In the house in Saudi Arabia they employed two Arab servants, Eugénie said: a cook and a butler, both discreet and understanding about the sleeping arrangements. It was an embassy house, marble-floored against the heat, with a wing for the servants. The cook, a widow, kept to herself. An older man named Ahmed was butler and valet; he had worked for the old ambassador, and Miles considered him a friend. But Christopher disliked the old man, and finally threw a fit about the way the laundry was done. Ahmed resigned with grave dignity, and was replaced by a boy named Omar. Omar was handsome, lean and flirtatious in his movements, and Miles came home early one day to find him in bed with Christopher. Miles waited while Omar dressed and left the room. Christopher cried, and talked about how he missed his work in England (he had worked for an interior designer, choosing fabrics), and how bored he was, how he needed an outlet. Miles, unmoved by the tears, reflected that again Christopher was wasting water in a desert. He fired Omar, and a third man came to them. His name was Angelo and he was Filipino; he had come to the country with a diplomatic family. He was Catholic, and made time to pray. Miles was pleased to find him ugly—not deformed, but the proportions of his face and body seemed wrong. Christopher found Angelo ugly, too, and he frowned and clanked his knife and fork at meals.

“You’re a physical snob,” Miles told him.

“It’s an aesthetic question,” Christopher said. “It’s about the beauty of your home.”

Angelo had not been working for them long when things began to disappear. The idea depressed Miles as a sad cliché, and he ignored it until a houseguest had a pair of gold cuff links removed from his room. The cuff links were found in Angelo’s things before he could fence them.

“Why were these in your room?” Miles asked him.

“I didn’t steal them,” Angelo said.

“Then how did they get there?” Miles asked.

The man shrugged, and didn’t meet his eye.

Miles didn’t want to fire Angelo; he liked him, and their position was delicate. Ahmed and Omar were already out in the streets resenting him, and he couldn’t control what they did or said. “The next time it happens,” Miles said, “I’m going to turn the matter over to the police.”

The man looked up at him, alarmed, then looked at his feet and nodded. “So I can keep the job,” he said.

“Yes.”

“They cut off a hand.”

“I know that,” Miles said. The Hammurabic code had been softened to a three-strikes rule. In the case of theft, the first two convictions served as warnings, and on the third they did cut off your hand.