“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?”

I stood there, looking at her. Saied gave me a jab in the side. “Well, uh, Miss Monroe,” I said, but then she started chattering again.

“The hell with it. Come on in. I guess I can use the money. But you tell that son of a bitch Khalid that—” She paused to take a long gulp from the tall glass of whiskey she was holding. “You tell him if he don’t care enough about my health, I mean, making me work when I already told him I was sick, then hell, you tell him there are plenty of others I can go work for. Anytime I want to, you can believe that.”

I tried twice to interrupt her, but I didn’t have any success. I waited until she stopped to take another drink. While she had her mouth full of the cheap liquor, I said, “Mother?”

She just stared at me for a moment, her filmy eyes wide. “No,” she said at last, in a small voice. She looked closer. Then she dropped her whiskey glass to the floor.

Later, after the return trip from Algiers and Mauretania, when I got back home to the city the first place I headed was the Budayeen. I used to live right in the heart of the walled quarter, but events and fate and Friedlander Bey had made that impossible now. I used to have a lot of friends in the Budayeen too, and I was welcome anywhere; but now there were really only two people who were generally glad to see me: Saied the Half-Hajj, and Chiriga, who ran a club on the Street halfway between the big stone arch and the cemetery. Chiri’s place had always been my home-away-from-home, where I could sit and have a few drinks in peace, hear the gossip, and not get threatened or hustled by the working girls.