“The airport?” Ally’s heart accelerated, abruptly, like a runner at the bang of the starter’s gun. Rasheed Airport housed the regime’s grounded air force jets. It was the sort of location that embassy security had warned her to avoid. The authorities wouldn’t take kindly to foreigners who ventured there, diplomatic status or not. “We should turn around.”

Hatim nodded with relief and made a U-turn at a small gas station.

There were no jokes about kangaroo stew or emu pie on the journey back to Karadah market. After Ally paid and unbuckled her seat belt, Hatim motioned for her to wait.

“Miss Ally, I am always happy to drive you.” He lowered his gaze to his lap. “But I like to stay near the market. Much better for you too, if you stay close to this neighborhood. This is a nice area, but other places, other people . . .”

Slowly, he raised his eyes. They were like mine shafts, with truth glimmering at the very bottom. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t mouth any words. Instead, he allowed her a glimpse, rare and dangerous, of things they both knew, but couldn’t speak aloud. It was intimate, in a way that made Ally ache.

“I understand.” A lump formed in her throat.

Hatim turned away and stared through the windshield.

“I don’t want you to get in trouble,” he said. “That’s all.”

He kept his eyes on some undefined point in the distance, until long after Ally closed her door and disappeared down the street.

* * *

The wind slammed the front door shut behind Ally. She hurried to her desk and flipped open her laptop, determined to write everything down while it was still fresh in her mind. As the laptop powered up, she struggled to make sense of what she’d learned from Miriam. Her mother? A communist?

Ally’s hands hovered above the keyboard. Finally, with a clack, her fingers hit the keys.

Radical art and radical politics.

She eyed the words on the screen dubiously. It was true, the 1970s was a freewheeling time in Baghdad. But were young women really banding together to agitate for political change? Ally reached for the small collection of memoirs and textbooks that Peter had brought from Dubai and selected a history of Iraqi politics. It fell open to an image from 1958, when the Iraqi army rebelled against a puppet king installed by the British. In the grainy photo, the mutilated body of the crown prince dangled from an ornate balcony.

Ally grimaced and turned the page to a timeline of coups, crises, and countercoups, stretching through the sixties and seventies. She ran her finger down a long list of political groups: pan-Arab Nasserites, social democrats, Baathists, Kurdish nationalists—and communists. It said the communists had enjoyed great popular support, but by the end of the seventies their leaders had largely been exiled, executed, or locked up.

Ally put down the book and stared at her laptop.