"How long have you known her?"

"More than a year. She came here to report before the war." I don't know what shifted, what made me make up another lie. I want people to trust Sam, and for her to trust me.

I feel her pacing back towards us, the squeak of her sandals across the cheap linoleum. "I'm sorry," she says. "I think we should go. There's another story breaking and my editors want me to file on something else."

I stand and Hatem stands, too. I try to explain why we are leaving so quickly, but I don't think he understands. He seems to feel we've only just arrived, and should stay for a meal.

"Thank you so much for your time, Mr- oh! Wait," she says, flipping back over her last two pages of notes. "I didn't get your name."

"I have it," I tell her. "I will give it to you in the car."

"But I need to make sure the spelling is right. Some people have a preference for how to write it in English."

"Hatem Mohammed," Hatem says.

"Mohammed? That's his last name?"

"Badr. Hatem Mohammed Badr." His eyes are locked on Sam's forehead as she writes down the name, but she seems oblivious.

"Do you use b-a-d-r, or b-a-d-e-r?"

He looks to me for an answer. His features expand, a map of his suspicions occupying more territory across his face.

"Put b-a-d-r. No *e'," I say. I am afraid that with the "e," Sam's readers will see the name and think "badder." Even though I know there is no such word, it is the way people will see it, and this troubles me. On the radio, I've heard the way Bush pronounces our president's name. He makes it sound like "sad" and "damn".

Sam peeks around the corner towards the kitchen to say goodbye to Hatem's wife. She is reticent but smiles broadly, and then hurries to Sam and kisses her on both cheeks.

Nearing the door, I remember how we got here. "Oh, your brother Adel never came by. He said he was going to join us. Please thank him."

"How do you know Adel?"

"We met-" Lie again? "We met him just today."

"Oh, I see." Hatem nodded, as if ticking off mental notes for himself. "You know, Adel is not really my brother."

And now I feel daft, because when I think about it, the two men do not look at all alike. Adel was fat and fair to the point of coming across as foreign, while Hatem is like any other working-class guy on the streets of Saddam City, gaunt and brown-skinned.

"But you can say he is something like a brother." He runs his hand over his beard and winces.

Sam stands in the hallway, snapping her bag shut. "You'll tell me about this conversation in the car, I take it?"

"Our brotherhood is something the Shi'ites have that I'm not sure you can understand," Hatem says. "Just like it is difficult for you to believe the evil things Saddam did, perhaps because he is one of yours."

"Actually, I'm also Shi'ite," I say "I mean, sort of - I am both. I am Sunni and Shi'ite."

"Sedog?" He smiles and slaps my back as a good friend might, rubbing where his hand has landed. "The two sides of the Iraqi heart. Maybe you are the Mahdi, like the messiah, coming to bring peace!" He laughs deeply, and I try to laugh along with him. "Seriously, it must be hard for you to decide which side you are on."

"Nabil?" Sam is holding on to the rail above the staircase.

"When you choose, if you choose well, you are always welcome to come back and visit us." He puts his hand on my shoulders and draws me to him, kissing alternating sides, three times, or maybe more, because already I am finding it difficult to keep track of how many times things have happened and how much time has passed. He lets me go and Sam is tapping her foot and a waking dream suddenly shoots through my mind: Noor's bullet zooming in the window and me flying up to catch it, my cupped, glowing hands saving the world from disaster.

9.

Saving Sam's editor, it seems, wanted her to go to the Museum of Art. He read on the newswire - this is a new word for me - that the museum's ancient art is being carried away by what they called "professional" looters. But we cannot get anywhere near the building. There are American military vehicles cordoning off the area, sending people back.

"Maybe we can come back later," I offer. "What can you do? One can't argue with a tank."

"That's not a tank," Sam says. "It's a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. See? There're no treads on it. It's just a scary-ass Humvee with big guns mounted on it. Okay, Rizgar. To the Hunting Club."

"Now Hunt Club? Again?" I am impressed with Rizgar's Arabic, given that many Kurds from the north do not speak so well. But his English is so nominal that I wonder how he and Sam manage to communicate.

"Yes." She turns towards me, and as she does so, I hear the vertebrae in her back clicking against each other, and then a sigh, maybe of pain and maybe of relief, passing her lips. "We need to see if we can get that interview for tomorrow."

