Then there were the Gypsy whores. Bulgaria didn’t hide its perversions any more than it hid its corruption, and these brown-skinned Roma girls knew where the gold was. Nothing could be easier than picking off a pasty American salesman whose wife was nearly five thousand miles away.

Haddad understood the temptation these men felt. He had felt it himself, many times. Most of the girls were quite attractive, wearing short sheer dresses that clung to their skin and suggested at the pleasures that lay beneath. Just last night he had succumbed to the charms of one sloe-eyed beauty, taking her to his room where she had let him do things few women would ever permit. She had received him with such enthusiasm, such passion, that he had to wonder if, unlike so many of the whores he had spent time with, her pleasure was genuine.

Haddad was so surprised and delighted by the girl that he considered inviting her to accompany him home. It was an absurd, blasphemous notion, though it hadn’t seemed so as she knelt over him.

After she was gone, he lay on the drenched bed sheets, thinking back to when he was a younger man, attending university in America. Like Bulgaria, there were no rules in the west, and the two girls across the hall from him, both as limber as gymnasts, had taught him how to please a woman. He often lay with them on their dorm room floor, watching them stroke and prod each other to a feverish frenzy-an education he wasn’t likely to forget.

Haddad had applied those lessons last night and had been rewarded in kind. But shortly after the girl was gone he remembered who he was and why he was here. Sending up a prayer, he asked for forgiveness, promising that he would never again allow himself to fall prey to such depravity.

It was a promise he wasn’t certain he could-or wanted-to keep. Nonetheless, women would not be a priority. There was something more important he needed to do.