The brand-new car Mourad had babied, waxing it by hand in the street, was dented, its left front bumper skimming the ground. Apart from the half moons the wipers made on the windshield, it was covered in dust, and when it got closer Aziz saw sticky coatings of smashed bugs on the hood. His brother had sounded ecstatic on the phone—he had been somewhere in New Jersey called Union City—now, getting out of the car, he looked weakened.

“Mourad!” Aziz screeched. “Mourad!” He jumped up and down.

Now Mourad was smiling wide; such smiling exaggerated his flaw of no chin. His eyes had disappeared; Mourad’s magnificently giant nose was all anyone could see.

“Aasslamma!”

“Hmaam! Hmaam! Wa Allah!”

So this November 17 was the day his youngest brother, Mourad, came back to Brooks Street. Instead of its being an anniversary of running, it was now also one of returning.

April walked into the conference room. One wall was covered with faces, names, dotted lines: red lines, blue lines, green lines. Kamal and Rafik were together in a box. The box was shaded yellow. Below the box were their two land-line phone numbers and their four cell-phone numbers. The phone numbers were connected to an orange-shaded box with a red line. That box contained Dhakir. Below his box were his six land lines, three pagers, and eleven cell phones. Some of the phone numbers were in faint gray. Those were numbers he no longer used. Dhakir’s red lines also ran to Ghazi’s box, which was multicolored, with four names inside it. Mourad and Heather were shaded green. Ghazi and Aziz were shaded the same yellow as Kamal and Rafik. In a separate green-shaded box were the Three. Red lines went from them to the Ghazi box.

Then there were the purple boxes. They connected to Dhakir’s box and one another with a fishnet of lines: red, blue, green, and dotted. One purple box was in London. Another was in Paris. Another was in Munich. Another was in Peshawar. A large one, containing seven faces, was in Algiers. Two purple boxes connected to Kamal. One was in Riyadh; one was in Basra.

Toward the bottom, there was a Brooklyn box: half yellow with Aziz in gray halftones, because he was no longer living there, and half blue with Waheb and Rachid. Red lines went from their phone number to Munich.