“I’d be a mighty poor confidential investigator if I told a complete stranger who was hiring me to do a job. Especially a stranger who is asking questions about an immigrant who died in an unpleasant and, as it turns out, suspicious way. Perhaps you’re an undercover INS agent? Perhaps even an agent of the Iraqi secret police—what are they called? Ammo or something?”

“Amn,” he corrected. “Yes, I see the problem.”

He tapped a finger on his coffee cup and finally decided he’d have to reveal something if I was going to talk. “My interest is in political prisoners. I’ve written on that subject off and on in various places for over a decade. My work has appeared in places like The New Yorker, but a lot of what I write is for organizations like Americas Watch or the Grete Berman Institute. They’re the ones who commissioned this particular book.”

I’d vaguely heard of the Grete Berman Institute—a man whose mother died in the Holocaust had endowed it to help torture survivors recover. “This particular book being about?”

He ate some of the nuts on the table. “I’m curious about the life political refugees can make, whether they find unusual obstacles or sources of strength in starting out fresh in a new place. If a man—or woman—was a professional in their home country, they’re often welcomed by an academic institution, here or in Europe. Anyway, professionals are the kind of people who most often have the resources and contacts to emigrate once they’ve been released from prison. But what of someone outside that professional milieu who leaves home? What happens to him then?”

The waiter stopped with the stock inquiry; I asked him to take the cabernet away and bring me a glass of Black Label, neat. “I see. Aisha’s father.”

“Yes. Aisha’s father. What led you to him?”

I smiled. “I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood much like Aisha’s and Mina’s. There’s no such thing as a secret among the children, especially if it involves someone like you—or me—coming in from the outside.”

“Yes, I always worry about who the children will talk to, but if you swear them to secrecy it only makes them behave more suspiciously to strangers. I heard about you from them. That you were a cop who came around with a police dog. Looking for Señora Mercedes.”

I took a sip of whisky. “If you came home with me I’d introduce you to the police dog. She’s an eight–year–old retriever with the incurable friendliness of all goldens. I wasn’t trying to sniff out Señora Mercedes with her. Or I was, but not with deportation in mind. Her daughter ran away from the prison wing of Coolis Hospital a week ago today and ended up dead a few hundred yards from her old front door.”