I walked over to welcome them to my humble estab-lishment. "How y'all doin'?" I said, pulling up a chair.

"Just fine," said Mahmoud.

"Say," said Jacques, studying his cards, "what was all that excitement in Frenchy's with that girl Theoni?"

I scratched my head. "You mean when she jumped up and started yelling? Well, the customer she was working on so hard gave her a present, remember? After he left Frenchy's, she opened the package and it turned out to be a baby book. Lots of cute pictures of this adorable baby girl, and a kind of diary of the kid's first few months. Turns out the guy was Theoni's real father. His wife ran off with her when Theoni was only eight months old. Her father's spent a lot of time and money tracking the girl down ever since."

The Half-Hajj shook his head. "Theoni must've been surprised."

"Yeah," I said. "She was embarrassed to have her fa-ther see her working in there. He tipped her a hundred kiam and promised to come back soon. Now she knows why he acted so uncomfortable when she was trying to get him excited."

"We're trying to play cards here, Maghrebi," said Mahmoud. He was about as sympathetic as a rusty razor. "Heard you was gonna exhume that dead cop."

I was surprised the news had gotten around already. "How do you feel about it?" I asked.

Mahmoud looked at me steadily for a couple of sec-onds. "Couldn't care less," he said at last.

"What you guys playing?" I asked.

"Bourre," said Saied. "We're teaching the Christian."

"It's been an expensive lesson so far," said Jacques. Bourre is a quiet, deceptively simple game. I've never played another card game where you could lose so much money so fast. Not even American poker.

I watched for a little while. Evidently, none of the three had any thoughts at all concerning the exhumation. I was glad of that. "Anybody seen Fuad lately?" I asked.

Jacques looked up at me. "Not for a couple days at least. What's the matter?"

"That check was stolen," I said.

"Ha! And you got stuck for it, right? I'm sorry, Martd. I didn't have any way of knowing."

"Sure, Jacques," I said in a grim voice.

"What you guys talking about?" asked Saied.Jacques proceeded to tell them the whole story, at great length, with many oratorical devices and changes of voice, exaggerating the truth and making me look like a complete and utter fool. Of course, he minimalized his own participation in the affair.

All three of them broke down in helpless laughter. "You let Fuad rip you off?" gasped Mahmoud. "Fuad? You're never going to live this down! I gotta tell people about this!"

I didn't say a word. I knew I was going to hear about it for a long time, unless I caught up to Fuad and made him pay for his foolish crime. Now there was nothing to do but get up and go back to my seat at the bar. As I walked away, Jacques said, "You've got a datalink in here now, Marid. You notice? And you owe me money for all the other ones I've sold so far. A hundred kiam each, you said."

"Come in sometime with the signed delivery orders," I said in a cold voice. I squeezed the slice of lime and drank a little of the White Death.

Chiri leaned toward me across the bar. "You're gonna exhume Khalid Maxwell?" she said.

"Might learn something valuable."

She shook her head. "Sad, though. The family's been through so much already."

"Yeah, right." I swallowed more of the gin and bin-gara.

"What's this about Fuad?" she asked.

"Never mind. But if you see him, let me know imme-diately. He just owes me a little money, is all."

Chiri nodded and headed down the bar, where a new customer had sat down. I watched Kandy finish up her last song. . I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and saw Yasmin and Pualani. "How was yottf day;*fc>ver?" said Yas- mm.

"All right." I didn't feel like going through it all.

Pualani smiled. "Yasmin says you two are gonna get married next week. Congratulations!"

"What?" I said, astonished. "What's this next week business? I haven't even formally proposed. I just men-tioned the possibility. I've got a lot to think about first. I've got a lot of trouble to take care of. And then I have to tajk to Indihar, and to Friedlander Bey-"

"Oops," said Pualani. She hurried away.

"Were you lying to me this morning?" asked Yasmin. Were you just trying to get out of my house without the beating you deserved?"

"No!" I said angrily. "I was just saying that maybe we wouldn't be so bad together. I wasn't ready to set a date or anything."

