“What guy?” Samir said.

“Your informant.”

“Ah. No. Turns out it was a waste of time. He just called to say he couldn’t find out what I needed.”

“Well if you’re not busy then, you want to go grab some dinner? Or maybe”—Abdullah looked hopeful—“hit a club? I’m supposed to be babysitting a wiretap, but now that Farouk’s gone home I was thinking I’d put the machines on automatic for a few hours.”

“You know I’d love to,” said Samir. “But I’m actually not feeling too well. I’m going to go home and get to bed early for once.”

Samir’s “informant” was actually Isaac, his former colleague from Halal Enforcement. Isaac was still at Halal; these days he headed a task force that was conducting a probe of the Baghdad PD’s vice division. Between his monitoring of the vice squad’s activities and his knowledge of Halal’s own operations, Isaac was able to predict with near-perfect accuracy which of Baghdad’s rat cellars, brothels, and other illegal establishments were liable to be raided on any given night. Earlier today Samir had forwarded his old friend an email joke—their prearranged signal that he was planning to go out. Once Isaac had the night’s vice raid schedule, he went to a pay phone, called Samir’s cell, and, without identifying himself, recited a list of target neighborhoods to avoid. Isaac did not ask, and Samir did not tell, what sort of illicit entertainment he’d be seeking. But Samir was pretty sure Abdullah wouldn’t be into it.

He drove home to the Kadhimiyah district apartment where he’d been living ever since his divorce. He showered and changed clothes, then pulled all of the ID out of his wallet, lingering for a moment over a snapshot of his twin sons, Malik and Jibril. The boys, ten years old now, lived with their mother in Basra.

Samir left the snapshot with the pile of his ID and grabbed a driver’s license with a fake name. The phony license was primarily a good luck charm—if he got into trouble tonight, the thing most likely to get him out was cash. He made sure he had plenty of that, too.

He slipped out of the apartment building through the back door, walked to a Baghdad Transit stop several blocks away, and caught a bus across the river. At Antar Square in Adhamiyah he switched to the subway. Descending into the station he glimpsed a funhouse reflection of himself in a security mirror. Past the turnstile, the darkened glass of a smoke shop presented him with another reflection; though less distorted than the first, the image still seemed like that of a stranger. It was the way he was carrying himself, he knew: Along with his identification, Samir had left behind his usual swagger.

He boarded a southeast-bound number 6 train, choosing a car whose only other occupant was a long-haired BU student reading a biology textbook. Samir sat across from him and waited, smiling, to see if he’d make eye contact. But the boy only burrowed deeper into his book.

The door at the far end of the subway car slid open and a transit cop entered. As he came down the car, rapping his nightstick against the empty seats, Samir straightened up and put on his day-face for a moment. The cop gave him a look but walked past without saying anything.

At the Muadham Gate station three men boarded the train together, all wearing the black uniform of the Mahdi Army’s Guardian Angel street patrol. The transit cop, making another pass through the car, pulled up short and raised his nightstick; but when all three Angels turned towards him, he reconsidered his options and stepped off onto the platform just as the train doors were closing. Samir, not quick enough to disembark, instead stood up and moved to the next car. Looking back, he saw the Angels approach the long-haired student, one of them reaching out to flick the locks brushing his collar.

Two stops later, the conductor announced the transfer point for the Sadr City El. When the subway got underway again, Samir took another look back into the adjoining car. The Angels and the student were gone, but the textbook lay on the floor, broken-spined. Samir watched it shuddering with the motion of the train.

He might have become a sailor if he weren’t so afraid of drowning.

Samir’s Uncle Zuhair—actually a cousin of his father’s—had been in the merchant navy. No one ever called him Sinbad, but like David Cohen he was a handsome man, so it was something of a curiosity that he never married. Whenever he was asked about this, Uncle Zuhair would say that he was married—to the sea. If the questioner was male, he might add a ribald joke about the hundreds of “ports” he had visited in his career.

Even now, knowing firsthand how far a man will go to hide his true nature, Samir had a hard time believing that his uncle was anything but an itinerant heterosexual who happened to love the smell of salt air. It would have been a fantastic cover. But Samir’s sole experience with deepwater travel, during a high school field trip to Kuwait City, had been a nightmare: The tour boat that was taking the class out to Failaka Island had gotten caught in a storm, and with the waters too rough for safe docking, they’d been forced to ride it out. Samir had thought for sure they would capsize, and when they finally made it back to port he swore he would never go through that again.

If he couldn’t share Uncle Zuhair’s profession, he could still adopt other aspects of his lifestyle. For most of his youth, Samir had been overweight, but towards the end of high school he began to work out, and his new physique, along with the rough sense of humor he had developed as a defense mechanism, proved attractive to a certain kind of girl. At BU, Samir cultivated a reputation as a ladies’ man. It wasn’t a complete charade, but he routinely exaggerated his exploits, at times recklessly endangering the reputations of the women involved. He felt bad about that, but he was terrified and desperate to hide what he was—at first from himself, and then later, when self-denial became impossible, from his friends and his family.

For a while he lived two lives, in two separate worlds. He knew he couldn’t go on playing a womanizer forever: As a man of the land, not the sea, he was expected to get married. The prospect wasn’t entirely unpleasant. He liked kids and thought he’d make a good father. As for the husband part of it, well, the movies and soap operas he relied on for advice in this matter all suggested that a good wife could work miracles of transformation. Samir doubted that even a great wife could make him truly enthusiastic about women, but he hoped that she could at least curb his lust for men.

In his senior year he got engaged to a fellow student, a chemistry major named Sabirah. Their betrothal, rather than magically curing him of his vice, only made it worse: As the wedding date neared, Samir began acting like a glutton taking his last pass through an all-you-can-eat buffet. When Sabirah confronted him about the fact that he was never home at night when she called him, he lied, confessing that he’d been seeing other women. He begged for another chance, but his lack of conviction was evident and Sabirah broke it off with him.

He tried again a couple of years later with Asriyah, a Halal switchboard operator. Asriyah, while perhaps not as smart as Sabirah, was a good deal more perceptive, and guessed the truth about Samir’s infidelities. She could have ruined him but chose to be merciful, supporting his public explanation of their breakup.

After two spoiled engagements Samir had a new reputation, one that made it much easier to remain unmarried without raising suspicion. Sometimes friends and relatives would take pity on him and try to fix him up with women who, for various reasons, couldn’t afford to be choosy about their prospects, but through a practiced obnoxiousness, Samir managed to keep even these women at bay.

He met Najat around the same time Mustafa met Noor. She was a new tenant in his building, and he got to know her after helping carry some packages up to her apartment. Najat was a Gulf War widow whose husband had been killed by friendly fire on the outskirts of New Orleans. She’d been alone since his death, but was thinking of getting married again. The way she said this—“I’m thinking of getting married again”—as though contemplating a business deal or a career move, piqued Samir’s interest. Marriage as a formal arrangement rather than a romantic adventure: That might suit his needs. But he wasn’t able to bargain in good faith, and Najat showed glimmers of the same perceptiveness Asriyah had had, so he didn’t pursue it.