Whatever the reason, Ish-Chayl/Breslau chose to meet the challenge I presented with evasive action, avoiding engagement until he had a better handle on it. He did say, almost in an aside, “We’ll talk later,” as he strode off with Abdul and Qazwini, and more than a week went by before I saw him again, before he sought me out.

He had been closeted with the General. Rumor had it that the going was rough, that their styles simply did not jell. Certainly Qazwini’s oppositional voice rose loud and late into the night, every night, except for the evening when my father materialized at our door.

His fine shoulders sagged, his face was sallow, not at all the calm adornment it had been a little more than a week ago. He settled himself in a director’s chair I had managed to lift from the nuclear site. He closed his eyes exhaustedly and rubbed the furrows on his brow. His stomach rumbled; he grimaced. “How can you stand the food?” he asked. “How’s your mother?”

I told him. He nodded. He couldn’t have cared less; tranquilly he moved on to another subject. If indeed he’d sustained the wounds of earlier conflict, they had stopped bleeding. We talked for an hour, as impersonally as strangers on a plane, and then he left without even a hint that we might meet again.

Valerie said, “He’ll be back.”

“We’ll see,” I said, feigning an indifference to match my father’s. But I was stung by his heartlessness, his insensibility, whatever the hell it was, although I wouldn’t admit it, not even to Valerie. “Maybe when his stomach feels better he’ll be more… paternal, you know?”

“Paternal or not, he’ll be back,” she repeated, “because he needs you.”

“You think so?”

She crossed the room, bent over, and kissed the top of my head. “What I mean,” she said softly, “is he wants something from you.”

“What?”

“We’ll find out.”

And we did on his next visit, a few nights later. He reinstalled himself in the director’s chair as if it had his name on it and took a brief stab at sociability (“Let’s see—how old are you now?”), segued into nostalgia (“Remember when you were five or six we used to play chess without pieces or a board, just in our heads?”), and made a foray into sentimentality (“Your mother hung your first baby shoes from the rearview mirror of the Ford”) which consumed me with doubt. Mother in a moment of abstraction might have hung me from the rearview mirror, but not my shoes.

Then he said, “I need a sounding board. Someone who knows these people better than I do, to take notes, lay plans, to diagnose, analyze. Will you work with me?”