“I think she ought to calm down,” he said. “I doubt if he’s going to leave her.”

  “Well, who ever knows? But I agree, it certainly wouldn’t be like him as we’ve known him for twelve years. My only thought is …” Her voice trailed away for a moment, came back with a note of something being seriously considered. “My only thought is whether he’s getting involved with some fundamentalist group that could be dangerous to him, to you, and to all the family.”

  “There are plenty around,” he agreed thoughtfully. “But surely the deputy counselor of the Egyptian embassy isn’t going to let himself get involved in anything like that. It would be all his job was worth—probably all his life was worth. Our son-in-law is no fool, after all.”

  “Of course that’s at the heart of all Bets’s worries. She got thoroughly scared of extremists during their years in Cairo. And so did I, you must remember. It’s no fun being the American ambassador with a lot of kooks running around the streets indistinguishable from your average good-natured, easygoing fellahin, not knowing which of them may suddenly loom out of the crowd to throw a bomb at you.”

  “I know,” he said. “You were a brave lady.”

  “It wasn’t all that easy for you in Greece, either,” she noted, and chuckled suddenly. “We really were a rather remarkable diplomatic couple, weren’t we? Maybe we justified all that flattering publicity we got.”

  “Including National Enquirer’s GHOST OF PHARAOH HAUNTS US AMBASSADOR’S BEDROOM,” he suggested.

  She laughed.

  “Even that,” she said. “As long as they spelled my name right.”

  “Those were the great days,” he said with mock nostalgia. “Secretary of State is a relative backwater.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “You love it, and you know it. Anyway, I told Bets to try to calm down and try not to let it get to her. I predicted he’d be back to his domesticated ways shortly.”

  “I hope so,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder if I should ask Hugo Mallerbie to see what he can find out about these nocturnal absences and this ‘really nice new club in Georgetown where a lot of embassy people go.’ He has his contacts.”

  “Only if he can do it without alerting the Egyptian embassy,” she said, tone suddenly dead serious. “I wouldn’t want them to get suspicious of him. That could be quite disastrous, if they were to get the wrong ideas about him.”

  “I know,” he said. “I won’t convey any suspicions to Hugo. It will all be a family matter designed to set my little girl’s mind at ease.”

  “Hugo,” she said dryly, “can start with nothing and end up with an entire scenario. He can be two jumps ahead of you before you know it. Please do be careful with him.”

  “I will,” he promised. “I’m not even sure I’ll do it. I’ll talk to Bets myself tomorrow and see how she feels. It may all have blown over by then, like so many other things … It is interesting, you know,” he said, abruptly thoughtful, “that Joanie Bourassa is ‘commiserating’ with her. Is Joanie having the same trouble with Boo?”

  “That was my word,” she said. “But yes, I gather there’s some bond of sympathy and similar experience.”

  “Also in recent weeks?”

  “I gather.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Yes, that’s what I think, too. Maybe Hugo can widen his inquiries a bit.”

  “Now, listen to us,” he said. “Here we go, typical Washington, typical world-we-live-in. Not a scrap of evidence to go on, not a reason in the world to suspect two perfectly decent Arabs who are close to us and whom we’ve known for years, particularly the one who is married to our daughter and father of our grandchildren—and we’re off and running like the most hysterical conspiracy buffs imagining the imminent wrath of Allah.”

  “Well—” she said slowly. “Not entirely, Ray. We don’t live in a very pleasant world, and strange things really do happen. I’m not averse to finding out things, if only for our daughter’s peace of mind. And mine, I might add.”

  “And mine,” he agreed, “of course. Still, it’s a commentary.”

  “Not on us,” she said. “We didn’t make it so.”

  “Didn’t we?” he inquired gloomily. “America has a lot to answer for.”

  “I refuse to construct a balancing act between international morality and immorality at this ungodly hour of the night,” she said firmly, turning on her side. “I’m going to sleep. Let me know what Hugo reports.”

  “In due course,” he said, also turning on his side, adjusting the two pillows he used to keep the recurring flux of a long-standing hiatal hernia at bay. “In due course.”

  But he wondered, as he began to drift toward sleep, if he really would ask Hugo to do anything at all. Samir in all likelihood was telling the exact truth, it was all innocent and just a temporary urge to get away now and then from the sometimes rather stifling luxuriousness of American life, so different from his own male-controlled native society. The same thing undoubtedly applied to Boo. His last thought brought a wry smile to his lips as he dropped off: if anybody needed a break from domesticity now and then it was Boo Bourassa from Syria, tied to a powerhouse like Joanie.

  * * *

  Only he wasn’t tied, really; that was the problem.

  And therein lay many a restless night for the State Department’s brightest assistant secretary. Right now, Joan Cohn-Bourassa also was lying awake, in their rambling house overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, wondering, as she had frequently in twenty years of marriage and even more so in these recent weeks, where Boo was now.

