“Don’t panic, don’t panic,” their captor said, fondly. He patted the top of frantic Ari’s head, sighed, and sank his great buttocks back into the upholstery.

“But you! That’s a lot of blood to wash off, brother. Oh, we never forgot. Hell of a lot of blood. A river of blood. I saw it, I was there. Up to the knees! Up to the knees!”

The Minister, just now emerging from the brace position, looked up to find Ari eying him strangely in the mirror. Never mind that it was a grotesque exaggeration: a river, stained red with blood, is not the same as a river of blood. But the Minister had not forgotten, no, not the difficult things, nor did he, as so many did, exaggerate or obscure. He remembered perfectly well how the Prime Minister had looked at nineteen, marking out an ambush on a field map. He remembered how they had recruited from the villages, handing out guns to young thugs who could not even spell their own names. He remembered the two halves of a girl’s head, rolling down a riverbank through reeds into water. Divided, perhaps, by this very man’s machete. All their boys had fought like animals, at one point or another. But the Minister had never forgotten, either, the beauty and quiet triumph of the nights that had followed those bloody days. A different life. Sharing simple food in the moonlight, not only with the village thugs but with bold, intelligent young men, committed to the future of their nation and willing to risk anything for it—including the eternal pollution of their own skulls.

“A sissy. Always with some sissy book in his back pocket. It should have been you, brother. Up to the knees!”

So it goes. Together the Minister of the Interior and the thoughtful boy who would later give him that title had read a thrilling book by an American with a German name—Vonnegut! A tale of war. It had so electrified them at the time, and yet, forty years later, the Minister found that he retained only one sentence of it and could not even retrieve its title. But he remembered two young men bent over one battered paperback, under a tree in the cleared center of a village. Books had been important back then—they were always quoting from them. Long-haired boys, big ideas. These days, all the Prime Minister read was his bank statements. Yet, in essence, he was the same good and simple man, in the Minister’s view—naïve, almost, doglike in his loyalties and his hatreds. If you were on the right side of the Prime Minister, you stayed there. So, at least, it had been for the Minister. Whatever he had needed had always been granted, up to and including this evening’s flight. He had been lucky, always.

“That’s lucky!” the man cried, and the Minister, yanked from his memories, began to fear that some form of voodoo was at work. “The water’s gone down! Look at that fat beautiful moon! We can take the bridge!”

Over the last bridge they went. The small tent city that had sprung up around the airport lay before them. The knife reëmerged, this time held low, at Ari’s waist. At a makeshift checkpoint, Ari stuck the green government badge in the windscreen with a shaking hand, and they were waved through, instructed to follow a police car past the camp and its abject inhabitants.

“Leave me anywhere here,” the Marlboro Man said. “Next to one with her legs open. ‘Let’s lift some skirts and make it hurt!’ Remember that old chant? And they’d all go running with their mothers into the bushes! Ha-ha! Now, don’t begrudge me that, Minister, please. You probably had some yesterday—but for me it’s been a little longer.”

For a big man, he moved nimbly, passing himself over the Minister, opening the car door, and stepping down onto gravel, smiling all the while. The Minister closed the door behind him.

“What the— What are you doing? Minister? Minister? He’s just walking away!”

The Minister’s phone was cold in his hand. He watched the man stride into the crowd. He felt as if he were releasing the spirit of chaos into the world. But wasn’t it already here?

All commercial flights had ceased. The tiny half-destroyed airport had become a base for aid workers, stranded journalists, sleeping soldiers. Only the runway still functioned. The few planes available had been chartered by the government, and passengers approached them by driving to a gate in the perimeter fence and having their documentation checked by yet more officials. When the Minister’s turn came, several young men approached the car, in uniform, or else in the dark-blue suits of the faithful. “This way, Minister, this way,” they said, hustling him out of the car. He was crossing the floodlit tarmac before he realized that he’d said no goodbyes to Ari, but when he turned to look back he could no longer even see the vehicle. Hundreds of people pressed against the chain-link fence, waving pieces of paper in the air, shouting and begging. Just outside the painted yellow line, along which the Minister had once liked to walk in his neat, upright way, wheeling a discreetly luxurious brown-and-gold suitcase behind him—just on the other side of this yellow line, instead of the usual bustle of baggage handlers and suitcases, there lay a young man in a yellow neon safety vest and ragged trousers, sleeping on the tarmac, his head resting on a boulder.

“This plane, Minister. Keep to your left, Minister. Keep moving, Minister. Minister?”

But someone was screaming his name, his given name, which he heard so rarely these days it stopped him now in his tracks. He swivelled to locate the source and soon found it, a clear head and shoulders above the majority of his diminutive countrymen. He was grinning the same stupid devilish grin and making the old gesture of solidarity, wildly above his head, with the crossed fists they had all once used to signify “You, too, are my brother.”

“Arrest that man,” the Minister said, quietly, to the young aide beside him, who, either not hearing or not understanding, nodded twice and said, “This way, if you please, Minister.”

Across the lake of tarmac, the Minister and the Marlboro Man locked eyes.

“Bon Voi Yah Gee! Bon Voi Yah Gee!”

Bon voyage. A phrase he’d probably only ever seen written down. Screaming it at the top of his lungs. And making that gesture, over and over, a gesture that, the Minister was painfully aware, had fallen out of fashion in recent times—in truth, had come to be reviled; the Minister himself had not performed it in many years. He could see people on either side of the lunatic hanging off his giant arms, cursing and abusing him.

The Minister tried to remind himself that nothing horrifying was happening—he was merely being wished well on his trip by an idiot. Bon Voi Yah Gee! Bon Voi Yah Gee! He turned back to his handlers and once more attempted to give his instruction, but the jet’s engines started up, and all was lost in this fresh wall of noise, all except those ridiculous words, attending the Minister’s footsteps like an incantation of some kind, or the rungs of a ladder, ascending and descending both, depending. Bon Voi Yah Gee! Up to the knees!

“This way, Minister. This way.” So many people seemed to be touching the Minister, guiding him, advising him, that he felt as if he were not so much walking as being carried. He stopped trying to speak. What point was there in words? Actions, only actions. A few feet from the stairs to the plane, he became aware of a sudden change in the light: an impudent gray cloud between the Minister of the Interior and that fat beautiful moon. Large warm raindrops big as acorns fell on his nose, on his single shoe, on his lapel, on the world. Rain fell off the curve of the plane in torrential sheets, rain rioted on the cheap tin roof of the airport, soaking the Minister to the skin, making it even harder to hear instructions, and then, just as abruptly, stopped. The cloud moved on, the moon returned. The Minister held his elbow together. He pressed his suit bag to his chest. “This way, Minister, this way.” The Minister shut his mouth and followed. ♦