As I got to the door, I looked back at Yasmin. “The universe doesn’t have secrets,” I said cynically, “only lies and swindles.” My indulgent mood vanished in a split second when I looked through the peephole. “Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath. I went back to the bed. “Yasmin,” I said softly, “give me your bag.”

“Why? Who is it?” She found her purse and passed it to me.

I knew she always carried a low-grade seizure gun for protection. I don’t carry a weapon like that; alone and unarmed I walked among the cutthroats of the Budayeen, because I was special, exempt, proud, and stupid. I had these delusions, you see, and I lived a kind of romantic fallacy. I was no more eccentric than your average raving loon. I took the gun and went back to the door. Yasmin watched me, silently and anxiously.

I opened the door. It was Selima. I held the seizure gun pointed between her eyes. “How nice to see you,” I said. “Come on in. There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“You won’t need the gun, Marîd,” said Selima. She brushed by me, seemed unhappy to see Yasmin, and looked in vain for somewhere to sit. She was extremely uncomfortable, I noticed, and very upset about something.

“So,” I said cruelly, “you just want to get in a few last whacks before somebody lays you out like Tami?”

Selima glowered, reached back, and slapped me hard across the face. I’d earned it.

“Sit on the bed, Selima. Yasmin will move over. As for the gun, it would have come in handy when you and your friends dropped by and started my morning with such a bang. Or don’t you remember about that?”

“Marîd,” she said, licking her glossy red lips, “I’m sorry about that. It was a mistake.”

“Oh, well, that makes it all better, then.” I watched Yasmin cover herself with the sheet and crawl as far away from Selima as she could, with her knees drawn up and her back in the corner. Selima had the immense breasts that was the trademark of the Black Widow Sisters, but otherwise she was almost unmodified. She was naturally prettier than most sex-changes. Tamiko had turned herself into a caricature of the modest and demure geisha; Devi accentuated her East Indian heritage, complete with a caste mark on her forehead to which she was not entitled, and when she was not working, she wore a brightly-colored silk sari, embroidered in gold. Selima, on the contrary, wore the veil and the hooded cloak, a subtle fragrance, and the demeanor of a middle-class Muslim woman of the city. I think, but I’m not sure, that she was religious; I can’t imagine how she squared her thievery and frequent violence with the teachings of the Prophet, may prayers and peace be upon him. I’m not the only self-deluded fool in the Budayeen.

“Please, Marîd, let me explain.” I’d never seen Selima — or either of her Sisters, for that matter — in such a state of near-panic. “You know that Nikki left Tami’s.” I nodded. “I don’t think she wanted to go. I think someone forced her.”

“That isn’t the message I got. She wrote me a letter about some German guy and what a wonderful life she was going to have, and that she had a real fish on the line here and she was going to play him for everything he had.”

“We all got the same letter, Marîd. Didn’t you notice anything suspicious about it, though? Maybe you don’t know Nikki’s handwriting as well as I do. Maybe you didn’t pay attention to her choice of words. There were clues in the note that made us think she was trying to get something across between the lines. I think someone was standing over her, making her write the letters so no one would think twice when she disappeared. Nikki was right-handed, and the letters were written with her left hand. The script was awful, nothing like her usual writing. She wrote our notes in French, although she knows perfectly well that none of us understands that language. She spoke English, and both Devi and Tami could have read that; that’s the language she used with them. She never mentioned an old German friend of her family; there may well have been such a man when she was younger, but the way she called herself ‘a shy, introverted little boy,’ well, that just underlined the bad feeling we had about the whole letter. Nikki told lots of stories about her life before she had her change. She was vague about most of the details — where she was really from, things like that — but she always laughed about what a terror she — he — had been. She wanted to be just like us, and so she went into these biographical accounts of her hell-raising. She was anything but shy and introverted. Marîd, that letter smelled from beginning to end.”

I let my hand with the gun drop. Everything Selima had said made sense, now that I thought about it. “That’s why you’re so shaken up,” I said thoughtfully. “You think Nikki’s in some kind of trouble.”

“I think Nikki’s in trouble,” said Selima, “but that’s not why I’m so rabbity. Marîd, Devi’s dead. She’s been murdered, too.”

I closed my eyes and groaned. Yasmin gave a loud gasp; she uttered another superstitious formula — “far from you” — to protect us from the evil that had just been mentioned. I felt weariness, as if I’d overdosed on shocking news and just couldn’t work up the proper reaction. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “let me guess: just like Tami. Burn marks, bruises around her wrists, jammed coming and going, strangled, and her throat cut. And you think someone’s out to get all three of you, and you’re next.”

I was astonished by her reply. “No, you’re wrong. I found her lying in her bed, almost like she was peacefully asleep. She’d been shot, Marîd, with an old-fashioned gun, the kind that used metal bullets. There was a bullet hole exactly centered on her caste mark. No signs of a fight or anything. Nothing disturbed in her apartment. Just Devi, part of her face blown away, a lot of blood splattered on the bedclothes and the walls. I threw up. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those old weapons were so bloody and, well, brutal.” This from a woman who’d slashed enough faces in her time. “I’ll bet no one’s been shot with a bullet in fifty years.” Selima evidently didn’t know about my Russian, whatever his name had been; dead bodies didn’t cause much scandal and gossip in the Budayeen; they weren’t all that rare. Corpses were more of an inconvenience than anything else. Getting large quantities of bloodstains out of nice silk or cashmere is a tedious job.

“Have you called Okking yet?” I asked.

Selima nodded. “It wasn’t his shift. Sergeant Hanar came and asked all the questions. I wish it’d been Okking instead.”

I knew what she meant. Hajjar was the kind of cop I think of when I think of “cop.” He walked around as if he had a cork up his ass, looking for petty rowdies to blast into grand mal seizures. He had a particular hard-on for Arabs who were inattentive to their spiritual duties: people like me and almost everyone else in the Budayeen.

I put the gun back in Yasmin’s bag. My mood had changed entirely; now suddenly, and for the first time, I felt sympathy for Selima. Yasmin put her hand on Selima’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. “I’ll make some coffee,” I said. I looked at the last Black Widow Sister. “Or would you rather have tea?”

She was grateful for our kindness, and our company, too, I think. “Tea, thank you,” she said. She had begun to calm down.

I put the kettle on to boil. “So just tell me one thing: why did the three of you work out your kinks on my body the other day?”

“Allah have mercy on me,” said Selima. She took a folded scrap of paper from her bag and brought it to me. “This is Nikki’s usual handwriting, but it’s obvious she was in a terrible hurry.” The words were written in English, scrawled quickly on the back of an envelope.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Selima glanced at me and quickly looked back down at the paper. “It says, ‘Help. Hurry. Marîd.’ That’s why we did what we did. We misunderstood. We thought you were responsible for whatever trouble she was in. Now I know that you had done her the service of negotiating her release from that pig Abdoulaye, and that she owed you money. She wanted us to let you know that she needed help, but didn’t have time to write anything more. She was probably lucky just to scribble this down.”