They were godlike. Aziz saw that Rafik was a tailless hound to their imperial. Their eyes were like skies or lakes. Their hair was wavy, not nappy. Their smiles were glacially white. One had hair burnished like a scabbard. Another had a jaw from conquering Sparta. A third sat with one leg crossing the other, leaning back, a forearm lazily in the air behind him, to take a drink or toss a comment to another table. Like the Italian sailor Aziz had never forgotten, they had the look that only people who have never suffered possess. As if the prevailing confusion of Aziz’s inner moments were instead, in their civilized interiors, harmonized into a quartet played for a czar.

“I’m going home,” Rafik said.

“No, please, don’t go.”

“You want to stay? You?”

If he told him he wanted to watch these ones, Rafik would leave.

“I am thinking you are right. I am in need of a woman.”

“Aha!” Rafik exploded.

“I was hoping I might see the Djara,” Aziz said, not entirely fibbing.

“The who?”

“You have forgotten.”

“That singer would not come here.”

“Not Djara in Algeria. That woman we saw one night, the night Heather came to the club.”

“That night. Shit. I remember.”

“She looked like Djara. You called her Djara.”

“Fuck Heather. Just fuck Heather.”

Aziz thought of his shame that night. It was now far below, in a seabed.

“I think the Saudi knew her.”

“The Djara?” Rafik frowned. “She would not touch his oily ass.”

“I think mine is at least as oily.”

Rafik laughed. “True, true.”

“It is oily, and it is not rich.”

“But your brother; you could present him as rich.”

“And I am able to say I am no longer a gas station attendant.”

“Energy business,” Rafik mused. “Say you used to be in the energy business.”

“Not a lie.”

“Not a lie.”

Rafik was alive. He ordered drinks, he pulled a napkin and a pen together on the table. “Let me explain something about women.”

Aziz looked at the round table. He was curious about the Saudi’s stature among these Olympians. Surely they thought him a goose. His bodyguards were at a nearby table for two. They were playing cards in their sunglasses. They looked like the sullen hot-heads who played dominoes in the alleys in Oran. How could they see the cards?

“The American man, he thinks a woman is to be ignored,” Rafik instructed. “They tell them this in magazines.”