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blinked into dusty light—and found herself staring straight at another prisoner who had pulled his own hood up. For a moment his dark eyes sparkled with a manic gleam. Then he winked and she winked back. Kindred souls.
    They yanked their hoods back down just in time. The guards were back, taunting and shoving. Later she had introduced herself more formally to David Khoury.
    Now he was almost out of sight, on his way back to Cairo, his post at the U.S. embassy, and she felt a sense of foreboding and the fleeting and impossible impulse to call him back.
    Under the intensity of her gaze, he turned briefly, just a glance, barely a nod. And then he was gone.
    For a moment, his last words echoed silently—
Somebody let you live.

At 17 Rue de la Bûcherie, above Librairie du Mille Ciels, Pauk climbed the familiar, narrow staircase quickly, soundlessly.
    At the crest of the second landing, instead of continuing up the last flight to his attic rooms, he paused to listen to the faint, flat whine of televised voices, a
fútbol
match, coming from inside his landlady’s apartment.
    In one hand he held a plain brown sack, and he took care not to crinkle or disturb the paper in any way. He knocked once, then again.
    At least a minute passed before he heard the scratch and click of the metal locks.
    The door opened and the old woman peered out at him with her milky eyes. The most she could see were shadows, and yet her wrinkled face seemed to literally crack into a smile.
“Vous êtes de retour! Bonjour!”
    In return, he held up the sack and gave it a shake.
“Coeur et foie.”
    â€œAh, coeur . . .”
In a voice of gravel and phlegm, Madame Desmarais admonished him to hurry inside and close the door before the cats escaped.
    He obeyed, eyes watering from the stench of cat piss and shit, waiting by the door until she limped her way back to the loveseat. Cats scattered as she turned and dropped onto the faded blue cushions. He shook the bag again for the animals’ benefit. Half a dozen multicolored felines clustered around him, squalling and mewling at the scent of bloody organs. A pied piper of sorts, he lured them toward the tiny kitchen, all the while his eyes flickering to the television screen, where—during a break in the France versus Pakistan game—a segment suddenly featured Terek Stadium in Grozny, Chechnya.
    His throat clenched as he was sucked back almost twenty years—only to see a boy, weak and spindly and crying like a baby, dragged by an old man with iron claws down a filthy, crumbling staircase. The boy struggled, fighting to run back to the apartment where his mother lay sick and close to death, but the old man was strong, and he forced the boy the rest of the way to the icy, stinking street.
    Gray world, filthy snow, bombs, tanks, and rubble.
    At the makeshift orphanage, they locked him in a closet so he couldn’t run away. When he managed to escape, he ran back to find his mother, but she was gone and strangers occupied what had been his home.
    Months later the rebel fighters, the Wahhabi, found him hiding in a ditch filled with raw sewage and freezing rain. Some of them laughed; others shook their heads and said he was an orphan crazy from war. But one day, a rebel put a long and battered rifle in his hands and showed him how to use it.
    So then, for the cause and for Allah, they told him to kill one of the Russian soldiers from the camp far across the creek. Whichever one he wanted!
    He had no idea if Allah cared or not—or if He even existed—but the rifle gave him a purpose and the faintest sense that he belonged to something.
    It took him three days lying prone in the snow and then mud. He shit and pissed his pants. He didn’t move. Lay there frozen in the rough weeds. Watching through the scope: one soldier, then another and another. He didn’t know which one to kill. By the third day the Russians began to move gear to their trucks. He