I swore I’d never tell anyone anything ever again. I wondered if the world ever got tired of its jokes; no, that was too much to hope for. The jokes would go on and on, getting worse and worse. Right now I was certain that if age and experience couldn’t stop the jokes, there was nothing about death that would make them stop, either.

I folded my new clothing carefully and packed it in the zipper bag. I wore my white robe and keffiya again today, making yet another new look — Arab costume but cleanshaven. The man of a thousand faces. Today I wanted to take Hajjar up on his promise to let me use the police computer files. I wanted to fill in a little background, on the police themselves. I wanted to find out as much as I could about Okking’s link to Bond/Khan.

Instead of walking, I took a cab to the police station. It wasn’t that I was getting spoiled by the luxury Papa was paying for; I just felt the urgent pressing of events. I was killing time as fast as it was killing me. The daddies were buzzing in my head, and I didn’t feel muscle-weary, hungry, or thirsty. I wasn’t angry or afraid, either; some people might have warned me that not being afraid was dangerous. Maybe I should have been afraid, a little.

I watched Okking eat a late breakfast in his flimsy fortress while I waited for Hajjar to get back to his desk. When the sergeant came in, he gave me a distracted look. “You’re not the only bakebrain I have to worry about, Audran,” he said in a surly voice. “We’ve got thirty other jerks giving us fantasy information and inside words they dig out of dreams and teacups.”

“You’ll be glad I don’t have a goddamn piece of information for you, then. I came to get some from you. You said I could use your files.”

“Oh, yeah, sure; but not here. If Okking saw you, he’d split my skull. I’ll call downstairs. You can use one of the terminals on the second floor.”

“I don’t care where it is,” I said. Hajjar made the phone call, typed out a pass for me, and signed it. I thanked him and found my way down to the data bank. A young woman with Southeast Asian features led me to an unused screen, showed me how to get from one menu to the next, and told me that if I had any questions, the machine itself would answer them. She wasn’t a computer expert or a librarian; she just managed traffic flow in the big room.

First I checked the general files, which were much like a news agency’s morgue. When I typed in a name, the computer gave me every fact available to it concerning the person. The first name I entered was Okking’s. The cursor paused for a second or two, then lettered steadily across the display in Arabic, right to left. I learned Okking’s first name, his middle name, his age, where he’d been born, what he’d done before coming to the city, all the stuff that gets put on a form above the important double line. Below that line comes the really vital information; depending on whose form it is, that can be the subject’s medical record, arrest record, credit history, political involvement, sexual preference(s), or anything else that may one day be pertinent.

As for Okking, below that double line there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Al-Sifr, zero.

At first I assumed there was some kind of computer problem. I started over again, returning to the first menu, choosing the sort of information I was looking for, and typing in Okking’s name. And waited.

áÇ ÔìÁ. Nothing.

Okking had done this, I was sure. He had covered his tracks, just as his boy Khan was now covering his own. If I wanted to travel to Europe, to Okking’s birthplace, I might learn more about him, but only to the point when he left there to come to the city. Since then, he did not exist at all, not officially speaking.

I typed in Universal Export, the code name of James Bond’s espionage group. I had seen it on an envelope on Okking’s desk once. Again, there were no entries.

I tried James Bond without hope, and turned up nothing. Similarly with Xarghis Khan. The real Khan and the “real” Bond had never visited the city, so there was no file on either of them.

I thought about other people I might spy on — Yasmin, Friedlander Bey, even myself — but I decided to leave my curiosity unsatisfied until a less urgent occasion. I entered Hajjar’s name and was not astonished by what I read. He was about two years younger than I was, Jordanian, with a moderately long arrest record before coming to the city. A psychological profile agreed point for point with my own estimation of him; you didn’t dare trust him as far as he could run with a camel on his back. He was suspected of smuggling drugs and money to prisoners. He was once investigated in connection with the disappearance of a good deal of confiscated property, but nothing definite came of it. The official file put forth the possibility that Hajjar might be profiting from his position on the police force, that he might be selling his influence to private citizens or criminal organizations. The report suggested that he might not be above such abuses of authority as extortion, racketeering, and conspiracy, among other law-enforcement frailties.

Hajjar? Come now, what ever gave you that idea? Allah forfend.

I shook my head ruefully. Police departments all over the world were identical in two respects: they all have a fondness for breaking your head open for little or no provocation, and they can’t see the simple truth if it’s lying in front of them naked with its legs spread. The police don’t enforce laws; they don’t even get busy until after the laws are broken. They solve crimes at a pitifully low rate of success. What the police are, to be honest, is a kind of secretarial pool that records the names of the victims and the statements of the witnesses. After enough time passes, they can safely shove this information to the back of the filing system to make room for more.

Oh yeah, the police help little old ladies across the street. So I’m told.

One by one, I entered the names of everyone who’d been connected to Nikki, beginning with her uncle, Bogatyrev. The entries on the old Russian and on Nikki matched exactly what Okking had finally told me about them. I figured that if Okking could excise himself from this system, he could alter its remaining records in other ways, too. I wouldn’t find anything useful here except by accident or Okking’s oversight. I went on with a diminished hope of success.

I had none. At last I changed my mind and read the entries on Yasmin, Papa, and Chiri, on the Black Widow Sisters, on Seipolt and Abdoulaye. The files told me that Hassan was likely a hypocrite, because he would not use brain implants for his business, on religious grounds, yet he was a known pederast. That wasn’t news to me. The only thing that I might suggest to Hassan someday was that the American boy, who already had his skull wired, might be more useful as an accounting tool than just sitting on a stool in Hassan’s bare shop.

The only person I knew on whom I didn’t peep was myself. I didn’t want to know what they thought about me.

After I searched the files for my friends’ histories, I looked at telephone company records for the phones in the police station. There was nothing enlightening there, either; Okking wouldn’t have used his office phone to call Bond. It was like I was standing at the hub of a lot of radiating roads, all of them dead ends.

I walked out of there with food for thought but no new facts. I liked knowing what the files had to say about Hajjar and the others; and the reticence it showed toward Okking — and, not so mysteriously, toward Friedlander Bey — was provocative if not informative. I thought about it all as I wandered into the Budayeen. In a few minutes I was back at my apartment building.

Why had I come here? Well, I didn’t want to sleep in the hotel room another night. At least one assassin knew I was there. I needed another base of operations, one that would be safe for at least a day or two. As I got more accustomed to letting the daddies help me in my planning, my decision making got faster and less influenced by my emotions. I now felt completely in control, cool and assured. I wanted to get a message to Papa, and then I would find another temporary place to sleep.