Through Istanbul the long cabs passed in the gloom, Olds 88s, Buick Roadmasters, Chrysler limousines, DeSotos with busted mufflers, the Detroit overstocks of the decades, a city of dead cars. From the air all the cities looked like brown storms collecting, traps of heat and dust. Rowser sent me to Cairo for one day to finish an update for the local associate, a man who'd suffered a stroke in the lobby of the Sheraton. Cairo the radarless airport, Cairo the flocks of red-dyed sheep crossing downtown streets, the roofless buses, people hanging over the sides. In Karachi there was barbed wire, broken glass cemented to the tops of walls, trucks carrying trees in burlap sacking. Military governments always plant trees. It shows their gentle side.In the Istanbul Hilton I ran into a man named Lane, a lawyer who did work for the Mainland Bank. The day before he'd run into Walid Hassan, one of David Keller's credit officers, at the Inter-Con in Amman. I'd last seen Hassan in Lahore, the Hilton, where we'd run into each other at the front desk, each of us signing a document allowing us to have a drink in the bar that lay behind an unmarked door off the lobby. In the bar we ran into a man named Case, who was Lane's boss.Case had come from Nairobi with a one-sentence story. When Kampala fell to the Tanzanian forces, people greeted them with flowers and fruit and beat their own captured troops to death in the street.All these places were one-sentence stories to us. Someone would turn up, utter a sentence about foot-long lizards in his hotel room in Niamey, and this became the solid matter of the place, the means we used to fix it in our minds. The sentence was effective, overshadowing deeper fears, hesitancies, a rife disquiet. There was around us almost nothing we knew as familiar and safe. Only our hotels rising from the lees of perennial renovation. The sense of things was different in such a way that we could only register the edges of some elaborate secret. It seemed we'd lost our capacity to select, to ferret out particularity and trace it to some center which our minds could relocate in knowable surroundings. There was no equivalent core. The forces were different, the orders of response eluded us. Tenses and inflections. Truth was different, the spoken universe, and men with guns were everywhere.The one-sentence stories dealt with our passing grievances or small embarrassments. This was the humor of hidden fear.

Back in Athens I went around to visit Charles Maitland in his apartment. He lived on a quiet street lined with oleanders about a block and a half away from me, just below the library of the American School of Classical Studies. It was his habit, opening the door to someone, to turn immediately and shuffle toward the living room, leaving the caller slightly unsure of his welcome. The gesture had the assurance and precision of superior breeding behind it but all it meant was that Charles grew impatient with conversation in doorways.It was a small apartment with many objects from Africa and the Middle East. He was just back from Abu Dhabi, where he'd been discussing alarm systems for refineries."Are they killing Americans?" I said.He sat by the window, shirt unbuttoned, in slippers, drinking a beer. A copy of Jane's Fighting Ships was on the floor near his feet. I made myself a drink and wandered along the bookshelves."I want them to use magnetic sensors," he said. "They're reluctant, it seems. The usual convoluted process. I've passed through a hundred partitioned offices. What are you drinking? Did I make that?”"You don't know how.”"Don't look at my books. It makes me nervous when people do that. I feel I ought to follow along, pointing out which ones were gifts from fools and misfits.”"They're Ann's books, most of them.”"When will you finally cast aside this way of seeing? It's defeating, you know.”"You're two distinct people, aren't you? They're hers, most of them. You read manuals, specification sheets.”"Tell me about Cairo," he said. "There's a city for you.”"Forty degrees Celsius.”"Nine million people. You need at least nine million people before you've earned the right to call yourself a city. The heat is impressive, isn't it?”"The sand is impressive. There was an old man with a broom sweeping sand off one of the airport roads.”"Damn it, I miss the sand. He was sweeping it back, was he, into the desert? Good man.”"I was only there a day.”"That's all it takes. Great cities take a day. This is the test of a great city. The traffic, the sewage, the heat, the telephones. Marvelous. Get David to tell you about the traffic in Tehran. Now there's traffic for you. There's a city.”"I've heard him.”Hacking laughter."They're all coming out, you know.”They'd been coming out in Pan Am 747s, in VC10s, in Hercules C-130s, in C-141 StarLifters. They flew to Rome, Frankfurt, Cyprus, Athens.Tennant heard gunfire as he left Tehran for the airport. It was the tenth straight day of gunfire for Tennant. People in Mashhad counted six straight days. Iran Oil Services chartered planes for the oilfield personnel and their families. Five hundred people arrived in Athens one day. Three hundred the next.Athens took on the soft glow of an executive refuge, an old storytelling kingdom where men from many lands gathered to