Her body led me to believe that she was too old to be dressed in anything but the long white Algerian hai’k, with a veil conservatively and firmly in place. The problem was that this body had never seen the inside of a hai’k. She was clad now in shorts so small that her well-rounded belly was bending the waistband over. Her sagging breasts were not quite clothed in a kind of gauzy vest. I knew for certain that if she sat in a chair, you could safely hide the world’s most valuable gem in her navel and it would be completely invisible. Her legs were patterned with broken veins like the dry chebka valleys of the Mzab. On her broad, flat feet she wore tattered slippers with the remains of pink fuzzy bows dangling loose.
To tell the truth, I felt a certain disgust. “Angel Monroe?” I asked. Of course that wasn’t her real name. She was at least half Berber, as I am. Her skin was darker than mine, her eyes as black and dull as eroded asphalt.
“Uh huh,” she said. “Kind of early, ain’t it?” Her voice was sharp and shrill. She was already very drunk. “Who sent you? Did Khalid send you? I told that goddamn bastard I was sick. I ain’t supposed to be working today, I told him last night. He said it was all right. And then he sends you. Two of you, yet. Who the hell does he think I am? And it ain’t like he don’t have no other girls, either. He could have sent you to Efra, that whore, with her plug-in talent. If I ain’t feeling good, it don’t bother me if he sends you to her. Hell, I don’t care. How much you give him, anyway?”
I stood there, looking at her. Saied gave me a jab in the side. “Well, uh, Miss Monroe,” I said, but then she started chattering again.
“The hell with it. Come on in. I guess I can use the money. But you tell that son of a bitch Khalid that—” She paused to take a long gulp from the tall glass of whiskey she was holding. “You tell him if he don’t care enough about my health, I mean, making me work when I already told him I was sick, then hell, you tell him there are plenty of others I can go work for. Anytime I want to, you can believe that.”
I tried twice to interrupt her, but I didn’t have any success. I waited until she stopped to take another drink. While she had her mouth full of the cheap liquor, I said, “Mother?”
She just stared at me for a moment, her filmy eyes wide. “No,” she said at last, in a small voice. She looked closer. Then she dropped her whiskey glass to the floor.
Later, after the return trip from Algiers and Mauretania, when I got back home to the city the first place I headed was the Budayeen. I used to live right in the heart of the walled quarter, but events and fate and Friedlander Bey had made that impossible now. I used to have a lot of friends in the Budayeen too, and I was welcome anywhere; but now there were really only two people who were generally glad to see me: Saied the Half-Hajj, and Chiriga, who ran a club on the Street halfway between the big stone arch and the cemetery. Chiri’s place had always been my home-away-from-home, where I could sit and have a few drinks in peace, hear the gossip, and not get threatened or hustled by the working girls.
Once upon a time I’d had to kill a few people, mostly in self-defense. More than one club owner had told me never to set foot in his bar again. After that, a lot of my friends decided that they could do without my company, but Chiri had more sense.
She’s a hard-working woman, a tall black African with ritual facial scars and sharply filed cannibal teeth. To be honest, I don’t really know if those canines of hers are mere decoration, like the patterns on her forehead and cheeks, or a sign that dinner at her house was composed of delicacies implicitly and explicitly forbidden by the noble Qur’n. Chiri’s a moddy, but she thinks of herself as a smart moddy. At work, she’s always herself. She chips in her fantasies at home, where she won’t bother anyone else. I respect that.
When I came through the club’s door, I was struck first by a welcome wave of cool air. Her air conditioning, as undependable as all old Russian-made hardware is, was working for a change. I felt better already. Chiri was deep in conversation with a customer, some bald guy with a bare chest. He was wearing black vinyl pants with the look of real leather, and his left hand was handcuffed behind him to his belt. He had a corymbic implant on the crest of his skull, and a pale green plastic moddy was feeding him somebody else’s personality. If Chiri was giving him the time of day, then he couldn’t have been dangerous, and probably he wasn’t even all that obnoxious.
Chiri doesn’t have much patience with the crowd she caters to. Her philosophy is that somebody has to sell them liquor and drugs, but that doesn’t mean she has to socialize with them.
I was her old pal, and I knew most of the girls who worked for her. Of course, there were always new faces — and I mean new, carved out of dull, plain faces with surgical skill, turning ordinary looks into enthralling artificial beauty. The old-time employees got fired or quit in a huff on a regular basis; but after working for Frenchy Benoit or Jo-Mama for a while, they circulated back to their former jobs. They left me pretty much alone, because I’d rarely buy them cocktails and I didn’t have any use for their professional charms. The new girls could try hustling me, but Chiri usually told them to lay off.
In their unforgiving eyes I’d become the Creature Without A Soul. People like Blanca and Fanya and Yasrnin looked the other way if I caught their eye. Some of the girls didn’t know what I’d done or didn’t care, and they kept me from feeling like a total outcast. Still, it was a lot quieter and lonelier for me in the Budayeen than it used to be. I tried not to care.
“Jambo, Bwana Marid!” Chiriga called to me when she noticed that I was sitting nearby. She left the handcuffed moddy and drifted slowly down her bar, plopping a cork coaster in front of me. “You come to share your wealth with this poor savage. In my native land, my people have nothing to eat and wander many miles in search of water. Here I have found peace and plenty. I have learned what friendship is. I have found disgusting men who would touch the hidden parts of my body. You will buy me drinks and leave me a huge tip. You will tell all your new friends about my place, and they will come in and want to touch the hidden parts of my body. I will own many shiny, cheap things. It is all as God wills.”
I stared at her for a few seconds. Sometimes it’s hard to figure what kind of mood Chiri’s in. “Big nigger girl talk dumb,” I said at last.
She grinned and dropped her ignorant Dinka act. “Yeah, you right,” she said. “What is it today?”
“Gin,” I said. I usually have a shot of gin and a shot of bingara over ice, with a little Rose’s lime juice. The drink is my own invention, but I’ve never gotten around to naming it. Other times I have vodka gimlets, because that’s what Philip Marlowe drinks in The Long Goodbye. Then on those occasions when I just really want to get loaded fast, I drink from Chiri’s private stock of tende, a truly loathsome African liquor from the Sudan or the Congo or someplace, made, I think, from fermented yams and spadefoot toads. If you are ever offered tende, DO NOT TASTE IT. You will be sorry. Allah knows that I am.
The dancer just finishing her last number was an Egyptian girl named Indihar. I’d known her for years. She used to work for Frenchy Benoit, but now she was wiggling her ass in Chiri’s club. She came up to me when she got offstage, wrapped now in a pale peach-colored shawl that had little success in concealing her voluptuous body. “Want to tip me for my dancing?” she asked.