The Bay of Foxes Read Online Free

of fresh French bread. He carries the food up the ill-lit stairs, because the elevator is broken. The walls are covered with graffiti and filth, and sounds of loud voices, arguments, and screams of children come from behind thin doors.
    Three teenage boys and a plump girl with wild hair come running down the stairs past him. They brush against him rudely, on purpose it seems, so that he almost drops his precious bags. He huddles against the concrete wall and swears at them. They laugh loudly as they clatter down the stairwell. “
Salaud!
” one of them shouts, as the glass door bangs shut.
    Breathless, he enters the open door on the fourth floor, the air redolent with the odor of coffee and incense. He almostfalls over the small child, Takla, Asfa’s youngest, who is crawling across the floor, crying. “Here,
mamush
,” he says, taking a warm
pain au chocolat
from the bag and giving it to the little boy, who sits on the dusty floor, thin legs apart, chewing, smiling up at him, happy. He goes into the hot, grimy, windowless kitchen and puts his bags down on the chipped counter, with its cigarette stains and sticky surface. He takes out the lamb and opens the wrapping, as the women crowd around to see what he has brought, marveling at the abundance. The older ones still wear slippers and white scarves around their heads, as though they were about to step out into the streets of Addis.
    Asfa’s wife, Eleni, looks up from the coffee she is pounding with a mallet she brought all the way from Djibouti, tears in her eyes at this sight. She asks him if he has robbed a bank. He laughs and says there will be enough to eat for everyone tonight: they must cook all the lamb for dinner. She says she will serve it with her
berbere
sauce, and he rubs his hands at the thought of the spicy taste. He asks her if Asfa is home yet.
    Before he left Addis Ababa, a friend had given him Asfa’s address. Now Eleni scowls at him and tips back her shapely head to indicate her husband’s whereabouts. She says he is there with yet another of his rescued victims. An unusually lively and good-hearted man, Asfa seems unable to turn anyone away, much to his poor wife’s despair. In his great, openhearted generosity he seems almost simpleminded, which indeed his wife accuses him of being, though she knows he is not at all simple, having earned a degree in engineering from the university in Addis.
    Dawit goes into the smoke-filled back bedroom to findhis friend. Asfa is watching a soccer game on the television. He sits cross-legged on a cushion on the floor with a group of young men crowded around him. There is hardly any furniture in the whole apartment except for the large television set, which always seems to be on. Asfa smiles broadly at him. He rises to his full height and strides across the floor through the others to greet Dawit enthusiastically, asking him where he has been hiding.
    Asfa is the only one of these men who has managed to find a regular job. He works in a hotel in Paris, where he has to wear a ridiculous uniform, a long, braided coat with a high hat. He does all sorts of menial jobs, thanks to his great strength. He is remarkably tall and strong but subject to violent fits of rage and once felled a man with one blow. He leaves every morning before dawn to take the long bus ride into the city and often comes back late.
    Now he asks Dawit why they have seen so little of him, why he has become such a stranger, why he leaves before anyone is up in the morning and comes back so late at night. Why does he no longer eat with them? In response Dawit looks at the scuffed linoleum on the floor, takes some of the money out of his pocket, and hands it over. “Here, take this. I’m sorry it is so little and so late,” he says and presses it into his palm, while Asfa whistles and stares at the wad of bills suspiciously. He seems surprised and disconcerted. He frowns, shakes his head, and looks at Dawit worriedly. Dawit adds, “I hope to have