Budayeen Nights by George Alec Effinger Read Free Book Online Page A

great wild west. You tell me.”
    “Have we got to Algeria yet?” I didn’t think so.
    “No, stupid. I’ve been sitting in that goddamn little coffeehouse for three hours charming the warts off this fat fool. His name is Hisham.”
    “Where are we?
    “Just crossed through Carthage. We’re on the outskirts of Old Tunis now. So listen to me. What’s the old guy’s name?”
    “Huh? I don’t remember.”
    He hit me hard in the right temple with the palm of his other hand. I hadn’t slept in two nights. I was a little confused. Anyway, he got the easy part of the job: Sitting around the bus stops, drinking mint tea with the local ringleaders and gossiping about the marauding Christians and the marauding Jews and the marauding heathen niggers and just in general being goddamn smooth; and I got the piss-soaked alleys and the flies. I couldn’t remember why we divided this business up like that. After all, I was supposed to be in charge—it was my idea to find this woman, it was my trip, we were using my money. But Saied took the mint tea and the gossip, and I got—well, I don’t have to go into that again.
    We waited the appropriate amount of time. The sun was disappearing behind a western wall; it was almost time for the sunset call to prayer. I stared at Saied, who was now dozing. Good, I thought, now I get to hit him in the head. I had just gotten up and taken one little step, when he looked up at me. “It’s time, I guess,” he said, yawning. I nodded, didn’t have anything to add. So I sat back down, and Saied the Half-Hajj went into his act.
    Saied is a natural-born liar, and it’s a pleasure to watch him hustle.
    He had the personality module he liked best plugged into his brain—his heavy-duty, steel-belted, mean-mother-of-a-tough-guy moddy. Nobody messed with the Half-Hajj when he was chipping that one in.
    Back home in the city, Saied thought it was beneath him to earn money. He liked to sit in the cafes with me and Mahmoud and Jacques, all day and all evening. His little chicken, the American boy everybody called Abdul-Hassan, went out with older men and brought home the rent money. Saied liked to sneer a lot and wear his gallebeya cinched with a wide black leather belt, which was decorated with shiny chrome steel strips and studs. The Half-Hajj was always careful of his appearance.
    What he was doing in this vermin-infested roadside slum was what he called fun. I waited a few minutes and followed him around the corner and into the coffeehouse. I shuffled in, unkempt, filthy, and took a chair in a shadowy corner. The proprietor glanced at me, frowned, and turned back to Saied. Nobody ever paid any attention to me. Saied was finishing the tail-end of a joke I’d heard him tell a dozen times since we’d left the city. When he came to the payoff, the shopkeeper and the four other men at the long counter burst into laughter. They liked Saied. He could make people like him whenever he wanted. That talent was programmed into an add-on chip snapped into his bad-ass moddy. With the right moddy and the right daddy chips, it didn’t matter where you’d been born or how you’d been raised. You could fit in with any sort of people, you could speak any language, you could handle yourself in any situation. The information was fed directly into your short-term memory. You could literally become another person, Ramses II or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, until you popped the moddy and daddies out.
    Saied was being rough and dangerous, but he was also being charming, if you can imagine that combination. I watched the shop owner reach and grab the teapot. He poured tea into the Half-Hajj’s glass, slopping some onto the wooden counter. Nobody moved to mop it up. Saied raised the glass to drink, then slammed it down again. “Yaa salam!” he roared. He leaped up.
    “What is it, O my friend?” asked Hisham, the proprietor.
    “My ring!” Saied shouted. He was wearing a large gold ring, and he’d been waving