Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

& Santa Fe Railroad. If one aspect of the material interested the abbess more than any other, she did not let on.

It was slow going. For reasons of both portability and government security, the sophisticated little computer lacked a printer. Switters read aloud the data off the screen—often struggling to translate as he read, for the majority of it was in English or Italian—and Masked Beauty wrote it down in French and by hand. Following their afternoon siestas, she and Domino would go over the longhand “printouts,” and several evenings a week, the entire sisterhood would gather for group discussions centered around the gleaned information. Switters would have liked to have been included in those discussions, if for no other reason than to blow the gunk out of his intellectual carburetor and to keep his discursive spark plugs clean. It was a long, long way from the C.R.A.F.T. Club, but, hey, a fully conscious man was an adaptable man.

When the Mary material concerned, as it increasingly did, one or more of the Virgin’s alleged modern apparitions, he was especially keen on joining the conversations. For better or worse, he’d trod the electronic road to Fatima before, and he very well might have something to contribute. (Remembering that Suzy had not even sent him a copy of her paper, a thin sheen of hurt lacquered his so-called fierce, hypnotic green eyes, only to instantly evaporate in the arid air. He couldn’t blame her. Suzy’s generation was unforgiving of dishonesty, and rightly so. Alas, it remained rather blissfully unaware that it was being lied to by corporate America—through the movies, TV shows, and magazines it so adored—a hundred times a day, but that’s another story.) Alas, again, no invitation to participate in the dialogues appeared forthcoming. Whether out of their exclusiveness or consideration for his own privacy, the doors to their meetings were closed to him.

Then, late one night at the burnt end of August, as the happy ghosts of long-deceased Bedouins rode the gritty desert winds (because they in life possessed the wisdom of physical nonattachment, nomads enjoyed an unusually smooth transition into death and made the world’s most contented ghosts), he discovered himself in unexpected and unusual discourse, the consequences of which were to be considerable.

It was well past midnight when he heard the bell. The bell ding-donged him out of a dream in which red-eye gravy played a prominent role. (Could it be that he’d munched one too many cucumbers, chewed a few too many chickpeas?) After the first four or five rings, he was alert; after the next four or five, he was on his stilts. He stood at the door, which had been left ajar to facilitate a nighttime stirring of day-parched air. There was more ringing, followed by male voices from outside the compound, followed by female voices from within. The male voices sounded angry, the female voices alarmed. Switters unzipped the crocodile valise. Mr. Beretta! Rise and shine!

Before he could pull on his trousers, there was a burst of automatic gunfire. In a flash, he was through the door, stilt-sprinting along a moonlit path in his boxer shorts. The ones with the baby ducks on them.

Something brighter than blood sang in his arteries. It climbed up his spine like the high notes of an anthem, clarifying his lungs, teasing his muscles and making them brisk. It wasn’t a syrup of wahoo, really: it wasn’t pure enough for that. Mostly, it was good old retro primal adrenaline, concocted in the fight-or-flight kitchen, the reptile house of the brain. But there were drops of wahoo in it. Had he said otherwise, he would have been untruthful.

He hadn’t gotten far before he met Domino. She’d been running to his room to get him. “For the gate,” she gasped. “They are demanding it open.”

“Yeah, I can hear that. Although their French really sucks.” He resumed his sprint. “And I have to say your English isn’t much better.”

“Switters! . . .” She was trying to keep up with him.

“It’s okay, darling. It’s just because you’re excited.”

Domino looked at him as if he were completely demented. “This is serious!” she cried.

“Ah, yes,” he agreed. She could have sworn his tone was sarcastic, or at least facetious.

By then, they had reached the gate. All of the sisters, with the exception of Masked Beauty, were gathered there. A couple of them had their hands clasped, apparently in prayer, but they were amazingly calm and composed. On the other side of the thick mud wall, men were shouting in broken French. They were saying that the oasis was a holy garden of Allah that had been desecrated by handmaidens of the great Western Satan. “Ah, yes,” muttered Switters again. This time, his voice had overtones of boredom and weariness. “Infidels!” the men screamed repeatedly. There was another savage spurt of gunfire. Switters yelled to the women to take cover, although he realized that the bullets, for the moment, were being sprayed in the air.

