2

 

 

LATER, after the return trip from Algiers and Mauretania, when I got back home to the city the first place I headed was the Budayeen. I used to live right in the heart of the walled quarter, but events and fate and Friedlander Bey had made that impossible now. I used to have a lot of friends in the Budayeen too, and I was welcome anywhere; but now there were really only two people who were generally glad to see me: Saied the Half-Hajj, and Chiriga, who ran a club on the Street halfway between the big stone arch and the cemetery. Chiri's place had always been my home-away-from-home, where I could sit and have a few drinks in peace, hear the gossip, and not get threatened or hustled by the working girls.

Once upon a time I'd had to kill a few people, mostly in self-defense. More than one club owner had told me never to set foot in his bar again. After that, a lot of my friends decided that they could do without my company, but Chiri had more sense.

She's a hard-working woman, a tall black African with ritual facial scars and sharply filed cannibal teeth. To be honest, I don't really know if those canines of hers are mere decoration, like the patterns on her forehead and cheeks, or a sign that dinner at her house was composed of delicacies implicitly and explicitly forbidden by the noble Qur'ân. Chiri's a moddy, but she thinks of herself as a smart moddy. At work, she's always herself. She chips in her fantasies at home, where she won't bother anyone else. I respect that.

When I came through the club's door, I was struck first by a welcome wave of cool air. Her air conditioning, as undependable as all old Russian-made hardware is, was working for a change. I felt better already. Chiri was deep in conversation with a customer, some bald guy with a bare chest. He was wearing black vinyl pants with the look of real leather, and his left hand was handcuffed behind him to his belt. He had a corymbic implant on the crest of his skull, and a pale green plastic moddy was feeding him somebody else's personality. If Chiri was giving him the time of day, then he couldn't have been dangerous, and probably he wasn't even all that obnoxious.

Chiri doesn't have much patience with the crowd she caters to. Her philosophy is that somebody has to sell them liquor and drugs, but that doesn't mean she has to socialize with them.

I was her old pal, and I knew most of the girls who worked for her. Of course, there were always new faces—and I mean new, carved out of dull, plain faces with surgical skill, turning ordinary looks into enthralling artificial beauty. The old-time employees got fired or quit in a huff on a regular basis; but after working for Frenchy Benoit or Jo-Mama for a while, they circulated back to their former jobs. They left me pretty much alone, because I'd rarely buy them cocktails and I didn't have any use for their professional charms. The new girls could try hustling me, but Chiri usually told them to lay off.

In their unforgiving eyes I'd become the Creature Without A Soul. People like Blanca and Fanya and Yasmin looked the other way if I caught their eye. Some of the girls didn't know what I'd done or didn't care, and they kept me from feeling like a total outcast. Still, it was a lot quieter and lonelier for me in the Budayeen than it used to be. I tried not to care.

"Jambo, Bwana Marîd!" Chiriga Called to me when she noticed that I was sitting nearby. She left the handcuffed moddy and drifted slowly down her bar, plopping a cork coaster in front of me. "You come to share your wealth with this poor savage. In my native land, my people have nothing to eat and wander many miles in search of water. Here I have found peace and plenty. I have learned what friendship is. I have found disgusting men who would touch the hidden parts of my body. You will buy me drinks and leave me a huge tip. You will tell all your new friends about my place, and they will come in and want to touch the hidden parts of my body. I will own many shiny, cheap things. It is all as God wills."

I stared at her for a few seconds. Sometimes it's hard to figure what kind of mood Chiri's in. "Big nigger girl talk dumb," I said at last.

She grinned and dropped her ignorant Dinka act. "Yeah, you right," she said. "What is it today?"

"Gin," I said. I usually have a shot of gin and a shot of bingara over ice, with a little Rose's lime juice. The drink is my own invention, but I've never gotten around to naming it. Other times I have vodka gimlets, because that's what Philip Marlowe drinks in The Long Goodbye. Then on those occasions when I just really want to get loaded fast, I drink from Chiri's private stock of tende, a truly loathsome African liquor from the Sudan or the Congo or someplace, made, I think, from fermented yams and spadefoot toads. If you are ever offered tende, do not taste it. You will be sorry. Allah knows that I am.