Yasmin looked hurt. "Well," she said, "while you're dicking around and making up your mind, I've got places to go and people to meet. You understand me? Call me when you take care of all your so-called problems." She walked away, her back very straight, and sat down beside the new customer. She put her hand in his lap. I took another drink.

I sat there for a long time, drinking and chatting with Chiri and with Lily, the pretty sexchange who was always suggesting that we get together. About eleven o'clock, my phone rang. "Hello?" I said.

"Audran? This is Kenneth. You remember me."

"Ah, yes, the apple of Abu Adil's eye, right? Shaykh Reda's little darling. What's up? You having a bachelor party and want me to send over a few boys?"

"I'm ignoring you, Audran. I'm always ignoring you." I was sure that Kenneth hated me with an irrational feroc-ity.

"What did you call for?" I asked.

"Friday afternoon, the Jaish will parade and demon-strate against the gruesome murder of Imam Dr. Sadiq Abd ar-Razzaq. Shaykh Reda wishes you to appear, in uniform, to address the Jaish at this historic moment, and also to meet the unit under your command."

"How did you hear about Abd ar-Razzaq?" I asked. "Hajjar said he wasn't gonna tell anybody until tomor-row."

"Shaykh Reda isn't 'anybody.' You should know that."

"Yeah, you right."

Kenneth paused. "Shaykh Reda also wishes me to tell you he's unalterably opposed to the exhumation of Khalid Maxwell. At the risk of sounding threatening, I have to pass along Shaykh Reda's feelings. He said that if you go ahead with the autopsy, you will earn his undying hatred. That is not something to dismiss lightly."

I laughed. "Kenny, listen, aren't we already fierce ri-vals? Don't we hate each other's guts enough by now? And aren't Friedlander Bey and Abu Adil already at each other's throats? What's one little autopsy between archen-emies?"

"All right, you stupid son of a bitch," said Kenneth shortly. "I did my job, I passed along the messages. Fri-day, in uniform, in the Boulevard il-Jameel outside the Shimaal Mosque. You better show up." Then he cut the connection. I clipped my phone back on my belt.

That concluded the second trip around the village. I looked at Chiri and held up my glass for a refill. The long night roared on.I got a good four hours' sleep that night. After the short rest I'd got the night before, I felt ex-hausted and almost completely worn down. When my eep daddy woke me at seven-thirty, I swung my feet out of bed and put them down on the carpet. I put my face in my hands and took a few deep breaths. I really didn't want to get up, and I didn't feel like jumping into battle with the forces arrayed against me. I looked at my watch; I had an hour before Kmuzu would drive me to the Budayeen for my appointment with the medical exam-iner. If I showered, dressed, and breakfasted in five min-utes, I could go back to sleep until almost eight-thirty.

I grumbled a few curses and stood up. My back creaked. I don't think I'd ever heard my back creak be-fore. Maybe I was getting too old to stay up all night, drinking and breaking up fights. It was a depressing thought.

I stumbled blearily to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Five minutes later, I realized that I was staring straight up into the hot spray with my eyes wide open. I felt asleep on my feet. I grabbed the soap and lathered my body, then turned slowly and let the stinging water rinse me. I dried myself and dressed in a clean white gallebeya with a dark red robe over it. As for breakfast, I had a decision to make. After all, I was going back to the Cham-ber of Horrors. Maybe food could be put off until later.

Kmuzu gave me his blank look, the one that's sup-posed to pass for emotionless, but was in fact transpar-ently unfavorable. "You were quite drunk again last night, yaa Sidi," he said, as he set a plate of eggs and fried lamb patties in front of me.

"You must be thinking of someone else, Kmuzu," I said. I looked at the food and felt a wave of queasiness. Not lamb, not now.

Kmuzu stood beside my chair and folded his well-muscled arms. "Would you be angry if I made an observa-x tion?" he asked.

Nothing that I could say would stop him. "No. Please make your observation."

"You've been lax. in your religious duties lately, you Sidi."

I turned and looked into his handsome, black face. "What the hell do you care? We're not even of the same faith, as you keep reminding me."

"Any religion is better than none."

