“That’s what he told you? How do you know he can be trusted? He could be anyone.”

A robber. A rapist. Or mukhabarat. This “Hatim” could be an older version of the Bolt Cutter, monitoring goings on in the market zone. Huda could picture him: doing the rounds of the meat and vegetable stalls, comparing notes with his informants, checking the coffee shops for malcontents. In the heat of the afternoon, he’d nap in the front seat of his car, dreaming of new punishments to inflict on the disloyal.

“You must call for Abdul Amir. Always. Promise me.”

“But I’ve seen plenty of women take taxis.”

But they are not you. Huda grit her teeth. If the mukhabarat knew someone else was driving Ally about, unmonitored, surely she and Abdul Amir would be punished.

“If anything happened to you, Abdul Amir would feel terribly guilty. Mr. Tom would not want you getting in some strange man’s car, either.”

Ally fixed her mouth in a stubborn line and stared out the window at al-Sha’ab Stadium. The sports arena appeared to be deserted, but everyone knew that in specially built chambers beneath the stands, Uday Hussein tortured athletes who didn’t live up to his expectations. Huda couldn’t remember exactly when she first learned of the dungeons in the stadium, or who told her about the iron-maiden coffin lined with a thousand spikes to pierce those shut inside. It was one of those facts, universally known but never spoken of publicly: a few whispers, the tilt of a head, the sighting of a footballer with a bloody hole where his ear should have been.

Ally leaned forward. “What’s that?”

In a dry gully, a long trailer glinted beneath a web of sand-colored netting. A twenty-foot missile sat in its bed, snub nose angled toward the horizon.

“Oh my God.” Ally craned her neck. “That’s a missile.”

Huda stared doggedly through the windshield. Ally swiveled about.

“You saw it, right?”

“Not really . . .”

“It was right there. A big missile.”

“I was watching the road.”

Ally stared at her in disbelief.

“So about the lemon tree,” said Huda, desperate to change the conversation. “If you really want to pay for it, you can.”

“The lemon tree?” Ally’s eyes widened. Frustration flickered in their blue depths. She massaged her temples, as if she had a headache coming on.

“It was ten thousand dinar.” Huda’s lie slipped out smooth as butter on bread. “That’s how much I paid.”

* * *

A gritty wind sliced the muezzin’s call into ribbons. Huda probably wouldn’t have noticed the call to prayer, but a man in a brown dishdasha had pulled his bicycle over to the shoulder of the road and was rolling out a mat of palm leaves. This was Iraq, and only the most pious stopped on the side of the road to pray.