“Why don’t you get married, Saleh? Settle down.”

“H called me in. Told me I can’t go to Syria again.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“I am. And I have a question for you: why don’t you get married? Better yet, why don’t we marry each other!”

“Then our mystery would disappear. Two more reporters get married to each other.”

“Mystery? We’re a couple of underpaid writers in a filthy, polluted city you can barely breathe in.”

Atia stared at me. “Sell one of those paintings Miss Homa gave you and you’ll be a millionaire. You can relax at home and think about all the literature you’ll write that no one will read.”

“I only have one painting from the great Miss Homa.”

“Well, her sales are going through the roof, aren’t they? Sit on that work one more year, sell, and get out of this business.”

“Keeping my mother in a nursing home is not cheap, you know. Even if I sell Miss Homa’s painting, I’ll still have to work.”

“Shame on you, Saleh, for keeping your mother in a nursing home.”

“Will you look after her then?”

“I can’t even look after myself.”

Our banter went on. In this town, writing for a living was a juggling act. You had to have seven balls in the air at all times or you’d sink. Some guys ran phony private classes for a living, scuttling from one part of town to another giving lectures on symbolism and metaphor. Others like me and Atia, we did a little of everything—a theater review here, an art review there, the biography of a martyr, a day-in-the-life of a future martyr, a film script about a sniper in Iraq—whatever it took to bring the bread to the table. One of my luckiest breaks was that the Citizen had needed an art reviewer when I’d needed a decent nursing home for my mother. For three years every Friday I made the rounds of the gallery openings in Tehran and would pick a couple of shows to write about. It was another side job but it gave me an in—into the moneyed class who shuttled between Dubai, London, and Tehran, fixing prices and making deals with the international auction houses. Theirs was a bulletproof way of laundering money and getting around the economic sanctions the Americans had on us. The money laundering was an art in itself; using inflated prices for contemporary art was true genius because no one could accuse you of being in the black market for frowned-upon ancient artifacts. For a penniless reporter, this mostly just meant occasional world-class food at parties where women strutted about in evening dresses that cost more than an entire combat operation at Khan-T. But it also gave one a chance to find that rare, one-in-a-thousand real artist whose cause one might champion. I’d done that with Miss Homa, who had returned the favor one day by gifting me one of her works, a medium-sized one-by-one-meter painting rendering the inside of a mosque’s classic blue dome. Atia was right: Miss Homa’s prices had really gone sky-high in the last couple of years and I could sell the painting.