The dancer just finishing her last number was an Egyptian girl named Indihar. I'd known her for years. She used to work for Frenchy Benoit, but now she was wiggling her ass in Chiri's club. She came up to me when she got offstage, wrapped now in a pale peach-colored shawl that had little success in concealing her voluptuous body. "Want to tip me for my dancing?" she asked.

"It would give me untold pleasure," I said. I took a kiam bill from my change and stuffed it into her cleavage. If she was going to treat me like a mark, I was going to act like one. "Now," I said, "I won't feel guilty about going home and fantasizing about you all night."

"That'll cost you extra," she said, moving down the bar toward the bare-chested guy in the vinyl pedal pushers.

I watched her walk away. "I like that girl," I said to Chiriga.

"That's our Indihar, one fine package of suntanned fun," said Chiri.

Indihar was a real girl with a real personality, a rarity in that club. Chiri seemed to prefer in her employees the high-velocity prettiness of a sexchange. Chiri told me once that changes take better care of their appearance. Their prefab beauty is their whole life. Allah forbid that a single hair of their eyebrows should be out of place.

By her own standards, Indihar was a good Muslim woman too. She didn't have the head wiring that most dancers had. The more conservative imams taught that the implants fell under the same prohibition as intoxicants, because some people got their pleasure centers wired and spent the remainder of their short lives amp-addicted. Even if, as in my case, the pleasure center is left alone, the use of a moddy submerges your own personality, and that is interpreted as insobriety. Needless to say, while I have nothing but the warmest affection for Allah and His Messenger, I stop short of being a fanatic about it. I'm with that twentieth-century King Saud who demanded that the Islamic leaders of his country stop dragging their feet when it came to technological progress. I don't see any essential conflict between modern science and a thoughtful approach to religion.

Chiri looked down the bar. "All right," she called out loudly, "which one of you motherfuckers' turn is it? Janelle? I don't want to have to tell you to get up and dance again. If I got to remind you to play your goddamn music one more time, I'm gonna fine you fifty kiam. Now move your fat ass." She looked at me and sighed.

"Life is tough," I said.

Indihar came back up the bar after collecting whatever she could pry out of the few glum customers. She sat on the stool beside me. Like Chiri, she didn't seem to get nightmares from talking with me. "So what's it like," she asked, "working for Friedlander Bey?"

"You tell me." One way or another, everybody in the Budayeen works for Papa.

She shrugged. "I wouldn't take his money if I was starving, in prison, and had cancer."

This, I guessed, was a dig, a not-very-veiled reference to the fact that I had sold out to get my implants. I just swallowed some more gin and bingara.

Maybe one of the reasons I went to Chiri's whenever I needed a little cheering up is that I grew up in places just like it. My mother had been a dancer when I was a baby, after my father ran off. When the situation got real bad, she started turning tricks. Some girls in the clubs do that, some don't. My mother had to. When things got even harder, she sold my little brother. That's something she won't talk about. I won't talk about it, either.

My mother did the best she knew how. The Arab world has never put much value on education for women. Everybody knows how the more traditional—that is to say, more backward and unregenerate—Arab men treat their wives and daughters. Their camels get more respect. Now, in the big cities like Damascus and Cairo, you can see modern women wearing Western-style clothing, holding down jobs outside the home, sometimes even smoking cigarettes on the street.

In Mauretania, I'd seen that the attitudes there were still rigid. Women wore long white robes and veils, with hoods or kerchiefs covering their hair. Twenty-five years ago, my mother had no place in the legitimate job market. But there is always a small population of lost souls, of course—people who scoff at the dictates of the holy Qur'ân, men and women who drink alcohol and gamble and indulge in sex for pleasure. There is always a place for a young woman whose morals have been ground away by hunger and despair.

