I opened my eyes and stared at Morgan. “Just keep looking, buddy,” I said, “because I don’t think anybody else is.”

“Money?”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“You got any money for me?”

I stood up angrily. “No, I ain’t got money for you! I told you I’d pay you another five hundred when you found Jawarski. That’s the deal.”

Morgan stood up. “All right, man, just take it easy, okay?”

I was embarrassed by my outburst. “I’m sorry, Morgan,” I said. “I’m not mad at you. This whole business is making me crazy.”

“Uh yeah. I know you were good friends with Shaknahyi. All right, I’ll keep at it.”

“Thanks, Morgan.” I followed him out of the office and showed him to the front door. “We’re not gonna let them get away with it.”

“Crime don’t pay, right, man?” Morgan grinned and slapped my burned shoulder. The pain made me wince.

“Yeah, you right.” I walked with him down the curving gravel driveway. I wanted to get away from the house, and if I left right now, I could escape without Kmuzu tagging along. “Like a ride to the Budayeen?” I asked.

“No, that’s all right. I got some other stuff to do, man. See you later.”

I turned back toward the house and got the car out of the garage. I thought I’d drop in on my club and see if it was still in one piece.

The day shift was still on, and there were only five or six customers. Indihar frowned and looked away when I caught her eye. I decided to sit at a table, rather than at my usual place at the bar. Pualani came up to say hello. “Want a White Death?” she asked.

“White Death? What’s that?”

She shrugged her slender shoulders. “Oh, that’s what Chiri calls that awful gin and bingara thing you drink.” She grimaced.

“Yeah, bring me a White Death.” It wasn’t a bad name.

Brandi was on stage, dancing to the Sikh propaganda music that had suddenly become wildly popular. I hated it a lot. I didn’t want to listen to political rantings, even if it had a great beat and a catchy two-bar figure.

“Here you go, boss,” said Pualani, dropping a cocktail napkin in front of me and pinning it in place with a highball glass. “Mind if I sit down?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.”

“Want to ask you about something. I’m thinkin’ of, you know, havin’ my brain wired so I can use moddies?” She cocked her head to the side and peered at me, as if I might not comprehend what she was telling me. She didn’t say anything more.

“Yeah,” I said at last. You had to respond like that with Pualani or you could spend the rest of your life trapped in the same conversation.

“Well, everybody says you know more’n anybody about it. I was wonderin’ if you could, like, recommend somebody?”

“A surgeon?”

“Uhhuh.”

“Well, there’s plenty of doctors around who’ll do it for you. Most of ’em are pretty reliable.”

Pualani gave me a pretty frown. “Well, I was wonderin’ if I could go to your doctor and use your name.”

“Dr. Lisan doesn’t have a private practice. But his assistant, Dr. Yenjknani, is a good man.”

Pualani squinted at me. “Would you write his name down for me?”

“Sure.” I scribbled the name and commcode on the cocktail napkin.

“And also,” she said, “does he do tits?”

“I don’t think so, honey.” Now Pualani had already spent a small fortune modifying her body. She had a cute ass that had been rounded with silicone, and cheekbones accentuated with silicone, and her chin and nose reshaped, and she’d already had breast implants. She had a devastating figure, and I thought it was a mistake to blow up her bust any more; but I’d learned a long time ago that you can’t reason with dancers when it comes to breast size.

“Oh, okay,” she said, obviously disappointed. I took a sip of my White Death. Pualani snowed no sign of going away. I waited for her to continue. “You know Indihar?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Well, she’s havin’ a lot of trouble. She’s really broke.”

“I tried giving her a loan, but she wouldn’t take it.”

Pualani shook her head. “No, she won’t take a loan. But maybe you could help her out some other way.” Then she got up and wandered toward the front of the club, and sat down next to a couple of Oriental men wearing sailor’s caps.

Sometimes I just wished real life would leave me alone. I gulped a little more of my drink, then stood up and went to the bar. Indihar noticed me and came over. “Get you something, Marid?” she asked.

“Jirji’s pension ain’t gonna help you very much, right?”

She gave me an annoyed look and turned away. She headed for the other end of the bar. “Don’t want your money,” she said.

I followed her. “I’m not offering money. How would you like a low-hassle job where you can live free and watch your kids all day? You wouldn’t have to pay a babysitter.”

She turned around. “What’s this all about?” Her expression was mistrustful.

I smiled. “I mean bringing Little Jirji, Zahra, and Hakim and moving into one of the empty apartments in Papa’s house. Save you a lot of money every month, Indihar.”

She considered that. “Maybe. Why would you want me in Papa’s house?”

I had to come up with some phony but real-sounding reason. “It’s my mother. I need someone to keep an eye on her. I’d be willing to pay you whatever you wanted.”

Indihar patted the bar with one hand. “Already got a job, remember?”

“Hey,” I said, “if that’s the problem, you’re fired.”

Her face lost its color. “The hell you talking about?”

“Think about it, Indihar. I’m offering you a nice home, free rent and meals, plus good money every week for a part-time job making sure my mom doesn’t do anything crazy. Your kids’ll be taken care of and you won’t have to come into this bar every day. You won’t have to take your clothes off and dance, and you won’t have to deal with the drunk jerks and the lazy-ass girls like Brandi.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I’ll let you know, Marid,” she said. “Soon as I figure out what kind of hustle you’re trying to pull. Sounds too good to be straight, sweetheart. I mean, you’re not wearing a Santa Glaus moddy or nothing.”

“Yeah, you think about it. Talk it over with Chiri. You trust her. See what she thinks.”

Indihar nodded. She was still watching me uncertainly. “Even if I say yes,” she said, “I’m not gonna fuck you.”

I sighed. “Yeah, you right.” I went back to my table. A minute after I sat down again, Fuad il-Manhous let himself drop into the other chair. “I woke up the other day,” he said in his high-pitched, nasal voice, “and my mama says to me, ‘Fuad, we don’t have no money, go out and take one of the chickens and sell it.’ ”

He was starting one of his dumb fables. He was so desperate for attention that he’d make himself look like a total fool just to make me laugh. The sad thing was that even his most fantastic stories were based on Fuad’s actual fuck-ups.

He looked at me closely, to make sure I understood him so far. “So I did. I went out to my mama’s chicken coop and I chased those chickens around and around till I caught one. Then I carried it down the hill and up the hill and over the bridge and through the streets till I came to the Souk of the Poultry Dressers. Well, I never took a chicken to market before, so I didn’t know what to do. I stood there in the middle of the square all day, until I saw the merchants locking their money up in boxes and loading their leftover stuff onto their carts. I’d already heard the sunset call to prayer, so I knew I didn’t have much time.

“I took my chicken to one of the men and told him I wanted to sell it, and he looked at it and shook his head.

’This chicken has lost all its teeth,” he says.

“So I looked at it, and by Allah, he was right. That chicken didn’t have a tooth in its head. So I says, ‘What will you give me for it?’ And the man gave me a handful of copper fiqs.

“Then I walked home with one hand in my pocket and my other hand holding the copper fiqs. Just when I was crossing the bridge over the drainage canal, there was this fierce swarm of gnats. I started waving my hands and swatting them, and then I ran the rest of the way across the bridge. When I got to the other side, I looked and I saw that I didn’t have the money anymore. I’d dropped all the coins into the canal.”