“You astound me,” he said.

There seemed no need for a reply.

“It seemed quite obvious to us that you were an agent provocateur. We contacted your American Central Intelligence Agency, and they denied any knowledge of you, which made us all the more certain you were one of their agents. We’re still not certain that you’re not. But you don’t fit any of the standard molds. You don’t make any sense.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“You don’t sleep. You’re thirty-four years old and lost the power to sleep when you were eighteen. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“In the war?”

“Korea.”

“Turkey sent troops to Korea,” he said.

This was indisputably true, but it seemed a conversational dead end. This time I decided to wait him out. He put out his cigarette and shook his head sadly at me.

“You were shot through the head? Is that what happened?”

“More or less. A piece of shrapnel. Nothing seemed damaged-it was just a fleck of shrapnel, actually-so they patched me up and gave me my gun and sent me back into battle. Then I just wasn’t sleeping, not at all. I didn’t know why. They thought it was mental-something like that. The trauma of being wounded. It was nothing like that because the wound hadn’t shaken me up much at all. I never knew I was hit at the time, not until someone noticed I was bleeding a little from the forehead, so there wasn’t any trauma involved. Then they-”

“What is trauma?”

“Shock.”

“I see. Continue.”

“Well, they kept knocking me out with shots, and I would stay out until the shot wore off and then wake up again. They couldn’t even induce normal sleep. They decided finally that the sleep center of my brain was destroyed. They’re not sure just what the sleep center is or just how it works, but evidently I don’t have one any more. So I don’t sleep.”