When I saw her again in Algiers, my mother's appearance had shocked me. In my imagination, I'd pictured her as a respectable, moderately well-to-do matron living in a comfortable neighborhood. I hadn't seen or spoken to her in years, but I just figured she'd managed to lift herself out of the poverty and degradation. Now I thought maybe she was happy as she was, a haggard, strident old whore. I spent an hour with her, hoping to hear what I'd come to learn, trying to decide how to behave toward her, and being embarrassed by her in front of the Half-Hajj. She didn't want to be troubled by her children. I got the impression that she was sorry she hadn't sold me too, when she'd sold Hussain Ab-dul-Qahhar, my brother. She didn't like me dropping back into her life after all those years.

"Believe me," I told her, "I didn't like hunting you up, either. I only did it because I have to."

"Why do you have to?" she wanted to know. She reclined on a musty-smelling, torn old sofa that was covered with cat hair. She'd made herself another drink, but had neglected to offer me or Saied anything.

"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-Abbès 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."

That made her furious. She jumped up and flung her half-full glass of liquor at me. It smashed into the already stained and streaked wall to my right. I could smell the pungent, undiluted sharpness of the Irish whiskey. I heard Saied murmuring something beside me, maybe a prayer. My mother took a couple of steps toward me, her face ugly with rage. "You calling me a liar?" she shrieked.

Well, I was. "I'm just telling you that the official records say something different."

"Fuck the official records!"

"The records also say that you were married seven times in two years. No mention of any divorces."

My mother's anger faltered a bit. "How did that get in the computers? I never got officially married, not with no license or nothing."

"I think you underestimate the government's talent for keeping track of people. It's all there for anybody to see."

Now she looked frightened. "What else'd you find out?"

I let her off her own hook. "Nothing else. There wasn't anything more. You want something else to stay buried, you don't have to worry." That was a lie; I had learned plenty more about my mom.

"Good," she said, relieved. "I don't like you prying into what I done. It don't show respect."

I had an answer to that, but I didn't use it. "What started all this nostalgic research," I said in a quiet voice, "was some business I was taking care of for Papa." Everybody in the Budayeen calls Friedlander Bey "Papa." It's an affectionate token of terror. "This police lieutenant who handled matters in the Budayeen died, so Papa decided that 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'an? 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 my brother and me. 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 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 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 Columbian 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 hate that song," said Indihar. Chiri had given her a glass of Sharâb, the soft drink the clubs keep for girls who don't drink alcohol, like Indihar. It's exactly the same color as champagne. Chiri always fills a cocktail glass with ice and pours in a few ounces of soda—which should be a tip-off to the mark: you don't get ice in your champagne in the real world. But the ice takes up a lot of space where the more expensive stuff would go. That'll cost a sucker eight kiam and a tip for Chiri. The club kicks three bills back to the girl who got the drink. That motivates the employees to go through their cocktails at supersonic speed. The usual excuse is that it's thirsty work whirling like a derwish to the cheers of the crowd.

Chiri turned to watch Janelle, who was on her last song. Janelle doesn't really dance, she flounces. She takes five or six steps to one end of the stage, waits for the next heavy-footed bass drum beat, then does a kind of shrugging, quivering thing with her upper body that she must think is torridly sexy. She's wrong. Then she flounces back the other way to the opposite end of the stage and does her spasm number again. The whole time she's lip-synching, not to the lyrics, but to the wailing lead keypad line. Janelle the Human Synthesizer. Janelle the Synthetic Human is closer to the truth. She wears a moddy every day, but you have to talk to her to find out which one. One day she's soft and erotic (Honey Pílar), the next day she's cold and foulmouthed (Brigitte Stahlhelm). Whichever personality she's chipped in, though, is still housed in the same unmodified Nigerian refugee body, which she also thinks is sexy and about which she is also mistaken. The other girls don't associate with her very much. They're sure she lifts bills out of their bags in the dressing room, and they don't like the way she cuts in on their customers when they have to go up to dance. Someday the cops are going to find Janelle in a dark doorway with her lace pulped and half the bones in her body broken. In the meantime, she flounces in time to the ragged screams of keypads and guitar synths.

