“That’s better than before—but it’s, it’s not news,” said Will, trying to modulate his robotic delivery into something more human, but failing. “It’s not ‘very much alive.’ It’s not very much anything.”

“You are too much.”

“I may be.”

Rood laughed, but a little unpleasantly. He’d wanted a bigger react. He wanted Will to believe Hoseyn was alive and kicking.

“There’s going to be fallout,” Rood said, his tone turning officious.

“Fallout?”

“The vice-president sees this as a reason to go back in.”

“To Iran?”

“Absolutely.”

“With what?”

“With you.”

SLASH RUN   JUNE

15.   GAVE PROOF

Summer enervated the government, told homeowners the sea could renew them, and left the rest their city. The air conditioner in the window broke, or the bill climbed too high, and a fan did enough. Arguments reached sidewalks and drifted through open windows. There was comfort in knowing you were not the only one in lost, mad hell. In Blagden Alley, Stanley could hear a harmonica one night, the tenor from church practice on Saturday, a baby’s whelping beside the cinder rage of rap.

Washington was as louche as any city; it just hid from itself until the heat set it free. Those who made the city’s daily bread—accusation—slowed in high temperatures. This year, the judgmental faculty wanted cold weather. Pundits withdrew to Chilmark. Reporters took mountain camping trips. Elected officials were in Missoula for barbecue. The president had a place he always went, and he went there. Motorcades slept. Diplomats went to the mother country while their daughters stayed behind for liebe with men their fathers’ age. The children of whores played outside at night and policemen too drained to give chase befriended them. Drunks bearing stolen rakes knocked on doors after sundown to sell gardening for cash money. The Black Rose, the consensual and legal bondage club, attracted gentle, amorous women. Only a few anywhere tried to quit smoking.

There was an undertow of bayou among the junior lawyers and investigators left behind by their vacationing betters. Trickery was deemed decent. Finding the lover scorned became as righteous a technique as finding the document that damned. Seduction had its uses. In each past, there was something dirtied, thrown away, and unreasonable to loving ones. That something was recoverable. It was not a breakfast thing. It was a midnight object.

The midnight lantern in Blagden Alley was Winnow. She was fourteen. Stanley had heard her mother scald mad at johns for years on the corner, under a streetlight. She taunted more than one cheapskate with his own cell phone, her finger light and ready on the speed dial to a wife in White Flint or College Park. This summer, Winnow mystified her mother. The illusion wasn’t that Winnow would be better than her mother. The illusion was that Winnow wouldn’t poach her johns. Yet Winnow was practical first and second, daughter only third.