On the bus, I sat next to him, but I didn’t want to talk to him or listen to him gloat.

“What’d we get for that chunk of glass?” he wanted to know. He’d already replaced the real diamond in his ring.

I just handed the money to him. It was his game, it was his score. I couldn’t have cared less. I don’t even know why I went along with him, except that he’d said he wouldn’t come to Algeria with me unless I did.

He counted the bills. “Two hundred? That’s all? We got more the last two times. Oh well, what the hell — that’s two hundred dinars more we can blow in Algiers. ‘Come with me to the Kasbah.’ Little do those gazelle-eyed boys know what’s stealing toward them even now, through the lemon-scented night.”

“This stinking bus, that’s what, Saied.”

He looked at me with wide eyes, then laughed. “You got no romance in you, Marid,” he said. “Ever since you had your brain wired, you been no fun at all.”

“How about that.” I didn’t want to talk anymore. I pretended that I was going to sleep. I just closed my eyes and listened to the bus thumping and thudding over the broken pavement, with the unending arguments and laughter of the other passengers all around me. It was crowded and hot on that reeking bus, but it was carrying

me hour by hour nearer to the solution of my own mystery. I had come to a point in my life where I needed to find out who I really was.

The bus stopped in the Barbary town of Annaba, and an old man with a grizzled gray beard came aboard selling apricot nectar. I got some for myself and some for the Half-Hajj. Apricots are the pride of Mauretania, and the juice was the first real sign that I was getting close to home. I closed my eyes and inhaled that delicate apricot aroma, then swallowed a mouthful of juice and savored the thick sweetness. Saied just gulped his down with a grunt and gave me a blunt “Thanks.” The guy’s got all the refinement of a dead bat.