“It’s important to me,” I said. I told her about my life in the faraway city, how I’d lived as a subsonic hustler until Friedlander Bey had chosen me as the instrument of his will. “You live in the city now?” She said that with a nostalgic longing. I never knew she’d been to the city.

“I lived in the Budayeen,” I said, “but Friedlander Bey moved me into his palace.”

“You work for him?”

“I had no choice.” I shrugged. She nodded. It surprised me that she knew who Papa was too.

“So what did you come for?”

That was going to be hard to explain. “I wanted to find out everything I could about my father.”

She looked at me over the rim of her whiskey glass. “You already heard everything,” she said.

“I don’t think so. How sure are you that this French sailor was my dad?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “His name was Bernard Audran. We met in a coffee shop. I was living in Sidi-bel-Abbes then. He took me to dinner, we liked each other. I moved in with him. We came to live in Algiers after that, and we were together for a year and a half. Then after you was born, one day he just left. I never heard from him again. I don’t know where he went.”

“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.”