Budayeen Nights (6 page)

Indihar was dancing on stage. She was a real girl with a real personality, a rarity in that club. Chiri seemed to prefer in her employees the high-velocity prettiness of a sexchange. Chiri told me once that changes take better care of their appearance. Their prefab beauty is their whole life. Allah forbid that a single hair of their eyebrows should be out of place.

By her own standards, Indihar was a good Muslim woman. She didn’t have the head-wiring that most dancers had. The more conservative imams taught that the implants fell under the same prohibition as intoxicants, because some people got their pleasure centers wired and spent the remainder of their short lives amp-addicted. Even if, as in my case, the pleasure center is left alone, the use of a moddy submerges your own personality, and that is interpreted as insobriety. Needless to say, while I have nothing but the warmest affection for Allah and His Messenger, I stop short of being a fanatic about it. I’m with that twentieth century King Saud who demanded that the Islamic leaders of his country stop dragging their feet when it came to technological progress. I don’t see any essential conflict between modern science and a thoughtful approach to religion.

“So,” said Chiri, trying to make conversation, “how did your trip turn out? Did you find whatever you were looking for?”

I looked at her, but didn’t say anything. I wondered if I
had
found it. When I saw my mother again in Algiers, her appearance had shocked me. In my imagination, I’d pictured her as a respectable, moderately well-to-do matron living in a comfortable neighborhood. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years, but I just figured she’d managed to lift herself out of the poverty and degradation. Now I thought maybe she was happy as she was, a haggard, strident old whore. I spent an hour with her, hoping to hear what I’d come to learn, trying to decide how to behave toward her, and being embarrassed by her in front of the Half-Hajj. She didn’t want to be troubled by her past. She didn’t like me dropping back into her life after all those years.

“Believe me,” I told her, “I didn’t like hunting you up either. I only did it because I have to.”

“Why do you have to?” she wanted to know. She reclined on a musty smelling, torn, old sofa that was covered with cat hair. She’d made herself another drink, but had neglected to offer me or Saied anything.

“It’s important to me,” I said. I told her about my life in the faraway city, how I’d lived as a subsonic hustler until Friedlander Bey had chosen me as the instrument of his will.

“You live in the city now?” She said that with a nostalgic longing. I never knew she’d been to the city.

“I lived in the Budayeen,” I said, “but Friedlander Bey moved me into his palace.”

“You work for him?”

“I had no choice.” I shrugged. She nodded. It surprised me that she knew who Papa was, too.

“So what did you come for?”

That was going to be hard to explain. “I wanted to find out everything I could about my father.”

She looked at me over the rim of her whiskey glass. “You already heard everything,” she said.

“I don’t think so. How sure are you that this French sailor was my dad?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “His name was Bernard Audran. We met in a coffee shop. I was living in Sidi Bel Abbes then. He took me to dinner, we liked each other. I moved in with him. We came to live in Algiers after that, and we were together for a year and a half. Then after you was born, one day he just left. I never heard from him again. I don’t know where he went.”

“
I
do. Into the ground, that’s where. Took me a long time, but I traced Algerian computer records back far enough. There was a Bernard Audran in the navy of Provence, and he was in Mauretania when the French Confederate Union tried to regain control over us. The problem is that his brains were bashed out by some unidentified noraf more than a year before I was born. Maybe you could think back and see if you can get a clearer picture of those events.”

That made her furious. She jumped up and flung her half-f glass of liquor at me. It smashed into the already stained and streaked wall to my right. I could smell the pungent, undiluted sharpness of the Irish whiskey. I heard Saied murmuring something beside me, maybe a prayer. My mother took a couple of steps toward me, her face ugly with rage. “You calling me a
liar
?” she shrieked.

Well, I was. “I’m just telling you that the official records say something different.”

“Fuck the official records!”

“The records also say that you were married seven times in two years. No mention of any divorces.”

My mother’s anger faltered a bit. “How did that get in the computers? I never got officially married, not with no license or nothing.”

