“Probably not a coincidence,” Frank said. “Did he talk about jihad?”

“No. But he did mention which hand to use to wipe your ass.”

“Excuse me?”

“Islamic law,” she said. “There are laws about going to the bathroom. Like how to wipe. It’s recommended to use a rock.”

“To wipe? A rock?”

Sykes nodded. “And when you walk into the toilet, you’re supposed to go in with your left foot first. Going out, you use your right foot first.”

“Like the hokey-pokey,” Rafe said, breaking in. He couldn’t help himself. It did sound like the hokey-pokey.

Sykes turned to him with a look that made him hope she wasn’t armed.

“Maybe that was just the public session,” Frank said.

Sykes turned back to Frank.

“Of the class,” he said. “Just a bunch of bullshit. My guy said there was a private session afterward. He wasn’t invited.”

“Can he get invited?”

“He said he could.”

“Do it,” she said. Then, turning to leave, she looked at Rafe again. “Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing?”

Without waiting for an answer, she was gone.

“Well,” Frank said, “she really told you.”

Cheese

CHEESE

Majid hadn’t told Catherine he loved her, of course. To do so seemed too blatant, too forward (and, yes, too unlikely to get a reciprocal declaration). And, as he analyzed them (as he was prone to do), he began to doubt his own feelings. But there were feelings. He thought of Catherine when he wasn’t with her. He thought about what she might be doing on nights they were apart. And he remembered the Harvard Club reception, where she had seemed so casual about running into Rafe. Perhaps too casual? Was he jealous? This was all new to him. He had never been jealous before.

The nights he spent with her now were, for him, no longer simple pleasures, mild diversions, unadorned expressions of the animal nature that God, if there was a God, had left implanted in his human creations even as they evolved into private bankers and wealth managers. He wanted to please her more than before, and he was more pleased himself, not just by the sex but even without it, just being there. He and Catherine had never talked about an “us,” of course, and even though he had consistently been surprised, during a decade in the West, by how openly Americans talked about their emotions, Catherine was an exception. In that she would have made a fine Arab. He had a fantasy of his mother meeting with her mother to arrange a match. Except Catherine wasn’t from an acceptable tribe, so that would have been tricky. And she never talked about her mother anyway. Another area that remained off limits.