Ghazi looked at Dhakir. He was prancing around for the old man, a chimp in a tutu before a mountain. The old man’s face was badly disfigured. Ghazi couldn’t tell if it was a birth defect, a cancer removed, a gun blast, or government guest treatment. The father’s lip looked as if it had been unfinished. Was that a hare lip? Ghazi had never gotten that straight. Or was it a cleft palate? He’d also heard that sometimes they managed to imitate these problems and then say, Well, this man was born this way. To have such power, what was it like? What was it like after you did that to a man and went home to your woman? Did you cradle her in your arms? Did you fuck her good, or tell yourself you did, because God knows you didn’t ask her. Or did you jack off in the shower and spare her the trouble? Looking at Dhakir, playing the Muslim bridegroom for this mangled old duke of the revolution, pained him. Because the old man believed—or pretended to believe, or willed himself to believe, or playacted that he believed—that Dhakir was what he advertised, the new owner of an Indonesian and Malaysian import-export business that had just taken the bold step of opening a retail establishment in Montreal’s hip new corridor where the college kids were spending money on nothings.

Whereas Ghazi suspected the trinket shop was under surveillance, by whom, or why, he didn’t know but could guess. A brother had sold it to Dhakir. A serious brother, as Dhakir put it, who hailed from Algiers by way of Paris. Now he was gone—“to Jordan,” Dhakir said, but in point of fact he was now in the custody of Philippe Ste.-Marie Renier, the judge investigating the Paris subway bombings, a prosecutor jurist who was said to go into the Algerian slums of Lyon with ski mask and Glock to shoot vagabonds for sport.

So here was this old man, with his hijab meek daughter on his peach leather sofa in a sublet on the outer edge of Montreal where all there was were gas stations and parking lots. Outside the apartment this same daughter wore hair highlighted with blue, eyes kohl and topaz, her tight tits in a lamé bustier or a Wonderbra with emerald sequins. It was in the sequins that Ghazi first met her. He was at a club with Dhakir. She was dancing. Around four in the morning, within an hour of first seeing her, Dhakir took her outside and fucked her in an alley. From then on, the con was on, the girl claiming pregnancy to Dhakir, Dhakir pretending respectability to her father, the old man in a shed where not a chink of light got. It sickened Ghazi. But only a little more than Montreal sickened him.