The closest house to that one was the one in Shibarghan, but you couldn’t get there from there. The mountains got in the way, and not even the pragmatic generosity of the Russians had led to the construction of a road from Rustak to Shibarghan. Maybe things would change after the Russians took over the country, I thought. Or maybe they would simply close down the whorehouses and let the miners work things out for themselves. In a free economy, you almost invariably find a whorehouse, wherever you have a large concentration of single men, except for places like Fire Island. But in a planned economy – well, consider the car I was driving, as far as that goes. The Soviets have never shown the proper attitude toward the whole topic of consumer goods. And hookers are consumer goods, even if some of them are pretty raw material.

It was with shining thoughts like this that I diverted myself as I drove all the way back to Kabul.

I stopped there long enough to buy gasoline. I filled the tank of the Balalaika, and I also filled the dozen or so five-gallon cans which filled the back seat and the trunk. When you start a trip in Afghanistan, you make sure that you have enough gas to get you where you’re going and back again. There are no roadside gas stations in the countryside, no clean rest rooms, no free tourist information, no uniformed attendants to wipe your windshield and check your oil. No green stamps, no Tigerino cards, no chance to play Flying Aces or Dino Dollars or Sunny Bucks or any of the great American gas station games. Nor, for that matter, does Afghanistan have much in the way of lung cancer or emphysema or heart disease or air pollution.

I think they’ll catch up, though. Kabul, surrounded by mountains on three sides, is a natural for smog once a sufficient degree of industrialization is reached. The mountains should sock in that rotten air as well as they do in Los Angeles.

From Kabul I took the southern route to Kandahar. The Russians had had nothing to do with this stretch of road, and I felt they were wise. I’d have preferred to have nothing to do with it myself. It was vaguely paved in that someone from the government had once dribbled a load of gravel down the middle of it. The rains had washed away most of the gravel and the rest of it was of little practical benefit, since it was right in the center of the road and the tires of the Balalaika passed on either side of it. The road twisted and dipped and swung this way and that, and periodically I would glance outside my window and see a couple of miles of nothing, pure nothing leading down to a barely visible valley below. The road had no shoulder. It just sat there alongside of the drop, and I held the car as close as I could to the wall on the other side of the road, and I tried to pretend that heights didn’t bother me, and I was very careful not to look over the side of the cliff any more than I had to.

Just before Kandahar I hit table land, a high level plateau across which the road cut straight and true and flat. I stopped the car long enough to pour a can of gasoline into its tank, then put the pedal on the floor and urged the car onward.

Kandahar itself was a rather impressive city, with a population of close to 150,000. It was more uniformly modern than Kabul, more squat concrete block houses and fewer mud huts, more cars and fewer donkeys and camels, more men and even some women in western dress. I stopped for a meal, worked my way through to the southern edge of the city, and pressed on toward where the house was supposed to be.

The house was rather similar to the one in Rustak. There was a single barnlike dwelling instead of a slew of little huts, and the madam was gross rather than gaunt, with a hair-sprouting birthmark in the center of her chin and a group of four deep vertical scars in the center of her forehead. She laughed a lot. She laughed when I told her I had come from Amanullah, and she guffawed when I explained that I was intent upon purchasing a particular prostitute for my own purposes, and she chortled when I showed her the letter of guarantee from Amanullah.

She looked at Phaedra’s picture and chuckled inanely to herself. The scars on her forehead wiggled like snakes. I thought of all those cathouses in novels where, if the madam really likes you, she’ll haul you off to the bedroom herself instead of turning you over to one of the girls. If this madam did anything of the sort, I could see where she might alienate a hell of a lot of customers.

“I know her not,” she said. “You want to look at my girls?”

“All right.”

“They are many of them with men now. I call others.”

She brought in a batch of them, and as the others finished with their clients she brought them in as well, and I guess that the girls were the true similarity between this cathouse and the other one. It certainly wasn’t the physical plant which reminded me of the other, nor was it any shred of resemblance between the wicked witch of the north and the wicked witch of the south. It was the girls, the poor pathetic girls, black and white and yellow and tan, dull-eyed and bow-legged and lead-footed from constant and merciless screwing.

“No,” I said, “I fear she is not here.”

“You care for drink before you go?”

“Coffee, if you have some.”

She did, so I did. It was particularly good, strong and rich, and I drank three cups of it. I stood to go, and the madam asked me if I wanted a girl.

“No,” I said, “I shall wait until I find the girl I seek.”

“Have one now. It is not good for a man to wait too long.”

I shook my head, not in answer but to clear it of cobwebs. I had thought she meant I should buy one of her girls, but she was more interested in renting than selling.

