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unseemly.
    “I can’t see how Richard did it,” she muttered. “Did he bribe them?
    What the fuck did he do?”
    “It wasn’t that. Honestly, I think it’s not for us to know. I think it’s just a huge hassle for the police. There’s too much paperwork involved. And, I hate to say it …”
    “Say it.”
    “The kid is a nobody. He’s dirt poor. He’s from some village far away and no one knows who he is. There’s nothing to be done.”
    “What have we done, then?”
    “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just stating the fact.”
    He hugged her. The old gentleman fixing the hot chocolates snuffed the last candle, bowed, and wished them good night. David thought about Benihadd’s refusal to take the body away with him. “We do not have a morgue at our post,” he had said. “There will have to be arrangements tomorrow.” And he had added, without even a trace of irony, “Here, even the garages are air-conditioned!” They waited for him to close the doors behind him, a kind discretion. But they got up anyway and, once again, they didn’t know what to say to each other. The facts were between them, stifling them. The dead boy was in the garage with the air-conditioning turned on, and a man sat next to him in vigil, praying next to a pot of mint tea. They were assassins.
    THEY MADE THEIR WAY BACK TO THE CHALET WITHOUT A servant.
    “David, are you afraid at all?”
    He said nothing, shaking his head. In the chalet, yellow leather babouches and hemmed towels had been laid out for them with a silver pot of sweetened tea. There was a note from Richard. “Try and sleep. There’s nothing to worry about.”
    “I am not afraid,” David said in bed. “Why should I be afraid?”
    She lay awake, tormented, while he snored.
    The wind quickened, and soon it was howling all down the valley. It spat sand from the deep desert all over the ksour of Azna like a hail of indescribable fineness. The casements and roofs hissed. The palm groves hissed, and the dogs scattered. The staff playing their guitars covered their heads with the hoods of their burnooses and in the garage the flames guttered and the man drinking tea suddenly looked up. Jo lay in the overblown and slightly Gothic four-poster waiting for the Ambien to kick in, a candle burning inside a lantern of coloredglass. She listened. Men were running through the dark. The great wood slab of the door began to sweat.
    AS THE NIGHT ENDED, THE STAFF ASSEMBLED BY THE GARAGES out of their fanciful uniforms. They gathered by the doors in their workaday burnooses and smoked cigarettes together as the sand pitter-pattered around them. A gray light lit the half-ruined mud walls as the fairy lights were turned off. A tumultuous mood connected them, drew them together though they said almost nothing. The ferocity of the wind was enough to restrain them. But rumors still flashed here and there. They pressed into the garages in small groups and paid their respects, looking down on the colorless corpse with a mixture of dread and determined fascination. Outside, someone muttered the words road kill . By the gate, the cooks cowered from the wind, looking out at the brownish miasma that smothered the road and the cliffs. What they had seen in the garage made them vaguely mutinous, though they wouldn’t mutiny against a cushy job. There were motivated by a rage that was not clear even to themselves. Deep down, they did not and could not accept the idea of an accident. A Muslim had been killed by a Christian. The mind could not accept it entirely, except on the flimsy level of reason.
    “I have heard,” one of them said, “that his legs were pulped. They ran over him, maybe more than once.”
    “My uncle is right. They think of us as flies. They cannot help themselves. And they are not mindful.”
    “They must have reversed over him. It defies belief.”
    “It was fate, then.”
    “But they did not hesitate. They reversed over him.”
    They winced in the wind and considered