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would leave you after two days.’
    ‘Sure. Why?’
    ‘Look at this.’
    Jack took out the handkerchief and spread it carefully on Baines’s desk blotter.
    On the Irish linen, where the golden tears had been, were now two dull, inarguable smears of lead.

By some untraceable miscalculation, Baines’s party arrived in Riyadh precisely at the beginning of Ramadan, during which the Arabs fasted all day and were consequently in too short a temper to do business with; which was followed, after twenty-nine solid days, by a three-day feast during which they weretoo stuporous to do business with. Once negotations were properly opened, however, they took no more than the two weeks Baines had anticipated.
    Since the Moslem calendar is lunar, Ramadan is a moveable festival, which this year fell close to Christmas. Baines half suspected that Theron Ware would refuse to see him in so inauspicious a season for servants of Satan, but Ware made no objection, remarking only (by post), ‘December 25th is a celebration of great antiquity.’ Hess, who had been reading dutifully, interpreted Ware to mean that Christ had not actually been born on that date – ‘though in this universe of discourse I can’t see what difference that makes,’ he said. ‘If the word “superstition” has any of its old meaning left at all by now, it means that the sign has come to replace the thing – or in other words, that facts come to mean what we say they mean.’
    ‘Call it an observer effect,’ Baines suggested, not entirely jokingly. He was not disposed to argue the point with either of them; Ware would see him, that was what counted.
    But if the season was no apparent inconvenience to Ware, it was a considerable one to Father Domenico, who at first flatly refused to celebrate it in the very maw of Hell. He was pressed at length and from both sides by the Director and Father Uccello, whose arguments had no less force for being so utterly predictable; and – to skip over a full week of positively Scholastic disputation – they prevailed, as again he had been sure they would.
    Mustering all his humility, obedience and resignation – his courage seemed to have evaporated – he trudged forth from the monastery, excused from sandals, and mounted a mule, the
Enchiridion
of Leo III swinging from his neck under his cassock in a new leather bag, and a selection of his thaumaturgic tools, newly exorcised, asperged, fumigated and wrapped in silken cloths, in a satchel balanced carefully on the mule’s neck. It was a hushed leave-taking – all the more so in its lack of any formalities or even witnesses, for only the Director knew why he was going, and he had been restrained with difficulty from bruiting it about that Father Domenico actually had been expelled, to make a cover story.
    The practical effect of both delays was that Father Domenico and Baines’s party arrived at Ware’s palazzo on the same day, in the midst of the only snowstorm Positano had seen in seven years. As a spiritual courtesy – for protocol was all-important in such matters, otherwise neither monk nor sorcerer would have dared to confront the other – Father Domenico was received first, briefly but punctiliously; but as a client, Baines (and his crew, in descending order) got the best quarters. They also got the only service available, since Ware had no servants who could cross over the invisible line Father Domenico at once ruled at the foot of his apartment door with the point of his bolline.
    As was customary in southern Italian towns at this time, three masked kings later came to the gate of the palazzo to bring and ask presents for the children and the Child; but there were no children there and the mummers were turned away, baffled and resentful (for the rich American, who was said to be writing a book about the frescoes of Pompeii, had previously shown himself open-handed), but oddly grateful too; it was a cold night, and the lights in the palazzo were of a grim and