Free Budayeen Nights by George Alec Effinger

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