Chapter 13 · Chapter 13

The stamp was still up. I had not finished thinking about it when he stood.

He did not push the chair back. He came up out of the sadr the way a man comes up when the sitting is finished and the room has not yet been told, and the chair stayed where it was behind him, and the hall went quiet in the middle of a sentence that a man on the left wall had been enjoying.

I have seen a room quieted by shouting. It does not hold. This held. Not one man in that majlis looked at another; they looked at their hands, or at the carpet between their knees, and the two by the door found work for their shoulders.

He put his hand on the ledger.

Not a slap. One strike, downward, palm and fingers flat, and it was not loud, and the pen jumped in the clerk's hand and left a stroke of ink where no stroke belonged, and the coffee moved once in the finjan on the table beside him and was still.

"The record of this inquiry is sealed," he said.

Flat, the way a man reads out a line he has