The man knew about the legend of the faux guide, hustlers who preyed on the tourists that streamed from the tour buses day in and day out at the medina gates. They had reputations for leading their clients deep within the labyrinthine corridors and alleyways, only to strand them if they didn’t cough up exorbitant amounts of baksheesh. That’s if the tourists were lucky. If they weren’t, they found themselves vigorously beaten and missing their money-belts, and every year, a few wanderers simply vanished, slipped between the cracks of these ancient medinas. Faux guide indeed.

            The little Arab turned into the impossibly thick clots of figures funneling through a dripping archway up ahead. Plump women, veiled in black, poured through that gaping mouth and clucked like hens as he elbowed them aside. As the boy pushed blindly through the stampede, the man took the opportunity and turned sharply down a side street, almost enjoying the game and laughing to himself as he imagined the boy’s dismay when next he turned around. With the crowds as they were, it could be a while. A long while.

            He was still smiling a few minutes later when he heard the sound of rapid footfalls behind him, heard the voice ring out like nothing had happened, as if perhaps the man had turned down the alley and had forgotten to call out to him by mistake.

            “So, ten dirhams. I will take you to the tanneries.”

            The man ignored him. A beggar squatted up ahead, just outside the stream of foot traffic. His face was buried in one hand, the other outstretched and motionless like a bog mummy.

The man had traveled much of the world, and he tried to be respectful of the customs wherever they went. Nop the Laotians, keep your soles down in Indonesia. Never make the OK sign in Brazil unless of course you want the recipient to either howl with laughter or pull off your shirt. The traveler knew that one of the five pillars of Islam was the giving of alms, so as he approached the beggar, he dropped a one-dirham coin in his palm. It bounced from the callused flesh before he could close his arthritic fingers around the silver piece, onto the ground and then into the hip pocket of the faux guide.

            “Give that to him,” the man said, but there was no heart in it. It seemed futile here. The constant barrage of vendors and touts, beggars and hashish dealers, had seen to that. “What kind of Muslim are you, taking money from a beggar?” he asked the boy instead.

            “I am a poor Meslem!” He looked up with a grin as the traveler fished for another dirham to give the beggar, who was peering into the creases of his palm uncomprehendingly. The beggar’s skin had the texture of the crust at the bottom of a loaf of bread, but the traveler held the coin there until he felt the scrape of calloused fingertips closing. Alms thus given, he spun down the first alleyway that caught his attention, and the next one after that, always with the swiftly fading hope that the boy would either become separated from him or lose interest. He did neither, but the man did succeed in letting the medina swallow him without a trace.

            The acrid-sweet smell of something dead hit the man’s nose, wafting from the black gap between two grubby stucco buildings that leaned toward each other like drunken old men. He turned away from it, heading back the way he’d come, when he noticed two other boys had approached the faux guide. He whispered something to them and they bolted past the man, into the alley from which the stench emanated. Maybe he had sent them away—beat it, chaps, this one’s mine. Then another thought seeped into the din pressing upon the man, a dark rider atop the back of the first: Maybe he had sent them to get some older friends to roll the stupid ferengi that had wandered so deep into such forbidding territory.