“They’re drunk,” whispered Domino, who was crouched at his side.

“Yeah, but not on arrack. Help me onto these stilts.” He was transferring to the taller pair that Pippi kept at the gate.

“Killer-B stuff?” she suggested, steadying the poles.

He grinned at her approvingly and nodded. “That’s some toxic honey. Blind a man and make him crazy.”

“Do be careful.”

Leaning the stilts and his body against the gate so that his hands would be free, he slid open the grate and stared down on the men, who raised their rifles and stepped back a few feet to stare up at him. There were only three of them. They had sounded like more. Dressed in cheap civilian khakis and those red-and-white checkered headdresses that always looked as if they’d been yanked off tabletops in a suburban spaghetti parlor (“They’ve copped our Italian night!” he wanted to yell to Pippi), the men had arrived in a dented old Peugeot sedan.

He greeted them in polite Arabic, and it would have been difficult to determine which had surprised them more, his language (it was an extended greeting and as flowery as the finest Arabic often can be) or his sex. The fact that the moon was illuminating—and the grate framing—a grin spiked with strife-torn teeth, a pair of gleaming f.h.g. eyes, and the barrel of a most capable-looking handgun, must also have contributed to their astonishment.

After a period of rather stunned silence, the men all began to clamor at the same time. Speaking Arabic now, one asked what kind of man would live in a nest of unclean women, another demanded to know what a foreigner was doing speaking in the tongue of great Allah, and the third inquired if Switters was prepared for death.

To the first question, he replied, “A lucky man”; to the second, “It’s as stupidly ethnocentric to think God’s language is Arabic as it is to believe Jesus spoke King James English”; and to the last, “Everybody on earth, unfortunately, is prepared for death, but very damn few are prepared for life.” The eloquence of his Arabic surprised even him: he must have chipped the rust off when traveling with the Kurds and Bedouins. While the attackers were quietly jabbering among themselves about his replies, he interrupted to ask if they might tell him a joke.

His request bewildered them—and rekindled their hostility. “Tell you a joke? Do you think this is a funny matter?”

“Hey, it’s written in the Koran that the gates of Paradise open wide for he who can make his companions laugh.” He quoted the chapter and verse, challenging them to look it up. “I was wondering if you boys might be among those favored by Heaven.”

That threw them into a state of consternation. For a good three or four minutes, they conferred with one another, occasionally scratching their kaffiyehs with their rifles, as if trying to remember a punch line. Finally, the eldest of the trio (all under thirty) stepped forward and announced, “It is irrelevant to Heaven whether or not we can make you laugh because you are not our companion.”

Well, that was reasonable enough, and he told them so. “You fellows aren’t as dumb as I originally believed.” At this, they seemed oddly pleased. Then, again listing chapter and verse, he brought up Mohammed’s prohibition against priests, asking them why, since the Koran clearly stated that each individual must approach God singularly and alone, had modern Islam spawned such an authoritarian hierarchy of ayatollahs, imams, and mullahs.

This time, their consultation was more brief. “These exalted authorities to whom you refer,” the spokesman said, “are not priests but scholars.” He stepped back rather smugly, confident that he’d had the final word, unaware that he was dealing with Switters.

Though Switters didn’t know the Arabic for semantics, he, nevertheless, got his point across. “They can call themselves ‘scholars’ until the camels come home,” he said, “but the truth is, they function as priests and bishops and cardinals, and you know they do. They intercede between a man and Allah.”

All four of them bantered about that for a while, making a lot of fuss but getting nowhere, until Switters eventually said, “Show me, if you can, where it says in the Koran that a devout Muslim has the duty or the right to kill those who don’t believe as he does. Show me where Mohammed sanctions the murder of those of another