“I do. Into the ground, that’s where. Took me a long time, but I traced Algerian computer records back far enough. There was a Bernard Audran in the navy of Provence, and he was in Mauretania when the French Confederate Union tried to regain control over us. The problem is that his brains were bashed out by some unidentified noraf more than a year before I was born. Maybe you could think back and see if you can get a clearer picture of those events.”

That made her furious. She jumped up and flung her half-full glass of liquor at me. It smashed into the already stained and streaked wall to my right. I could smell the pungent, undiluted sharpness of the Irish whiskey. I heard Saied murmuring something beside me, maybe a prayer. My mother took a couple of steps toward me, her face ugly with rage. “You calling me a liar?” she shrieked.

Well, I was. “I’m just telling you that the official records say something different.”

“Fuck the official records!”

“The records also say that you were married seven times in two years. No mention of any divorces.”

My mother’s anger faltered a bit. “How did that get in the computers? I never got officially married, not with no license or nothing.”

“I think you underestimate the government’s talent for keeping track of people. It’s all there for anybody to see.”

Now she looked frightened. “What else’d you find out?”

I let her off her own hook. “Nothing else. There wasn’t anything more. You want something else to stay buried, you don’t have to worry.” That was a He; I had learned plenty more about my mom.

“Good,” she said, relieved. “I don’t like you prying into what I done. It don’t show respect.”

I had an answer to that, but I didn’t use it. “What started all this nostalgic research,” I said in a quiet voice, “was some business I was taking care of for Papa.” Everybody in the Budayeen calls Friedlander Bey “Papa.” It’s an affectionate token of terror. “This police lieutenant who handled matters in the Budayeen died, so Papa decided that we needed a kind of public affairs officer, somebody to keep communications open between him and the police department. He asked me to take the job.”

Her mouth twisted. “Oh yeah? You got a gun now? You got a badge?” It was from my mother that I learned my dislike for cops.

“Yeah,” I said, “I got a gun and a badge.”

“Your badge ain’t any good in Algiers, salaud.”

“They give me professional courtesy wherever I go.” I didn’t even know if that was true here. “The point is, while I was deep in the cop comp, I took the opportunity to read my own file, and a few others. The funny thing was, my name and Friedlander Bey’s kept popping up together. And not just in the records of the last few years. I counted at least eight entries — hints, you understand, but nothing definite — that suggested the two of us were blood kin.” That got a loud reaction from the Half-Hajj; maybe I should have told him about all this before.

“So?” said my mother.

“The hell kind of answer is that? So what does it mean? You ever jam Friedlander Bey, back in your golden youth?”

She looked raving mad again. “Hell, I jammed lots of guys. You expect me to remember all of them? I didn’t even remember what they looked like while I was jamming them.”

“You didn’t want to get involved, right? You just wanted to be good friends. Were you ever friends enough to give credit? Or did you always ask for the cash up front?”

“Maghrebi,” cried Saied, “this is your mother!” I didn’t think it was possible to shock him.

“Yeah, it’s my mother. Look at her.”

She crossed the room in three steps, reached back, and gave me a hard slap across the face. It made me fall back a step. “Get the fuck out of here!” she yelled.

I put my hand to my cheek and glared at her. “You answer one thing first: Could Friedlander Bey be my real father?”

Her hand was poised to deliver another clout. “Yeah, he could be, the way practically any man could be. Go back to the city and climb up on his knee, sonny boy. I don’t ever want to see you around here again.”

She could rest easy on that score. I turned my back on her and left that repulsive hole in the wall. I didn’t bother to shut the door on the way out. The Half-Hajj did, and then he hurried to catch up with me. I was storming down the stairs. “Listen, Marîd,” he said. Until he spoke, I didn’t realize how wild I was. “I guess all this is a big surprise to you — “

“You do? You’re very perceptive today, Saied.”

“ — but you can’t act that way toward your mother. Remember what it says — “

“In the Qur’ân? Yeah, I know. Well, what does the Straight Path have to say about prostitution? What does it have to say about the kind of degenerate my holy mother has turned into?”

“You’ve got a lot of room to talk. If there was a cheaper hustler in the Budayeen, I never met him.”

I smiled coldly. “Thanks a lot, Saied, but I don’t live in the Budayeen anymore. You forget? And I don’t hustle anybody or anything. I got a steady job.”

He spat at my feet. “You used to do nearly anything to make a few kiam.”

“Anyway, just because I used to be the scum of the earth, it doesn’t make it all right for my mother to be scum, too.”

“Why don’t you just shut up about her? I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Your empathy just grows and grows, Saied,” I said. “You don’t know everything I know. My alma mater back there was into renting herself to strangers long before she had to support the two of us. She wasn’t the forlorn heroine she always said she was. She glossed over a lot of the truth.”

The Half-Hajj looked me hard in the eye for a few seconds. “Yeah?” he said. “Half the girls, changes, and debs we know do the same thing, and you don’t have any problem treating them like human beings.”

I was about to say “Sure, but none of them is my mother.” I stopped myself. He would have jumped on that sentiment, too, and besides, it was starting to sound foolish even to me. The edge of my anger had vanished. I think I was just greatly annoyed to have to learn these things after so many years. It was hard for me to accept. I mean, now I had to forget almost everything I thought I knew about myself. For one thing, I’d always been proud of the fact that I was half-Berber and half-French. I dressed in European style most of the time — boots and jeans and work shirts. I suppose I’d always felt a little superior to the Arabs I lived among. Now I had to get used to the thought that I could very well be half-Berber and half-Arab.

The raucous, thumping sound of mid-twenty-first-century hispo roc from Chiri’s jukebox broke into my daydream. Some forgotten band was growling an ugly chant about some damn thing or other. I’ve never gotten around to learning any Spanish dialects, and I don’t own a Spanish-language daddy. If I ever run into any Colombian industrialists, they can just damn well speak Arabic. I have a soft spot in my liver for them because of their production of narcotics, but outside of that I don’t see what South America is for. The world doesn’t need an overpopulated, starving, Spanish-speaking India in the Western Hemisphere. Spain, their mother country, tried Islam and said a polite no-thank-you, and their national character sublimed right off into nothingness. That’s Allah punishing them.

I was bored as hell. I knocked back the rest of my drink. Chiri looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “No thanks, Chiri,” I said. “I got to go.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Well, don’t be a stranger now that you’re a fascist swine cop.”

“Right,” I said. I got up from my stool. It was time to go to work. I left the rest of my change for Chiri’s hungry register and went back outside.

There was always a crowd of young children outside the station house on Walid al-Akbar Street. I don’t know if they were hoping to see some shackled criminal dragged in, or waiting for their own parents to be released from custody, or just loitering in the hopes of begging loose change. I’d been one of them myself not so very long ago in Algiers, and it didn’t hurt me any to throw a few kiam into the air and watch them scramble for it. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a clutch of coins. The older, bigger kids caught the easy money, and the smaller ones clung to my legs and wailed, “Baksheesh!” Every day it was a challenge to shake my young passengers loose before I got to the revolving door.