“He has the opposite problem to everyone else,” Nazik said, watching her husband. “He remembers too much. He does not sleep well.”

“Hmph.” Maya considered it. “What about the other two?”

Zeyk’s mouth pursed. “I can’t say for sure. Nazik and I spent the rest of that night dealing with Selim. There was an argument about what to do with his body. Whether to take it out to the caravan and then hide what had happened, or to get the authorities in immediately.”

Or to go to the authorities with a lone dead assassin, Maya thought, watching Zeyk’s guarded expression. Perhaps that had been argued as well. He was not telling the story in the same way. “I don’t know what really happened to them. I never found out. There were a lot of Ahad and Fetah in town that night, and Yussuf heard what Selim had said. So it could have been their enemies, their friends, themselves. They died later that night, in a room in the medina. Coagulants.”

Zeyk shrugged.

Another silence. Zeyk sighed, refilled his cup. Nazik and Maya refused.

“But you see,” Zeyk said, “that is just the start. That’s what we saw, what we could tell you for sure. After that, whew!” He made a face. “Arguments, speculation— conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory— not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

“You don’t believe in any of them?” Maya asked, feeling suddenly hopeless.

“No. I have no reason to. The Ahad and Fetah were in conflict, I know that. Frank and Selim were connected somehow. How that affected Nicosia— whether it did—” He blew out a breath. “I don’t know, and I don’t see how one could know. The past . . . Allah forgive me, the past seems a sort of demon, here to torture my nights.”

“I’m sorry.” Maya stood. The brilliant little chamber suddenly seemed cramped and florid. Catching a glimpse of the evening stars in a window, she said, “I’m going to go for a walk.”

Zeyk and Nazik nodded, and Nazik helped her get her helmet on. “Don’t be long,” she said.

The sky was matted with the usual spectacular array of stars, with a band of mauve on the western horizon. The Hellespontus reared to the east, late alpenglow turning its peaks a dark pink that sawed at the indigo above it, both colors so pure that the transition line seemed to vibrate.