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for
Marmaduke."
    Ari feigned ignorance by raising his
eyebrows.
    "My cat."
    "Ah."
    She risked lowering her eyes to see if
the body attached to that menacing face looked just as ominous. She
gave a little cough.
    "Do you really live here?"
    "Why, don’t I look like I live
here?"
    "You look like a homeless person who
broke in. Are you a burglar?"
    Offended, Ari’s scowl deepened. The
girl’s amiable courtesy (‘homeless person’) was freighted with
rudeness that would have been unthinkable in his homeland. The most
flea-bitten Sadr City street urchin might filch your wallet, but he
would never accuse you of looking like a vagrant. Diane, her rumba
dress peeking out from under a wool coat, looked like someone from
a good family, or at least a family with financial
resources.
    Suddenly, Diane’s hand went to her
mouth and she laughed, "Mr. Snail, Mr. Snail!"
    Hmmm …? Ari glanced down. To his intense mortification, he saw
that his fly was undone. He had not felt well lately and his
appearance had suffered. Also, it seemed, his sense of propriety.
Growling, he turned away to zip up.
    "Eeew, what’s that smell?" The girl
pinched her nose theatrically.
    "Can I help you, child? Are you
lost?"
    "I only live on the other
side of Mr. Nottoway! How can I be lost?" Her face was
super-charged with childish innocence, making her appear like one
of the most wicked little girls Ari had ever seen. Not that he knew
much about girls. All three of his children had been boys—for
which, had he been so inclined, he would have praised Allah. The
girl continued: "Mr. Nottoway says he thought he saw Marmaduke…my
cat…hanging around your house. Has he come in here? I’ve heard of
cats getting trapped in houses by accident. I’ve heard…well some
people…like from far away…even eat them!"
    "That is not a cat in my stew pot," Ari
said irately, though he was not as put off by the idea as the girl
obviously was. Sometimes you just had to eat what was
available.
    "Can I look around? Maybe you missed
seeing him. He’s yellow, like a rose."
    "Roses are not yellow," said Ari
authoritatively.
    "They can be. They even wrote a song
about them."
    Ari’s protest was brought up short by
an awareness of ignorance. He had only taken red roses to his
fiancé during his Western-style courtship (drawing the ire of his
conservative prospective in-laws). There may have been yellow roses
at the florist but he had been too blinded by love to notice. Or,
perhaps, yellow roses only existed here, in America. It often
seemed Americans had no time for anything else beyond being clever
and inventive.
    "Very well," he said to Diane, but not
without annoyance. It was as rude to tell someone that his house
stank as it was to comment on the owner’s own malodorous hygiene.
This would not usually bother Ari who, in the Army and on covert
field operations, had been surrounded by men so pongy they could
make a camel retch. It was the bold rudeness of the child that
nonplussed him. Bad girls in Baghdad got whipped as a matter of
course. Really bad girls got much worse. Diane’s behavior bordered
on the perverse. Ari gave her the same look that had sent
recalcitrant soldiers unquestioningly to their deaths.
    She shrugged it off. "Oop-de-doo-doo.
That’s cat poop."
    "No it isn’t."
    "I know cat poop."
    Ari thought this was probably true. If
he conceded this point, however, her argument would be clinched.
Yes, her beloved Marmaduke was in the house. Ari called him Sphinx.
He found it hard to admit that he had grown fond of the filthy
beast, or at least dependent upon him. Whenever Sphinx was not
there to curl up alongside Ari on his mattress, he found it hard to
sleep. But denying that the smell came from cat droppings meant
admitting he ate food that smelled like cat droppings.
    Diane was leaning past his legs for a
better look inside the living room.
    "You don’t have much
stuff." She cocked her head the other way. "You don’t have any stuff. Are you
poor?"
    " Io