Free Budayeen Nights by George Alec Effinger Page A

sentiment, too, and besides, it was starting to sound foolish even to me. The edge of my anger had vanished. I think I was just greatly annoyed to have to learn these things after so many years. It was hard for me to accept. I mean, now I had to forget almost everything I thought I knew about myself. For one thing, I’d always been proud of the fact that I was half-Berber and half-French. I dressed in European style most of the time—boots and jeans and work shirts. I suppose I’d always felt a little superior to the Arabs I lived among. Now I had to get used to the thought that I could very well be half-Berber and half-Arab.
    The raucous, thumping sound of mid-twenty-first-century hispo roc from Chiri’s jukebox broke into my daydream. Some forgotten band was growling an ugly chant about some damn thing or other. I’ve never gotten around to learning any Spanish dialects, and I don’t own a Spanish-language daddy. If I ever run into any Colombian industrialists, they can just damn well speak Arabic. I have a soft spot in my liver for them because of their production of narcotics, but outside of that I don’t see what South America is for. The world doesn’t need an overpopulated, starving, Spanish-speaking India in the Western Hemisphere. Spain, their mother country, tried Islam and said a polite no-thank-you, and their national character sublimed right off into nothingness. That’s Allah punishing them.
    I was bored as hell. I knocked back the rest of my drink. Chiri looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “No thanks, Chiri,” I said. “I got to go.”
    She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Well, don’t be a stranger now that you’re a fascist swine cop.”
    “Right,” I said. I got up from my stool. It was time to go to work. I left the rest of my change for Chiri’s hungry register and went back outside.
    3

    There was always a crowd of young children outside the station house on Walid al-Akbar Street. I don’t know if they were hoping to see some shackled criminal dragged in, or waiting for their own parents to be released from custody, or just loitering in the hopes of begging loose change. I’d been one of them myself not so very long ago in Algiers, and it didn’t hurt me any to throw a few kiam into the air and watch them scramble for it. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a clutch of coins. The older, bigger kids caught the easy money, and the smaller ones clung to my legs and wailed, “Baksheesh!” Every day it was a challenge to shake my young passengers loose before I got to the revolving door.
    I had a desk in a small cubicle on the third floor of the station house. My cubicle was separated from its neighbors by pale green plasterboard walls only a little taller than I was. There was always a sour smell in the air, a mixture of stale sweat, tobacco smoke, and disinfectant. Above my desk was a shelf that held plastic boxes filled with dated files on cobalt-alloy cell-memories. On the floor was a big cardboard box crammed with bound printouts. I had a grimy Annamese data deck on my desk that gave me trouble-free operation on two out of every three jobs. Of course, my work wasn’t very important, not according to Lieutenant Hajjar. We both knew I was there just to keep an eye on things for Friedlander Bey. It amounted to Papa having his own private police precinct devoted to protecting his interests in the Budayeen.
    Hajjar came into my cubicle and dropped another heavy box on my desk. He was a Jordanian who’d had a lengthy arrest record of his own before he came to the city. I suppose he’d been an athlete ten years ago, but he hadn’t stayed in shape. He had thinning brown hair and lately he’d tried to grow a beard. It looked terrible, like the skin of a kiwi fruit. He looked like a mother’s bad dream of a drug dealer, which is what he was when he wasn’t administering the affairs of the nearby walled quarter.
    “How you doin’, Audran?” he said.
    “Okay,” I said.