The phone on Bilal's desk rang while he was still washing for the night prayer, and it rang eleven times before he got to it with wet hands.
"Sheikh Bilal? You don't know me. I am calling from Karachi. A man gave me your number years ago and I kept it."
"Then you were right to keep it. Tell me."
The caller was a sheikh of a small mosque behind the tyre repair shops. He told it plainly, the way frightened men often do. A boy of fourteen had been walking home from school with the same three friends he had walked with since he was nine. Halfway down the long alley behind the shops, he stopped talking. One friend asked what was wrong. The boy did not answer. He kept walking, past the corner where they always split up, in a direction that was not his. The friends followed half a block and then one of them ran for his mother. She found him sitting on a kerb, talking to no one, in a voice that was not his voice.
"I had a reciter I trusted. He died last year. I didn't know who else to call."
"Give me a minute."
The directory was four long wooden boxes of index cards, forty years of names. Bilal had begun it as a young man so that frightened families would stop going to charlatans. Every card held one reciter, a city, a telephone number, and a line or two in his small hand. Honest. Travels. Won't take money from widows. Talks too much. Over the years the families had passed his number across borders, and the boxes had grown tabs for countries he had never seen.
He had one name in Karachi he trusted without reservation, a reciter called Ahmed. Bilal rang him first, and Ahmed picked up on the third ring as he always did. He listened, and then said he had two families on his book that week, one of them a girl in her third day who needed him every evening, and he could not do the boy justice. So Bilal turned to a man in Cairo who travelled and had done this work more than a thousand times. Bilal read out the number twice and made the sheikh read it back.
When the line went dead he finished washing, slowly, because his knees no longer let him do anything quickly. He prayed the night prayer late, on the rug by the window, with the Lahore street below gone quiet except for a rickshaw coughing at the corner. The canal two streets over had been dry since February, and by day boys played cricket on its cracked bed. Afterward he sat a while with his hands open in his lap and asked Allah to heal the boy and to guide the Cairo man's tongue. Then he got up, found a blank card, and wrote on the back of it, Karachi, a boy, the alley. He did that for every call. His late wife used to say the boxes would bury him.
The next afternoon a woman called from Lagos.
She spoke English fast and low, as if someone might be listening from the next room. Her sister had been cutting onions in the courtyard behind their compound. The knife had stopped following her hand. The sister had watched it hover above the onions and then go on cutting by itself, at the same rhythm, with the same care. She tried to put it down. Her hand would not put it down.
"I took the onions away from her," the woman said. "It kept cutting. It cut the board. It cut the table. It cut my dress when I came close." She stopped. "Then she said a word to me. I don't know what language it was. Sheikh, I have known her for forty years. It wasn't hers."
Bilal gave her two names in Lagos and told her which one to call first.
When she hung up he added her call under the first one on the same card. Karachi, a boy. Lagos, a woman. He would not have thought more about it, except that on the third evening the post brought the monthly bulletin.
It came from a woman in a small town outside Johannesburg who had written it for ten years to a few hundred reciters and those who helped them. It was usually prayer times for travellers and the names of the recently dead. This month she had a story from São Paulo, passed to her by a reader there. A senior man in a glass office tower had stood up in the middle of a meeting, walked to the window and pressed both palms flat on the glass for nearly a minute. He was testing it. When a colleague asked him to sit down, he turned and smiled at her like a stranger. Security found him six hours later on a park bench forty kilometres away, still smiling, unable to say his own name.
At the bottom of the page she had written a question she had never asked in ten years: "Is anyone else seeing what I am seeing?"
Bilal read it twice and put the bulletin under the card with Karachi and Lagos on it.
The man in Cairo called on the fifth day.
"The boy is himself again," he said. "His mother is feeding me so much I may not get home."
"Praise be to Allah. How was it?"
"Easy. That's the strange part." The Cairo man paused, and Bilal heard him moving papers. "By the time I got there it had settled. It wasn't fighting and it wasn't performing. It sat in him as if it was waiting to be put out. I recited, and it left at once. Not a mark on the boy afterward. I didn't need any of the after-work. It was young, I think, and well trained."
"Trained by whom?"
"That's not a question I ask, Sheikh. They come trained or they don't." Another pause. "I've had two other calls this week from districts that never call me. I wrote them down. That's all."
That night a reciter in Istanbul called, an old acquaintance, wanting nothing in particular. Near the end he said it the way people pass on weather.
"You remember the man on the Asian side? The one whose card you keep in the other box?"
Bilal did remember. There was a fifth box, smaller, that no family ever saw. In it he kept the names of sorcerers, so that he could tell people who not to go to.
"A client found him in his chair on Monday. Head back. Mouth open. Fine the night before. The doctor wrote his heart. The client didn't call anyone. He just walked out and went home the long way, I'm told." The reciter cleared his throat. "And there was one in Tunis who drowned in his own garden pool. A pool you could stand up in. And someone in Dhaka, on a street corner at noon. Nobody saw anything."
"Three in a week."
"Three that I've heard of. I'm not sorry, Sheikh. May Allah forgive me, I'm not."
After the call, Bilal opened the fifth box and found the three cards. He turned each one face down and pushed them to the back. He asked Allah to deal with them by His justice, which was not Bilal's to guess at. Then he closed the box and went back to the other stack. It was on the far side of his desk, and he did not move one stack toward the other.
It was past midnight on the seventh day when the reciter in Beirut called. He was a man in his sixties with a careful voice, and he had been on Bilal's cards for twenty years.
"Forgive the hour. I've just finished. A woman, eleven days in. She's asleep on the floor where I worked and her husband is crying in the kitchen."
"Is she well?"
"She's well. It went out clean. Very clean." He was quiet for a moment. "I've had trained ones before, Bilal. Plenty. They have tricks, and the tricks are theirs. This one did everything in order. It stopped her, then it drove her, then it spoke through her, then it waited. It went step by step, like a man reading off a list. I've never thought this in my life, but it was as if it were following a protocol."
Bilal pulled a blank card toward him and wrote the word down. "Protocol." He looked at it.
"Three cases on my book this week," the Beirut man said. "Last week it was two. The third came yesterday, from a district I don't work in, through people I don't know."
They said their goodbyes. Bilal laid the new card on top of the stack, on top of Karachi and Lagos and the bulletin and the Cairo man's two calls. He reached for the cap of his pen.
The phone rang again before he had it on.