I turned to look at those sheep-eyed, sad-faced girls. Most of them had left, returning to the long line of men waiting for service, but a few still dawdled about.

“I do not think so,” I said.

“When did you last have a woman? You have not had a woman since you left Kabul.”

“Well-”

“Not since Kabul,” she repeated, her words an accusation. “Know you what happens when a man waits too long between women?”

She began to tell me and I tried not to listen. She was as disheartening as an army training film on the ravages of venereal disease, and the fact that I knew she was crazy didn’t help. It was one thing to know that you were hearing an old madam’s tale; it was another thing to dismiss out of hand the urgent warning that one’s thing would turn green and grow pimples and get smaller and smaller and then drop off entirely. I may not have believed it, but that certainly didn’t mean I wanted to hear about it.

Not since Kabul?

Hell. Not since New York, I thought. There was a beginning with Julia Stokes, but a beginning, you will recall, was all it was; I had been forced to depart before I could arrive. Since then such opportunities as may have existed somehow never seemed worth the trouble. In France, in Tel Aviv, in Iraq and Iran – well, there were girls, certainly; but that’s never reason enough in and of itself to get involved. Not unless one happens to be particularly in the mood. Which, what with all the worry and aggravation and all, I hadn’t happened to be.

And still wasn’t.

“I must go,” I told the fat madam.

“You are less than a man,” she taunted.

“Perhaps.”

“You are a farradóon who would mince as a girl.”

“You are a fat old lady with a face that would cause a clock to cease ticking.”

“Fat!”

I raced for the car.

I drove back to Kandahar and managed to find a petrol pump. I filled the tank and the five-gallon cans once again, and I stopped at a grocery story to fill the rest of the car with food. Anardara was three hundred hard miles from Kandahar, and I had no idea how long the trip would take or what my chances might be of getting food or drink along the way. I bought hunks of flat bread and a large round cheese, and for drinking I took two dozen bottles of Coca-Cola.

Well, that was what they had. They have it everywhere. In parts of the world where the natives have never heard of America, everybody drinks Coca-Cola. Little kids in Asia and Africa start drinking the stuff before they’re old enough to have their second teeth, and so it has a chance at their baby teeth first. In villages throughout the world, the first two words of English everyone learns – often the only words of English – are Coca and Cola.

So far the Russians haven’t been able to invent it. Their finest spies have been unable to penetrate the iron-clad security system in Atlanta, where the Coca-Cola formula is guarded more carefully than the most precious of atomic secrets. All efforts to break it down chemically have met with utter failure. Nobody really knows what’s in it.

I had some bread, I had some cheese, I drank a warm Coke.

I hit the road.

Chapter 12

The Wicked Witch of the West had lost an eye to some loathsome disease. She had never bothered to replace it with a glass eye and did not wear a patch, either. Nor was she wearing a Hathaway shirt, which was just as well, because she would have set their image back immeasurably. Aside from the gaping, red-rimmed eye socket that glared at one, she wasn’t particularly bad looking. Her body was well proportioned and her face would have been attractive.

She compensated for her relative shortage of deformities by reeking. She was the rankest-smelling female in the world, and it was not necessary for me to smell every woman on earth to make this statement. She stank; her breath was enough to curdle Coca-Cola and her flatulence suggested a lifelong diet of nothing but baked beans. I don’t think she ever bathed; if she did, the Farah Rud River would have a water pollution problem.

“You come from Amanullah!” She slapped me on the back, put her mouth to my ear for a confidential whisper. I tried to do something about my nostrils. “He is my good friend,” she hissed. (You couldn’t hiss this in English, but the Afghan for it is full of sibilants. Don’t quibble.) “My very good friend,” she went on, still hissing. “Always he brings me my very best girls. So many of the maradóosh, they are not lovely, they do not please men, they bleed, they get sick, they die. Often they are diseased, and men complain later that their members have been set afire and immersed in acid. But from Amanullah I obtain always only the very finest, the milk of the milk. The best girl in this house is a girl Amanullah sold me.”

“One of them,” I said, “is a girl he should not have sold you. I must repurchase her.”

“I do not sell my girls, kâzzih.”

“Amanullah wishes to buy her himself. I am his agent.”

“Oh?”

I showed her the letter. “You see? He will pay your price for the girl, whatever you declare your price to be. And of course you know that Amanullah is a man of his word, that his word is to be trusted.”

“It is so.”

“The girl is called Phaedra Harrow,” I said. “Or perhaps she is called Deborah Horowitz.”

“You do not know her name?”

“It is one of the two.”

“But I know neither name,” she said, punctuating the remark flatulently. I took an involuntary step backwards. “I give them new names when they come into my house, and they learn their new names even as they learn their new lives. The old names cease to have any importance for them. They are even buried under their new names.”