"Jee-sus," she whispers. "Seriously?"

"That's what it says." I wonder why, if Sam is Jewish, even only half-Jewish like I'm half-Shi'ite, she says "Jesus" all the time.

"Do you trust this guy?"

My stomach is beginning to hurt, probably from these strange sauces made by someone who is no doubt from Al-Ummal and has no idea how to make Chinese food. Something inside contracts, then relaxes. "I don't know. I didn't know him well at school. But I don't think my cousin Saleh would send me to someone he doesn't trust."

Sam picks up a chopstick from the counter and puts it into her mouth at the same angle she would a cigarette. Unsatisfied with her almost subconscious drag, she eyes the biscuit jar.

I look over the note again. Mustapha did say he'd have a messenger drop off a note.

"Rizgar's not going to like that," she says. "He doesn't like when I do things without him." She chews the chopstick a bit between her molars. "He's very protective of me."

"I know."

"Not that you're not-"

I hold up my hand, trying to make her stop explaining. "I understand what you meant. I'll talk to him."

"Rizgar? Yeah, but I'm not sure he trusts you."

"Really? I think we work together well."

"Maybe it's a Kurdish thing. Your guys did kill about a few hundred thousand of theirs, easy."

"My guys? No one in my family worked for-"

"I mean, the half of your guys who are Sunni."

I wonder if Sam even knows about some of the things that Kurds would do to Arabs, given the chance. About the fact that they want to break up Iraq so they can make their own country and take all our oil wealth with them. About the Arabs in the north who have been chased out of their homes at gunpoint in the past few weeks, decades after Saddam moved them there. I've been reading about it in the newspapers.

"Sorry, I'm not being fair," says Sam. "I'm just trying to see it through his eyes." I wonder if, when I'm not there, she tries to see it through mine. "My God," she says. "This place is too complicated. I don't know if we should do this. My editors are happy to just run the story as is, so what am I doing putting my ass on the line? Mine and yours!"

"You don't have to worry about me. I'm ready to do whatever it takes to get the story."

Including getting a gun. I'll go back to Zayouna first thing, pick one out, pay for it, and keep it under my shirt, like everyone else. Protective, like Rizgar.

"We have to finish this, Sam. If we give up on getting to the truth, what was the point of any of the work we've done together? What are you doing here?"

She looks at me with a mix of sweetness and pity, like she's sorry she ever gave me all those talks about the truth, about ethics, about what good journalists do and don't do.

A baretta. Or maybe a Smith and Wesson. Louis said that was one of the best.

"He also wanted you to bring the photocopies."

"Maybe Baylor's right. Maybe we hold off a day and see."

"But you need to finish the story as soon as possible, right? I mean, your editors don't want to wait another few days, do they."

"No." Her mouth twitches. "It's now or never."

I come towards her in the kitchen. I have an urge to cover her mouth with mine, to turn that twitch into a kiss. Instead I lean against the wall by the door, on the back of which is a newly placed page of emergency instructions, signed by the Hamra Management.

In case of an attack on the hotel, such as by mortars or shelling, hide under furniture such as desks for protection.

In case of an attack outside the hotel, I'll be Sam's furniture.

"You're a guest in Iraq. Let me do the worrying. Everything will work out the way it's supposed to." I hardly know if I believe that, but when Amal says it, I always like the way it sounds.

Sam puts her fingers on her eyelids and makes slow circles. "You know what, I am worried. And I'm feeling awful about Joon. I've known her for three years and we've never spoken to each other like that."

"Maybe you'll sort things out with her."

"Maybe." She opens her eyes again. "So you'll talk to Rizgar?"

"Yes. I'll explain."

She smiles with crooked lips, not looking up.

43.

Looking Every so often my mind will work in a very organized way. The plan of action comes out short and clear, like my poems once did. On my way across the lobby, I find my fingers air-typing a list of what I need to do. See Munzer, then Rizgar, prepare for Mustapha. Talk to Saleh once more to check that he doesn't have any doubts about Mustapha. Take money out of my bottom drawer, waiting in an envelope behind my old notebooks, and decide what kind of gun to buy.

I catch Munzer just as he is leaving his shift for the day, on the steps outside the hotel.

"You got the note?" he asks.

"Yes," I say. "I would have come over to get it. I thought you were going to leave it here for me."

"I was leaving soon and I wanted to make sure it got to you. It seemed important."

"You read it?" I didn't mean to sound so accusatory.

"No. You just seemed anxious about it, so I thought whatever you were waiting for must be very important."

"The people who were dropping it off were supposed to believe that Miss Samara lives here, at the Sumerland."

"Okay, so no problem."

"Well, what if they saw you or one of your guys run across the street right afterwards to deliver it to the Hamra?"

He looks at me with eyes that don't seem to have blinked even once. "I don't think so, Mr Nabil. I don't think so at all." He gazes at his watch and takes a step down, away from me. "You don't have to worry. I'll keep our secret. But you must excuse me. I need to pick up my wife from work. She works at the Babel Hotel. Let me know if you need anything else," he says, taking the next three steps towards the street, a car key already in his hand.

Rizgar is asleep behind the wheel, the windows down. I shake the car a little bit until he awakens.