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."

Indihar 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.

"Say hello to Papa for me," said Chiri.

"What makes you think I'm going there?"

She gave me her filed-tooth grin. "Time for good boys and girls to check in at the old kibanda."

"Yeah, well," I said. I left the rest of my change for her hungry register and went back outside.

I walked down the Street to the arched eastern gate. Beyond the Budayeen, along the broad Boulevard il-Jameel, a few taxis waited for fares. I saw my old friend, Bill, and climbed into the backseat of his cab. "Take me to Papa's, Bill," I said.

"Yeah? You talk like you know me. I know you from somewhere?"

Bill didn't recognize me because he's permanently fried. Instead of skull wiring or cosmetic bodmods, he's got a large sac where one of his lungs used to be, dripping out constant, measured doses of light-speed hallucinogen into his bloodstream. Bill has occasional moments of lucidity, but he's learned to ignore them, or at least to keep functioning until they go away and he's seeing purple lizards again. I've tried the drug he's got pumping through him day and night; it's called RPM, and even though I'm pretty experienced with drugs of all nations, I never want to take that stuff again. Bill, on the other hand, swears that it has opened his eyes to the hidden nature of the real world. I guess so; he can see fire demons and I can't. The only problem with the drug—and Bill will be the first to admit this—is that he can't remember a goddamn thing from one minute to the next.

So it wasn't surprising that he didn't recognize me. I've had to go through the same conversation with him a hundred times. "It's me, Bill. Marîd. I want you to take me to Friedlander Bey's."

He squinted back at me. "Can't say I ever seen you before, buddy."

"Well, you have. Lots of times."

"That's easy for you to say," he muttered. He jabbed the ignition and pulled away from the curb. We were headed in the wrong direction. "Where did you say you wanted to go?" he asked.

"Papa's."

"Yeah, you right. I got this afrit sitting up here with me today, and he's been tossing hot coals in my lap all afternoon. It's a big distraction. I can't do nothing about it, though. You can't punch out an afrit. They like to mess with your head like that. I'm thinking of getting some holy water from Lourdes. Maybe that would spook 'em. Where the hell is Lourdes, anyway?"

"The Caliphate of Gascony," I said.

"Hell of a long drive. They do mail orders?"

I told him I didn't have the slightest idea, and sat back against the upholstery. I watched the landscape slash by—Bill's driving is as crazy as he is—and I thought about what I was going to say to Friedlander Bey. I wondered how I should approach him about what I'd found out, what my mother had told me, and what I suspected. I decided to wait. There was a good chance that the information in the computers linking me to Papa had been planted there, a devious means of winning my cooperation. In the past, I'd carefully avoided any direct transactions with Papa, because taking his coin for any reason meant that he owned you forever. But when he paid for my cranial implants, he made an investment that I'd be paying back for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be working for him, but there was no escape. Not yet. I maintained the hope that I'd find a way to buy my way out, or coerce him into giving me my freedom. In the meantime, it pleased him to pile responsibility on my unwilling shoulders, and gift me with ever-larger rewards.

Bill pulled through the gate in the high white wall'around Friedlander Bey's estate and drove up the long, curved driveway. He came to a stop at the foot of the wide marble stairs. Papa's butler opened the polished front door and stood waiting for me. I paid the fare and slipped Bill an extra ten kiam. His lunatic eyes narrowed and he glanced from the money to me. "What's this?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's a tip. You're supposed to keep that."

"What's it for?"

"For your excellent driving."

"You ain't trying to buy me off, are you?"

I sighed. "No. I admire the way you steer with all those red-hot charcoals in your drawers. I know I couldn't do it."

He shrugged. "It's a gift," he said simply.

"So's the ten kiam."

His eyes widened again. "Oh," he said, smiling, "now I get it!" "Sure you do. See you around, Bill."

"See ya, buddy." He gunned the cab and the tires spat gravel. I turned and went up the stairs.

