Chapter 16 · Chapter 16

"Then ask it," I said. "You have had it in your mouth since the majlis. You set it down with the cup and you have not picked it up since."

"I set nothing down."

"You poured for me and you did not drink. That is not a man at his ease."

He stood by the table with the lamp on it, and the light went up the front of his thobe and no higher. He had not taken off his bisht, though the evening was warm and the room was warmer, and I understood that he had come into this wing the way he went into a meeting he expected to end badly.

"At one in the morning," he said, "a car stood at the gate. You came out through the side door and you got into it. There was a man in the back. The car went west. That is what was reported to me, from three mouths, before the coffee went round a second time."

"Three mouths."

"Three."

"And all three of them standing at a window a hundred paces away, in the dark, watching a car."

"Deema."

"The man is from the company.