well, I don’t have to go into that again.
We waited the appropriate amount of time. The sun was disappearing behind a western wall; it was almost time for the sunset call to prayer. I stared at Saied, who was now dozing. Good, I thought, now I get to hit him in the head. I had just gotten up and taken one little step, when he looked up at me. “It’s time, I guess,” he said, yawning. I nodded, didn’t have anything to add. So I sat back down, and Saied the Half-Hajj went into his act.
Saied is a natural-born liar, and it’s a pleasure to watch him hustle.
He had the personality module he liked best plugged into his brain — his heavy-duty, steel-belted, mean- mother-of-a-tough-guy moddy. Nobody messed with the Half-Hajj when he was chipping that one in.
Back home in the city, Saied thought it was beneath him to earn money. He liked to sit in the cafes with me and Mahmoud and Jacques, all day and all evening. His little chicken, the American boy everybody called Abdul- Hassan, went out with older men and brought home the rent money. Saied liked to sneer a lot and wear his gallebeya cinched with a wide black leather belt, which was decorated with shiny chrome steel strips and studs. The Half-Hajj was always careful of his appearance.
What he was doing in this vermin-infested roadside slum was what he called fun. I waited a few minutes and followed him around the corner and into the coffeehouse. I shuffled in, unkempt, filthy, and took a chair in a shadowy corner. The proprietor glanced at me, frowned, and turned back to Saied. Nobody ever paid any attention to me. Saied was finishing the tail-end of a joke I’d heard him tell a dozen times since we’d left the city. When he came to the payoff, the shopkeeper and the four other men at the long counter burst into laughter. They liked Saied. He could make people like him whenever he wanted. That talent was programmed into an add-on chip snapped into his bad-ass moddy. With the right moddy and the right daddy chips, it didn’t matter where you’d been born or how you’d been raised. You could fit in with any sort of people, you could speak any language, you could handle yourself in any situation. The information was fed directly into your short-term memory. You could literally become another person, Ramses II or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, until you popped the moddy and daddies out.
Saied was being rough and dangerous, but he was also being charming, if you can imagine that combination. I watched the shop owner reach and grab the teapot. He poured tea into the Half-Hajj’s glass, slopping some onto the wooden counter. Nobody moved to mop it up. Saied raised the glass to drink, then slammed it down again. “Yaa salam!” he roared. He leaped up.
“What is it, O my friend?” asked Hisham, the proprietor.
“My ring!” Saied shouted. He was wearing a large gold ring, and he’d been waving it under the old man’s nose for two solid hours. It had had a big, round diamond in its center.
“What’s the matter with your ring?”
“Look for yourself! The stone — my diamond — it’s gone!”
Hisham caught Saied’s flapping arm and saw that, indeed, the diamond was now missing. “Must have fallen out,” the old man said, with the sort of folk wisdom you find only in these petrified provincial villages.
“Yes, fallen out,” said Saied, not calmed in the least. “But where?”
“Do you see it?”
Saied made a great show of searching the floor around his stool. “No, I’m sure it’s not here,” he said at last.
“Then it must be out in the alley. You must’ve lost it the last time you went out to piss.”
Saied slammed the bar with his heavy fist. “And now it’s getting dark, and I must catch the bus.”
“You still have time to search,” said Hisham. He didn’t sound very confident.
The Half-Hajj laughed without humor. “A stone like that, worth four thousand Tunisian dinars, looks like a tiny pebble among a million others. In the twilight I’d never find it. What am I to do?”
The old man chewed his lip and thought for a moment. “You’re determined to leave on the bus when it passes through?” he asked.
“I must, O my brother. I have urgent business.”
“I’ll help you if I can. Perhaps I can find the stone for you. You must leave your name and address with me; then if I find the diamond, I’ll send it to you.”
“May the blessings of Allah be on you and on your family!” said Saied. “I have little hope that you’ll succeed but it comforts me to know you will do your best for me. I’m in your debt. We must determine a suitable reward for you.”
Hisham looked at Saied with narrowed eyes. “I ask no reward,” he said slowly.
“No, of course not, but I insist on offering you one.”
“No reward is necessary. I consider it my duty to help you, as a Muslim brother.”
“Still,” Saied went on, “should you find the wretched stone, I’ll give you a thousand Tunisian dinars for the sustenance of your children and the ease of your aged parents.”
“Let it be as you wish,” said Hisham with a small bow.
“Here,” said my friend, “let me write my address for you.” While Saied was scribbling his name on a scrap of paper, I heard the rumbling of the bus as it lurched to a stop outside the building.
“May Allah grant you a good journey,” said the old man.
“And may He grant you prosperity and peace,” said Saied, as he hurried out to the bus.
I waited about three minutes. Now it was my turn. I stood up and staggered a couple of steps. I had a lot of trouble walking in a straight line. I could see the shopkeeper glaring at me in disgust. “The hell do you want, you filthy beggar?” he said.
“Some water,” I said.
“Water! Buy something or get out!”
“Once a man asked the Messenger of God, may Allah’s blessings be on him, what was the noblest thing a man may do. The reply was ‘To give water to he who thirsts.’ I ask this of you.”
“Ask the Prophet. I’m busy.”
I nodded. I didn’t expect to get anything free to drink out of this crud. I leaned against his counter and stared at a wall. I couldn’t seem to make the place stand still.
“
“Trying to remember,” I said peevishly. “I had something to tell you. Ah, yes, I know.” I reached into a pocket of my jeans and brought out a glittering round stone. “Is this what that man was looking for? I found this out there. Is this — ?”
The old man tried to snatch it out of my hand. “Where’d you get that? The alley, right?
“No, I found it. It’s — “
“He said he wanted me to look for it.” The shopkeeper was already gazing into the distance, spending the reward money.
“He said he’d pay you money for it.”
“That’s right. Listen, I’ve got his address. Stone’s no good to you without the address.”
I thought about that for a second or two. “Yes, O Shaykh.”
“And the address is no good to me without the stone. So here’s my offer: I’ll give you two hundred dinars for it.”
“Two hundred? But he said — “
“He said he’d give me a thousand.
“A long time.”
“I’ll bet. So?”
“Let me have the money first.”
“Let me have the stone.”
“The money.”
The old man growled something and turned away. He brought a rusty coffee can up from under the counter. There was a thick wad of money in it, and he fished out two hundred dinars in old, worn bills. “Here you are, and damn your mother for a whore.”
I took the money and stuffed it into my pocket. Then I gave the stone to Hisham. “If you hurry,” I said, slurring my words despite the fact that I hadn’t had a drink or any drugs all day, “you’ll catch up with him. The bus hasn’t left yet.”
