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didn't understand. To her Tangier would always be a city which the infidels controlled. Later, when he brought Kalinka, his mother looked into her eyes.
    "This woman smokes hashish."
    "I know. I know."
    It had bothered him at first, but he came to realize that the smoke was a part of her, part of the aura of dreaminess and mystery that he loved.
    "Perhaps," his mother said, "she will cause you pain."
    She hadn't yet. She served him, cooked for him. She polished his moccasins and arranged them on the floor in pairs. Farid finally found the horn and gave it to them as a gift. They kept it standing straight on the floor beside their bed. It was as tall as Kalinka, and its end, shaped like a bell, reminded him of her name.
    At the S û ret é they said she was the best thing ever to happen to him. Once he overheard Aziz speaking to a colleague in the police canteen. "Of course Hamid understands the foreigners," he said. "He lives with a Chinese woman now, has learned all their secrets from her."
    A Chinese woman—she was not that, but he understood why they thought she was. Just as all foreigners were infidels, and all infidels were Christians, so all Orientals were Chinese to them.
    The wind. The wind. It blew so often in Tangier. When he thought back over that time he remembered the wind and the tears that flowed from Peter Zvegintzov's eyes. It pleased him that he lived with a woman who could inspire great love and break mens’ hearts. To love a woman—yes, that he understood. A woman could charm a man, cast a spell upon him, drive him mad. He was himself, he knew, bound to Kalinka by invisible bonds of passion that only she could break.
    Who was she? Why had Peter lied and said she was his wife?
    The wind, blowing hard outside, steady, raw, drove him finally into sleep. His last thought before falling off was of Peter's misery and the way Kalinka haunted him, lived on in his heart even after her betrayal.

Lake
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    I t was three o'clock in the morning, and still Lake couldn't sleep. The wind was bothering him, ripping at the palms in the Consulate garden. He stared up at the ceiling and thought of faucets that leaked, appliances in the basement that didn't work. He couldn't bear a smudge on a window or a puddle of grease beneath a car.
    He stole out of bed, went to the bathroom, snapped on the light, splashed water on his face. Then, as he stared into the mirror, he practiced a stiff salute. His curly hair was dull, not glossy as he liked, and there was a bald spot toward the back. There was a terrible ticking too—something like a bomb that threatened to blow up inside his brain.
    He turned on the shower, adjusted the faucets until the water ran hot. Then he stood under it, trembling in the heat. It had been the same in Guatemala during the visit of the Secretary of State. He had almost had a nervous breakdown then, terrible chills in the tropic nights, insomnia, strange urges to fix things, clean things up. He'd felt caged in, restless, smoked too many cigarettes, and had been frightened by his inability to sleep. Was it happening to him again, all those strange symptoms that had come together and then nearly brought him to the brink? This time would he succumb? Would Tangier drive him mad?
    He dressed and wandered into the stainless steel kitchen, opened the refrigerator, found a package of bacon, threw some strips into a frying pan, and began to scramble eggs. When he was finished he turned on the blower to remove the fumes, then set to work washing the utensils. Everything had to be cleaned and arranged as it was before. When the servants came they mustn't find a trace.
    He went back to the bathroom, brushed his teeth and shaved, then rinsed out the sink and applied an acrid spray to purify his breath. He checked himself in the mirror again, noticed crow's-feet around his eyes. His jawline was becoming flabby. His muttonchop sideburns were turning gray.
    He looked in at Janet—she was curled