  He had accompanied her dutifully, as he always did, to Dolly Munson’s party; charmed, as he always did, their hostess and everyone else on the premises with his quick wit and shrewd appraisals of the day’s events; come dutifully home, apparently to call it a night and go to rest as a good husband should; and then suddenly appeared out of his dressing room clad in the scruffy jeans and worn old leather jacket—not even Ralph Lauren or Gucci! she noted with automatic scorn—that he affected when he wanted to disappear into the anonymous Georgetown night. Where he went, God only knew. Maybe Allah did. Joan Cohn-Bourassa, in any event, did not.

  His appearance, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and obviously ready to go at almost midnight, had precipitated one of their increasingly frequent, increasingly bitter arguments as she had attempted, with her usual lack of finesse and success, to persuade him to abandon whatever he had in mind. At least, she was bitter. Boo smiled amicably and shrugged and let it all roll off his back.

  “Where are you going?” she had demanded sharply, even as she told herself that the confrontational approach had never been the way to handle Boo. But they were getting on, entering their mid-forties, and at her recent birthday (forty-four) something had suddenly seemed to snap inside. She found that she was getting tired of domestic diplomacy and playing second fiddle and being subservient in a way her State Department colleagues, among whom her reputation for brusqueness was legendary, could never have imagined. It was time, she had abruptly decided, for Joanie Bourassa to be Joanie Bourassa. Increasingly in these recent weeks she had let him have it, verbally and once, about a week ago, even physically, with a flying shoe which he had caught gracefully and tossed back at her with an inimitable puckish smile.

  “Now, Joanie,” he said this time, easygoing grin coming with apparent spontaneity to his darkly handsome face, “you mustn’t take that tone with me. I’m only going to the mosque to meet some friends of mine and pray a little and then we’re going to a club in Georgetown which is a favorite Arab hangout and have some shish kebab and tea and talk awhile. It’s only midnight, after all. The night is yet young.”

  “Take me with you,” she demanded, as her friend the Secretary of State’s daughter Bets had done in the identical situation a few hours before. Boo’s response had not been to take umbrage, as Samir had. He was much more experienced. He just became more humorous, more amicable, more easygoing; and more infuriating.

  “It’s just men,” he said. “It’s just man-talk. You know us Arabs. We love to sit around for hours and just talk. No harm in it.” His smile became quite disarming. “We never really settle anything, though we like to think we do. It just goes round and round and round.”

  “Then I don’t see why you want to waste time on it,” she snapped. “I just can’t see the purpose in it.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t,” he said with an air of kindly tolerance that she found frustratingly patronizing. “It really isn’t your nature. Joan Cohn-Bourassa gets results! She’s famous for results! It isn’t her cup of tea to just talk without a purpose. Capital P. I’m surprised you don’t understand that about us after all these years. You’re supposed to be such a friend of the Arabs, and yet you don’t seem to understand us.” He uttered a wistful sigh that was intended to infuriate further, and did. “It’s sad, you know? The great Arabist and she gets impatient with us. That’s no way to get anywhere, in the Middle East.”

  “Oh, come on!” she said angrily. “Don’t be disingenuous. The Arabs don’t have any better friend than I am and you know it. Anyway, we’re not talking about the whole Arab world. I’m talking about my husband who wants to go out catting around after midnight by himself in Georgetown, for God’s sake. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Now, you know I’m not doing that,” he protested mildly. “Look!” His expression took on the earnest, open air she was coming to dislike intensely. “Do you really think I’m being physically unfaithful to you? Really?”

  She studied him for a long moment, shook her head impatiently.

  “No, I don’t. I truly don’t. But then what are you doing? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  “Just talking,” he repeated. “Men like to talk. Arab men particularly like to talk. It’s our culture. It’s our nature. We can’t help ourselves. It isn’t as though this is the first time I’ve gone out to talk with my friends in twenty years of marriage.”

  “But not as often or as consistently as you have in the past several weeks,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Sometime I will take you with me and you’ll see. But I can’t right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the others wouldn’t like it,” he said. “It would upset them. They’re always kidding me about being married to the world’s most famous Jewish Arabist, as it is. They’d never understand it if you actually dared to crash their male citadel.”

  “One of these days,” she promised grimly, “I will. And then what will you say?”

  “‘Meet my wife Joanie,’” he said, “‘whom I love and of whom I am very proud.’ Don’t wait up. I may be quite late.”

  And with a smile, a wave, and a last, quick-disappearing grin like some swarthy Cheshire Cat, he was out the door and gone before she could quite grasp the fact that he intended to go in spite of her. But she should have grasped it: it had happened often enough in the past month or so, far more often than it ever had before.

  Now it was almost one o’clock, and in the big double bed they shared—except on his nights out, when she increasingly often found him in the morning curled up on one of the big overstuffed sofas in the living room—she was tossing and turning, tossing and turning. She was furious with him, furious with herself for letting him upset her, furious with her supercharged mind that kept spinning around and around and wasting precious minutes on absolute trivia. If she could only think of something constructive, she told herself angrily, she could stand it. But not the absolute time-consuming, sleep-defying junk that clogged her mind now.

  Joan Cohn-Bourassa, to quote a recent “Style” section profile in the Washington Post, “has perhaps the best mind and the shortest fuse of anyone in the State Department. Her ability to analyze swiftly, decide without hesitation and act immediately has already made her a force to be respected and feared in Foggy Bottom. By what appears to be an inborn ability to strip all issues to their essentials and apply her conclusions rapidly without fear or favor, she has already achieved the position of the department’s most effective, and most attractive, dynamo.”

