“No.” He paused. “It’s more about … about the evil humans do to each other. I don’t think hunting animals is evil.”

“It’s funny,” she said, looking through the drawings again. “Classical art’s all about naked bodies, isn’t it? But peaceful nakedness, not frightened.”

“You haven’t seen late Titian, have you? His Flaying of Marsyas?”

“No.” She doesn’t know who “Titian” is. “So this is … older work. What have you been doing more recently?”

“I haven’t painted for a while,” he said. “In the last few years, I’ve been working with embroidery.”

“Embroidery?”

“Yes. Do you know what I mean by the Bayeux Tapestry?”

Rat must have looked a little foggy.

“It’s this eleventh-century tapestry that was done to commemorate the Norman Conquest—you know, when William the Conqueror invaded England,” Gillem explained. “It’s a marvelous object—I have a book of it I can show you. It’s like a room-length embroidered comic strip. There are little panels of the king on his throne conferring with his ministers, and of the ships landing, and of battlefields with archers and horses getting speared. The whole thing is full of an unbelievable energy and charm, and at the same time it’s also this piece of propaganda: a justification for an extremely ruthless invasion. I’m using it as the inspiration for this new piece I’m doing for a museum in Holland.”

“You’re going to do something about the Norman Conquest?” Rat sounded dubious.

“No, I’m making a piece about the invasion of Iraq. It’s for an exhibition called East and West. A group exhibition, twenty-five artists from all over the world. My piece is going to be called Freedom Is Untidy. I don’t know how to say ‘untidy’ in French. C’est bordelique, la liberté? That sounds a bit jollier than the original. I like the idea of using embroidery, this art form that nowadays we think of as being very female and antiquated—elderly maiden aunts by the fireside—to portray war and bloodshed and military might, and using it to make a strong argument against war.”

“How far have you got?”

“I’ve plotted out most of the scenes I want.”

“May I see?”

“Would you like to?”

He opened up for her another portfolio of drawings.

They were colored ink on white paper, simple, almost childish.

It began with an ink drawing of two airplanes shearing through two burning towers. “I was very struck by medieval mosaics of the Tower of Babel—you know, the original Tower of Babel was in modern-day Iraq,” he explained.

Then there was an American council of war, with a caption saying, “Let’s start a new Crusade. A war against oil-rich Islam!”

There was a big ship sailing across the sea, full of tiny men and fighter planes, and American and British flags entwined, and in the ocean below, octopus and starfish and seahorses all gaping.