Still, he was a bit strange. He didn’t seem to need people. He shied from affection, tenderness, warmth. And certainly his approach to the earliest chapters of Genesis displayed an eccentricity of mind, a view that was wildly, recklessly deviant from that of most scholars. He had become, I thought, an exceptional man, invested with an odd and unpleasant prominence. But what was he concealing from me?

And why? I asked myself as I walked out of the sunset scorch into our dusky hut and stopped short, blinking at Val disbelievingly. She stood in the middle of the room, clothed in nothing but a wreathed smile, a flimsy sheath in folds at her ankles, and her astonishing beauty. Zun, the silent gnome who had sat in the presence of Abdul’s father—it seemed ages ago—was palpating her breasts with his enormous hands. Immersed in his probe, he was totally inattentive to my arrival. A look not of bliss but of blindness clouded his eyes as he squeezed her ripe melons. So deep was his fixation that his mouth hung open as his slow fingers swept downward, over the flatness of her belly, the inspired rise of her buttocks, tracing the subtle curvature of her thighs, knees, calves, and up again between those lovely long legs to the lustrous electric floss and on, up still higher to the perfect brown cheekbones. It was as if the apperception of all his senses was wired to his fingertips.

“Hi!” she said, totally ignoring those two marauding paws.

“What the hell’s he doing?”

“Getting the feel of things.” She giggled.

“I can see that. Goddammit…”

“He’s the resident sculptor.”

At the mention of his title, the wizened little man smiled around an oval of intermittent teeth.

“He’s the sculptor?”

“Yep,” she said. “He’s going to put me up in the square. Abdul’s orders.”

“Why?”

“Because Abdul said I’m the Minister Pleni… Pleniposanctuary—something like that—of Tourism and Hospitality. He said I served with honor and distinction in welcoming your Daddikins.”

I was about to combust like a spectator in the first row of a burlesque show. I turned toward the door.

“Where’re you going? You just got here.”

“I can’t watch this. I’ll explode.”

“Stick around. He’s about done.”

And he was, in another few minutes that seemed an eternity. As soon as he’d gone I said, “Don’t you see why Abdul’s making such a big-assed deal out of this?”

“What big-assed deal? So he sends around a nice old geezer to sculpt me.”

“Once back in Maryland he said he wanted to make you his queen.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said. Her voice had an edge to it. “Problem is, you’re jealous.”

“Of course I am. But there’s another problem. I think you’re pissed off at me for not taking better care of you.”