“I think you underestimate the government’s talent for keeping track of people. It’s all there for anybody to see.”

Now she looked frightened. “What else’d you find out?”

I let her off her own hook. “Nothing else. There wasn’t anything more. You want something else to stay buried, you don’t have to worry.” That was a He; I had learned plenty more about my mom.

“Good,” she said, relieved. “I don’t like you prying into what I done. It don’t show respect.”

I had an answer to that, but I didn’t use it. “What started all this nostalgic research,” I said in a quiet voice, “was some business I was taking care of for Papa.” Everybody in the Budayeen calls Friedlander Bey “Papa.” It’s an affectionate token of terror. “This police lieutenant who handled matters in the Budayeen died, so Papa decided that we needed a kind of public affairs officer, somebody to keep communications open between him and the police department. He asked me to take the job.”

Her mouth twisted. “Oh yeah? You got a gun now? You got a badge?” It was from my mother that I learned my dislike for cops.

“Yeah,” I said, “I got a gun
and
a badge.”

“Your badge ain’t any good in Algiers, salaud.”

“They give me professional courtesy wherever I go.” I didn’t even know if that was true here. “The point is, while I was deep in the cop comp, I took the opportunity to read my own file, and a few others. The funny thing was, my name and Friedlander Bey’s kept popping up together. And not just in the records of the last few years. I counted at least eight entries—hints, you understand, but nothing definite—that suggested the two of us were blood kin.” That got a loud reaction from the Half-Hajj; maybe I should have told him about all this before.

“So?” said my mother.

“The hell kind of answer is that? So what does it mean? You ever jam Friedlander Bey, back in your golden youth?”

She looked raving mad again. “Hell, I jammed
lots
of guys. You expect me to remember all of them? I didn’t even remember what they looked like while I was jamming them.”

“You didn’t want to get involved, right? You just wanted to be good friends. Were you ever friends enough to give credit? Or did you always ask for the cash up front?”

“Maghrebi,” cried Saied, “this is your
mother
!” I didn’t think it was possible to shock him.

“Yeah, it’s my mother. Look at her.”

She crossed the room in three steps, reached back, and gave me a hard slap across the face. It made me fall back a step. “Get the fuck
out
of here!” she yelled.

I put my hand to my cheek and glared at her. “You answer one thing first: Could Friedlander Bey be my real father?”

Her hand was poised to deliver another clout. “Yeah, he could be, the way practically
any
man could be. Go back to the city and climb up on his knee, sonny boy. I don’t ever want to see you around here again.”

She could rest easy on that score. I turned my back on her and left that repulsive hole in the wall. I didn’t bother to shut the door on the way out. The Half-Hajj did, and then he hurried to catch up with me. I was storming down the stairs. “Listen, Marîd,” he said. Until he spoke, I didn’t realize how wild I was. “I guess all this is a big surprise to you—“

“You do? You’re very perceptive today, Saied.”

“—but you can’t act that way toward your mother. Remember what it says—“

“In the Qur’ân? Yeah, I know. Well, what does the Straight Path have to say about prostitution? What does it have to say about the kind of degenerate my holy mother has turned into?”

“You’ve got a lot of room to talk. If there was a cheaper hustler in the Budayeen, I never met him.”

I smiled coldly. “Thanks a lot, Saied, but I don’t live in the Budayeen anymore. You forget? And I don’t hustle anybody or anything. I got a steady job.”

He spat at my feet. “You used to do nearly anything to make a few kiam.”

“Anyway, just because I used to be the scum of the earth, it doesn’t make it all right for my mother to be scum, too.”

“Why don’t you just shut up about her? I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Your empathy just grows and grows, Saied,” I said. “You don’t know everything I know. My alma mater back there was into renting herself to strangers long before she had to support the two of us. She wasn’t the forlorn heroine she always said she was. She glossed over a lot of the truth.”

The Half-Hajj looked me hard in the eye for a few seconds. “Yeah?” he said. “Half the girls, changes, and debs we know do the same thing, and you don’t have any problem treating
them
like human beings.”

