My friends were wrong, of course: that damned appointments book, sourced from the same binder who made the members’ journal at London’s haughty Athenaeum, was too heavy with the name Berihun Bekele for me to be passed over. I was instead raised up: the perfect quisling, the perfect decadent product of a misshaped society, the perfect whore to the aristocracy of court and the exploiters of Texas and Birmingham. How was I different from an Italian Fascist, from a collaborator of the occupation? My jackbooted foot was on the neck of the poor. Men came, led by a little surgeon with a grave face and hands that looked a great deal like my own. He had a birthmark on his cheek, like a burning torch.