"Good afternoon, yaa Sidi, " said the butler.

"Hello, Youssef. I'd like to see Friedlander Bey."

"Yes, of course. It's good to have you home, sir."

"Yeah, thanks." We walked along a thickly carpeted corridor toward Papa's offices. The air was cool and dry, and I felt the gentle kiss of many fans. There was the fragrance of incense on the air, subtle and inviting. The light was muted through screens made of narrow strips of wood. From somewhere I heard the liquid trickle of falling water, a fountain splashing in one of the courtyards.

Before we got to the waiting room, a tall, well-dressed woman crossed the hall and went up a flight of stairs. She gave me a brief, modest smile and then turned her head away. She had hair as black and glossy as obsidian, gathered tightly into a chignon. Her hands were very pale, her fingers long and tapered and graceful. I got just a quick impression, yet I knew this woman had style and intelligence; but I felt also that she could be menacing and hard, if she needed.

"Who was that, Youssef?" I asked.

He turned to me and frowned. "That is Umm Saad." I knew immediately that he disapproved of her. I trusted Youssef's judgment, so my first intuition about her was most likely correct.

I took a seat in the outer office and killed time by finding faces in the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. After a while, one of Papa's two huge bodyguards opened the communicating door. I call the big men the Stones That Speak. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. "Come in," said the Stone. Those guys don't waste breath.

I went into Friedlander Bey's office. The man was about two hundred years old, but he'd had a lot of body modifications and transplants. He was reclining on cushions and drinking strong coffee from a golden cup. He smiled when I came in. "My eyes live again, seeing you O my nephew," he said. I could tell that he was genuinely pleased.

"My days apart from you have been filled with regret, O Shaykh," I said. He motioned, and I seated myself beside him. He reached forward to tip coffee from the golden pot into my cup. I took a sip and said, "May your table always be prosperous."

"May Allah grant you health," he said.

"I pray that you are feeling well, O Shaykh."

He reached out and grasped my hand. "I am as fit and strong as a sixty-year-old, but there is a weariness that I cannot overcome, my nephew."

"Then perhaps your physician—"

"It is a weariness of the soul," he said. "It is my appetite and ambition that are dying. I keep going now only because the idea of suicide is abhorrent."

"Perhaps in the future, science will restore you."

"How, my son? By grafting a new zest for living onto my exhausted spirit?"

"The technique already exists," I told him. "You could have a moddy and daddy implant like mine."

He shook his head ruefully. "Allah would send me to Hell if I did that." He didn't seem to mind if I went to Hell. He waved aside further speculation. "Tell me of your journey."

Here it was, but I wasn't ready. I still didn't know how to ask him if he figured in my family tree, so I stalled. "First I must hear all that happened while I was gone, O Shaykh, I saw a woman in the corridor. I've never seen a woman in your house before. May I ask you who she is?"

Papa's face darkened. He paused a moment, framing his reply. "She is a fraud and an impostor, and she is beginning to cause me great distress."

"Then you must send her away," I said.

"Yes," he said. His expression turned stonelike. I saw now not a ruler of a great business empire, not the controller of all vice and illicit activity in the city, but something more terrible. Friedlander Bey might truly have been the son of many kings, because he wore the cloak of power and command as if he'd been born to it. "I must ask you this question, O my nephew: Do you honor me enough to fill your lungs again with fire?"

I blinked. I thought I knew what he was talking about. "Did I not prove myself just a few months ago, O Shaykh?"

He waved a hand, just that easily making nothing of the pain and horror I'd suffered. "You were defending yourself from danger then," he said. He turned and put one old, clawlike hand on my knee. "I need you now to defend me from danger. I wish you to learn everything you can about this woman, and then I want you to destroy her. And her child also. I must know if I have your absolute loyalty."

His eyes were burning. I had seen this side of him before. I sat beside a man who was gripped more and more by madness. I took my coffee cup with a trembling hand and drank deeply. Until I finished swallowing, I wouldn't have to give him an answer.