Ahmed closed the last file of the evening and set it on the stack, and the stack leaned.
It was taller than it should have been. He had noticed the height a few minutes before and gone back to the file in his hands, and his eyes had kept sliding off the page to it, the way a tongue goes back to a chipped tooth.
He got up, pressed his fists into the small of his back, and stood at the window.
The street was quiet. It was always quiet at this hour, and the quiet was half the reason he had taken the flat. Over the years he had taught himself to let it settle him on the nights when the work would not. Tonight it did not settle him. He went back to the desk.
His notebooks went back fifteen years, one small one a year on the shelf above the bed. For the last eight he had also kept a ledger at the desk, ruled in columns, and on Thursdays he copied the week's cases into it from the notebook in his jacket: date, district, kind, time, outcome. He wrote everything by hand. He had never trusted that a man who typed his cases into a machine carried the work the same way as a man who wrote it down.
He pulled the current ledger toward him and opened it to this week.
Seven entries.
He counted again. Seven cases in six days. The week before had four. The week before that, three. Before that, two.
Two, three, four, seven.
He did not know what next week would bring. He knew, the way he knew when a case was lying to him, that it would not go back to two.
He turned back a year to find the same four weeks. He ran his finger down the column. One, two, one, two. Six cases in that stretch last year. Sixteen in the month just gone. A little under three times as many.
He sat back.
As he always did at this point, he held up the possible reasons one at a time.
Seasons. He had come to believe the rate shifted with the time of year, though the shift was small and too uneven for anyone to have written about. He checked last summer. Last summer showed nothing like this. It was not the season.
Referrals. Sometimes a man's book swelled because one or two people who sent him families had started sending more. Then the rise belonged to the channel, not to the world. He went down the sources. They were more varied than usual. Several of this week's cases had come through people who had sent him nothing in a year. If anything, the opposite was true.
Clustering. If something were spreading in one place, the cases would bunch near a centre and thin out with distance. He looked at where the seven had happened. They were spread across the city with no bunching at all. No two shared a postal district. The spread looked almost deliberately even.
He stopped on deliberately and threw the word out. It was a tired man's word at the end of a long week. Spreads that looked planned to a tired man had often turned out, on a rested morning, to be chance. He made himself look again. It could be chance. It was also even in a way chance did not usually manage.
He could not tell which.
To check a date he took this year's notebook out of his jacket. It was soft from his chest, and it fell open where the spine had been bent most often, at a page he knew.
The date. The street. "Fatima, twenty-five, sorcery-bound, settled." The passages. An hour and ten minutes. "Clear."
In the margin beside it, in his own level hand, the word "please."
He still did not remember writing it. He had looked at it a dozen times since that night, and each time the same small coolness had moved under his ribs and gone. Tonight, as his eyes stopped on it, a chime sounded near his right ear, one clear note, the kind a spoon makes on a glass in another room. He turned his head. The flat was silent. A weight settled on his right shoulder, light as a hand, and stayed there while he looked at the word. The case was closed. Fatima was well. Her mother had called a week later to say she was eating again. He turned the page.
He made the call.
The man he rang was about his own age, in another city, and had come to the work another way. He had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his grandfather, and the family kept records older than anything Ahmed had. They had compared notes now and then for ten years.
The line picked up on the second ring.
"Ahmed."
"You have a few minutes?"
"I have exactly that many. What have you found?"
"I don't know yet. My rate this month is three times last year's. I'm trying to decide whether I'm reading something or making it up."
A longer pause.
"How are you measuring?"
"Cases over a rolling four weeks against the same four weeks last year. It's climbing. This week was seven."
"Seven."
"Seven."
Ahmed heard a chair scrape on the other end, and a drawer, and the dry sound of pages. He did not hurry the man. He had been glad of the quiet to do his own counting, and he gave his friend the same.
When the voice came back, it was more careful.
"I haven't watched it as closely as you. I looked at the last fortnight only. Six. The fortnight before was three."
"Doubling."
"Doubling. And my referrals are strange. Two new sources this week, people I've never dealt with. Both brought a case."
"Mine too. Three of the seven came from new people."
The silence on the other end lasted three breaths.
"Give me the spread. Not the cases. Where are yours happening?"
Ahmed told him. Then the other man described his own, slowly, the way a careful man describes a pattern he does not trust himself to see. Neither of them tried to name it. They laid the two shapes side by side and let them sit.
"Mine is even. Yours is even. I know that should mean nothing in a region big enough for evenness to be likely. I also know how that sentence sounds."
"I hear it too."
Ahmed looked up at the ceiling. A water stain from the flat above had been there most of a year, and he kept meaning to call the landlord about it. He kept his eyes on it now.
"Are we looking at," he began, and stopped. The sentence had no honest ending.
"We are not looking at anything yet. We have two facts. Our rates are up, and our referrals have spread out. I can't explain either one by any cause I know how to test. Put together, they don't fit any frame I have."
"Nor mine."
"Do you have people you trust in other regions?"
"Two. One in Cairo. One in Istanbul."
"Call them. Ask them the same things. I'll call mine. We talk again in three days."
"Three days."
He put the phone down and sat a long time.
He wrote nothing in the ledger about the call. Every sentence he tried came out too early or too frightened. In the margin of this week's page he put a small mark in his own shorthand, four characters. Follow up, three days, intake pattern.
He closed the ledger and put it in the drawer.
He made tea in the dented pot, one pinch of leaves, water to the scratch on the inside. He always drank it standing at the counter, because the table was buried in books and papers he had never shelved. The tea went cold in his hand before he remembered to drink it, and the weight on his shoulder had not lifted.
He washed the cup, turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.
At 2:14 the phone lit up on the nightstand. The number was one he did not know. The message under it named a district on the far side of the city, one he had never once been called to.