“He was executed by his government?”

“He was executed by me.”

The eyes widened, the jaw dropped. Astonishment registered on Amanullah’s pendulous face. Radiance slowly replaced it and the fat Afghan slave trader beamed at me.

“You have done me a great favor,” he said. “The man did me a great wrong. Ah, you might say, but he did not cheat me! And this is true. I made a fine profit on every girl purchased from him. But he made me a partner in his sinfulness. He made me a criminal, a corrupt one. May the flames torture him throughout eternity, may the worms that eat his flesh grow sick from the taste of him, may his image fade from human memory, may it be as if he had never been.”

“Amen.”

“More beer!”

After more beer, after an infinity of more beer, after a veritable tidal wave of more beer, Amanullah and I had repaired to his house, a brick and stone edifice on the northeast outskirts of the city. There he made me a small pot of coffee and poured himself – guess what? – another beer.

“But coffee for you, kâzzih. You have no head for beer, eh? It makes you sleepy and stupid.”

Sleepy, no. Stupid? Perhaps.

“You like my city, kâzzih? You enjoy Kabul?”

“It’s very pleasant.”

“A peaceful city. A city of great wealth and beauty, although there are yet the poor with us. Great beauty. The mountains, sheltering Kabul from the winds and rain. The freshness of the air, the purity of the waters.”

The only problem, I thought, was that a person could get killed around here.

“And in recent years there is so much development, so many roads being constructed, so much progress being made. For years we Afghans wished only to be left to ourselves. We asked nothing else. Merely that the British leave us alone. And the others who dominated us, but largely the British. And so at last the British were gone, and we lived under our own power, and it was good.

“But now the Russians give us money to build a road, and so we take the money and dig up a perfectly good road and replace it with a new one built with the Russian money. And the Americans come to us and say, ‘You took aid from the Russians, now you must take aid from us or we will be insulted and offended.’ Who would offend such a powerful nation? And so we permit the Americans to come into our country and construct a hydroelectric power station. And the Russians see the hydroelectric power station and force upon us a canning factory. The Americans retaliate by shipping bad-smelling chemicals to be plowed into the soils of our farms. And so it goes. So it goes.”

He hoisted his beer, drank deeply. “But I talk to excess. I am a man of excess. I feel that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. You will have some cheese? Some cold meat? Ah. Everything worth doing is worth doing to excess. There is a saying-”

“A hand in the bush is worth two on the bird,” I suggested.

“I have never heard this before. I am not entirely certain I understand it in its entirety, but I can tell that there is wisdom in it.”

“Thank you.”

“I myself was thinking of yet another adage, but it does not matter now. I am in your debt, kâzzih. You have purged the world of the man who most dishonored me. Only tell me what I might do to liquidate the debt I owe you.”

“Phaedra.”

“Your woman.”

“Yes.”

“But that is less than a favor,” he said. “That is merely another debt I owe. If the girl was not a slave, she was never that man’s to sell. So although I may have purchased her, she was never mine to sell when I sold her, for I could not acquire a true and honest title. Do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

“Thus although she may have been sold to a house of maradóosh, they cannot own her. But, because I must do business with these people, and because it was proper for them to trust me and foolish for me to trust this Englishman, the burden must fall upon me. Do you see?”

“I’m not sure.”

He sighed. “But it is elementary, kâzzih. I shall buy the girl’s freedom. If.”

“Pardon.”

A shadow darkened his face. “If she is alive. If you find her… worth taking. The men who work in the mines live in grim villages devoid of women. There are no women anywhere about except for the houses of the maradóosh. And when they receive their pay, the mine workers rush to these houses and stand in long lines to wait their turns with the slave girls. They are men of no culture, these miners. In Kabul it is a joke to call them Yâ’ahâddashún. But you are a foreigner, you would not understand. It is remarkable enough that you speak our language as well as you do.”

“Thank you.”

“Often I can understand almost all the words you say.”

“Oh.”

“But these mine workers, they are crude. Rough boorish men. They use women cruelly.” He lowered his head, and a tear trembled in the corner of one big blue eye. “I could not say with assurance that your woman, your girl, is alive today.”

“I must find her.”

“Or that you would want her. So many women, the experience ruins them. Some have in their lifetimes known only a handful of men, and then to embrace thirty or forty or fifty a day-”

“Thirty or forty or fifty!”

“Life is hard for a maradóon,” Amanullah said. “There is a labor shortage.”

“No wonder.”

“Ah. If you will permit a delicate question, had this Phaedra considerable experience before she was brought here?”

I burned my mouth on my coffee. I barely felt the pain. I remembered a taxi racing through garbage-laden streets, a head on my shoulder, a voice at my ear. I have things to tell you. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I’m not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don’t want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time but it’s not what I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out. I want to grow. I am a virgin. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am a virgin. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I am a virgin. I am –

“-a virgin,” I said.

“Eh?”

“She is eighteen years old,” I said. “She was never with a man in all her life.”

“Extraordinary!”

“A virgin.”

“Eighteen years without knowing a man!”

“Yes.”

“And the likeness you showed me – she is a beauty, is it not so?”

“It may not be so now,” I said. “It was so then. A beauty.” I thought for a moment. “A beautiful face and body, and a beautiful spirit, my friend Amanullah.”

“It is rare, this beauty of the spirit.”

“Yes.”

“Beauty and purity.”

“Yes.”

“You go to find her,” he sobbed. “You take my car. My driver returns in a week’s time and he drives you to look for her, to search for her.”

“Search?”

“Ah, there are four houses where she might be, kâzzih. Four houses scattered far apart in the vastness of Afghanistan. And I do not know to which house I sold which girls.”

“Oh.”

“But my driver returns in a week, and he and my car are at your disposal.”

“A week,” I said.

“And until then my house is your house and my refrigerator is your refrigerator.”

“A week is a long time,” I said. A week in Kabul, I thought, could turn out to be an exceedingly long time. That meant I wouldn’t get out of the city until the 21st of the month, and the coup was scheduled for the 25th, which meant the city would be in Russian hands before I got back to it. And I would have to get back to it if I had Amanullah’s car and driver along. And-

“-an excellent driver,” he was saying. “A Pakistani, and when his mother lay on her deathbed, of course I told him to go to her. In a week’s time he flies home from Karachi.”

“He flies?”

“We have an airport in Kabul. It is most modern.”

“Then the car is here.”

“Of course.”

“I could take it myself.”

He stared at me. “You do not mean to say that you are familiar with automobiles?”