cobbled street. The apartment house across the way did the same, and the two buildings almost kissed above my head, like two dowdy old matrons leaning across a back fence. There was a jumble of mail slots, and I found Angel Monroe’s name scrawled on a card in fading ink. I jammed my thumb on her buzzer. There was no lock on the front door, so I went in and climbed the first flight of stairs. Saied was right behind me.
Her apartment turned out to be on the third floor, in the rear. The hallway was carpeted, if that’s the right word, with a dull, gritty fabric that had at one time been maroon. The traffic of uncountable feet had completely worn through the material in many places, so that the dry gray wood of the floor was visible through the holes. The walls were covered with a filthy tan wallpaper, hanging down here and there in forlorn strips. The air had an odd, sour tang to it, as if the building were occupied by people who had come there to die, or who were certainly sick enough to die but instead hung on in lonely misery. From behind one door I could hear a family battle, complete with bellowed threats and crashing crockery, while from another apartment came insane, high-pitched laughter and the sound of flesh loudly smacking flesh. I didn’t want to know about it.
I stood outside the shabby door to Angel Monroe’s flat and took a deep breath. I glanced at the Half-Hajj, but he just gave me a shrug and pointedly looked away. Some friend. I was on my own. I told myself that nothing weird was going to happen — a lie just to get myself to take the next step — and then I knocked on the door. There was no response. I waited a few seconds and knocked again, louder. This time I heard the rattle and squeak of bedsprings and the sound of someone coming slowly to the door. The door swung open. Angel Monroe stared out, trying very hard to focus her eyes.
She was a full head shorter than me, with bleached blonde hair curled tightly into an arrangement I would call “ratty.” Her black roots looked as if no one had given them much attention since the Prophet’s birthday. Her eyes were banded with dark blue and black makeup, in a manner that brought to mind the more colorful Mediterranean saltwater fish. The rouge she wore was applied liberally, but not quite in the right places, so she didn’t look so much wantonly sexy as she did feverishly ill. Her lipstick, for reasons best known to Allah and Angel Monroe, was a kind of pulpy purple color; her lips looked like she’d bought them first and forgot to put them in the refrigerator while she shopped for the rest of her face.
Her body led me to believe that she was too old to be dressed in anything but the long white Algerian haik, with a veil conservatively and firmly in place. The problem was that this body had never seen the inside of a haik. 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.
2
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. Chiri’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’an. 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, 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 didn’t have much patience with the crowd she caters to. Her philosophy is that
“
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 and bingara,” I said. I usually have that 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
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,
