The correspondent had learned long ago that the important things happened in anterooms. Not in the communiqués, which were composed afterward like the alibis of a guilty man, but in the corridors where the delegates waited with their cold coffee and their practised faces. He thought of this now, reading the wire from Oman, where the negotiations were to resume on a Saturday. An American Vice-President was flying in; the Qataris had already gone ahead into Iran itself, carrying the tattered truce between them like a wounded child that no one wished to be seen dropping. Everyone spoke of the Strait of Hormuz. The Americans wanted a pledge that no one would shoot at the ships. It was the kind of promise that meant nothing and cost nothing, and for that reason it would be very expensive.
In Berkhamsted the morning had come up sunny and clean, eighteen degrees, the light lying flat and honest across the common where he had walked as a boy. It was a treachery of a kind, that innocence of English weather. A man could stand at his window with the sun on the brick and believe the world had a shape, a moral, an ending you could see coming. He did not believe it. He had been in enough countries to know that the sun shone equally upon the just and the unjust, and that it shone hardest of all upon those who had stopped asking which they were.
There was a photograph in the paper of a funeral in Tehran, and a son who had not come to it. Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the heir presumptive, had stayed away from his own father's grave, and now the wire services were full of the word vacuum, as though power were a thing that abhorred an empty room. The correspondent knew better. Power did not abhor the empty room; it preferred it. It was in the empty room, the unwitnessed corridor, that the real decisions were made, by men who had learned to mistake their own survival for a cause. Somewhere in Washington a President had said he would decimate and destroy all areas of Iran if anyone tried to kill him. It was the language of a frightened man dressed as a strong one, and it frightened the correspondent more than any calm threat could have done, because he had seen where such sentences ended. They ended in a village no one could find on a map, with a woman holding her husband's legs to keep him from being pulled through a torn window into the roaring air.
He turned the pages the way a man turns over stones, expecting nothing good beneath them. In Venezuela the dead had passed four thousand, the twin earthquakes having done in an afternoon what no army could manage in a year. Nearly seventeen thousand injured; thousands more merely missing, that bloodless bureaucratic word for a grief with no body to attach itself to. A youth baseball league was counting its own, the small coffins arriving faster than the certificates. The Japanese rescue teams had set up in La Guaira and gone quietly to work, and this at least was something a man could hold onto: that when the earth opened, strangers came with their hands. It was not faith, exactly. But it was the nearest thing to grace he had seen on the wire in a long while, and he had learned to take grace where it was left, like coins forgotten on a windowsill.
The rest was politics, which was only the arrangement of suffering into columns. In Cuba the lights had gone out for the second time in a week, the island under an American fuel blockade, the grid failing like an old heart. In Nicaragua the government had stripped its lawyers of their certification, which was a way of removing the last people who might read the law aloud in a courtroom and embarrass someone. In Russia the buffer zone was to be widened, the spokesman explained, in the reasonable voice of a man discussing drainage, while at Zaporizhzhia the advance had reached the city's outskirts and the emergency crews dug for survivors under an air strike. They were always widening something, these men. A zone, a mandate, a definition of the enemy. Meanwhile a Moscow theatre put on its small brave shows where the word Ukraine could not be spoken, the war sitting in the room like a relative no one would introduce.
And then, at the bottom of the page, the thing that made him set down his cup. A report of certain wealthy men – crypto billionaires, the paper called them, as if wealth were a mineral you could be made of – who had decided that democracy had run its course and were setting about to found their own nations. Where money would buy a vote outright, and no tiresome poor man could dilute it. He had known such men. Not these particular ones, but their fathers and grandfathers, in the lobbies of hotels in Havana and Saigon, the ones who believed that history was a transaction and that they had read the terms more cleverly than the rest. They never lasted. The countries they bought always turned in their hands like a knife held by the blade. But they did a great deal of damage on the way down, and it was never they who bled.
He closed the paper. The sun was still on the common, and a boy was crossing it with a fishing rod, going down to the canal as he himself had gone sixty years before, in a country that had believed itself innocent and had not been. The men in the anteroom in Oman would sign something today, or they would not, and either way the ships would go through the Strait, and the oil would move, and the price of it would be paid in a currency that never appeared in the communiqué. He had spent his life trying to name that currency. He had never quite managed it. But he knew its colour, and its weight, and he knew that it was always counted out in the smaller rooms, by the people who were never asked, in the plain sunlight of an ordinary morning that had no idea what it was lighting.