I laughed. "I'm not so sure. I could name a few-"

"You understand what I mean. Has your self-esteem fallen so low again that you don't feel worthy to pray? That is a fallacy, you know, yaa Sidi."

I got up and muttered "None of your business." I went back into the bedroom, looking for my rack of mod-dies and daddies. I hadn't touched a bite of the breakfast. The neuralware wasn't in the bedroom, so I went into *he parlor.

It wasn't there, either. I finally discovered it ding under a towel on the desk in my study. I sorted .rough the small plastic squares. Somewhere along the hne, I'd really put together an enviable collection. The ones I wanted, however, were the special ones, ones that Fd had ever since I'd originally had my skull amped. They were the daddies that fit onto my special second implant, the daddies that suppressed unpleasant bodily signals. It was the software that had saved my life in the Rub al-Khali. I chipped them in and rejoiced at the difference. I was j longer sleepy, no longer hungry. One daddy took care my growing anxiety, too. "All right, Kmuzu," I said "Let's get on the road. I've got a lot to do today."

"Fine, yaa Sidi, but what about all this food?"

I shrugged. "There are people starving in Eritrea. Send it to them."

Kmuzu customarily failed to appreciate that sort of humor, so I just made sure I had my keys and went out into the corridor. I didn't wait for him to follow; I knew ^'d be along immediately. I went downstairs and waited for him to start the car and bring it around to the front door. During the ride to the Budayeen we said nothing more to each other.

He let me out by the eastern gate. Once more I had a lot of plans that didn't involve Kmuzu, so I sent him home. I told him I'd call when I needed a ride. Some-times it's great to have a slave.

When I got to the morgue, I had an unpleasant sur-prise. Dr. Besharati hadn't even started on the corpse of Khalid Maxwell. He looked up at me as I entered. "Mr. Audran," he said. "Forgive me, I'm running a little late this morning.

We had quite a bit of business last night and early today. Unusual for this time of year. Usually get more murders during the hot months."

"Uh huh," I said. I hadn't been in the place two min-utes, and already the formaldehyde was irritating my eyes and nose. The suppressor daddies didn't help me at all with something like that.

I watched as the M.E.'s two assistants went to one of the twelve vaults, opened it, and lifted out Maxwell's body.

They wrestled it awkwardly to one of the two work tables. The other one was already occupied by a cadaver in anearly stage of disassembly.

Dr. Besharati pulled off one pair of rubber gloves and put on another. "Ever watched an autopsy before?" he asked. He seemed to be in great spirits.

"No, sir," I said. I shuddered.

"You can step outside if you get squeamish." He picked up a long black hose and turned on a tap. "This is going to be a special case," he said, as he began playing the water all over Maxwell. "He's been in the ground for several weeks, so we won't be able to get quite as much information as we would with a fresh body."

The stench from the corpse was tremendous, and the water from the hose wasn't making any headway against it. I gagged. One of the assistants looked at me and laughed. "You think it's bad now," he said. "Wait until we open it up."

Dr. Besharati ignored him. "The official police report said that death came about as the result of being shot at close range by a medium-sized static pistol. If the range had been greater, the proper functioning of his nerves and muscles would've been interrupted for a brief time, and he'd have been rendered helpless. Apparently, though, he was shot close up, in the chest. That almost always leads to immediate cardiac arrest." While he was talking, he selected a large scalpel. "Bismillah," he murmured, and made a Y-shaped incision from the shoulder joints to the sternum, and then down to the top of the groin.

I found myself looking away when the assistants lifted the skin and muscle tissue and sliced it free of the skele-ton. Then I heard them snapping the rib cage open with some large implement. After they lifted the rib cage out, though, the chest cavity looked like an illustration in an elementary biology book. It wasn't so bad. They were right, though: the stink increased almost unbearably. And it wasn't going to get better any time soon.

Dr. Besharati used the hose to wash down the corpse some more. He looked across at me. "The police report also said that it was your finger on the trigger of that static pistol."

I shook my head fiercely. "I wasn't even-"

He raised a hand. "I have nothing to do with enforce-ment or punishment here," he said. "Your guilt or inno-cence hasn't been proved in a court of law. I have no opinion one way or the other. But it seems to me that if you were guilty, you wouldn't be so anxious about the outcome of this autopsy."

