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bathroom too many times already. She has bathroom problems. Not for me!”
    “What do you mean, not for you ?” interjected Young Hemingway, who by now was utterly outraged by such unmitigated misogyny.
    “I mean I wouldn’t neek her with your zeb. ”
    He was, as always, aware of every woman in the café. “They’re here for one reason only, and that reason is us three.” Young Hemingway asked him why he didn’t make a move if he was so sure. “Too soon.” The only people I’d heard speak this way were fishermen. They look at the sky, gauge the wind, the clouds, have a sixth sense about things, then when you least expect it, they’ll say, “Now!” The woman with the slender figure had just cast a look at our table. With absolutely no discretion, Kalaj began to chuckle out loud, “She looked!” We caught a smile ripple on her face.
    There are two kinds of men about town in France: flâneurs and dragueurs . As becomes obvious in no time, la drague— cruising—is not a hobby, not a science, not an art, not even a question of odds and probabilities. With him it was the perfect alignment of will with desire. His desire for a woman was so relentless that it would never cross his mind that a woman might not desire him back. He never doubted that a woman wanted him. They all did. As far as he was concerned, all women wanted all men. And vice versa. What stood in the way between a man and a woman at Café Algiers was a few chairs, a table, maybe a door—material distance. All a man needed was the will and above all the patience to wait out a woman’s scruples or help her brush them aside. As in a game of penny poker, he explained, all that matters was simply the will to keep raising the pot by a single penny each time; a single penny, not two; a single penny was easy, you wouldn’t even feel it; but you had to wait for her to raise you by a penny as well, which is when you’d raise her by another, she by yet another, and so on. Seduction was not pushing people into doing things they did not wish to do. Seduction was just keeping the pennies coming. If you ran out, then, like a magician, you twirled your fingers and pulled one out from behind her left ear and, with this touch of humor, brought laughter into the mix. In the space of fifteen minutes one morning, I saw him offer a woman a cinquante-quatre —a fifty-four-cent cup of coffee, tax included—put his arm around her each time he burst out laughing, and be off with her.
    “But don’t get me wrong. In the end it’s always the woman who chooses you, not the other way around—always the woman who takes the first step.”
    “What about all this bit about raising them with a penny each time?” asked Young Hemingway.
    “That was bunk,” Kalaj replied.
    “And Nostradamus, then?”
    “Bunk too.”
    His friend stood up to go to the bathroom, huffing, “Nostradamus—really!”
    No sooner has he left our table than Kalaj said, “I can’t stand this guy.”
    “I thought you were friends.”
    Dismissive smirk again. “With that face of his? Are you serious?”
    Suddenly, Kalaj put on a pouting face, stared intently at his cup, meditated on its shape, and began spinning the cup ever so slowly on its saucer. It took me a moment to realize what he was doing. He was mimicking Young Hemingway’s way of pondering every syllable coming out of Kalaj’s mouth. I burst out laughing. He laughed as well.
    AT CAFÉ ALGIERS, people dubbed him Che Guevara or el révolutionnaire , but mainly they called him Kalaj, short for Kalashnikov. “Have you seen Kalaj?” they’d say. Or: “Kalaj is haranguing the brotherhood of man over at Casablanca.” It meant he is arguing about politics in Cambridge’s most popular bar. Or: “Kalaj shouldn’t be long, it’s almost l’heure du thé , teatime,” some of the regulars would say to make fun of how ill-suited he was for anything resembling the ritual civility of five o’clock tea. Sometimes you could even hear him