“If you want, I kill you now,” he said.

Walter was crossing the street from the train station to the bank, this stranger seemingly attached to his arm, gripping it so firmly Walter could feel someone else's perspiration seeping into his own skin. Tomorrow he hoped to be far away from here -- he’d heard the port town was the worst -- but right now this guy was showing him a knife or dagger that gleamed from the inside of his ragged kaftan, even though it was summer and very hot. He’d lost a contact lens two days before, back across the strait, in a temporary camp site between two houses set back from the road, and he could only see with one eye at a time -- to have both eyes open was to be temporarily blinded. All he knew was one eye was open, the corrected one or not, and it blinked when it saw the knife and he almost stopped walking in the middle of the street.

“No, I don’t want that,” he said, because not to say something seemed a mistake. Back in the station was Pittenger, who had offered to travel with him inland since the Swiss vacationers Walter had attached himself to had not been allowed to leave the boat. The Swiss had neglected to bring their passports, and when the boat yawned open to let them all off, the Swiss had been detained by border police with guns drawn. The Swiss had thought Morocco was part of Europe, that Tangiers would be cool, that Algeciras had been a festive town, that all they needed was their national identity cards and they could enter Africa. But if they knew Morocco was part of Africa, then how could they think it was part of Europe? Their logic eluded him, and he felt angry at their mistake. Though he was traveling alone, he didn’t want to travel alone, especially not here. He wished Pittenger was with him right now.

“All right then,” the Moroccan said, dropping his hand from his open kaftan and letting the kaftan fall over his belt with the knife or dagger attached to it. “Buy my hash.”

“I don’t want it,” Walter said, shaking his head fiercely as they reached the other side of the street. The drill, he’d heard, was that they cornered you into buying their hash and then they turned you in and then it was a double helix of detention and bribery until they decided to release you. His open eye was the good one and he could see the Moroccan quite clearly and it was as if his eye fed right into his legs because suddenly he was running back across the street without looking, running with almost a gallop, back toward Pittenger, bursting into the grim safety of the train station waiting room where two Australian women were hunched with fear against their exaggerated backpacks while a half dozen boys or teens baited them and Pittenger sat calmly against the wall and looked up at him.

“Did you change some money?” he asked.

“I couldn’t,” Walter said, his face flushed, his mouth puffing short breaths. “There was a guy all over me.”

“I can front you for the ticket until Rabat,” Pittenger, who had arrived with his own dirham, offered as if it made no difference whatsoever.

“I’d appreciate that.” Walter sat on the floor next to him. They were both sweating, but only Walter was scared. The Australian women would not look at them. They would not look at anybody. One of the teens surrounding them inspected his fingernails as if they held a secret or had just posed an annoying question, while two other boys knelt by the women, speaking to them in low urgent voices, and the other three arranged themselves in a blockade. You would have thought Tangiers would have had a bigger train station, but this was in the last century, and Walter wasn’t even sure it was the main station.

“You think we should do something?” Walter asked Pittenger.

“Not yet,” Pittenger said. He was a cop from Hyattsville, Maryland, and he really knew when, even if this was Mo-rah-ko, as he called it. The street was the street, he’d already once told Walter, and he knew the street. He was the kind of guy whom the hustlers knew to avoid, even though he wasn’t all that large; he was the kind of guy who kept his moustache mean and his eyes fixed and his nostrils flared, if such a gesture were possible; he was the kind of guy who said things like, “People who have to exercise authority don’t really have any authority at all,” even though Walter had only known him forty minutes; he was the kind of guy you were lucky to find when you were almost twenty years old and new to Morocco and looked like maybe you were fifteen or fourteen or thirteen.

Forty minutes ago on the boat as Walter stood staring at the beleaguered Swiss Pittenger had come up to him and said, “You don’t want to be hanging around here. Stick with me. It will be all right.” Walter had never met anybody like him, unless you counted the time he met Clint Eastwood, and that hadn’t happened yet, that would happen much later, and it wasn’t even Clint Eastwood but somebody else, somebody whom Walter felt so safe with he would do anything stupidly dangerous. Who was that guy?

He saw now that there was a puddle close to him on the floor, an imminent puddle that seemed to be growing closer, reaching out to him like a quiet child asking to be brought along or a determined mother wanting to keep him from wherever he was going, the touch of the puddle soft and supple, and then he saw the source of the puddle and it was one of the Australian’s water bottles and the puddle was a call for help even though from what he could see their situation was unchanged.

“Hey.” He nudged Pittenger.

Pittenger was already up with his little mountain climber backpack hooked firmly to his shoulders. “Right on time,” he said, as he stared out through the smudged windows at something that Walter had failed to see or hear.

He strode toward the wall of teens that he seemed certain would dissolve, and the boys ever so slightly shifted and leaned to allow him through, as if Pittenger were an undeniable force moving inexorably on a track whose direction had already been determined and could not be altered. He took up each woman with one hand and set them on their feet. “Train’s here,” he said, his back to the boys.

“Well, thank you very much,” one of the Australians said. They were both older than Walter but younger than Pittenger.

“This is Walter,” said Pittenger, nodding behind him without looking, knowing that he was dutifully standing there. “I’m Jim.” He tapped a bota bag slung over his sunburnt neck. “I’ve got plenty of water.”

He herded the two of them under a sign that said in two alphabets, DEPARTURE: TO THE TRAINS, Walter trailing him as closely as he could without stepping on his heels.

In the compartment the women were subdued and Pittenger glared out the window as if willing the train to roll and Walter thought sadly about how there were no toilet seats for him in Morocco. He’d read somewhere that only the fancy hotels had toilets you could sit on, how you had to squat, and his stomach already hurt and he hadn’t even been here an hour. Almost an hour and he had sixty dollars in his pocket and he’d counted on lasting ten days. In his backpack were a half-consumed plastic jar of peanut butter and a half-full bottle of multi-vitamins.

“You came here with only that? You are one crazy dude!” Pittenger said later, in Rabat, as they walked the streets at midnight, the women safely escorted to their hotel. “I’ll sleep on the sidewalk with you, buddy. That’s no big deal.”

At the gates of the kasbah they were offered a tour for the equivalent of forty cents by two men who could only be described as shady. “A bargain,” Pittenger accepted, as he pushed the two men forward into the dark city and ostentatiously -- at least from Walter’s vantage point behind him -- shifted his blackjack from his jeans pocket to the draped hood of his sweatshirt. Why there, Walter wondered, as they descended into the kasbah, Morocco’s only “rectolinear” one, the guidebook had said, but that had been written by Harvard students who could be free and easy with their rectolinears. There was a bright moon and a large sandy hill in the distance that ran down to the water and the kasbah was indeed a bleached grid of low white buildings on narrow but plausible streets and Walter grew less afraid, especially with that blackjack in Pittenger’s hood.

One night, four years into the future, on what would be his last such trip, Walter would hear a woman scream in the wealthy Lima suburb of Miraflores and he would look up and see a man running from her with something glittering in his hand, and again Walter’s legs would start without him even telling them to, and he’d race to catch up to the man with the woman’s purse, and the man would take him down street after street, far from the boulevard where they’d started, until it was only the two of them, Walter’s voice shouting after him, Stop you motherfucker, Stop as he got closer and closer and he’d realize just as he reached to grab him that he himself was the Eastwood figure he would meet, that it was himself. And when he caught the thief and the thief in the same breath turned to show him his own knife, Walter saw why he had hoped it was someone else.