weave their tales of gunfire and chanting mobs. We who lived there began to feel we hadn't fully appreciated the place. Stability was rare, it seemed, in the cities of the eastern Med, the Gulf, well beyond. Here was our own model of democratic calm.They would come on scheduled flights out of Beirut, Tripoli, Baghdad, out of Islamabad and Karachi, out of Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and Dubai, the wives and children of businessmen and diplomats, causing room shortages in Athens hotels, adding stories, new stories all the time. This would happen in the first month of the new Islamic year. The men staying behind were encouraged by their embassies to take vacations, at the very least to stay indoors whenever possible. The first month was the holy month.From the window I watched a priest come down a sidestreet toward the building. They moved like ships, these men in their black cassocks and cylindrical hats, wide and rocking. Sunday."Why aren't you flying your plane?”"Should I be?”"Ever since I've been here you've gone out on Sundays.”"Ann thinks I'm trying to develop a sense of ruined dignity.It would be impaired, this sense, if I were to stand in a dusty field with a model plane buzzing about my head. There's nothing ruined in such a scene. It's merely pathetic. When older men do certain things alone, it means you must pity them. Things boys are thought to do. There's something suspect in this whirling ship of mine. That's the theory.”"Not Ann's theory.”"It's a theory. I haven't finished shaving, my shirt is open. All ways to enlarge my ruined dignity, according to her.”"Is she right?”"They're her books," he said evenly."Business problems. Are you having trouble coming up with assignments?”He waved a hand."Because I can always talk to Rowser.”"Spare me.”"He's not so bad. Once you understand the way his mind works.”"How does his mind work?”"On-off, zero-one.”"Binary. How do minds in general work? Anyone's. Christ, we're out of beer. Are there stores open seven days a week after death?”The tribal mask was wood and horsehair, grimacing. Heavy-lidded eyes, geometric nose. I almost told Charles about the murders in the Cyclades. But going over it mentally I found the subject so closely tied to Owen Brademas there was little to say without bringing him into it. A character study of Owen would be necessary. The material was his, the suggestion of a sense behind the killings. I didn't think I was up to providing a background, on a sleepy late-summer day, and Charles appeared in no mood to take one in."I don't mind working for Rowser at all," I said. "I told Kathryn. This is where I want to be. History. It's in the air. Events are linking all these countries. What do we talk about over dinner, all of us? Politics basically. That's what it comes down to. Money and politics. And that's my job. Yours too.”"I'm in the world, granted. I've always been in the world. But I don't know that I like it anymore.”"All of us. We're important suddenly. Isn't it something you feel? We're right in the middle. We're the handlers of huge sums of delicate money. Recyclers of petrodollars. Builders of refineries. Analysts of risk. You say you're in the world. That's profound, Charles. I wouldn't have reacted to that a year ago. I would have nodded absentmindedly. It means something to me now. I came here to be close to my family and I'm finding something more. Seeing them. But also just being here. The world is here. Don't you feel that? In some of these places, things have enormous power. They have impact, they're mysterious. Events have weight. It's all gathering. I told Kathryn. Men running in the streets. People. I don't mean I want to see it blow up. It's a heightening, that's all. When the Mainland Bank makes a proposal to one of these countries, when David flies to Zurich to meet with the Turkish finance minister, he gets a feeling, he turns a little pinker than he already is, his breath comes faster. Action, risk. It's not a loan to some developer in Arizona. It's much broader, it has a serious frame. Everything here is serious. And we're in the middle.”"How do minds work?" he said."What?”"What does the latest research show?”"I don't know what you're talking about.”"It's in the air. It's history. It's turning pinker all the time.”His voice had the abruptness of someone who talks to strangers in the subway. It was naked. There was an element of injured self in it. Whatever the tone indicated, I didn't think there was any point in responding.I went out to the terrace. It was one of those sandblasted days. The city was achromatic, very dense and still. A woman came out of a building and walked slowly down the street. She was the only person in sight, the one thing moving. In the emptiness and glare there was a mystery about her. Tall, a dark dress, a shoulder bag. Locusts droning. The brightness, the slow afternoon. I stood watching. She stepped off the curbstone without looking back this way. No cars, no sound of cars. Was it the empty street that made her such an erotic figure, the heat and time of day? She drew things toward her. Her shadow gave a depth to things. She was walking in the street and even this was powerful and alluring, an act that had erotic force. The body presumes on the machine. An