“Well, it looks real enough. Professionally printed.”

“That photo is obviously a fake, though,” Samir put in. “What do you think, Waj? Photoshop?”

“Could be.” He pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the front page, where a rectangle of newsprint had been neatly excised. “What happened here? Somebody clip out a recipe?”

“We’re not sure how that happened,” Mustafa said. He’d first noticed the cutout about an hour before he received the call informing him Gabriel Costello was dead. “There are some pages missing from the inside, as well.”

“Would it be all right if I made a copy of this?” Waj asked. “I’d like to read it through, maybe show it to a couple of my research guys.”

“As long as you keep it in-house.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t post it on the Library . . . Hmm, that’s interesting.”

“What?”

“According to this, these September 11 attacks took place on a Tuesday.”

“Sure, just like 11/9,” Mustafa said.

“Yes,” said Waj, “that’s the problem . . .” He pulled up a calendar on one of his computer screens. “Yeah, see: September 11, 2001, was a Saturday, not a Tuesday.”

Samir snorted. “What a surprise, even the date is fictional.”

Wajid stared at the calendar. “You think about it, it’s too bad September 11 wasn’t a Tuesday . . .”

“Why?” said Mustafa.

“Because then November 9 would have been a Friday.”

Friday: first day of the weekend. Mustafa heard the Fairfax preacher: Come the rapture, I know I won’t be home . . . “The towers would have been empty.”

“Emptier, anyway,” Waj said. “Janitors, security people, probably some office workers clocking overtime. But the restaurant would have been closed, and the evacuation would have gone a lot faster . . .”

Samir, bemused, said: “What are you talking about?”

“In Christian countries, the weekend starts on Saturday,” Mustafa explained. “Or Sunday.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Samir said. “And I know crusaders can be idiots. But do you really think they wouldn’t have checked to make sure the towers would be open for business that day?”

“What if they hadn’t, though?” Mustafa said. Just imagine it: the planes, themselves emptier because of the holy day, crashing into mostly vacant offices, silent halls and stairwells. Of course it still would have been a great tragedy, and the shock of the towers’ destruction would not have been lessened in the slightest. But once the smoke cleared and word began to spread of the even greater tragedy so miraculously averted, might history not have proceeded down a different path? Maybe leveler heads would have prevailed. Maybe the pointless war with America could have been called off. The thought of this alternate reality, in which not only the thousands of lost soldiers but even that silly Fairfax preacher got to live out their natural lives, filled Mustafa with a sudden, irrational joy.

Then he thought, Fadwa, and his joy faded.

“Dude,” Wajid said, reading some or all of this in his expression. “Forget about it. Samir’s right. They would have checked.”

“I know,” Mustafa said.

“And even if they hadn’t . . . The guy who sold them the plane tickets would have said something.”

Waj stepped out of his office to arrange the copying of the newspaper and Samir tagged along with him. Mustafa and Amal remained seated, both looking quietly out the window.

“ ‘Number three,’ ” Amal said finally, unable to help herself.

“I apologize for that,” Mustafa said, embarrassed. “I assure you I’ve told Waj nothing about you that would imply an inappropriate relationship. But he has a fertile imagination, and he lacks a proper filter between his brain and his mouth.”

“So I gather.”

“Also, he takes a very personal interest in my marital affairs. He’s prouder of my marriage to Noor than I am at this point; he believes he’s responsible for it.”

“And why is that? Did he introduce you to her?”

“No,” Mustafa said. “He made it possible for me to afford to marry her. Stock options,” he explained. “Waj sold me some of his shares in eBazaar, a few months before the IPO.”

“EBazaar! But you must be rich, then. Why are you still in government service?”

“I would be rich, if I’d taken all the shares Waj offered me. But I decided to hedge my bet by investing in some other Internet stocks that didn’t perform nearly as well . . . Still, it was quite a windfall. I thought I was rich. Rich enough to behave very stupidly, for a while.”

“Forgive me,” Amal said, “but I still don’t understand how you could do such a thing.”

“Oh, it’s not hard. There’s actually an 800 number you can call, to get information on the practicalities of taking multiple wives. A website, too, government-funded, courtesy of Al Saud . . . At least that used to be the case. I suppose your mother’s efforts in Congress may have led to some changes.”

“That isn’t what I—”

“I know what you meant,” Mustafa said. “The short answer is, you do it by deliberately confusing what is permitted with what is right. Money makes the confusion easier.” He looked at her, then continued in a softer tone: “It’s OK, I don’t expect you to understand. You kind of had to be there.”

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Female infertility

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Female infertility is a condition in which a woman either cannot conceive or cannot carry a pregnancy to term. There are many types of infertility and many possible causes, such as genetic defects, physical abnormalities, hormonal disorders, and the effects of various diseases.

Female infertility is one of the most common grounds for divorce . . .

Fadwa was praying to the Virgin Mary on the night Mustafa met Noor.

Mustafa had known Fadwa since childhood. She was the daughter of his mother’s oldest friend, and whenever Umm Mustafa went home to visit her family in downstate Iraq, or when Fadwa’s parents came up to Baghdad, the two of them ended up playing together. When he was very young, Mustafa’s sisters sometimes teased him by saying that he and Fadwa were going to be married one day.

Then, just as the two of them were reaching an age when boys and girls were expected to play separately, Fadwa’s father got a job abroad, in America of all places. Umm Mustafa was sad to see her friend leave, but she was also excited, because she thought her own dreams of travel would now be realized. But visiting Fadwa’s mother in her new home proved insurmountably difficult: Americans were stingy with tourist visas, and both times that Umm Mustafa successfully navigated the bureaucracy, the trip had to be canceled at the last minute, once because Abu Mustafa couldn’t get leave from the university and once because of Umm Mustafa’s declining health.

Mustafa’s mother had been dead three years by the time he saw Fadwa again. He’d just finished college and started working at Halal. He’d heard Fadwa’s family was back in Iraq—her father’s American job a casualty of the Gulf War—but still he was surprised to get a letter from her, an invitation to her brother’s wedding. He almost didn’t go. He was on assignment that weekend, a stakeout in Samarra, but at the last moment he got Samir to cover for him and drove south to the village where his mother had been born.

Fadwa had grown into a beautiful young woman. Mustafa spent most of the wedding party hovering around her, and late in the day the two of them went for a stroll through the village, visiting their childhood haunts. Little about the place had changed, with the exception of the broad irrigation canal that now ran through the fields to the west. Numerous signs proclaimed the canal a “gift” of the Baath Labor Union.