“I could not exactly refuse.”

It was the day they’d followed me from my mother’s nursing home. By then they were already stuck for new ideas for the Abbas show. I’d asked them why they didn’t just wrap it all up. The show had already completed its arc and now it was time to wind it down. But word from the ministry was that the series must go on another year. Their exact words: The restive population, nervous about the state of the currency against the dollar, needs an antidote to keep it home watching programs that promote both patriotism and partnership with our good neighbors. In this case, the “good neighbors” were the Iraqis. It was also why H had insisted I come up with a new pilot that followed a hero circa 2006, when the Americans were deep in Iraq. I had said yes to both, since saying no was not an option, and then I had disappeared back into the maw of the war here.

I did not see a healthy return to Tehran and Saeed knew this.

A commotion had broken out outside. Men were shouting. Someone was popping off AK rounds and for a moment I thought Cleric J might be back and that was old Abu Yusuf being overenthusiastic with his weapon, as usual. But the scene in the open area of the mokeb looked positively violent. More people came inside to see what was going on, where a tight but widening circle of men were kicking and swearing at something or someone. I could not catch what they were saying.

A teenager from Najaf who’d been helping at the mokeb ran toward me. “Come! Ta’aal, ta’aal!”

People made way. On the ground I saw the pummeled, bloodied face of a young man. Maybe nineteen. You could see his beard was choppy, like he had been trying to cut it with a knife in a hurry. He looked half-starved and ready to fall asleep or die. The kicking barely made a dent in him. He was done. He had the long, handsome face of a North African, and when I was told he might be Tunisian I wasn’t surprised. A van screeched to a halt outside the mokeb and two men came running toward us.

“He’s ours. We’ll take him.”

No one gave way. One of the kitchen guys shouted back, “He’s not yours! We found him hiding in the mokeb. He’s ours. Who are you?”

They tried pushing past the crowd but were shoved back. It was a standoff to see who owned the enemy combatant. He’d probably been cowering in some dark corner of the mokeb ever since last week’s misbegotten blitz on the town and somebody going to take a dump in private had finally found him. The two men, from whatever outfit they were, really didn’t have a leg to stand on here. We weren’t part of anyone’s command structure. We didn’t have to give up the kid if we didn’t want to. What I didn’t know then (and I should have) was why we weren’t giving him up. I realized that with those two men he had no chance, wherever they took him; what I didn’t realize was that he had even less of a chance with us.