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asphalt of the airstrip. The pitiful figure of Dr. Milhauz was revealed in the amber glow of the tail lights, sitting on the ground in despair. Phillipe withdrew the knife, but he did not release the pressure from the driver’s neck.
    “I would help you up, Doctor,” Phillipe said. “But I’m otherwise occupied.”
    Dr. Milhauz lifted his head and stared. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. Tears had streaked the grime on his face.
    “This is very bad,” he muttered as he climbed into the truck. “This does not bode well for our mission here.”
    Phillipe released the driver from his grip. “After you take us to our quarters, you will return for the doctor’s things. Understand?”
    But the driver didn’t respond. He shoved the truck in gear and sped off, just as the moon appeared, round and red between the clouds.

    5.
    T he way station was a large, tattered tent that had once been part of a mobile UN hospital unit, its Red Cross insignia scrawled over with overlapping graffiti—Phillipe saw the slogan POLISARIO VIVA! SADR VIVA! peeling now, and in several places, apparently fresh, the odd bee hieroglyph Dr. Milhauz had inscribed in the sand. Worn but magnificent Berber carpets covered the canvas floor within. These, a couple of storm lanterns, a ten-gallon tub of UN protein crackers, and several gallon jugs of stale water were the only furnishings. They slept fitfully that night atop the carpets. Dr. Milhauz snored so loudly, he woke himself up several times; Phillipe, plagued by sand fleas and uneasy dreams, rose before dawn.
    In the morning, the young man in the Méhari truck returned, its bed full of Dr. Milhauz’s gear. A cohort in the back kicked the stuff out of the bed, shouting obscenities in Hassaniya, and the driver roared off to the east, which was the direction of the camp at Awsard. High cirrus clouds streaked the sky just beginning to blaze. The suitcases and trunks had been broken open, rifled through; everything of value and half the doctor’s clothes, gone. His books remained, but they had been defaced, the pages torn.
    “This is an outrage!” Dr. Milhauz cried, outraged. “I’m going to report this to the council!”
    Phillipe watched placidly, munching on a cardboard-tasting UN cracker—his breakfast—as the little man went through the tatters of what was left, gathering his clothes into heaps, discarding his destroyed books, burying the rubble in a sandy hole.
    “But they missed something,” he said, smiling weakly. “These!” He pulled up a hidden compartment in the bottom of one of his trunks to reveal two bottles of Johnnie Walker Red—this stuff as good as currency in some parts of the world.
    “I would be careful, Doctor,” Phillipe cautioned. “From what I’ve read, the Saharouis consider alcohol an abomination. A crime against Allah.”
    “I’ve often thought a drink or two would solve these people’s problems instantly,” the doctor said, adjusting his round glasses. “Join me?”
    “Too early.” Phillipe shook his head.
    The doctor, clutching the bottles to his belly, disappeared into the tent and could be heard in there all afternoon, drinking whiskey and muttering to himself.

    6.
    T wo days passed. Phillipe spent them not unpleasantly, chasing the shade around the tent, writing long letters to Louise and working on his Satie monograph. His cell phone, useless out here, showed no signal, only the smiling, animated mussel graphic of the French wireless network Moulignac.
    When Satie died in 1925, his brother and a few close friends broke into the small, single room in Arcueil, the dingy Parisian suburb, where the eccentric composer had lived for the last thirty years of his life without receiving a single visitor. There, they found an incredible rat’s nest of fantastic stuff, a lifetime’s worth of creative detritus. Two broken pianos (one of them chalked with the cryptic phrase this house haunted by the Devil ), both stuffed with