Chapter 16 · Chapter 16

I finished, and the lamp did not change, and neither did his face.

Talal turned his finjan a quarter turn on the low table and set it down without drinking. The small sound of porcelain went into the corners of the room and stayed there.

"The fourth date," he said. "Say it again."

"The fourth of the month. The word was carried into the majlis on the fourth."

"And the paper you were given says the fourth."

"It does."

He reached under the table's edge and drew out a folder that had been lying there the whole time, flat and shut, and I understood that he had put it there before I came in, and had let me speak for an hour with it under his hand.

He opened it and turned it toward me.

I read standing. It was my own argument, the one I had just spoken from memory, and beside each line was the correspondence it rested on. The dates were not the fourth. They were the eleventh, and the twelfth, and one was the nineteenth. Three weeks of paper, and not one of them touched the fourth.

"Read the seal," he said.

I read the seal.