arrogance that's sensual. That nothing else moved into view, that she walked with a lazy sway, that her dress was the kind of fabric that clings, that her buttocks were hard and tight, that the moment of her passage in the sun went by so slowly, all these things made sexual drama. They weighed on me. They put me in a near trance of longing. That's what she was, hypnotic, walking down the middle of the street. Long slow empty quiet Sundays. When I was a boy these were the days I hated. Now I looked forward to them. Prolonged moments, dead calm. I needed this one day, I'd found, of simply being.Ann was in the living room when I went back inside. Her face seemed bleached, eyes large and pale. She held a drink."Don't look at me.”"I thought you were out," I said. "On the phone Charles said you were at the flower market.”"It closes at two. I got here just before you did actually.”"Been hiding from me.”"I suppose I have.”"Where is Charles?”"Napping.”"What an interesting couple. They take turns disappearing.”"Sorry, James, really.”"I ought to be going anyway.”"Don't be so glum. What are you drinking?”"You're having problems then.”"That's the nature of the beast, isn't it? Our son is planning a visit. Peter. We'll repair it by then. Our duty is clear. Did you notice, he didn't finish shaving? He always seems on the verge of doing some great sort of comic turn. He lapses into comedy all the time. I wonder if he knows. The man's actually a gifted comic. I mean half shaven. He won't let me go with him to fly his plane. He doesn't want to be seen.”There was a ready-made quality about the way she spoke. Tired nonstop fluency. It came raining out. Tension and fatigue made her overbright, almost frantically eager to string sentences together, any sentences. She used pitch as an element of meaning. What she said was beside the point. It was the cadences that mattered, the rise and fall of the ironic voice, the modulations, the stresses. What we lacked was a subject."Have we spoken since Nairobi? I came back with some wonderful dirty words. My sister collects them for Charles. The life they lead, let me tell you. A house servant, a gardener, a man for the horses, a night guard, a day guard. But there's no butter, there's no milk.”Her eyes wouldn't meet mine."The Tennants are here, you know. We'll all go to dinner this week. They don't much like it here. They want to go back to Tehran. They're determined, regardless of danger.”She'd met the Tennants in Beirut. Earlier they'd lived in New York. In four years there, the Tennants said, no one ever bothered them. No one was rude or abusive. They were never threatened or mugged. They walked everywhere, they said in a tone that pretended to wonder why such a thing should be considered remarkable. This is what people said when they wanted to pay formal tribute to New York.We walked everywhere."I feel sad for them," she said. "They were only just getting the feel. It takes more time in some places than others. I mean when people aren't shooting, of course. When they're shooting, you just go about your business, head down. You don't have to worry about getting the feel or learning the rhythm. It's all rather dramatically done for you. Where you can go, when you can go there.”In Beirut she used to go all the way to the airport to mail a letter. Some days they'd put it in a box, some days they'd give it back to her. In the end this is what brought them out. It wasn't the local hepatitis, the cholera to the north, even the steady gunfire. It was the arbitrary nature of things. Moods and whims. Nothing the same two days running. Stray events. Life shaped by men whose actions had the wanton force of some sudden tuf ñ in nature. Often the men themselves didn't know how they would act from one moment to the next and this put her on constant edge. She couldn't follow the thoughts behind the eyes. Checkpoints, men's eyes. The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. During the worst of the fighting they kept on washing floors. They washed floors long after the floors were clean. The uniform motions, the even streaks. Unvarying things, she saw, must have deeper value than we know."Don't look at me," she said again."You're not so hard to look at, you know.”"Stop. I'll be a grandmother one of these days.”"Is Peter married?”"Hardly. He tends to be dithery in his relations with people. I wish I could learn that kind of indecisiveness myself. Forever plunging. That's your Ann Maitland, dearie.”"Should we talk, you and I?”"I thought men talked to other men. You know, buy each other foaming mugs of stout, do a little back-slapping. Things look better in the morning sort of thing.”"Charles isn't talking.”"No, he isn't, is he? He'd much rather sleep.”"Charlie's baffled.”"It's just an affair," she said. "I've had others.”"I wonder what I say to that.”"Nothing. We'll repair it. We have in the past. It requires sequences that have to be completed, one after the other. Distinct stages of development. The funny thing is I haven't learned the drill as well as he has. I do badly at it. I make things difficult for all concerned. Poor James. I'm sorry.”The voice was her own now, reflective and balanced, connected to something. She leaned forward to touch my hand. The world is here, I thought.