“God damn it!” he exploded. “Would it hurt you to kiss his ass a little? What the hell kind of business partner are you?”

“If I suddenly changed character on him, he’d know something was up. And that would be the end of it. He hasn’t exactly become any more solicitous since his coronation. If you try to gouge or wheedle it out of Abdul, you’ll only succeed in antagonizing him.”

“Why should he be antagonized when it’s to his advantage in the long run? Particularly if our strategy is laced with subtlety…?”

“I’m familiar with your stratagems,” I said. “They have all the subtlety of a cyclone.”

“You’re letting me down,” Grady said. His glinty eyes pierced mine, never blinking. “I swear, since you stepped off the plane you’ve given less than a diminished performance.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “and it’ll probably get worse.” Why don’t we, I was about to add, just forget our partnership, tear up the contract? But no. I’d had enough of confrontational fireworks.

“Tell you what,” I promised, “I’ll try to do better.”

He stared at me, trying to determine the depth of my sincerity. Finally, “Okay,” he said stiffly. “But you’d better start pulling your weight. And you can begin your reformation by returning my director’s chair. You think I don’t know who stole it?”

Somewhere, about halfway along the road that stretched from Coproliabad to the nuclear compound, was an ill-defined, unfrequented track, overgrown with exhausted foliage. It led off at a right angle into an especially desolate footpath, one of many that had been used, then abandoned, then forgotten by the people somewhere in their misty past.

Colonel Ish-Chayl, at the head of a straggly column, held up his hand and halted. Immediately he was challenged by the General.

“Why here?” Qazwini asked petulantly. The Colonel didn’t answer. He squinted through the latticework of rotted trees, anchored not by their roots but by the iron grip of vines that snaked from trunk to trunk to keep them from falling.

Qazwini was annoyed. This was not the first time that Ish-Chayl had halted the apathetic constabulary, examined the terrain briefly, and then continued on down the road. Nor was it the first time that Qazwini had questioned him without getting an answer. And so the General did what he had done on each previous occasion. He called the troops to attention and strutted down the ranks, reviewing them as if he were Patton and they his crack regiment. Whenever he paused in his inspection, jutting his heavy jaw and gluing a gimlet eye on one of his men, “Why,” he would roar, “you such a fuckup? Why you such a shitbird?” He had picked up the nomenclature from his favorite movie, which was about the U.S. Marine Corps. He had seen it eight or ten times.