"I'm glad Baghdad is now safe enough that you can have a nap out on the street," I say, teasing. He unlocks the door languidly, letting me in.

"Just closed my eyes for five minutes, that's all. It's so hot, and it's bad for the car to run in the heat all day just so I can sit in the air-conditioning."

"True. Also expensive," I say, as he takes off into Karada. "But you could sit inside the lobby, where it's air-conditioned."

"The lobby is for the translators," he says. "The drivers sit and wait by their cars."

That's right, I think. But not all of them. Some translators go to their journalists' rooms and eat dinner.

I ask Rizgar to take me to my cousin Saleh's house again. It's short, I promise. It's really important.

"I'm her chauffeur," he says. "Not yours."

"Five minutes. Just five."

"Fine," he says, and we drive in silence, me holding back the information that I now have, wanting to wait until I'm ready to jump out of the car to tell him, so I won't have to face him lecture me for too long, or to feel him brooding the whole way.

Instead, I find myself pushing Rizgar towards small talk, asking him questions about his family that I had never asked before. His wife and three children are in Irbil, but he has relatives in Kirkuk and Suleimaniye. His wife's family is from Halapca. He asks me if I know what happened there. I say that I've heard some stories, but I don't know what part of them is true. It's all true, he says, and it's worse than you would think. He says he has a lot of young cousins who keep having children with strange birth defects like bad fingers and missing body parts, or other things in the wrong place, or diseases that kill them before they're old enough to run.

"I'm glad Saddam is gone," I say. I suppose I mean it, too. It can't all have been made up by the Americans, all those stories, those deformed children. If America hadn't come, maybe Saddam would do that to some other place. If Saddam were still here, Sam wouldn't be.

Rizgar nods as if he's ready to believe me but hasn't yet made the decision to do so. He points out that we're on Saleh's street. I'm startled; I had meant to ask him to wait a few blocks away, and now down the street will have to do.

"Can you wait here? It's better you don't park in front of his house."

"Maku mushkile."

Ashtar answers the door. She invites me inside and tells me she will set the table for me to eat. I tell her I had a huge, late lunch, and that I just need to have a quick talk with Saleh. He isn't here, she says; he said he'd probably be staying late at his new job, but why don't I have tea and wait for him? I end up running inside to use the toilet. It's a terrible feeling, knowing that someone else is having to listen to the sound of you throwing up.

Out in the hallway, her face is drawn with concern. Am I all right? Do I want to have a biriani - just rice and potatoes this time, not at all spicy? Just tea? Stay and rest, she says. I tell her no, just a glass of water, and that I really should be going home. And in fact, that's all I want just now, because I'm thinking that it might not be the last time tonight I'm going to be sick. "Stay here. Let me call your parents and tell them you weren't feeling well," she says. "You don't have to," I say, "and besides that, the phones still aren't working," and she touches her forehead to show she forgot. Just tell Saleh I came by, and that maybe I'll try to stop by tomorrow before work, and she says he leaves early now, by 7.30. And as I head for the door she rushes back to the kitchen to give me some dolma she made for me to deliver to my family.

In the car, Rizgar is waiting, his face still bearing traces of sleepiness.

"Don't you get enough rest at night?" A stupid question on my part. I rarely get more than five hours these days.

"The family that I'm staying with just had a baby girl," he says. "She keeps me up half the night. I'm going to have to find some other place to live."

"Really?" It occurs to me I hadn't asked him much about his living situation. I assumed that he was staying either with relatives, or in a cheap hotel. "Where are they?"

"In Karada." I try to contain my surprise. Karada is a relatively affluent neighbourhood, right near the Hamra. Did I assume poverty, only because he's Sam's driver? They might be Rizgar's distant relatives, Kurds who'd done well for themselves as businessmen in Baghdad.

"So when you drop me off in my neighbourhood after work, it's totally out of your way," I say.

He bends his head to one side, a kind of humble acknowledgement that he had never let me know that he was sometimes spending an extra half-hour in the car, maybe more on bad days, just to help me get home safely. "It doesn't matter," he says. "It's my duty."

"It's not your duty. Sam probably doesn't know the difference."

He shrugs. "There are a lot of things Sam doesn't know. It's my job to see that you do everything safely."

"Oh, by the way, can you drop me off in Mansour? I'm going to walk from there."

He glances at me with a squint.

"Like you said, there are a lot of things that Sam doesn't know."

He smiles, reaches for a cigarette, and opens the window a crack before he lights it.

"You're very kind."

"Anything for the prince," he says.

"Oh! The prince," I chuckle.

"As I see it, when I'm driving her I have to treat her like the queen. You, you don't exactly qualify as the king, so I decided that you get to be the prince."

"Oh, really. Well, then I'll have to appoint you as the head of royal security!"

He grins and I find myself wishing, just for a minute, that I also smoked, so that I could share that with him, or that I knew some Kurdish.

"How do you say, how are you?"

"What?"

"How are you, in Kurdish."

He blows out the smoke with rounded lips. "It depends on the Kurdish."

"Well, your Kurdish."

"Choni chaki."

"Choni chaki?. Choni Chaki is shlonak?"

He nods as if he knew I would make fun of it.

"And zorspiz, this is thank you?"

"Zor spas," he says, correcting me.

"What a great language."