I thought about that for a moment. "Are we likely to get much useful information?" I asked.

"Well, as I said, not as much as if he hadn't spent all that time in a box in the ground. For one thing, his blood has putrefied. It's gummy and black now, and almost use-less as far as forensic medicine is concerned. But in a way you're lucky he was a poor man. His family didn't have him embalmed. Maybe we'll be able to tell a thing or two about what happened."

He turned his attention back to the table. One assis-tant was beginning to lift the internal organs, one by one, out of the body cavity. Khalid Maxwell's shriveled eyes stared at me; his hair was stringy and straw-like, without luster or resiliency. His skin, too, had dried in the coffin. I think he'd been in his early thirties when he'd been mur-dered; now he wore the face of an eighty-year-old man. I experienced a peculiar floating sensation, as if I were only dreaming this.

The other assistant yawned and glanced at me. "Want to listen to some music?" he said. He reached behind himself and flicked on a cheap holosystem. It began to play the same goddamn Sikh propaganda song that Kandy danced to every time she took her turn on stage.

"No, please, thank you," I said. The assistant shrugged and turned the music off.

The other assistant snipped each internal organ loose, measured it, weighed it, and waited for Dr. Besharati to slice off a small piece, which was put in a vial and sealed. The rest of the viscera was just dumped in a growing pile on the table beside the body.

The medical examiner paid very special attention to the heart, however. "I subscribe to a theory," he said in a conversational tone, "that a charge from a static pistol creates a certain, unique pattern of disruption in the heart.

Someday when this theory is generally accepted, we'll be able to identify the perpetrator's static pistol, just as a ballistics lab can identify bullets fired by the same projectile pistol." Now he was cutting the heart into nar-row slices, to be examined more thoroughly later.

I raised my eyebrows. "What would you see in this heart tissue?"

Dr. Besharati didn't look up. "A particular pattern of exploded and unexploded cells. I'm sure in my own mind that each static pistol leaves its own, unique signature pat-tern."

"But this isn't accepted as evidence yet?"

"Not yet, but someday soon, I hope. It will make my job-and the police's job, and the legal counselors'-a lot easier.

Dr. Besharati straightened up and moved his shoul-ders. "My back hurts already," he said, frowning. "All right, I'm ready to do the skull."

An assistant made an incision from ear to ear along the back of the neck, just below the hairline. Then the other assistant pulled Maxwell's scalp grotesquely forward, until it fell down over the corpse's face. The medical examiner selected a small electric saw; when he turned it on, it filled the echoing chamber with a loud burring sound that set my teeth on edge. It got even worse when he began cutting in a circle around the top of the skull.

Dr. Besharati switched off the saw and lifted off the cap of bone, which he examined closely for cracks or other signs of foul play. He examined the brain, first in place, then he carefully lifted it out onto the table. He cut the brain in slices, just as he'd done the heart, and put one piece in another vial.

A few moments later, I realized that the autopsy was finished. I glanced at my watch; ninety minutes had sped by while I was wrapped in a kind of gruesome fascination. Dr. Besharati took his samples and left the Chamber of Horrors through an arched doorway.I watched the assistants clean up. They took a plastic bag and scooped all the dissected organs into it, including the brain. They closed the bag with a twist-tie, pushed the whole thing into Maxwell's chest cavity, replaced the pieces of rib cage, and began sewing him back up with large, untidy stitches. They set the top of the skull in place, pulled Maxwell's scalp back over it, and stitched it back down at the base of the neck.

It seemed like such a mechanical, unfeeling way for a good man to end his existence. Of course it was mechani-cal and unfeeling; the three employees of the medical examiner's office would have twenty or more autopsies to perform before suppertime.

"You all right?" asked one of the assistants with a sly grin on his face. "Don't want to throw up or nothing?"

"I'm fine. What happens to him?" I pointed to Max-well's corpse.

"Back in the box, back in the ground before noon prayers. Don't worry about him. He never felt a thing."

"May the blessings of Allah be on him and peace," I said, and shivered again.