Mr. Harrow cracked a pistachio with his thumbnail, dropped the shell into his coat pocket, and pushed a plate across the tablecloth at me.
"Eat, friend," he said. "Nobody here said a word over any of it. I checked the kitchen myself."
It was Saturday night at the Belvedere on McLean Boulevard, a wedding hall with a chandelier in the lobby and carpet the colour of wine. Two hundred and forty guests. A Lebanese band. A buffet as long as a bus, with lamb on the bone, rice with almonds, chicken with lemon, and stuffed vine leaves going round in a little silver tray on a motor. Not one of them had stopped at the buffet and said the name. They'd come in from the car park laughing and shaking hands and gone straight to the food.
I ate. It was hot. Everything at the Office canteen had been cold, and I hadn't known how much I minded until the lamb was in me.
Harrow watched me with pleasure. He was tall even sitting, in a camel overcoat he hadn't taken off, and his hands were very clean. When he smiled his teeth were fine, but there were a few more of them than there should have been, set back behind the first row.
"I read your assessment," he said. "Single subject. Most people in my department would see that and keep walking. I saw it and bought you dinner. You know why?"
"No."
"Because the subject has a granddaughter." He took a photograph out of his inside pocket and laid it by my plate. It was Samira at a table in a restaurant, laughing, with a young man in glasses whose arm was along the back of her chair. "Tariq. Twenty-six. Teaches maths at Eastside High. They're engaged. Wedding's in the spring. She prays five times a day, she reads, she fasts the Mondays. Her own companion has been in post twenty-four years and he's never won a thing off her. Do you know why?"
I knew why. I'd been in the house.
"Because her grandfather was always in the next room," Harrow said. "And now he isn't. Except he could be."
He laid it out like a man selling a kitchen. A consultancy, he called it. I'd keep my chits and lodging, and on top of that a placement with Separation, the best department in the building. I'd advise her companion and give him what I knew. And at night, when it counted, I'd be Ibrahim. A voice. A chair. Cologne in the hall. Grandpa doesn't like the imam. Grandpa doesn't trust the boy. Grandpa wants you home, with him.
"The prayer goes," he said, "and the ring goes, and you go back to your old house for good. Everybody wins, friend. Well. Nearly everybody."
"What do you want from me tonight?"
He smiled the second row of teeth.
"Something her own companion doesn't have," he said. "Good faith. Something only your man knew."
I thought about it for as long as it took the vine leaves to go round once.
"March," I said. "He had pneumonia. Three in the morning, and she'd been up with him four nights. She sat by the bed and thought he was asleep. She said, 'I just want it to be over.'"
Harrow stopped chewing.
"Her own companion heard that," I said. "He doesn't know the rest. Ibrahim wasn't asleep. He heard her. He lay there and kept his eyes shut so she wouldn't know he'd heard. She still doesn't know."
Harrow took a small notebook out of his overcoat and wrote in it. Then he cracked another pistachio and gave me the nut, which nobody had ever done.
Since March I'd been saving it the way he saved the silk, on the top shelf, for a job worth it. I'd taken it down once, in his last week, at two in the morning, and he'd answered it by reaching for her hand. Now it was in Harrow's notebook, under a phone number and something he'd crossed out. He paid me for it in green chits, a fat fold of them, and I put them in my pocket without counting.
"That," Harrow said, "is what we call an asset. Welcome to Separation, friend."
I got the boy through his father. That was always the way in.
1985. Karim was ten and came to the shop after school to sweep, because his father said a man learns a trade by watching it. He swept badly. He swept around things. He read comics behind the cutting table when he thought nobody could see, and he always thought nobody could see.
That afternoon he knocked over the oil. A small can of machine oil, the long-spouted kind, on the shelf by the second machine. It went across the cutting table and into a length of cream wool that was going to be a coat for Dr. Saleh.
The boy stood there with the broom. I watched the stain go out through the weave like a map.
Ibrahim came out from the back. He looked at the wool. I was ready. I'd been ready for ten years.
"He does it on purpose," I said. "He doesn't care about the shop. He doesn't care about you. Your own father would have broken his arm."
"Do you know what that cost?" Ibrahim said.
"I'm sorry, Baba. It just. . ."
"It just. It just." Ibrahim took the wooden yardstick off the wall. He didn't hit him with it. He brought it down on the cutting table beside the boy's hand, flat, and the crack of it went round the shop. "You'll never be anything. Do you hear me? You'll sweep somebody else's floor your whole life."
The boy's face went still and white. At his ear, for a moment, I saw his own companion, a thin grey thing like a coat hanger, write something down.
That night Ibrahim ate standing up and didn't say the name, and Karim ate in his room. Later Nadia took a plate up to him and sat on the end of his bed with the door shut. I didn't follow her. I had both their dinners to eat.
She came home at a quarter to eleven on the phone, with her keys in her teeth.
"No, I'm here, I'm home," she said, getting the door open with her shoulder. "Tariq. I'm home. I'll call you tomorrow, I'm dead on my feet."
She went in. She didn't say anything at the door.
I went in behind her, and there at her right ear, sat her companion. I'd seen him across rooms for twenty-two years and never said a word to him. He was young the way a jinn is young, which is to say older than the country, in a tracksuit top zipped to the chin. He was cracking his knuckles one after the other, and he had too many of them.
"You see that?" he said. "You see what I did? The door. Twenty-two years, I could never get her past the door. The old man was always in the kitchen saying it, or she was saying it because he taught her. Tonight? Phone. Keys. Boyfriend. Boom. Harrow said you'd be coming. You're the grandpa guy."
"I'm the grandpa guy."
"Room's all yours, Grandpa. She sleeps with the thing on. Every night." He cracked another knuckle. "Make it good."
She went up the stairs. He went with her.
The back bedroom was dark. The bed had been stripped down to the mattress, and the oxygen machine was gone, back to the company, leaving four dents in the carpet where its wheels had been. The baby monitor was still on the nightstand, the white one with the cracked aerial, its green light on. Samira had put it there in the spring so she could hear him breathe from upstairs. Nobody had turned it off.
I stood over it. I knew how he cleared his throat. I knew how his voice went at night, lower, with the catch at the end where the lungs gave out. I'd had eighty-one years of it from the inside.
I put my mouth to the grille.
"Samira," I said, in his voice. And then the thing he only ever called her, in Arabic: "My darling."
Nothing. The green light. The house ticking.
Then her feet on the stairs, fast, not careful, and the hall light came on, and she was in the doorway in his old cardigan with the parent unit in her hand, holding it out in front of her like something she'd found. Her face was wet.
"I knew you'd come," she said.