Officer Ibrahim weighted the corners of the map with what he had on him: his pen, his phone, his tea glass and the tape recorder, which kept trying to roll. The photocopier had turned the red pins into black dots and the green ones into grey. He had circled six places in pencil where a black dot and a grey one sat almost on top of each other.
"Here," he said, and put his finger on the first circle. "And here. A case opens on a Tuesday. By the next Thursday it's closed, and two streets away a new one opens. Captain Qureshi called it a conversation."
Ahmed looked at the circles without leaning in. He wore a pressed shirt buttoned to the collar, and the skin under his eyes was the colour of weak tea. He had sat across tables from officials before and expected nothing quick from this one.
"The captain was being generous," he said. "Two networks were working the same ground. One opened cases and the other closed them. Where the closing was fast, the opening moved."
"Moved by whom?"
"By whoever was opening them."
Ibrahim wrote that down. It was the third time in twenty minutes the reciter had answered a question without answering it. Captain Qureshi had warned him about that, and had also told him Ahmed never lied, and that the useful part lived in the gap between the two.
He had inherited the file a week ago: two archive boxes and a ring binder with the captain's slanted hand down every margin. The first box held the twenty-three practitioners who had died in one fortnight at the start. The second held everything after. He had read them at his kitchen table at night with the fan on its lowest setting and his wife asleep down the hall, and somewhere in the second box he had stopped thinking of it as a case about sorcerers. He had no name for what it was instead. His grandmother would have had one, and he had spent his adult life glad he didn't need her words. The rest of his week went to the liaison desk, where he sat with men from the new border offices about the refugee buses coming down the coast road from what used to be Iran, and Qureshi's boxes had been the quiet part of it.
"The ones who closed cases," he said. "The ministry says mosque volunteers."
"Some were. Some taught school. One I met sold vegetables from a cart. They were trained in three days by people who had themselves been trained in three days." Ahmed turned his glass a quarter turn on the table. "Someone built it fast, and built it well."
"Someone you know?"
"Someone I've never met."
Ibrahim heard that it was true and let it go.
"And now?"
"Now it's settling. In three weeks the new pins have dropped to almost nothing, and the closings are finishing what's left. In my judgement the two sides have st. . ."
His mouth stayed open on the rest of the word.
His hands lay flat on either side of the map and did not move. He was looking past Ibrahim's shoulder at the blank wall, where there was a calendar from a tyre company and nothing else, and his face had gone still. Ibrahim had seen frightened men freeze across this table. This looked more like a dog lifting its head at a sound in the house nobody else has heard.
Ibrahim waited. You let a man find his words. Often the ones he found after a silence were better than the ones he had meant to say.
The silence ran on past the length of any silence he had sat through in an interview room.
"Ahmed," he said, carefully. "Are you all right?"
Ahmed's eyes came back to him one degree at a time.
"I need a moment," he said. "Forgive me."
"Take what you need."
Ahmed went out. Ibrahim gave it half a minute, switched off the recorder and followed as far as the foyer.
The regional office was a low seventies building with a glass front onto a small courtyard, and through the glass he could see all of it. The attendant was watering the potted lemon by the gate from a plastic jug. The duty sergeant paced by the entrance with his phone, three steps and back, arguing with someone about a car. Above the wall the sky had gone the washed colour it took before the sunset prayer, with one long cloud low in the west.
Ahmed walked past both men to the far side, where a waist-high wall ran along the edge of the property. He put one hand flat on the top of it. Then he looked up.
Ibrahim watched him for a long time.
He had expected a phone call, or a man getting his breath back, or a cigarette, though Ahmed didn't seem like a smoker. Ahmed stood with his hand on the wall and his face turned up and did not move, like a man trying to hear a car on a road several valleys over.
The job had taught Ibrahim to check himself, so he did. Traffic on the ring road. The thin stream from the jug into the lemon pot. The sergeant's voice climbing on the word "insurance". The foyer smelled of floor polish and the old air conditioner's wet dust, and the lamp on the reception desk had come on with its timer and buzzed the way it always did. On the television over the desk, with the sound off, the evening news showed the lake of Tiberias from the air, a ring of pale stones where the water had been. His pulse was ordinary. If something had happened, it had happened somewhere his body couldn't reach.
The attendant finished the lemon and moved on to the geraniums. The sergeant hung up, swore and dialled again. Neither of them looked at the man at the wall.
Ibrahim filled a paper cup at the water cooler and didn't drink it. The rim went soft between his fingers. He thought about the twenty-three. He thought about a line in Qureshi's margin beside one of Ahmed's first statements, underlined twice: "He hears things before they arrive. I don't know what that means. Write down when."
He looked at the clock above the desk, uncapped his pen and wrote the time on the back of his hand. 6:41.
Twelve minutes by that clock, and Ahmed came back inside.
"Thank you," he said in the foyer, as if Ibrahim had held a door for him. "Shall we finish?"
They finished. Ahmed answered every remaining question in the flat professional voice he had started with: dates, regions, the colleagues he had worked beside, the number of cases he had closed himself, given to the single digit. Twice his eyes went to the window and came back. He did not return to the sentence he had left, and Ibrahim, who had a feel for which doors to push, left that one shut.
Near the end, for the form, Ibrahim asked whether he expected new cases in the coming months. The captain's template had the question on its last page. Most witnesses said no, or that they hoped not. Ahmed sat with it so long that the recorder clicked over to the second side of the tape.
"I expect," he said, "that the cases I see will be different."
He wouldn't say how. When Ibrahim waited, he folded his hands on the map. Ibrahim wrote the answer down word for word and underlined it once, the way Qureshi would have.
He switched the recorder off and began rolling up the copy.
"What happened out there?" he said. "Off the record."
Ahmed took his time.
"I don't know," he said. "That's the honest answer. If I knew, I'd tell you."
Ibrahim believed him, and wrote nothing.
He walked Ahmed out. The attendant had gone and the courtyard was empty, the geraniums dark with water. The cloud in the west had turned the colour of old brass, and from three streets over the call to the sunset prayer was starting, thin under the traffic.
On the steps Ahmed stopped and turned.
"Officer. Captain Qureshi told me you'd close the file now the cases have stopped."
"That's the plan. The ministry's calling it resolved. I sign it off on Thursday."
Ahmed looked past him, once, at the place on the wall where his hand had been. The call went on behind him, and Ibrahim noticed for the first time that the muezzin was taking the long notes more slowly than usual, as if he had to lift each one.
"Keep it open," Ahmed said.
He went down the steps. Ibrahim stood with the rolled map under his arm and turned his hand over. The ink had started to blur into the hairs along his wrist, and he could still read the time.