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.
Two things eventually changed his mind. The first was a holiday visit to see his sister Johara. Johara and her husband had just had a baby boy—their third—and holding the infant in his arms awakened Samir’s paternal longing. Johara’s husband, seeing his expression, said, “You really should marry, Samir. You could be a daddy too.”
The other factor was Mustafa’s announcement that he was going to marry Noor. This was a crazy decision, as even Mustafa seemed to recognize, and it was even crazier that Samir would allow it to influence his own behavior. But the night he heard the news, Samir had a dream in which he was being questioned before a grand jury. His inquisitor, who bore a resemblance to his old grade school nemesis Idris Abd al Qahhar, wanted to know why he was still single. “Your best friend has two wives,” the inquisitor said, “while you have none. What is the meaning of this riddle? What defect are you hiding?” Samir looked over at the section of the seating area reserved for upcoming witnesses and saw Asriyah, her eyes full of secret knowledge. He woke up gasping.
The next day he ran into Najat in the elevator and asked her if she was still thinking about getting married.
A week before Samir and Najat’s wedding day, Halal raided the home of a bookkeeper in Adhamiyah. The bookkeeper, who unwisely decided to test his quick-draw skills against the agents who broke down his door, did not survive, but they managed to get his laptop computer intact.
Back at headquarters, it took Isaac all of half an hour to guess the laptop’s password—the bookkeeper’s father’s name, followed by the bookkeeper’s mother’s name, followed by the bookkeeper’s own birth date, backwards—and another hour to go through the files. By then most of the other agents had gone out for a post-raid dinner; only Samir, who’d gotten hung up booking some other seized items into evidence, was still around.
“What’s wrong?” Samir said, seeing Isaac’s expression as he came out of his office. “Don’t tell me the encryption defeated you.”
“No, I got in,” Isaac said. “I found a list of payoffs to Baghdad PD officers—including that patrolman you suspect in the Ghazi al Tikriti murder.”
“Well, that’s great, man! Why the long face?”
Isaac pulled up a chair beside Samir’s desk. “I found another file as well,” he said. “Payoffs to federal agents. Including Halal.”
“Ah,” Samir said, feeling the same nervous flutter he always did when the subject of corruption came up. Though he’d never taken a bribe, like every Halal agent he’d committed other infractions—sampling the wares of the bootleggers they arrested, now and then taking a bottle home with him, or when they found cash, letting a few bills stick to his palms on the way down to evidence. In fact at this very moment he was sitting on five hundred riyals that had, until a few hours ago, been in the dead bookkeeper’s wall safe. A little wedding bonus. “So who’s on the list?” he asked Isaac. “Anyone I know?”
“No one on our team, thank God,” Isaac said. “But you know Habib Murad?”
“Yeah, sure.” Habib worked upstairs, in the department that handled confidential informants. Samir actually knew him quite well—and not just from work.
Isaac ran a hand through his hair. “I fucking hate this. You know I’m a team player, right? And it’s not like my own hands are spotless. With small stuff, I’m happy to look the other way. But if a guy in the CI’s office is taking Saddam’s money, he could be getting people killed. I can’t look away from murder.”
“No,” Samir said. “Of course not.”
“Right, of course not.” Isaac laughed, then sighed. “All right,” he said, standing up, “let me go report this before I lose my nerve.”
Samir watched him walk out. Then he got up himself, and went to find a pay phone.
The following evening Samir stopped on his way home to drop off a check at the hall where the wedding reception was due to be held. As he was getting back into his car, Habib Murad drove up alongside him and gestured for him to follow.
They drove to a nearby parking garage. Habib went all the way to the top level, which was deserted at that hour. By the time he turned off his engine and opened his door, Samir was already coming around the car. He dragged Habib out by the collar and began pummeling him.
“Hey!” Habib shouted, putting his arms up to block the blows. “Knock it off! I just want to talk! Hey! Hey!”
Samir shoved him back and drew his pistol. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded. “All of Halal is looking for you.”
“I know, I got your message . . .” Eyeing the gun warily: “It’s not just Halal. Saddam knows you have the bookkeeper’s list and he’s cleaning house. Anybody on there who’s not already in custody is due to have a bad accident. They’d have got me already if not for your warning.”
“Why are you here, Habib?”
“To thank you for saving my ass.”
“To thank me! You think I did it for you?”
“No, I can see that was too much to hope for,” Habib said, with a trace of bitterness. “But if you did it to protect yourself, you’re a fool. Go ahead, threaten me, but it’s true! What were you afraid I was going to do, out you as a faggot to the DA as part of some deal? How paranoid do you have to be to think they’d even care about that?”
Samir shrugged. “Who knows what you might try, if you get desperate enough? A guy who’d throw in with Saddam—”