Once we get past the checkpoint, where a few American soldiers are posted, we drive into the Hunting Club. The grounds are green and spacious, and from here it seems that we are no longer in Baghdad. There are many types of beautiful shrubs and trees and everything is well-manicured. Rizgar stops the car outside the main building and Sam hops out and I step out, too. "You can walk me up, but I don't think you'll need to come in with me. These guys speak English better than I do." She rolls her eyes, which I've come to realize means that I shouldn't take what she just said seriously.

"I will be happy to escort you anyway."

"No, seriously, these INC folks have been spending so much time in Washington, they ought to be naturalized citizens by now. They probably prefer not to have an unknown Iraqi in the room."

"Oh. Of course," I say, feeling foolish.

We walk into the wide-doored, white building and I follow Sam to the reception area. There are dark, rectangular spots along the walls where pictures must have been removed, the area around them bleached lighter from the sun. I can imagine the line of photographs of Saddam and his sons - dressed in equestrian uniforms or riding atop their favourite horses - which must have been removed only in the last day or two. These photographs of Saddam doing sportsman-like things were often published in the newspapers.

The man behind the desk says that we can stay where we are until the press spokesman comes to collect us.

"Oh, he's just waiting with me," Sam says, gesturing in my direction.

The room has large wooden chairs, upholstered with red leather seats. Sam runs her fingers down one of the carved arms and sits, and I take the chair next to her.

"It's like Saddam tried to make it look like a real English hunting club, smack in the middle of Baghdad." She points up at the mountings above the window. There are wooden plaques with hooks that were obviously a display for old rifles, judging from the shape of the faded spots, but the guns are absent.

"Look at this place." Sam leans in towards me and lowers her voice. "The lap of luxury when people were supposedly starving due to the sanctions." She gets up and inspects a massive vase, painted blue and white in a Chinese motif, sitting next to the end table. "This one might be an antique." She tilts her head back and uses her eyes to direct me to the huge chandelier, glittering like a sun shower above our heads. She sits down again and crosses her legs, letting the upper bounce against the lower. "Just like the palaces. You'd think people would have wanted to tear the place apart."

The receptionist slides open the glass panel covering the window that he sits behind. He sticks his head through and says to me, "Dr Marufi says he can see her in ten minutes."

"He says ten minutes more," I tell Sam.

"I got that."

I hadn't considered the possibility that Sam would know more than how to say hello and thank you. "Do you speak some Arabic?"

"Not really. Dribs and drabs. I learned a bit from a phrasebook, but the numbers and minutes are among the few things that stuck. I wish I'd done Arabic in college."

"So you went to college? Not to university."

Sam takes out her notebook and flips to a blank page. She begins making a list. I feel she is speaking to me one moment and then ignoring me the next. But now I realize that she must be making a list of important questions to ask in her interview. She stops after five lines. "I know in England college means something less than university, which is probably what you're thinking of."

"Yes. I have friends who studied there and they say it was very important to get accepted to university."

"Right." Sam shuts the notebook and taps on it with her pen. "You know, Nabil, I think we're having little misunderstandings about a lot of things."

I can feel a muscle in my throat go tight, like a bicycle chain when the gears are changed too quickly.

"I need you to work a little harder to be on the ball for me when we're doing interviews. I wasn't, well, entirely happy about the way things went earlier."

"I...did you find that I was not on the ball?" I know I should listen to her first, but I thought that the expression "on the ball" means to be alert. Was I not alert?

"I mean, we need to be on the same page with how this works. I need you to translate sentence by sentence. Word for word. You can't listen for five minutes and then translate. You'll forget what the guy said and then-"

"Oh, but I won't forget. I have a great memory. Also, he didn't want to stop for me to translate. He wanted to tell me everything, and then for me to explain it to you."

She shakes her head, her eyes squinting as if to see something far off in the distance. "It doesn't matter what he wants, or what anyone we're talking to wants. You have to find a way to slow them down or stop them when they're speaking. They'll get used to it, everybody does. Just do something like this," she says, tilting the palm of her hand up at a forty-five-degree angle, "and say, *wait, I have to translate.'"

"But that would be interrupting him. It might appear impolite. We were guests in his house."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. You'll get used to it. It's already an unusual kind of conversation. Guy's talking with a foreigner and half of the conversation is taking place in a language he doesn't understand." She pauses. "Also, I feel like you're not translating exactly what the guy is saying. I need to have it in their words - as close to their words as possible." She turns to me and lifts her eyebrows, and now the wrinkles that were in hiding are visible.

