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pot each time. He poured the finished coffee into small cups and handed Lily the first cup, the one with the most foam.
    “What does bukrah al mishmish mean?” she asked.
    Adan began to laugh. “Awadh told you that?”
    “What does it mean?”
    “Nothing. It’s just a piece of foolishness.” He took a sip of coffee. “It means nothing. It means ‘tomorrow the apricots.’”
    Sitting on the ground, even on cushions, felt uncomfortable, straining her legs. A physical anthropologist once told her that westerners who sit in chairs don’t have squatting facets—modifications of the anklebone, like some Asians and Africans have, so they are unable to squat without strain for more than thirty seconds. Now she understood.
    The coffee was hot and sweet, spiced with a lingering taste of cardamom. She sipped it, savored it, and sipped again. She put down the cup and shifted her legs to kneel on the pillow with her feet behind her.
    “The tanib is not with you?” Adan asked.
    “He stayed behind in Rum.”
    Adan poured a second cup of coffee, and Lily drank it slowly and carefully, adjusting her legs again.
    “Someone is waiting for you here.” Adan poured a third cup, this time without sugar, and Lily realized that that was a signal to leave.
    “Abu Huniak. Glubb Pasha. He is waiting for you.”
    “Where?”
    He doused the fire with what was left of the coffee and went outside. Lily followed.
    They strolled down toward the Urn tomb. Two stories of arches made it look like a giant columbarium.
    A man wearing a seersucker suit with a white linen vest stood in the middle of the street watching Lily. Straw-colored hair was plastered on his forehead, except for the tufts that stood straight up in a cowlick on the back of his head. It made him look like a fractious child. As Lily passed, he didn’t move, but his eyes followed her. She felt his intense gaze penetrate her wake and she rubbed the back of her neck.
    Adan pointed to a ledge above the arches of the Urn Tomb. “Up there.”
    A man was seated in a camp chair in the shade by the open flap of an olive green army tent. He wore a British army uniform topped with a red-checkered kafiya instead of a military cap. He had a thin military moustache, a slightly lop-sided jaw, and he was reading a book.
    Lily turned to Adan and said, “ Bukrah al mishmish .”

Chapter Seven
    In the hotel, Lily opened a musty closet, shook her dress out of the duffle, put it on one of the wire hangers, and brought it into the bathroom to steam out the wrinkles while she showered and bathed. She intended to do both.
    Colonel Glubb had driven her to the hotel in Amman in his old Buick to arrange for her to speak to His Majesty, Emir Abdullah, about Gideon being held at Rum.
    The dress, pale green, had cost five dollars—the sort of dress her mother would have called unacceptable and gauche. But it had sleeves that covered her elbows, a high mandarin collar, and reached down to her mid-calf, modest enough for an Arab city like Amman. The belt was a sort of sash that wound around her waist twice and tied in a loop.
    Tomorrow, she would go to a palace and talk to a king. She should have gone to the souk and bought something else. Too late for that.
    The bathroom was a step up from the bedroom, to accommodate plumbing under the floor, she supposed. The soap had a drawing of olives on the wrapper and smelled of jasmine. In the shower, she worked up a lather with the flimsy washcloth, savoring the perfume, rubbing the cloth against her skin, worrying about Gideon, wondering what she could say to the Emir to have him released.
    Iridescent bubbles formed and burst and washed in a stream to a drain in the middle of the floor. She watched the water swirl counter clockwise down the drain, remembering Rafi. He would stand at the kitchen sink finishing the dishes, swishing the water counterclockwise, trying to make it turn against nature. Numb with grief, she still expected to find him everywhere: across