Aziz looked up, and the den folded back in on him. The Egyptian was listening intently, perhaps for the first time since he had been with him. Or maybe this was the first time Aziz was able to notice. The Egyptian looked puzzled; he did not understand the way they were talking. It was their urchin patois from Arzew.

In his best school Arabic, Aziz said to the Egyptian, “My friend needs to know where to come. What should I tell him?”

The Egyptian looked worried.

“Everything is fine,” Aziz said too fast, fear draping on his shoulders, his eyes getting that squinting look that he knew did not bring confidence. You look like a pickpocket, his father would joke. Stop doing that with your eyes. The roundel of his brothers and mother and sisters teasing him about it played in his head. Stop, he pleaded. Stop it.

“Let me talk to him.”

“Wait, Rafik, wait.”

He could hear Rafik barking to someone who was with him. He had heard he had a girlfriend, an American.

“May I speak to your friend?” the Egyptian asked, perhaps too formally.

“He . . . he . . . does not speak well,” Aziz tried to explain, haltingly, sounding to himself like a raving liar, the kind who was possibly violent, never believable.

“He does not speak Arabic?”

“He does, he does. He is Algerian.” There, he had said it. This was the problem, something about that.

“Algeria. You have bad troubles there.”

“Yes.”

“There are many from there that have come here.”

“Yes.” His chest was pulling downward, or maybe his last ribs? No, it was a stone the size of his head on his chest.

“Let us meet your friend at the mosque,” said the Egyptian, sour and bored. “I will drive you there. I will tell him how to get there.”

“Rafik, we are going to meet you.”

“Who?”

“Me, and—” He could not call him the Egyptian, but he had no memory of his name, so he said, “The kindest man who has helped me. I am at his home.”

This did not remove the expression from the Egyptian’s face.

“But I can come there.”

“Cousin, it is better this way.”

“Why? I am ready to leave this minute.”

“The mosque is a good place to meet.”

“But where is it?”

Aziz looked imploringly at the Egyptian. “The mosque—where is it?”

“Excuse me,” the Egyptian said. “I must talk to my wife first. Please wait.”

His bowels were shrinking and hot. Perhaps they were going to call the police on another phone. Americans always had two phones, had he not heard that? And these were more Americans than Arabs, more Americans than Egyptians.

He should have talked to Rafik alone without the Egyptian present. But he could not tell Rafik where to come; he did not know this address, or the town. He did not even know the name of this family.

“Rafik.”

“What is going on?”

“I cannot say, but listen.”