I was about to say “Sure, but none of them is my mother.” I stopped myself. He would have jumped on that sentiment, too, and besides, it was starting to sound foolish even to me. The edge of my anger had vanished. I think I was just greatly annoyed to have to learn these things after so many years. It was hard for me to accept. I mean, now I had to forget almost everything I thought I knew about myself. For one thing, I’d always been proud of the fact that I was half-Berber and half-French. I dressed in European style most of the time—boots and jeans and work shirts. I suppose I’d always felt a little superior to the Arabs I lived among. Now I had to get used to the thought that I could very well be half-Berber and half-Arab.

The raucous, thumping sound of mid-twenty-first-century hispo roc from Chiri’s jukebox broke into my daydream. Some forgotten band was growling an ugly chant about some damn thing or other. I’ve never gotten around to learning any Spanish dialects, and I don’t own a Spanish-language daddy. If I ever run into any Colombian industrialists, they can just damn well speak Arabic. I have a soft spot in my liver for them because of their production of narcotics, but outside of that I don’t see what South America is for. The world doesn’t need an overpopulated, starving, Spanish-speaking India in the Western Hemisphere. Spain, their mother country, tried Islam and said a polite no-thank-you, and their national character sublimed right off into nothingness. That’s Allah punishing them.

I was bored as hell. I knocked back the rest of my drink. Chiri looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “No thanks, Chiri,” I said. “I got to go.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Well, don’t be a stranger now that you’re a fascist swine cop.”

“Right,” I said. I got up from my stool. It was time to go to work. I left the rest of my change for Chiri’s hungry register and went back outside.

3

There was always a crowd of young children outside the station house on Walid al-Akbar Street. I don’t know if they were hoping to see some shackled criminal dragged in, or waiting for their own parents to be released from custody, or just loitering in the hopes of begging loose change. I’d been one of them myself not so very long ago in Algiers, and it didn’t hurt me any to throw a few kiam into the air and watch them scramble for it. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a clutch of coins. The older, bigger kids caught the easy money, and the smaller ones clung to my legs and wailed, “Baksheesh!” Every day it was a challenge to shake my young passengers loose before I got to the revolving door.

I had a desk in a small cubicle on the third floor of the station house. My cubicle was separated from its neighbors by pale green plasterboard walls only a little taller than I was. There was always a sour smell in the air, a mixture of stale sweat, tobacco smoke, and disinfectant. Above my desk was a shelf that held plastic boxes filled with dated files on cobalt-alloy cell-memories. On the floor was a big cardboard box crammed with bound printouts. I had a grimy Annamese data deck on my desk that gave me trouble-free operation on two out of every three jobs. Of course, my work wasn’t very important, not according to Lieutenant Hajjar. We both knew I was there just to keep an eye on things for Friedlander Bey. It amounted to Papa having his own private police precinct devoted to protecting his interests in the Budayeen.

Hajjar came into my cubicle and dropped another heavy box on my desk. He was a Jordanian who’d had a lengthy arrest record of his own before he came to the city. I suppose he’d been an athlete ten years ago, but he hadn’t stayed in shape. He had thinning brown hair and lately he’d tried to grow a beard. It looked terrible, like the skin of a kiwi fruit. He looked like a mother’s bad dream of a drug dealer, which is what he was when he wasn’t administering the affairs of the nearby walled quarter.

“How you doin’, Audran?” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s all this?”

“Found something useful for you to do.” Hajjar was about two years younger than me, and it gave him a kick to boss me around.

I looked in the box. There were a couple hundred blue cobalt-alloy plates. It looked like another really tedious job. “You want me to sort these?”

“I want you to log ‘em all into the daily record.”

I swore under my breath. Every cop carries an electronic log book to make notes on the day’s tour: where he went, what he saw, what he said, what he did. At the end of the day, he turns in the book’s cell-memory plate to his sergeant. Now Hajjar wanted me to collate all the plates from the station’s roster. “This isn’t the kind of work Papa had in mind for me,” I said.