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friends were bobbing too, one in a dragon and one in a panda bear. He was happy—like the Frankish butcher had said he would be. He found himself employing a phrase he’d gleaned from TV: “You guys are the best.”
    They laughed at him, and Meg used her own new slang: “Sucker,” she said.
    “I’m not a sucker,” Nick said.
    “You are so.” She sipped at her cocktail—Sex on the Beach—through a straw and paddled her feet in the water. “You love the Guild.”
    “In that case we’re all suckers,” Nick said. “All we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules.”
    Leo, rotating gently in his panda bear, snorted. “That’s a pretty tall order,” he said. His slang was better than both of theirs, and he loved to show off.
    “What does that mean?”
    “A tall order?” Leo put his head back and let his three braids dangle in the water. His head was plucked bald except for a square patch of hair at the back, which was long and braided into three thin plaits. He had been told this hairstyle would not be acceptable in Bangalore, but he still had a few months in Chile, and Leo wasn’t going to reach for the razor until the plane was waiting for him. “A tall order is something that is nearly impossible. So you say that all we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules. I say, ‘That’s a tall order.’ It means that I’m not sure I can do it.”
    “Why not?”
    Leo rolled his head to the side and looked at Nick. “I’m disenchanted with the Guild.”
    “Why?”
    “Remember that guy, a couple of weeks ago? I was walking with him across the quad.”
    “Yes,” Nick said. “The man in the baby-blue suit.”
    “The Man in the Baby-Blue Suit,” Meg said. “It sounds like a song.”
    “He wasn’t anything like a song,” Leo said. “Unless it was a song about ominous government types.”
    “What was his name?”
    “He never told me.”
    “All right, so.” Meg thought about it. “We’ll call him Mibbs.”
    “They call me Mister Mibbs!” Nick was pleased with his joke.
    Leo didn’t laugh. “You saw him, Nick. He wasn’t funny.”
    “No,” Nick agreed. “Even in that suit he wasn’t funny.”
    “He walked at a distance from me,” Leo said. “As if he were afraid to come too close. He asked me about my experiences on what he kept calling the ‘warpath.’”
    “That’s nothing new. Everyone’s always asking you crazy questions about being an Indian,” Nick said. “Like that thirteenth-century Japanese guy who keeps challenging you to an archery contest.”
    “And that German woman,” Meg piped up. “Astride von What-have-you.”
    Leo put his hands over his ears. “Oh, God, Astride! I was so glad when she finally left.”
    Nick laughed, but Leo dropped his hands from his ears and his eyes were serious. “He asked me all sorts of intense questions. Very specific. About certain practices of, shall we say, revenge? Revenge isn’t quite the right word. It’s about compensation, completion . . . but to an outsider, it can look . . .”
    “Vicious?” Nick supplied the word, thinking of Badajoz.
    “Perhaps. In any case, Mr. Mibbs had very broad questions about what ‘Indians’ do with white captives.”
    “Like, torture?”
    Leo shrugged. “He had all this crazy mixed-up information about the Mohawks and the Mixtecs, most of it complete bullshit. He seemed to think that Mohawks sacrifice babies on top of pyramids and eat their livers, which is absurd because . . . well, never mind. The point is, he was obsessed with how to find out if a stolen baby had been killed or adopted. I told him that I’m Pocumtuk, not Mixhawk . . . ” Leo laughed, then frowned when Nick and Meg just stared at him. “Well, anyway, he told me to shut up and answer his questions. So I said I could only speak for my nation, but that it was important to understand that when it is deemed appropriate for our captives to die, they die in a manner that we feel mirrors the agonies of our