Just before Kandahar I hit table land, a high level plateau across which the road cut straight and true and flat. I stopped the car long enough to pour a can of gasoline into its tank, then put the pedal on the floor and urged the car onward.

Kandahar itself was a rather impressive city, with a population of close to 150,000. It was more uniformly modern than Kabul, more squat concrete block houses and fewer mud huts, more cars and fewer donkeys and camels, more men and even some women in western dress. I stopped for a meal, worked my way through to the southern edge of the city, and pressed on toward where the house was supposed to be.

The house was rather similar to the one in Rustak. There was a single barnlike dwelling instead of a slew of little huts, and the madam was gross rather than gaunt, with a hair-sprouting birthmark in the center of her chin and a group of four deep vertical scars in the center of her forehead. She laughed a lot. She laughed when I told her I had come from Amanullah, and she guffawed when I explained that I was intent upon purchasing a particular prostitute for my own purposes, and she chortled when I showed her the letter of guarantee from Amanullah.

She looked at Phaedra’s picture and chuckled inanely to herself. The scars on her forehead wiggled like snakes. I thought of all those cathouses in novels where, if the madam really likes you, she’ll haul you off to the bedroom herself instead of turning you over to one of the girls. If this madam did anything of the sort, I could see where she might alienate a hell of a lot of customers.

“I know her not,” she said. “You want to look at my girls?”

“All right.”

“They are many of them with men now. I call others.”

She brought in a batch of them, and as the others finished with their clients she brought them in as well, and I guess that the girls were the true similarity between this cathouse and the other one. It certainly wasn’t the physical plant which reminded me of the other, nor was it any shred of resemblance between the wicked witch of the north and the wicked witch of the south. It was the girls, the poor pathetic girls, black and white and yellow and tan, dull-eyed and bow-legged and lead-footed from constant and merciless screwing.

“No,” I said, “I fear she is not here.”

“You care for drink before you go?”

“Coffee, if you have some.”

She did, so I did. It was particularly good, strong and rich, and I drank three cups of it. I stood to go, and the madam asked me if I wanted a girl.

“No,” I said, “I shall wait until I find the girl I seek.”

“Have one now. It is not good for a man to wait too long.”

I shook my head, not in answer but to clear it of cobwebs. I had thought she meant I should buy one of her girls, but she was more interested in renting than selling.

I turned to look at those sheep-eyed, sad-faced girls. Most of them had left, returning to the long line of men waiting for service, but a few still dawdled about.

“I do not think so,” I said.

“When did you last have a woman? You have not had a woman since you left Kabul.”

“Well-”

“Not since Kabul,” she repeated, her words an accusation. “Know you what happens when a man waits too long between women?”

She began to tell me and I tried not to listen. She was as disheartening as an army training film on the ravages of venereal disease, and the fact that I knew she was crazy didn’t help. It was one thing to know that you were hearing an old madam’s tale; it was another thing to dismiss out of hand the urgent warning that one’s thing would turn green and grow pimples and get smaller and smaller and then drop off entirely. I may not have believed it, but that certainly didn’t mean I wanted to hear about it.

Not since Kabul?

Hell. Not since New York, I thought. There was a beginning with Julia Stokes, but a beginning, you will recall, was all it was; I had been forced to depart before I could arrive. Since then such opportunities as may have existed somehow never seemed worth the trouble. In France, in Tel Aviv, in Iraq and Iran – well, there were girls, certainly; but that’s never reason enough in and of itself to get involved. Not unless one happens to be particularly in the mood. Which, what with all the worry and aggravation and all, I hadn’t happened to be.

And still wasn’t.

“I must go,” I told the fat madam.

“You are less than a man,” she taunted.

“Perhaps.”

“You are a farradóon who would mince as a girl.”

“You are a fat old lady with a face that would cause a clock to cease ticking.”

“Fat!”

I raced for the car.

I drove back to Kandahar and managed to find a petrol pump. I filled the tank and the five-gallon cans once again, and I stopped at a grocery story to fill the rest of the car with food. Anardara was three hundred hard miles from Kandahar, and I had no idea how long the trip would take or what my chances might be of getting food or drink along the way. I bought hunks of flat bread and a large round cheese, and for drinking I took two dozen bottles of Coca-Cola.

Well, that was what they had. They have it everywhere. In parts of the world where the natives have never heard of America, everybody drinks Coca-Cola. Little kids in Asia and Africa start drinking the stuff before they’re old enough to have their second teeth, and so it has a chance at their baby teeth first. In villages throughout the world, the first two words of English everyone learns – often the only words of English – are Coca and Cola.

So far the Russians haven’t been able to invent it. Their finest spies have been unable to penetrate the iron-clad security system in Atlanta, where the Coca-Cola formula is guarded more carefully than the most precious of atomic secrets. All efforts to break it down chemically have met with utter failure. Nobody really knows what’s in it.

I had some bread, I had some cheese, I drank a warm Coke.

I hit the road.

Chapter 12

The Wicked Witch of the West had lost an eye to some loathsome disease. She had never bothered to replace it with a glass eye and did not wear a patch, either. Nor was she wearing a Hathaway shirt, which was just as well, because she would have set their image back immeasurably. Aside from the gaping, red-rimmed eye socket that glared at one, she wasn’t particularly bad looking. Her body was well proportioned and her face would have been attractive.

She compensated for her relative shortage of deformities by reeking. She was the rankest-smelling female in the world, and it was not necessary for me to smell every woman on earth to make this statement. She stank; her breath was enough to curdle Coca-Cola and her flatulence suggested a lifelong diet of nothing but baked beans. I don’t think she ever bathed; if she did, the Farah Rud River would have a water pollution problem.

“You come from Amanullah!” She slapped me on the back, put her mouth to my ear for a confidential whisper. I tried to do something about my nostrils. “He is my good friend,” she hissed. (You couldn’t hiss this in English, but the Afghan for it is full of sibilants. Don’t quibble.) “My very good friend,” she went on, still hissing. “Always he brings me my very best girls. So many of the maradóosh, they are not lovely, they do not please men, they bleed, they get sick, they die. Often they are diseased, and men complain later that their members have been set afire and immersed in acid. But from Amanullah I obtain always only the very finest, the milk of the milk. The best girl in this house is a girl Amanullah sold me.”

“One of them,” I said, “is a girl he should not have sold you. I must repurchase her.”

“I do not sell my girls, kâzzih.”

“Amanullah wishes to buy her himself. I am his agent.”