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The restaurants flaunted expatriate cuisine, and enfiladed the passing crowds with the lilt of Irish ceilidh or Neapolitan songs. Their names were all of other places: the Vienna Café, the Taj Mahal, London Restaurant, the Temple of Heaven…. Anywhere but here. Yet here, in the illusion of the town”s heart, a practical zeal seemed to unite the marching mass of pedestrians. Even the Babel of immigrant languages had merged into the town”s own coarse, quick lingo. Walking by twos and threes, they laughed together. The economy was running high this year. Only when alone, the familiar tension surfaced in their tight mouths and stares.
    Nobody looked at the savages perched on their steps and benches, but Rayner knew they no longer went unnoticed. The murders in outlying farms, which had risen to four, had sent an ambiguous frisson through the town—amixture of fear, half-pleasurable excitement, and underlying anger. Only the natives seemed oblivious of this, and still wandered the streets with their frowns furrowed at something else, and sang their songs at night along the river.
    Rayner never walked in the mall without thinking: here I am in the core of the town, and
this is all there is.
The townspeople were so oddly dedicated to their lives, so vigorous and motivated. They had successfully turned their backs on anything but themselves. Sometimes he felt as if he had aged unbearably here. Once or twice, when he could snatch ten minutes from his rounds, he had simply sat in the mall and watched it.
    Even in May, with the heat intensifying, the date palms and hibiscus made pools of scent and shadow, and along the benches beneath them an audience of old men in shorts and wide-brimmed hats monitored the bustle. Rayner wondered what they were seeing. They resembled some ancient theatrical chorus. Years of harsh sun had driven the glitter of life deep inside their skulls. In them the town seemed to be watching itself, but with blank eyes.
    Rayner snatched his lunch at Nielsen”s Baked Potato kiosk, a portable oven rigged up like a caravan. Its cook was a gentle-mannered savage girl (who was to disappear in time), one of the rare natives to have taken work in town. He wanted to ask if people had changed towards her, but instead took his potato in its paper cup and walked away.
    In the mall”s center a chess tournament was in progress. Everywhere but here the thoroughfare was paved with small, lava-like blocks, but under the central clump of palms and daturas the black and white paving slabs formed the board for giant chessmen. Across it the local masters prowled among their wooden pieces as if personally implicated in their fate. But the queens” and knights” faces had been worn away, so the players lookedas if they were moving pigs and logs about, and even the spectators were mostly down-at-heel.
    Rayner did not know why the back of the woman”s head in front of him looked familiar: the dancer”s hair seized back into an auburn scallop. Then she turned and he saw Zoë. She accused him laughingly, “You never stayed for my dance!”
    “I did. But I went soon afterwards.” How extraordinary she looked, he thought, flawlessly made up at noon as if she had attended some state function. “I thought your dance was the only good thing of the evening.”
    “Did you?” She sounded tentative now, so that he remembered how girlish she had become when her hair was unloosed. “You came on a bad night. I didn”t dance it well. And there were thugs in the audience.”
    The crowd had edged them back against some café tables, mingling them with customers, and Rayner asked her to join him for coffee with a naturalness which vaguely surprised him. The moment they were seated he imagined how incongruous they must look: he so awkward and carelessly dressed, she high-colored and immaculate. If it were not for the severity of her dancer”s hair, he thought, people might have taken her for a high-class prostitute. As it was, she