I had my soup, and it was wonderful. Saied just watched me wordlessly and sipped a glass of tea. We got back on the bus in time. I felt good now, comfortably full, and warmed by a nostalgic glow. I took the window seat, hoping that I’d be able to see some familiar landscape as we passed through Jijel and Mansouria. Of course, it was as black as the inside of my pocket beyond the glass, and I saw nothing but the moon and the fiercely twinkling stars. Still, I pretended to myself that I could make out landmarks that meant I was drawing closer to Algiers, the city where I had spent a lot of my childhood.

When at last we pulled into Algiers sometime after sunrise, the Half-Hajj shook me awake. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I felt terrible. My head felt like it had been crammed full of sharp-edged broken glass, and I had a pinched nerve in my neck, too. I took out my pill case and stared into it for a while. Did I prefer to make my entrance into Algiers hallucinating, narcotized, or somnambulant? It was a difficult decision. I went for pain-free but conscious, so I fished out eight tabs of Sonneine. The sunnies obliterated my headache — and every other mildly unpleasant sensation — and I more or less floated from the bus station in Mustapha to a cab.

“You’re stoned,” said Saied when we got in the back of the taxi. I told the driver to take us to a public data library.

“Me? Stoned? When have you ever known me to be stoned so early in the morning?”

“Yesterday. The day before yesterday. The day before that.”

“I mean except for then. I function better with a ton of opiates in me than most people do straight.”

“Sure you do.”

I stared out the taxi’s window. “Anyway,” I said, “I’ve got a rack of daddies that can compensate.”

“Marîd Audran, Silicon Superman.”

“Look,” I said, annoyed by Saied’s attitude, “for a long time I was terrified of getting wired, but now I don’t know how I ever got along without it.”

“Then why the hell are you still decimating your brain cells with drugs?” asked the Half-Hajj.

“Call me old-fashioned. Besides, when I pop the daddies out, I feel terrible. All that suppressed fatigue and pain hits me at once.”

“And you don’t get paybacks with your sunnies and beauties, right? That what you’re saying?”

“Shut up, Saied. Why the hell are you so concerned all of a sudden?”

He looked at me sideways and smiled. “The religion has this ban on liquor and hard drugs, you know.” And this coming from the Half-Hajj who, if he’d ever been inside a mosque in his life, was there only to check out the boys’ school.

So in ten or fifteen minutes the cab driver let us out at the library. I felt a peculiar nervous excitement, although I didn’t understand why. All I was doing was climbing the granite steps of a public building; why should I be so wound up? I tried to occupy my mind with more pleasant thoughts.

Inside, there were a number of terminals vacant. I sat down at the gray screen of a battered Bab el-Marifi. It asked me what sort of search I wanted to conduct. The machine’s voice synthesizer had been designed in one of the North American republics, and it was having a lot of trouble pronouncing Arabic. I said, “Name,” then “Enter.” When the cursor appeared again, I said, “Monroe comma Angel.” The data deck thought about that for a while, then white letters began flicking across its bright face:

I had the machine print out the address. The Half-Hajj raised his eyebrows at me and I nodded. “Looks like I’m gonna get some answers.”

“Inshallah,” murmured Saied. If God wills.

We went back out into the hot, steamy morning to find another taxi. It didn’t take long to get from the library to the Kasbah. There wasn’t as much traffic as I remembered from my childhood — not vehicular traffic, anyway; but there were still the slow, unavoidable battalions of heavily laden donkeys being cajoled through the narrow streets.

Number 16 was an exhausted, crumbling brick pile with two bulging upper stories that hung out over the 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?”