“He’s not a true devotee,” laughed the barman. “Now the saint, the saint could have drunk down this whole cask and still walked home. He once drank down a bottle in this very house and never even stopped for breath. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is. These folks,” he gestured with his ladle down the road. “Weak stomachs. Can’t blame ’em.”

Thanakar got up and limped across the road. He reached his hand out for a cup. The barman poured him a huge portion, and with streaming eyes and burning tongue, he drank it down, in honor of the prince. He felt pollution coursing through his blood, and motioning to the barman to fill the cup again, he drank again to Abu the Undefiled. Dignity is the least important thing, he thought, drunkenness hitting him like a slap.

“Well done, sir,” said the barman. “I can tell you’re a gentleman. What’s your name?”

“Thanakar Starbridge.”

The barman cocked an eye. “My cousin,” said Thanakar, responding to the unasked question.

“Well then, God bless you, sir,” said the man, winking facetiously. “Pretty soon we’ll have all the nobs down here. You’re not with him, are you?” he asked, gesturing towards where the pervert stood picking his lips until they bled.

“Not in the sense you mean.”

“Stay away from him, sir. He’s a stinker.”

“He’s a scumbag,” agreed Thanakar companionably. But at that moment, as if to demonstrate their connection, the pervert took off again, and Thanakar put down his cup and followed. The pervert paused at the head of the street and climbed the steps of a house there. Thanakar climbed after him, his kneepan rattling.

It was a richly furnished house, of ill repute and bad smells, the kind the nose instinctively connects with vice. And even though Thanakar could identify only cigarettes and perfume as he stepped into the hall, the smell seemed to combine with the velvet upholstery and flowered carpets and unlock a host of dark associations as a key might unlock an armoire full of secrets. Furniture that elsewhere might have been considered sumptuous, here seemed tainted. Such elegance in such a place seemed to stink of softness and corruption, and brutal empty lives, and consciences so tender that they needed cosseting. Gilt chandeliers hung from high ceilings, blazing with light. There were no shadows anywhere. In a parlor off the hallway the pervert sat at ease in an armchair of carved wood and fat upholstery. In other parlors, poisonous well-dressed men talked in low voices or sipped pale wine.

A gong sounded as the street door closed, and a woman came into the hallway, a wineglass in her hand.

She was plump and pretty, with a dress that lapped the carpet—an old-fashioned style and an autumn color that contrasted wistfully with the spring green walls. Thanakar took a few steps forward and he saw a quick sly look disturb her features, like an olive dropped into a cocktail, or a pebble dropped into a pool. His limp had gotten much worse that day. In the woman’s pretty face, he saw a question quickly asked and quickly answered, and afterwards her face resumed its placid surface. She smiled.