I took him to the room with the gingerbread house on the wall. “I’ve done nothing to you. Why do you come to my mokeb and embarrass me?”

“There’s a war going on, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten. And every man out there has a weapon and this is my mokeb.”

“Yours?” He laughed.

“What is it you want?

“I lost the contract with the British station. Because of you. You disappeared on me in Tuz Khurma and took that head-chopper woman with you. Where? I have no idea.”

“There are ten thousand stories in every little town in Iraq right now. They need to have the one about a woman who cut off a couple of heads that were already beginning to stink?”

“That’s what makes the story. It’s why the English guy wanted it. It wasn’t your business to make that call.”

“But I did.”

“Where is she?”

“I took her away so a whore’s son like you—and your masters—won’t make a caricature of her for foreign TV. She cut off those heads because she was angry. I can understand that.”

“You can?”

I said nothing. I didn’t understand anything. I’d set up Zahra the Beheader in the sprawling Sadr City quarter in Baghdad for the time being. She’d become my charge because everything I’d suffered at the hands of TV bastards like Saeed came down to keeping her from them.

“Go out of here. Please!”

“What, you think you found your calling making lunch for the militias?”

“And dinner.” After a while I added, “And breakfast.”

“Please, Saleh! I can’t work in Iraq without someone who can speak your kind of English. All right, forget about the head-chopper. Get your backpack on, we’ll go to Baghdad and find new work with some other Europeans.”

“Fuck the Europeans.”

“Why?”

“Because this is their mess.” I mumbled, “Sykes and fucking Picot.”

“Say what?”

“Nothing. Just go away.”

There was an AK hanging off the wall and like a fool he jumped, grabbed it, and aimed it at me. “I’m taking you to Tehran then. For disappearing like you did, they’ll send you to that place where grown men have to beg for their mothers.”

“Put that thing away, for the love of Imam Husayn.”

He put the weapon back and sighed. I could tell he felt silly.

“Listen, Saleh, the audience for the Abbas: Sniper Legend and Fist of God serial has shrunk to half what it was two months ago. Do you understand what that means back in Tehran? O Channel is blaming you for it.”

“I’m not responsible if their writers can’t write. They should have thought things through before they bought the film footage from you. Footage that, by the way, you stole from me.”

“From us. I stole from us. There’s a difference.”

“Well, at least you admit to the theft.”

His face turned morose and sulky. “You made a deal with O Channel before coming back out here. You’re going to write for them again. I’ve heard about it.”