“Well, obviously. Come, Umm Dabir, you’ve seen my personnel file. If I were a two-time divorcée, you’d know it.”

“Well yes, of course, but . . . What kind of a joke is that?”

“A little boy’s joke.” Amal shrugged. “You know how it is. I thought I’d gotten beyond this sort of hazing, but apparently not.” She held up the message slip. “Can I ask you to do me a favor and not tell anyone about this? A rumor will only encourage them.”

“Of course,” Umm Dabir said, incensed now on Amal’s behalf. “What do you want me to do if this ‘Abu Salim’ calls back?”

“He won’t,” Amal said. “I’ll make certain of that.”

If ever she wanted to blame someone, she could always say it was Saddam Hussein’s fault.

The year Amal went away to college was the same year the federal government indicted Saddam’s uncle, Khairallah Talfah. Talfah, the former Baghdad mayor who’d resigned under a cloud of scandal, had been out of the public eye for some time, but the feds hadn’t forgotten about him. They’d been quietly building a racketeering case against him and had caught a break when Hussein Kamel, who was Saddam’s son-in-law and Talfah’s former aide, agreed to become a government witness.

In addition to Talfah, the indictment also named the current mayor, the chief and deputy police commissioners, and several high-ranking Baathists. Saddam himself was not charged—not yet—but with Hussein Kamel talking to the Attorney General, it was only a matter of time.

All of which put Amal’s father, Shamal, in a difficult position. Shamal was a Baghdad police sergeant and a Baath Union officer. It was not possible to be either of those things without also being somewhat corrupt, but where some men embraced corruption willingly, others did only what they had to do. Shamal belonged to the latter group, and he and a number of like-minded friends had talked privately for years about banding together to clean up the police force.

Now suddenly it was more than just talk. In the shake-up following the indictments, Shamal was offered a promotion to police captain and a corresponding increase in his union responsibilities. If he took the offer, there could be no more fence-sitting: He’d either have to declare openly as a reformer and risk the consequences, or admit he lacked the courage and pledge his loyalty to evil men.

Amal, only sixteen, was told none of this, but she could tell by the way her parents and her older brothers were acting that something serious was going on. One night she was awakened from a deep sleep by her mother, who told her to get dressed—they had guests. When Amal came downstairs, her father was sitting at the kitchen table with Saddam Hussein and his son Uday.

The Baath Union president was famous for his late-night calls on friends and allies—or people he hoped to make his allies. In interviews, he ascribed this habit variously to insomnia, a busy schedule that made daytime socializing difficult, and a desire for honesty. “People are more open with you in the small hours,” he said.

This was Saddam’s first such visit to Shamal. He’d come bearing gifts: a silver-plated service revolver and a case of whiskey. Shamal struggled to project an appropriate combination of emotions—honor at the social call, gratitude for the presents, blasé disregard for the felony violation—while remaining respectfully noncommittal about the proposed alliance.

It was a tough juggling act to pull off at 2 a.m., and Amal didn’t get to see how it turned out. She and her siblings were only in the room for a few minutes, just long enough to be introduced, before her mother hustled them back to bed. As Amal left the kitchen she looked over her shoulder and saw Uday staring at her backside with a smile on his lips.

Several days later, her mother sat her down to talk about college. Amal still had another year of high school to finish, after which she’d been hoping to attend BU, but now her parents had come up with an altogether different plan. Amal’s aunt Nida was on the board of the University of Lebanon, which had an early admissions program for gifted students. Given Amal’s high grades, she’d surely qualify. She could start as a freshman this fall.

“But I don’t have my high school diploma yet,” Amal said, bewildered.

“You’ll have to pass a test,” her mother explained. “That’s no problem, though—Nida will put you up over the summer and provide you with a tutor. She’s already agreed.” Before Amal could raise any other objections, her mother added: “Your father and I think it’s a wonderful opportunity. You will take it.”

Early one morning a few weeks later, Shamal and Amal climbed into the family station wagon and headed west along the interstate. Amal was full of questions she knew she couldn’t properly ask; as they drove across Anbar Province she tried to think of some magic phrasing that would allow her to ask them anyway, but every time she thought she’d come up with an opening she’d take one look at her father’s face and forget what she was going to say. Eventually, exhausted, she slipped into a doze. When she woke again, they were in Syria.

They stopped to eat at a diner outside Damascus and had what was technically a conversation, about the classes Amal was thinking of taking during her first semester. But the talk was all surface, and once they got back in the car they didn’t speak again until they reached Beirut.

They arrived at Aunt Nida’s in the late afternoon. Though they’d been on the road for ten hours, Shamal announced he wouldn’t be staying; he had work the next day and needed to get back to Baghdad. Amal sensed he was less concerned about missing work than about having to explain where he’d been.

Shamal set Amal’s bags on the sidewalk and kissed her on the forehead. “Be good,” he told her. “Make us proud.”

Amal opened her mouth to say “I will,” but what came out was: “You too.”

Aunt Nida was a successful businesswoman who’d gotten involved in politics and was now planning a run for the House of Representatives. She was a member of the Unity Party, the liberal, secular, pan-Arab coalition party founded in the late 1950s by Gamal Abdel Nasser. In Lebanon, Unity was opposed by not just one, but two Parties of God: the conservative National POG, which was dominated by Sunnis and the House of Saud, and the ultraconservative Lebanese POG, which was run almost exclusively by Shia.

The political intrigue involved in playing the two POGs off against one another made for some fascinating war stories, but left Nida with little spare time to act as a chaperone, especially once Amal (who’d aced her high school equivalency test) moved onto the U of L campus. Nida assigned one of her sons to check in on Amal periodically, but for the most part she was left to look after herself, in a way that would have been unimaginable had she remained in Baghdad.

Her two roommates were Jemila and Iman, both arts majors but otherwise as different as could be. Jemila, a Beirut native who was studying theater, was what was known in the parlance of the day as a “modern” girl, a term that could mean either “sophisticated free spirit,” or, said another way, “whore.” Jemila had a steady stream of boyfriends, and it was the boyfriends who most often used “modern” in its second sense—with a smile when Jemila first met them, and with anger or tears when, inevitably, she dumped them.

Iman came from Khafji, an oil town on the Gulf coast. She was studying to be a documentary filmmaker. Iman was also a “ninja”: Outside the dorm and the women’s gym where she took her exercise, she wore a black abaya with a niqab veil that left only her eyes visible. “Ninja,” like “modern,” was a term with multiple connotations, but anyone who assumed from her style of dress that Iman was a sheltered hick soon learned otherwise.

When Amal professed her ambition to become a cop like her dad, it was Iman who suggested she apply to the Bureau. “The ABI is more open to women than most local police forces,” she said. “It still won’t be easy, but you’ll at least have a chance. And you’ll get to chase bank robbers.”