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color.
    “Pardon me,” he said, wondering if it had been a mistake to buy a one-way ticket. “I’ve come all the way from the coast, thinking you were going to talk to me about a job.”
    “And that is what we are doing. Isn’t that what we are doing?”
    Barrett glanced at Diana, sitting alongside him, her legs crossed, hands clasped over a knee, hair aglow in the dazzle slicing through the casement windows.
    “You’ve wandered a bit far afield,” she said in a voice tinged with exasperation. Soothing the scrapes caused by Barrett’s abrasiveness was probably something she did fairly often. “Your questions seem to be making Fitz uncomfortable.”
    Fitzhugh remarked that he did not feel uncomfortable so much as baffled. It was as if Barrett were examining him not for his qualifications and experience but for his political correctness. He said that as a relief worker he had devoted himself to filling empty bellies, not to politics. “An empty belly is an empty belly, and what I think about the politics of the situation doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”
    “On the contrary. Politics has everything to do with it.”
    “That isn’t what I said!” Fitzhugh’s voice broke, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s, as it usually did when he got angry. “I said that what I think about the politics has nothing to do with it.”
    “A Jesuit is what you should have been, John Barrett,” Malachy said. “Why are you being so argumentative?”
    “And look who’s talkin’. Malachy, there’s no man as contentious as you. I’m not arguin’. It’s dedicated people we’re lookin’ for, committed people. For when the goin’ gets rocky, as rocky it is bound to get.” Barrett removed his glasses, blew on the lenses, and wiped them deliberately with a handkerchief. “Relief work is full of dilettantes. Nice people lookin’ to do some good in the world so they can feel good about themselves. They hand out a few chocolate bars and go home.”
    Fitzhugh offered a none-too-amiable smile. “What is it you’re suggesting?”
    Barrett, returning his glasses to his face, was about to reply when Douglas made a sound—not a sigh, an exhalation rather, long and slow. It was almost inaudible, yet it had the same effect as a judge’s gavel in a noisy courtroom. The conversation stopped, everyone turned to him. Fitzhugh would always remember that moment distinctly, because it was the first time he’d observed the American’s peculiar power to draw all eyes and ears to himself with nothing more than a vague gesture, a change of expression, or a breath. It was a kind of magnetism, too effortless to have been learned.
    “Fitz doesn’t seem like any dilettante to me,” he said in his pleasing drawl. “Seems all right to me, and I’m the one who’ll be working with him. So how about we end the inquisition and tell him what the job is?”
    “Splendid suggestion.” Diana, rising, moved in a whisper of cotton and linen to a desk, one of those old campaign things with brass handles and corner brackets, and withdrew a large map, folded up with its printed side out. “Stuffy in here,” she murmured, and cranked a window open. Immediately the intoxicating scent from her gardens filled the room.
    Diana spread the map over a table: a pilot’s chart, Fitzhugh saw by the black vector lines fanned across the green of equatorial swamps, the reddish browns and yellows of highlands and arid plains.
    He shook a cigarette from his pack and asked Diana if she minded.
    “Not at all, now that the window’s open. You are familiar with this neck of the woods?”
    A lacquered fingernail fell on one of the brown patches toward the upper edge of the map, marked Jebel al-Nubah in transliterated Arabic, the Nuba mountains. The years that did not show in Diana’s face, Fitzhugh observed, were revealed in the fissured skin of her hands. They disappointed him somehow.
    “Never been there,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has, oh,