“Cigarette?” said one of the men.
Somebody got out a pack and they lit up.
They puffed slow streams of pale white smoke.
They adjusted their uniforms, fixed their collars.
The voices upstairs continued to mutter and chant.
The leader of the men looked at his watch.
“Twenty-five minutes,” he said.
“I wonder what they’re up to up there.”
He went to a window and looked out.
“Hot day,” said one of the men.
“Yeah,” said someone else in the slow warm time of early afternoon.
The voices had faded to a murmur and were now silent.
There was not a sound in the house.
All the men could hear was their own breathing.
An hour of silence passed.
“I hope we didn’t cause any trouble,” said the captain.
He went and peered into the living room. Mrs. Ttt was there, watering some flowers that grew in the center of the room.
“I knew I had forgotten something,” she said when she saw the captain.
She walked out to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry.”
She handed him a slip of paper.
“Mr. Ttt is much too busy.”
She turned to her cooking.
“Anyway, it’s not Mr. Ttt you want to see; it’s Mr. Aaa.
Take that paper over to the next farm, by the blue canal, and Mr. Aaa’ll advise you about whatever it is you want to know.”
“We don’t want to know anything,” objected the captain, pouting out his thick lips.
“We already know it.”
“You have the paper, what more do you want?” she asked him straight off.
And she would say no more.
“Well,” said the captain, reluctant to go.
He stood as if waiting for something.
He looked like a child staring at an empty Christmas tree.
“Well,” he said again.
“Come on, men.”
The four men stepped out into the hot silent day.
Half an hour. later, Mr. Aaa, seated in his library sipping a bit of electric fire from a metal cup, heard the voices outside in the stone causeway.
He leaned over the window sill and gazed at the four uniformed men who squinted up at him.
“Are you Mr. Aaa?” they called.
“I am.”
“Mr. Ttt sent us to see you!” shouted the captain.
“Why did he do that?” asked Mr. Aaa.
“He was busy!”
“Well, that’s a shame,” said Mr. Ass sarcastically.
“Does he think I have nothing else to do but entertain people he’s too busy to bother with?”
“That’s not the important thing, sir,” shouted the captain.
“Well, it is to me.
I have much reading to do.
Mr. Ttt is inconsiderate.
This is not the first time he has been this thoughtless of me.
Stop waving your hands, sir, until I finish.