  Effective, she thought wryly now—sometimes. Attractive—well, the writer had her own feminist agenda to pursue, and every woman who performed with an ounce of decisiveness automatically became attractive—unless, of course, she was a member of the opposition party, in which case she became obstreperous, obstructive, and “not particularly distinguished” in appearance and personality. Joanie Bourassa did not think of herself as particularly attractive, but she did make a point of being well groomed. With her short, wiry stature, her slicked-back, slightly graying black hair held in place by her trademark barrette, and her challenging, no-nonsense air, she did indeed give the impression of being a dynamo—at the moment, she thought in wry frustration, producing sparks but no real directed energy. This was repugnant to her orderly mind and an increasing source of irritation with Boo, off somewhere with his fellow talkers in the soft spring night of the beautiful, murder-ridden capital, which was not, in these closing years of the twentieth century, the safest place to be.

  With a great effort of will she forced herself to come back to the immediate problem before the department, particularly her own Near Eastern Affairs section of it. She knew there had been an NSC meeting at the White House concerning Sidi’s latest demarche, and she knew the bare bones of the CIA report, as transmitted by Eulie, which formed the basis of that concern; but that was all. Had there been a decision at the White House? And if so, what was it?

  She had hoped she might be able to corner the Secretary for a moment at Dolly’s and get a quick briefing from him, but either by accident or design he had somehow always seemed to be drifting away to some other part of the room. She had noted his quick exchange with Senator Wilson and observed Willie’s expression of quickly suppressed surprise and dismay, and had concluded accurately that Ray was passing along the gist of the CIA report. But whether he had informed Willie of any White House decision she couldn’t tell; and later at table when it developed that she would be Willie’s dinner partner, she had tried indirectly and unsuccessfully to elicit some indication from him. Willie, as always, was too old and shrewd a hand at the game to reveal anything; he had even pretended, with a twinkle in his eye, that he was trying to get information from her. When he had finally brought their brief and amicable sparring match to a conclusion, he had said with a chuckle, “Well, Joanie, I’m afraid that we’re equally ignorant, right? Ray hasn’t told either of us, yet. But I can guess what you want him to say.”

  “That’s right,” she retorted crisply. “I want him to tell me that the NSC decision was to proceed slowly and with great caution where Sidi is concerned. He’s a megalomaniac, and too much pressure can only make him worse. I’m not worried, though. We had a meeting about it at State this morning. I know the Secretary feels as I do.” She gave Willie a sharp, sidewise glance. “I suppose you don’t. You want us to lay down an ultimatum and go in with all guns blazing.”

  “No,” Willie said slowly. “Not really. But I do want us to determine a position and stick with it. If I know our man in the White House, he’s like some of our other recent men in the White House. He’ll be firm today and waffle tomorrow. This doesn’t stop people like Sidi, and each time it happens it only confuses the country and our allies and convinces the world all over again that the US is being weak and indecisive and we can’t be trusted to stand firm on anything. All of which are bad.”

  “‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” she quoted with a smile.

  “One of the most pernicious things Ralph Waldo Emerson ever said,” Willie observed, but amicably. “Always quoted triumphantly, out of context, by people like you. Nobody ever accused you of being inconsistent, Joanie. And I challenge you on the word ‘foolish’ as it applies to me. I like to think my consistencies aren’t foolish. Particularly in the realm of foreign affairs.”

  “So,” she said, deciding to find out, “are you going to hold hearings on it?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “It depends on how fast and how far this thing develops.”

  “Haven’t we got enough troubles at State?” she inquired humorously. “Must you people always keep at us?”

  “It’s good for you,” Willie said. “It keeps you on your toes. Wait until Johnny Jones decides to get into the act.”

  “That scum,” she said, lowering her voice and glancing across the room to the table where the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Department was holding forth. “I know Dolly likes to stir things up, but why invite that particular sleazebag?”

  “If Secretary Bourassa is referring to my distinguished colleague from the other body,” Willie said with mock solemnity, “I must ask her to be more respectful.”

  “Ha!” she said. “Respect! That’ll be the day.”

  “Nonetheless,” Willie said, “he may want to get into it. Then whatever we do to you on the Senate side will seem like patty-cakes.”

  “You can be pretty rough, too, Senator,” she remarked. “In your kindly, grandfatherly way.”

  “I am a grandfather,” he said. “And, I hope, kindly. We’ll just have to see how things go. Let me know when you get something definite on the White House’s attitude.”

  “I think you’ve already got it pretty well pegged,” she said. “From your point of view. From mine, I think it makes sense. I agreed this morning to go on Sally Holliwell’s Capitol Perspective next week. By then it ought to be pretty well out in the open.”

  “So have I,” he said. “What a coincidence. Had somebody told her already?”

  “Not that I know of. But you know Washington and how things get around. Or maybe it’s just some instinct for what’s coming up in the news. We haven’t had a good, rousing crisis in the Middle East for a while. Maybe the media’s just concluded that it’s time for one.”