“Big bright tears collect in the corners of her eyes. She looks up at me with a pitiful expression on her face, at least the part of it I can see. ‘My father is desperately ill,’ she says. ‘The doctor doesn’t expect him to live through the day.’

“Well, I was shocked by the news. ‘May Allah have mercy on your father, and grant him health. If he dies, I’ll have to sell my chicken to someone else today.”

“The girl didn’t say anything for a moment. I don’t think she really cared what happened to my chicken. At last she said, ‘My father sent me here this morning to find you. His conscience is troubling him. He says that he traded unfairly with you, and he wishes to make up for it before he is called to the bosom of Allah. He begs that you accept his donkey, the very donkey that faithfully pulled my father’s cart for ten years.”

“I was a little suspicious about this offer. After all, I didn’t know this girl as well as I knew her father. ‘Let me fet this straight,” I go. ‘You want to trade your fine donkey for this chicken?’

“ ‘Yes,’ she says.

“ Til have to think it over. It’s our last chicken, you know.’ I thought about it and thought about it, but I couldn’t see anything that would make my mama mad. I was sure that finally she’d be happy about one of my trades. ‘All right,’ I go, and I grabbed the donkey’s rope halter. Take the chicken, and tell your father that I will pray for his well-being. May he return tomorrow to his stall in this souk, inshallah.’

“ ‘Inshallah,’ the girl says, and she lowered her eyes to the ground. She went away with my mama’s last chicken, and I never saw her again. I think about her a lot, though, because she’s probably the only woman I’ll ever love.”

“Yeah, you right,” I said, laughing. Fuad has this thing for mean hookers, the kind who carry straight razors. You can find him every night over at the Red Light Lounge, Fatima and Nassir’s place. Nobody else I know even has the guts to go in there alone. Fuad spends a lot of time in there, falling in love and getting ripped off.

“Anyway,” he said, “I started leading the donkey home, when I remembered what my mama told me. So I strained and pushed and lifted until I got that donkey to my shoulders. I got to admit, I really didn’t know why my mama wanted me to carry it that way, when it could walk by itself just as well as I could. Still, I didn’t want her mad at me anymore.

“I staggered toward home with the donkey across my back, and as I climbed down the hill, I passed the beautiful walled palace of Shaykh Salman Mubarak. Now, you know Shaykh Salman lived in that great mansion with his beautiful daughter, who was sixteen years old and had never laughed from the time she’d been born. She had never even smiled. She could talk all right, but she just didn’t. Nobody, not even her wealthy father, had ever heard her say a single word since the shaykh’s wife, the girl’s mother, had died when the girl was three years old. The doctors said that if anyone could make her laugh, she’d be able to speak again; or if anyone could make her speak, she’d then laugh as any normal person might. Shaykh Salman had made the usual offers of riches and his daughter’s hand in marriage, but suitor after suitor had tried and failed. The girl just sat glumly by the window, watching the world pass by below.

“That’s when I happened to walk by carrying the donkey. It must have looked pretty weird, upside down on my back with its hooves waving in the air. I was told later that the shaykh’s beautiful daughter stared at me and the donkey for a few seconds, and then burst out into a helpless fit of laughter. She recovered her speech then too, because she called loudly for her father to come look. The shaykh was so grateful, he ran out into the road to meet me.”

“Did he give you his daughter?” asked Indihar.

“You bet,” said Fuad.

“How romantic,” she said.

“And when I married her, I became the richest man in the city after the shaykh himself. And my mother was quite pleased, and didn’t mind that she had no chickens left at all. She came to live with my wife and me in the shaykh’s palace.”

I sighed. “How much of that was true, Fuad?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “I forgot a part. It turns out that the shaykh was really the poultry dresser, who went to the souk every morning. I don’t remember the reason why. And so the veiled girl was just as beautiful as I thought she’d be.”

Indihar reached over and grabbed Fuad’s half-full mug of beer. She raised it to her lips and finished it off. “I thought the poultry dresser was dying,” she said.

Fuad frowned in serious thought. “Yeah, well, he was, see, but when he heard his daughter laughing and calling his name, he was miraculously healed.”

“All praise to Allah, Fount of blessings,” I said.

“I made up that part about Shaykh Salman and his beautiful daughter,” said Fuad.

“Uh huh,” said Indihar. “You and your mama really raise chickens?”

“Oh sure,” he said eagerly, “but we don’t got any right at the moment.”

“Because you traded them?”

“I told my mama we should start again with younger chickens that still got their teeth.”

“Thank God, I have to go mop up the spilled beer,” said Indihar. She went back behind the bar.

I drained the last of my White Death. After Fuad’s story, I wanted three or four more drinks. “Another beer?” I asked him.

He stood up. “Thanks, Marid, but I got to make some money. I want to buy a gold chain for this girl.”

“Why don’t you give her one of the ones you try selling to the tourists?”

He looked horrified. “She’d scratch my eyes out!” he said. It sounded like he’d found another hot-blooded sweetheart. “By the way, the Half-Hajj said I should show you this.” He pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it in front of me.

I picked it up. It was heavy, shiny, and made of steel, about six inches long. I’d never held one in my hand before, but I knew what it was: an empty clip from an automatic pistol.

Not many people used the old projectile weapons anymore, but Paul Jawarski used a .45 caliber gun. That’s what this came from.

“Where’d you get this, Fuad?” I asked casually, turning the clip over in my hands.

“Oh, in the alley behind Gay Che’s. Sometimes you can find money there, it falls out of their pockets when they go out into the alley. I showed it to Saied first, and he said you’d like to see it.”

“Uh huh. I never heard of Gay Che’s.”

“You wouldn’t like it. It’s a tough place. I don’t ever go in there. I just hang around in the alley.”

“Sounds smart. Where is it?”

Fuad closed one eye and looked thoughtful. “Hamidiyya. On Aknouli Street.”

Hamidiyya. Reda Abu Adil’s little kingdom. “Now, why did Saied think I’d want to know about this?” I asked.

Fuad shrugged. “He didn’t tell me. Did you? Want to see it, I mean?”

“Yeah, thanks, Fuad. I owe you one.”

“Really? Then maybe—”

“Another time, Fuad.” I made a distracted, dismissing motion with my hand. I guess he took the hint, because in a little while I noticed he was gone. I had a lot to think about: Was this a clue? Was Paul Jawarski hiding out in one of Abu Adil’s crummier enterprises? Or was it some kind of a trap baited by Saied the Half-Hajj, who couldn’t know that I no longer trusted him?

I didn’t have any choice. Trap or not, I was going to follow it up. But not just yet waited until the next morning before I followed up on Fuad’s information. I had the disconcerting feeling that I was being set up, but at the same time I felt I might as well live dangerously. I sure wasn’t getting any closer to finding Jawarski using more conventional methods. Maybe sticking my head on the block would tempt the executioner to make an appearance.

And then maybe the clip didn’t belong to Jawarski, after all, and there wasn’t anything at Gay Che’s but a lot of guys in exquisitely tailored caftans.