Maybe you are already in it, Aziz thought. It didn’t fit, though. If Ghazi were in it, he already would have a key. No need to tell Aziz, to make a show of finding it.

“Rafik could come back,” Aziz said.

“He is with Heather.” Ghazi’s head stayed down.

“You know how they are—they could be back early.”

“Heather and he, I have fixed,” Ghazi said.

“Fixed?”

“I told Rafik that Heather confided things to me.”

“Things?”

“That she knows of his women.”

“You did not.”

“That she forgives him. Because she knows she has not loved him as he deserves to be loved.”

“She said this?”

“That he lives in her soul, lives constantly.”

“Heather does not talk that way.”

“That she will wait until he is ready for him to come back to her bed. And when he does, she will pleasure him to distraction. She will submit to him body and heart and mind and spirit.”

“He did not believe this.”

“He wept.”

“He what?”

“Cried in my arms. Said, ‘Ghazi, I love her more than life. I am only hers. I have defiled my love and her. God sees. God knows. He sent you to me.’ ”

“He was playing.”

Ghazi shrugged and dialed a phone number from the yellow pages. “Storage Planet? Yes. This is Muhammed Ghezil. My father, he has a storage. . . . Yes, in Boston. . . . No, yours. Maybe yours. . . . No, no, he died. Yes. Last week. I have a key . . . yes . . . yes. Yes, his estate. Absolutely. His name was Rafik Ghezil.”

He would never find which one. There were too many in Boston. His English was still too bad. But absolutely—how did he have that word? After two months and a few language tapes?

Ghazi drove Mourad’s new Escort. They spent an hour being lost. Aziz begged him to turn back twice. But now, at the U-Stor-It in Everett, Ghazi was jiggling Rafik’s key at unit 523.

The door opened.

They peered.

“There must be a light,” Ghazi said.

They patted the sides of the wall for a switch.

“Mourad has a flashlight in his car,” Ghazi said.

“He does not.”

“I believe Mourad does.” They opened the trunk. There was a first-aid kit, a gasoline canister, a blanket, four bars of chocolate, and a flashlight. Aziz meekly followed Ghazi back to the unit.

The suitcases Aziz had seen in Rafik’s room a year ago were in the front. Behind them were enormous drums, corrugated and metal. Then there were boxes—Minute Maid, Ajax—making a barricade. Ghazi took a suitcase and tried to open it. It was locked. He tried another. Shut. He knelt before the third. “Smell this,” Ghazi said. “Here, on this zipper.” Aziz’s nose touched the cool metal.

“Hash,” Aziz said.

“No.”

“What then?”

“It is not hash. I know from university too well the smell of hash.”

“But this is old hash. It has been here for months.”

“Maybe.”

“So what is it?”