“When I fought the French before you were born, I did not fight to have Algerians killing Algerians,” the father said.

“Maybe it is working, as they say it is much better,” Dhakir said.

Ghazi nodded, but as neither was looking at him, he stopped. What would happen, he wondered, when those following Dhakir came to this place and found this old man, proud of his long battle for freedom, with a wolf in his tabernacle? Maybe they would never come. Sometimes, they just watched.

“His brother. Not his mother, his brother,” Aziz said slowly into the receiver. A motorcycle on Atlantic Avenue ka-powed. A sweaty passerby pushed into him.

“Are you for real?” said the woman who had answered Mourad’s work number.

“Is he on duty?” A small girl stepped on Aziz’s foot. Now someone was leaning on a car horn.

“Sir, even if you were his mother, I couldn’t give out that type of information.”

“Just tell him I am on the phone. His brother from Algeria.”

“He’s not from Africa. He’s Arab. See, I know that. Who is this?”

“Aziz Arkoun. His brother. I am standing at a pay phone, and—”

“A pay phone in Africa?”

“In Brooklyn, New York, United States of America.”

“There’s no need to raise your voice, sir.”

“I’m at a pay phone! I can barely hear you!”

“I don’t like your tone.”

“Please. My thanks to you would be great.”

“Don’t ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ me. This conversation has ended. Any questions, write a letter. Commonwealth Security Services, Logan Airport Command Station, five hundred Terminal E, East Boston, Mass., zero two one two eight.”

She hung up.

Aziz slammed down the receiver and accidentally kicked the man who had been waiting behind him for the phone.

“You got a problem?” The man was easily twice Aziz’s size.

“You stand on my ass!” Aziz shouted.

“Fuck you, motherfucker.”

Aziz kicked him, hard this time, and ran.

This was not good.

He was insane to be this angry.

He looked over his shoulder. No man was running for him. He saw a drugstore and slowed to walk through the automatic door.

He put fingers over his nose and palms over his mouth. He was breathing hard next to a long wall of cosmetics. He could not believe it—a security guard was eyeing him already. Aziz made a quick turn down an aisle of aspirin, cough syrup; he was almost at the cough drops but no, the guard had headed him off.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Fuck. Fuck. What to do?

“Sir!”

Aziz was running back toward the aspirin. I took nothing, he said to himself. I did nothing.

A voice on a loudspeaker came on. “Security needed at the front. Security report to aisle five at the front of the store.”