Grady was not in attendance either, having refused to yield to a custom that promised a profitless hour of boredom. The rear of the crowd was starting to rumble impatiently among the vermian cherry trees, so I wasn’t aware of the jumble of uniforms until they surrounded me. General Qazwini pointed a large pistol at my head. He snarled, “Freeze.” To make his point he fired a slug an inch from my ear. My hair singed. Lipgloss yiped in a fluttery falsetto and went fetal at my feet. Everybody else, including the dogs, ran.

At dusk I stood before Abdul in the throne room of the palace. He sighed sternly and shook his head in sorrow, disappointed and puzzled by all the trouble I had caused. Kalid and his bravos stood by, staunchly at the service of their sheik.

“You haven’t behaved well,” Abdul said.

“That’s a crime?”

“You want charges?” He was thoroughly enjoying himself, titillated as if by some unspeakable perversion. “You’re guilty of anti-Asso activities. Malicious and provocative hooliganism. Prejudicial cosmopolitanism. You murdered an honorable and defenseless warrior.”

“Who?” I was baffled.

“A tribesman from the north.”

“You mean”—I couldn’t believe it—“Val’s kidnapper? He was an enemy!”

“We do not kill enemies when they are tribesmen.”

“No. You just cut off their cocks.”

He shrugged. “We have our traditions. It is not for you to change them. And then,” he added, “there’s espionage. You’ve jeopardized our security with false, deceptive, and misleading practices. You stole state secrets to accommodate a foreign power, that pissant Grady. You violated our trust.”

How could he have reached that conclusion? Because he wanted to. We could have done without all this blather, these allegations, but my pain and my fear pleasured him.

A faraway glaze darkened Abdul’s eyes. He cleared his throat. “Valerie came to me earlier this evening, after you’d left her. She revealed that you’d been taking our confidences to Grady, so that he could exclude us and profit from them. You might as well know that while—”

I stopped listening. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.

“Where is she,” I croaked.

“—conspiring to deprive the province of its most valuable—”

“Where is my wife, Abdul?”

I didn’t feel much like a husband. I felt like a corpse—a premonition immediately reinforced when Abdul said, “She’s not yet your wife, is she? In any case, she’s safe with me now. Her forthrightness will be rewarded.” He rose from his throne and approached me, as if a closer proximity would intensify the verdict. “And you,” he said, “will be going to the ganching tower.”