"I understand that," I say. "That's what I am trying to do."

"But a lot of the time you were letting that man speak for a while and I know he would have said five or ten sentences, and you're coming back to me with just one. I may not know much Arabic, but I can just feel that in my bones."

Sam's right. I wasn't giving her every sentence. I was trying to leave out the parts that seemed extraneous or confusing.

"I see."

Or maybe embarrassing.

"I need to hear everything, even if you don't think it would be important."

"Everything? Every single thing he says, like the name of every relative he says Saddam killed? Or how he might go to Al-Hilla in the morning to look for his cousins' remains?"

"Wait, he said he was going to Al-Hilla?"

"He said he was going to go to Al-Hilla to search for his cousins who he thinks were buried in a mass grave there, which is now being exposed."

"Exhumed. And?"

"Or maybe he said Al-Mahawil. I think both, maybe. He said he'd go tomorrow, or on Monday."

Sam expels a long breath. I can smell the coffee in it when it hits my face.

"Nabil, you never mentioned either of those places. You just said the south."

"They are in the south."

"Yes, but the fact that it's Al-Hilla or Al-Mahawil makes a big difference. Specifics. Specifics are the heart of journalism. There were reports this morning that Iraqis are flocking down there and trying to dig up these mass graves with their bare hands. If I had known what he was planning I might have asked him about that. Maybe we could have followed his family there and spent the day with them. That would have been a great story."

"But I'm telling you about it now."

"It doesn't matter now. I can't ask him questions now. Unless we go back," she says, looking at her watch, "which I don't think we have enough time to do."

I can't understand why Sam is making such a fuss over one man with looted goods and dead relatives. We can probably find a thousand men who will tell us the same story.

"Do you want to go back?"

"No, not really. That's not the point. I just want you to know that I need to hear these things while we're in the middle of the interview so I can ask follow-up questions." She lifts her fire-eyebrows towards me. "Do you know what I mean? I need specific details, all the time."

"Yes, yes I see. I'm sorry. I thought these small details were insignificant."

"Sometimes small details make big stories. Let me be the judge of what's significant or not." She uncrosses her legs and stands up. With her back to me, she leans her weight into a bent knee while the other leg is straight - lunging left and then right, for the second time today. I hear a pop emerge from somewhere in the vicinity of her hips. I wonder how old Sam is. She looks like she is in her late twenties, but sometimes she moves like she might be younger. Like a teenager who cannot sit still.

She spins back around towards me. "Don't get me wrong, Nabil. You're doing a fantastic job. Your English is beautiful," she says, pinching her thumb and a few fingers together near her lips, and then releasing them with a tiny kiss. "You just need to learn how it all works." She parts her feet and then doubles over, placing her hands flat to the floor.

Her face is reddish-brown when she comes up. "Sorry," she says. "My body is so sore. The chairs at that hotel are shit, and I was up late last night working. My editor lives in a fantasy world where a good reporter should be able break some big, earth-shattering story within a week of coming to Baghdad."

I almost forgot that some people might have reason to stay up late at night. Since the war began, we rarely have electricity past 8 p.m.

She looks at her watch again. "Oh, and remember to speak in first-person. Don't say, *he says so and so.' Just say what the guy says as if you're him."

"Sam, excuse me. But is it, *you are him?' Or, *you are he?"*

Sam's lips curve into a slight frown of incredulity. "Brilliant," she breathes. "You're right. It is *you are he.' I think. Do they teach this kind of stuff in school here?"

"Not really. But I studied the grammar on my own to make sure I understood all the rules."

"You like following rules, huh?" She stands and bends towards the glass window, which has no one sitting behind it now.

"It just makes understanding the language easier."

"Jeez, these guys are taking forever. There's also supposed to be another press conference with the army later, but I don't think I'm going to go." She locks her fingers together, then presses them out so they crack at nearly the same moment, sounding almost musical.

A round of automatic gunfire splinters into the air and continues for half a minute. It could be a mile away, or two. Another round comes, with a slightly different rattle, angled to answer the first. They seem like the call of birds in the trees, one speaking to the other.

Sam rolls her eyes at me. "Afternoon target practice. I guess you're used to it."

"No. Really not. We never used to hear this before the war."

"Well, yeah, I guess they killed people in prisons and basements, not out on the street."