The phone rang for the third time in seven minutes, the same number each time, and on the third ring Ahmed capped his pen.
He was three days past the call with his colleague and halfway down the ledger again, and he had told everyone who might need him that he could not be reached before evening. Unknown numbers stayed unknown in those hours. This one had rung, waited five minutes, rung, waited two, and rung again. Families at the end of their rope rang like that. So did people who were used to being answered.
"Yes."
"Is this the reciter Ahmed?"
"Who's asking?"
A short breath came down the line, the breath of a man who did not usually introduce himself to civilians and was deciding how much of himself to hand over.
"Captain Qureshi. Regional investigation bureau. Your name came from Sheikh Bilal's office in Lahore."
Bilal kept four boxes of cards on reciters and a fifth on people families should be warned away from, and he gave names out of them only when an institution had cause, which was seldom. In seventeen years Ahmed had sat across from an institution four times. Each time had ended in a long, polite conversation about how little he could say to people who did not share his words.
"I'd like to see you today. I'd rather not describe it on the telephone."
The ledger lay open at the week of seven. Ahmed looked at the column, at the margin mark that meant follow-up, and felt the review pressing against a ceiling it would not get through on his numbers alone.
"I work from my flat. Above the tailor's, third floor."
Qureshi arrived in eighty-five minutes, a man in his fifties with grey at the temples and a pressed shirt gone soft at the collar from the drive. He looked over the front room Ahmed used as an office as he came in: the shelf, the ledgers in their cabinet, the clay jug sweating on its saucer. Ahmed had seen bailiffs look at rooms that way, fixing them for a report. Qureshi sat, put a buff folder on the desk and kept his hand flat on top of it.
"In the public record I have a number of unconnected deaths. In my department's reading they share a pattern we have no shelf for. I've come to see if you have one."
"Tell me the pattern."
"Twenty-three deaths in two weeks. All of them people our files list under a heading we use among ourselves. Practitioners."
"Sorcerers."
"That's the word you'd use, yes. Twenty-three that we know about. We don't watch all of them." He did not open the folder. He recited from memory, the way Ahmed recited a case. "Three strokes. Five cardiac events. Four asphyxiations, origin unknown. Two drownings, one of them in a garden pool so shallow it wouldn't drown a child. Nine the coroners have left open."
Every one of them, he went on, had been under the department's eye for years. None had changed his habits in the month before. No struggle, no assailant, no witness. They were spread across the country with no cluster at all and bunched in time so tight that chance would not cover it.
"About two thousand names in our files. In two weeks we'd expect to lose none of them, or one. We've lost twenty-three."
Ahmed said nothing for a while. He could feel the captain reading the silence, deciding whether this was a civilian who would be useful or one who would need a junior to walk him to his car.
"You have a frame for it."
"I have a category. I don't know yet if it's a frame."
He chose the words the way he chose verses for a frightened house. He had watched faces like Qureshi's close the moment the vocabulary of his work came into a room. He could say it in his own language and watch the door shut, or say it in words that lay close to the captain's and leave the question of who for later.
"People in that category live under old rules. They're older than the state's, and they're made with the parties they do business with. When a practitioner breaks one, the wronged party collects, by a procedure the practitioners understand and your institutions can't see."
"You're saying."
"That what you have looks like an enforcement. A large one, all at once, against men who broke the same rule. I'm not telling you it is one."
He waited for the captain to ask who the parties were. The question never came. Qureshi asked something else.
"Is there a trigger? Something recent that would let a party act this widely."
"If there was, it happened where none of us can see. I can ask."
"And the ones we don't watch?"
"The same, I would think. You'll find them later, in other files."
Qureshi wrote nothing down. He opened the folder instead, to a page of figures in a typed column.
"There's a second thing. It's why I came today and not next week." He turned the page toward Ahmed. "Forgive our language. Anomalous behaviour in persons with no history of it. Signs of possession, in districts where we used to get one a year. Six weeks ago, two in our weekly reports. This week, forty-one."
Ahmed's fingers closed on the edge of the desk. The column climbed the way his own had climbed, alone at this desk, with the stain on the kitchen ceiling to stare at.
"The twenty-three. Were any of them known for possession work?"
"Seventeen."
"Captain, I need to make two calls."
"I'll wait."
He had never made a call about a case with a stranger in the chair. He made two. His colleague in the other city picked up on the first ring, as if he had been sitting over the phone, and Ahmed asked him one question, and his colleague said nine. Cairo took longer. The line hissed, a child shouted somewhere behind the man who answered, and then the man said fourteen and asked Ahmed what was happening. Ahmed told him he would ring again. He put the phone face down on the blotter.
"Seven here. Nine and fourteen from two men I trust. Thirty this week between three reciters."
"A sample of three."
"In my line of work three is not small."
Qureshi let a long breath out through his nose.
"My files have no heading for any of this. I'll write it in the language they take and keep your version in my own notebook. I'd like to keep coming to you. When I can't come, I'll send Ibrahim, my officer. He's young. He believes in nothing yet, which makes him a good note-taker."
"Come."
"Most of my colleagues won't accept your way of putting it."
"Most of mine won't either. Not yet."
The jug had stopped sweating by the time the captain's car pulled away, a young man at the wheel who had not once looked up at the window. Ahmed did not open the ledger. He sat with the lamp off and the street light coming orange through the shutter slats, and let the two columns stand next to each other.
Someone was killing the men who put jinn into people. In the same weeks, someone was putting jinn into people who had never met a sorcerer in their lives, carefully, evenly, as if working from a list. He tried every other reading he knew, and none of them carried both columns at once. Two hands, then, each with its own purpose. They might not even know about each other. He found he would rather have had one enemy. He thought of the seven houses on this week's page: a grandmother who had stopped speaking at the evening meal, a bus conductor found standing on his own roof at dawn with his arms out, a girl of twelve who laughed in a man's voice and then asked her mother why everyone was crying. None of their families had ever paid a sorcerer for anything. He had checked each time, because it was the first question on his sheet.
The folder was still on the desk. Qureshi had left it, by accident or not. Ahmed carried it to the window and opened it in the stripes of orange light.
The top page was a coroner's photograph: a tiled garden pool with a hand's depth of water in it and a grown man lying face down, his cheek against the bottom. His shoes stood on the paving behind him, side by side, the laces tucked inside them, the way a man leaves his shoes at the door of a mosque before he goes in to pray.