And yet… I was tempted. I thought of my father—I was always thinking of my father—he would have jumped at the chance; for him the pursuit of the unattainable, the unresponsiveness to reality, put him in a bracket with Don Quixote. I thought of my mother’s prophetic fancy: I do not think you will die, she had said, without making a Real Contribution. But even she on her most unworldly wavelength would have rejected old Mop Head’s sales pitch. Still…

There was Armbruster. “Talent,” he said I had, as he probed his ass with his fingers, “and an unlimited potential for… for…” He didn’t know what, but it certainly wasn’t as a facilitator in Chatterton’s cabal.

“You don’t trust me,” he said flatly. “Not that I give a damn. I don’t want your approval, I want Abdul Whatsisname’s money.”

Another long silence. “I suppose,” he went on, “he would want to see what we’ve accomplished before he puts up a dime. So, tell you what—I’ll give you and Whatsisname a demonstration as soon as he shows interest in the project.” He smiled bountifully. “Isn’t that a good idea?”

And only then did it occur to me: What was I so exercised about? I was no more than a courier delivering the pouch to Abdul. Let him get incensed, let him expose the old man as a buffoon, let him get banished from the violet eyes of our darling. But definitely not me.

FIFTEEN
THE INCENDIARY

“No,” Abdul said, clipping the syllable rather emphatically. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s difficult to visualize,” I told him, “it’s like, well, like a butterfly—you can see the wings but not the engine. Wouldn’t you care to see Chatterton’s engine?”

“No,” he repeated. “First, it could be a trick, an illusion. Second, I don’t have the money, so it’s all kind of academic. And third,” he added forthrightly, “he’s crazy.”

“A little eccentric, perhaps, but crazy…?”

“They’re all crazy. All you’ve got to do is look in their eyes and there’s nobody home.”

“Not all of them. Grady’s sane.”

“I don’t like Grady. He’s always sniffing around. He spies on me.”

Jesus, here he goes again. Abdul al Sadr, prince of paranoids. “Well…” Yet I knew what he was trying to say. I had the feeling, when his nose was in his newspaper, that Grady was listening, his nobody-home eyes tracking us.

“Why do you think he’d do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know why,” he said impatiently. “But whenever I’m alone around here, when Val and Derek are off together or something, he pops up out of nowhere. Once he popped up in Washington on Connecticut Avenue—suddenly appeared as if by accident, and asked me to have a drink.”

“Did you?”

“No. Not that I’m that much of a Muslim. It’s just I don’t drink with people I don’t like.”

“You might have found out what he wanted. If anything.”

“I don’t want to know what he wanted. I want him to let me the hell alone.”