I was going out the door, “Holy moly,” she said. “Here it is.”

I stood there, hexed by her words. She said, “What Grady calls BRITs, it’s a big secret handed down as a sacred trust from—get this—sheik to sheik, from Saeed to Abdul. Grady,” she added, “is going to wet his drawers.”

We sat in the throne room drinking the dry, light Rhine wine we picked up at the Leipzig duty-free shop on the way here. Abdul held his father’s bowl, carrying to his lips the touch of flesh that had lately been feeding vultures.

We talked hardly at all, although something clearly was on his mind. So I sat and waited, providing an obbligato to his silence. I wanted to say, “I thought we came back here to talk,” but the wine was pleasant and so was the silence, and there was about him a newfound air of regal inaccessibility I wasn’t going to challenge. It didn’t seem like the time to ask him to reveal his shit-brick birthright; all of a sudden, Grady was no longer the most imposing power-monger in my life.

Finally, “Isn’t wine supposed to be a mood elevator?” he asked.

“Or a depressant.”

He shrugged. “About Grady: he’s trying to scam us. It’s the wolf and the lamb, in spades. Well, the time has come for the lamb to kick a little ass.”

“Not literally, I hope.”

“Why,” he asked scornfully, “do you always deplore violence? There is no quicker remedy, no better medicine for dealing with violent people.” He paused, sipping his wine.

I said, “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Do anything drastic.”

“Drastic?” He scowled at my soppiness. “Christ,” he went on, “what an insipid word for a… a long-overdue response to provocation.”

“What kind of response are you talking about?”

“I haven’t decided yet, although we can do whatever we please,” he said. “Would you refill our bowl?”

I poured. The earth seemed to be quaking but, no, it was my hand.

“Don’t be alarmed about Grady,” he said. “We have no intention of stripping the skin off his back or cutting off his balls or…” he was warming to the subject, “or flattening him under his own bulldozer or firing him from the mouth of a cannon, as our ancestors once did to a British provincial governor, after chopping him up to fit in the barrel.”

“That limits your options considerably.”