He insisted Heather sleep in the same bed with him. They could be watching. Or, worse, when Bridges was in the bedroom that morning, he could have planted a tiny camera. Heather said Mourad had seen too many movies, and there was no way she would crawl into his bed, no way at all. She allowed that it would be best to go into the other room only at night, and only with all the lights off. Then one day she came back from work and said a girl who worked for one of the lawyers had a case where somebody, she wasn’t sure if it was the FBI or state troopers, had in fact used “listening devices and micro-cameras” and they had everything on tape that was said or done by these people, who were just trying to make a living and were not really criminals, just doing what everybody else does anyway.

So Heather slept in the same bed as Mourad.

At first Aziz tried to live alone, away from Muslims or Arabs. He rented a mean room without a bathroom, except for one shared with a Nigerian and a Chinese. The Nigerian spoke English, but he was not well. He had some kind of disease, and every time Aziz went into the bathroom the stench from him was overpowering. It was not puke or shit, it was something worse. The Chinese spoke no English. Every so often Aziz would look at him when they passed in the hall and try to say with his eyes how worried he was. But the Chinese never once looked up. Then one day he was gone. A little later the Nigerian was found dead outside the front door of the building.

Aziz, who had only a radio and an extra pair of shoes—everything else had been stolen—put them in a grocery bag and took the subway to Coney Island Avenue. He had gathered by his second week in Brooklyn that Pakistanis lived there. He could disappear among them or perhaps find others—Moroccans? Tunisians?—who could at least help him find a job. The money Mourad had pushed in his hand—about a hundred dollars—was running out.