That was not all. There had been, in addition, in a single morning, a statistician who wanted to take his dog with him to Katmandu, an expert in basic hygiene who had sent his laundry home from Baghdad in the diplomatic pouch, and the discovery of an impostor in the port facilities team on the Persian Gulf. (This last was the worst, since the recipient government had recently commended him as the best expert ever assigned there.)

Bekkus made his appearance with a paper in his hand. He came in and stood across the desk from Glendenning. “You once straightened me out on this Moslem nomenclature, Clifford, but I’ve lost track again. Too much on my mind. What name does an individual like this get filed under?”

Glendenning took the form held out by Bekkus, sat down, and studied it. “An easy one,” he said, and smiled. Glendenning had a smile that turned up tightly at the corners and in this way matched his heavy eyebrows, which he had also trained into upward flourishes. The combination gave him a look of being between inverted commas. “Proper name, Mohammad; Ali’s his father’s name; and Abdulkader was his grandfather.”

“What about this Hadji part?”

“That just means he’s been to Mecca.”

“And what’s Scek?”

“That means his father was a religious leader. I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Then what’s this ‘Néant’? That’s what I originally had him filed under.” Bekkus, seated now, leaned across and pointed.

Glendenning looked hard. After a moment he said, “Forget that. That’s French for ‘nil.’ It’s supposed to be in the box below, where it says Marital Status.”

Bekkus sighed. “This Moslem nomenclature certainly presents administrative problems.”

“If you think so, Rudie, it’s just as well you weren’t with me at Quetta.” Glendenning had spent some part of his youth as an official in what is now Pakistan. “Ten thousand people in my bailiwick there, and every last one of them had a name, I assure you.” Glendenning often spoke of these greater responsibilities of his past, oddly emphasizing his reduced authority. “Ministers of human fate, we were, Rudie. Ministers of human fate.” When Bekkus looked blank, he added with a four-cornered smile, “Thomas Gray. ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.’”

Bekkus objected. “But yours was a multipurpose, paternalistic administration.”

“It was.”

“You had built-in flexibility. You were operating within a broader framework.”

“We were.”

“It left room for scope.” Bekkus crossed one knee over the other. “There was area for dialogue. Here at the Organization, on the other hand, we’re functioning within unformulated personal situations, even at the decision-making level. Your post at least relates to staff members in the field, and involves less interfacing. Whereas in my outfit we’re continually evaluating the individual problems of Headquarters staff. And there’s no more time-consuming subject matter, I can tell you.” Bekkus shook his head. “Per se.”