Knowledge is a dangerous thing, multiply dangerous because I was privy to a couple of particulars Grady with all his sagacity did not suspect, and I was hesitant to share them with him.

Should I have confided that Abdul planned to kick him out of the country and gain control? That it was Abdul alone who knew the formula, and he had no intention of sharing with Grady, who was hellbent on snagging it? What could such a confession have accomplished? It could only have intensified the discord between them, and precipitated a showdown that would be disastrous. It was not beyond Grady’s influence and resentment to call in the Marines in the North, under the guise of safeguarding American lives and property. Assama had so far escaped the war on the other side of the mountains; now it would become another battlefield, with Coproliabad immersed in a bloodbath as were Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul.

A wall was being built between Grady and me, as strong and substantial as that which existed between him and the Assos. I was for the first time consciously aware that I was on their side of the barricade, and for reasons that I was not quite able to grasp. Was it guilt, aggravated by the act of bringing grief, however indirectly, to a disadvantaged race? Or shame, in being identified with the aggressor? Or was it an excess of pity for the afflicted masses?

All I knew, the affinity existed. I wanted their friendship (by which I possibly meant approval), knowing they would resist any attempt on my part to gain it, not only because of the skin I wore but because of the company I kept. I felt terribly alone, isolated from them and, by a curious inversion, from my own kind. In the slow, sleepless hours of the night thoughts of doom like panicked bats flopped crazily and uncontrollably around my head.

The arsenal of fear has many weapons. When a man knows that the baleful eye of the enemy is on him, particularly in the dark, he is prone to finding it as disturbing as the application of a knout. I’d lie on my shoddy pallet, scarcely breathing, bathed in flop-sweat and jolted by the race of my heart, alert to the crack of a twig or the quiet footfall of somebody out there, or was it just another rat restlessly scurrying? I’d get up and look around. There’d be nothing under the black sky, nothing that took the phantom shape of a spy in the surging silence, so I’d go back to bed and with a mind still unrelieved wait for that inevitable midnight knock on the door.