“I always go away and come back. What’s different now?”

“The enemy.”

I waited for him to explain.

“They’ve put a prize on Iranian heads.”

This wasn’t news. It had been the same in Syria. But I’d always thought of it as the unlikely thing that happens to the next guy. It was too much like the movies and I didn’t want to buy into the fear. But I could see his disquiet wasn’t going away. I said, “It’s different here, Maysam. The good Iraqi people won’t sell an Iranian out.”

“Don’t be so sure. When the prize is high and—” he pointed to the bleakness that was everywhere, “when this hell is what a man has to wake up to every day, he will sell his own brother. Trust no one outside the mokeb.”

I nodded. Maysam was our mother and father here. Sometimes he got so pissed off at Cleric J’s recklessness that he dared to do what no one else did and screamed at the fighting cleric. Those were the best of times and we all sat back, grinned, and bet on who’d win that round.

“I hear and obey.” I turned to go toward the big pots to start the rice, but he held my hand.

“There is something else.”

Death, in all its colors, immediately hovered. We had all become connoisseurs of this sentence—there is something else.

“Someone has been martyred?”

“Your three friends. The Irani.”

I looked at him nonplussed.

“Martyr Ali-Akbar’s friends from before,” he added by way of an explanation that I didn’t need. He was speaking of the Three Magi.

“But they were not supposed to be here,” I said weakly. “They were back in Iran.”

“Arrived two days ago. Friendly fire.” He pointed skyward. “Air. Seven more from our own Hashd men were also martyred with them. They were inside . . .” He pointed to a large concrete drainage pipe sitting on the side of the road. “Inside something like that, I believe.”

This added detail, for some reason, was sickening. Not the friendly fire, which happened all the time, but that they’d been inside some big tube. Why? I was boxed into this little detail and couldn’t get out of it. Nor could I understand why the Three Magi hadn’t made contact with me when they’d arrived two days earlier.

“Do you want to escort them back home?” Maysam asked.

“Is there anything left of them?”

He nodded. “Enough.”

* * *