These children, his supposed offspring, never appeared. He wouldn’t put up with slander, nor did he explode with every stray spark; the great battle of his life was with his sons.

Now what he needed to do was hook Omar, or get him to remove himself far away, with his siren. If they weren’t in the city, it would be almost impossible to find them. Months of searching … And anyway, where was he to begin? There were so many villages and towns on the banks of each river and its tributaries … But nothing happens there, and it would be death for a nocturnal animal like Omar. Then Halim thought of Wyckham, the smuggler.

He found him on board a ship of the Booth Line. He asked about his son: he hadn’t seen him for a good while, and wanted news. Where was he? Wyckham was genial, and crafty. He spoke well of Omar, and said that both of them had left the foreign bank and were planning to open a supermarket for imported goods. That was why Omar had gone to the United States, but he’d had no news of him so far. It might come at any moment, when you least expected it, the way things happened with Omar.

“Good God, I wanted to give the liar a punch on the nose,” Halim grumbled. “He calculated every word, and spoke with all the conviction of a preacher.”

Then he remembered Cid Tannus, who played backgammon with Halim himself, and was his companion in years gone by. Tannus, with two bright eyes in his little grasshopper face, didn’t often come by Halim’s shop. Rânia didn’t like him, said he got in the way of the customers, because his short visits got longer and longer, and the two men, in loud voices, remembered the good old times of the casinos and Polish girls. Zana, too, picked quarrels with him:

“All that old bachelor thinks about is orgies.”

For Tannus was, and always had been, one for seeking out tenth-rate clubs, shacks with no lock on the door, nothing but a few wooden poles with a roof on top. As he wandered around from one party to another, he would see Omar, and sometimes they would have a drink together, just for the pleasure of it, with no women at the table. They had a chat, and Tannus always asked him to give Halim a hug from him, but Omar never did anything of the sort.

“He never told me about those meetings,” Halim said. “And anyway, he never talked to me. He only opened his mouth for his mother.”

“He must have for other women,” Cid Tannus said, laughing.

“This Pau-Mulato … It seems Omar is really crazy about her. The two of them have disappeared.”