Anyway, to celebrate this holy undertaking, my friends had turned my place of business into an even more raucous den of licentiousness. I guess it seemed reasonable at the time. I only wished I could recall more of what had gone on.

I didn’t have any problem remembering what I’d done earlier in the day. I’d conspired with a Damascene whore to revenge myself on a man, someone who had betrayed my trust and stolen some money from me. The financial loss had been insignificant; it was the insult that had to be dealt with.

The man was Fuad, whom the people of the Budayeen called il-Manhous, which means something like “the Universally Despised.” When the Greek philosopher Plato sat down to consider the Ideal Form of “loser,” it was Fuad he imagined.

No one really liked Fuad. He whined, he begged, and he couldn’t carry out the simplest tasks without finding humiliating new ways to screw up. Still, his reputation was that he was a pitiful guy but basically harmless. I never would’ve believed him clever enough to scam me for twenty-four-hundred kiam, yet he had. I couldn’t let him get away with that, of course, but I could afford to be patient enough to work out a satisfying counter-sting.

Friedlander Bey, my great-grandfather and the most powerful man in the city, hears of everything that happens. I hear almost everything, because I’m Papa’s trusted right-hand man and because a lot gets said in my nightclub when the liquor’s flowing.

It was a little after two o’clock in the afternoon, about eight hours before the party was due to begin. I was sitting in my usual spot at the bar, where it curved in the back. Chiriga had thrown together my first white death of the day — gin, bingara, and a little Rose’s lime juice. I had a chipzine plugged into one of my two corymbic implants, and I was hearing a speech by the new amir of Mauretania, the country where I’d been born. As for all the seminaked women, sexchanges, and debs in the club, they were no distraction. After the first hundred thousand twirling tassels, the industry begins to lose some of its raw fascination.

The lovely young Yasmin sat beside me, sipping peppermint schnapps. She was a gorgeous, black-haired sexchange with whom I’d been having an on-again, off-again affair for the last few years. I was glad to have her back working for me. She put down her glass and stretched her lithe body. “Never guess what I heard,” she said, yawning.

Yasmin hears almost as much gossip as I do, but her problem is she believes all of it. I reached up and popped out my chipzine. “You heard that they’re going to build a replica of the Budayeen out in the desert so the tourists won’t bother us local residents around here.”

Yasmin’s dark eyes grew larger. “No! Are they? For real?”

“Forget it, Yasmin, I just made that up. What did you hear?”

She lifted her peppermint schnapps again and sucked up the rest of it noisily through a straw. “Fuad, that’s what.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What about Fuad?”

“Oh, just that he’s back in town. I heard it from Floor-Show Fanya who works over by the Red Light.”

I nodded. The Red Light had always been Fuad’s favorite club. Dumb criminals really do return to the scene of the crime, as if the Felons Federation had given him a copy of their pamphlet Common Sense: Why Bother? Here he was back in the city and probably believing that I’d never find out about it.

“I praise Allah for your good news,” I said. “That’s Fuad’s idea of laying low, huh?”

“You heard how he’s got this weird thing about going out with the black working girls. They know they can rob him all day and all night long. It gets him hot or something. Now he’s got himself a job as an itinerant crumber.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. It was only two in the afternoon, and already things were getting a little strange. “The hell is an itinerant crumber, Yasmin?”

“Oh, a guy who travels from town to town, friendless and alone, living on his wits, with his stainless steel implement. He scrapes away the bread crumbs and stuff between courses in good restaurants.”

“You mean like a busboy?”

“Sure,” she said, nodding. Then she shook her head. “No, not really. Crumbing is one step below busboy. He’s working over by Anna’s restaurant in the Hotel Palazzo di Marco Aurelio, you want to go see.”

Didn’t interest me. “What, he wears a white shirt and a bow tie and all that waiter drag?”

Yasmin nodded again. “Yeah, but he’s so starved-looking, he’s no great advertisement for the restaurant.”

“Shukran,” I said. Thanks. “Very interesting, sweetheart.”

“Thought you’d like to hear it.” She squeezed my arm, slipped off her stool, and casually made her way down the bar toward the three customers who’d just come into the club. There were worse ways to get hustled than by buying Yasmin drinks for an hour.

Chiriga, my good friend, partner, and barmaid, rested her elbows on a clean bar towel. She noticed that I’d already knocked back about half my white death. “You take it easy with those,” she said, frowning. “I think Papa and Kmuzu are right. You’re more fun to have around when you’re not drunk or taking pills.”

I didn’t even answer. This was one of those black-pot kettle-calling times. Instead, I looked around our club. There were five dancers working for us in the daytime. One was Yasmin; one was the beautifully restructured real girl, Pualani; the third was Lily, a sexchange who had a crush on me; and two new dancers named Baby and Kitty. I hadn’t yet read them: Were they real girls, debs, changes? I didn’t really need to know, but everyone else on the Street hung on the day the truth would come out.

“Slow shift so far,” I said.

“Always slow in the daytime. The really kinky girls make more money at night.”

“So why don’t you work nights again and make more money?”

Chiri looked at me as if I were stupid. “Didn’t I just say? ‘Cause the really kinky girls are there.” She gave a little shudder, as if she herself hadn’t seen everything and done it all twice.

“Depends on your definition of kinky,” I said. I was twisting my thin little red straw into an equilateral triangle.

Chiri grinned at me. Her strong white teeth were filed to points, the ancient fashion among the old cannibals back home. “I’m kinky, Marîd. You’re kinky. Every girl, deb, and change here in the afternoon is kinky. But those bitches at night, though — wow, kinky is what they did last summer. They’re into whole new realms by now. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Another drink, Chiri, please.” She took my tumbler and scooped some ice cubes into it, then went to the back bar for the bingara.

I thought some more about Fuad. I suppose that with my connections I could’ve gotten even with him with less expensive preparations, but I didn’t care at all about the money. Papa had made me wealthier than I’d ever dreamed, although I never let anyone know the details. As far as my interest in Fuad was concerned, it was the principle of the thing. And after all, I was planning to get back my twenty-four-hundred kiam, as well as every copper fiq that I would invest in the scheme to make it work.

Now, what did I know for sure? Only that Fuad was back in the city, working at the Ristorante Maximo, and still courting trouble nightly at Fatima and Nassir’s Red Light Lounge. Good enough. It was time to set my scheme in motion.

I unclipped my phone from my belt and whispered Sulome’s name into it. The phone found her stored commcode and began ringing. After a few moments, I heard her voice, husky with sleep. “Marhaba,” she said.

“Il-hamdu lillaah!” I said. Praise be to God. “I’m sorry I woke you up, Sulome. It’s Marîd Audran.” Chiri brought my second white death, and served it to me with a decided lack of graciousness.

“You couldn’t have waited another couple of hours?” Sulome sounded grumpy. “It was a long night.”