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heard it all, so why not? “Go ahead.”
    “Es true, I picked it up. I would have told you. I forgot.”
    “The dagger?” says Harry.
    “Yes. But it’s not what you think. I picked it up to put it on top of the note. I told you about it, remember? I wrote to Emerson that night, a short note, telling him I took the coins and not to follow me.”
    “Yes.”
    “I left the note on Emerson’s desk, in the study. I picked up the dagger. It was on the desk. I put it on top of the note to hold it there. So he would find the note, that’s all.”
    “A paperweight.”
    “Yes.” She nearly jumps out of her skin, pointing at me as I say the words.
    “Essactly,” she says. “I used it to make a paperweight. Do you understand? That’s how my fingerprints got on it. Don’t you see?” She looks at me and then back to Harry with pleading eyes. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
    Harry thinks about it for a moment. He fixes her with a long and uncomfortable stare, and then glances over the top of his glasses at me. “What do you think?” He’s asking me.
    Before I can answer, Harry does it himself. “A paperweight for a nonexistent note, one you say you left at the scene, but the cops never found.” He gives her one of his sardonic smiles. “Do you have any idea what the police would have done if you told them that the day they arrested you?”
    Katia swallows hard. “No.” From her expression, if Harry told her “summary execution” she would believe it.
    “They’d still be laughing,” he says. “Do you know what that means?”
    She shakes her head. “No.”
    “That the police sometimes don’t know the truth when they hear it.”
     
     
     

NINE
     
     
    Alim Afundi longed for the arid Zagros Mountains of his homeland and for the village of his father. He wondered if he would ever see his home again. He knew he would never see his parents. Both had been killed two years earlier in an errant attack by American warplanes while visiting relatives near the border with Iraq. The mighty Satan called the accident “collateral damage” and dismissed it as part of the unfortunate cost of peacekeeping.
    And for now Afundi and his comrades remained on another continent half a world away.
    It was nearly a year since their escape from America’s fenced fortress at Guantanamo Bay. This word, “Guantanamo,” was one they had never heard or known of until they achieved their freedom. In the months that he and his men had been held, there had been no visits from international groups or others representing the prisoners. Afundi’s American captors had seeded rumors within the prison that they were on the American mainland in a place called Florida, surrounded by swamps and shark-infested seas, and from which there was no way home.
    There had been a few attempts at escape, but as far as Afundi knew, he and his comrades, six of them, were the only freedom fighters thus far to succeed. They cut through wire, tunneled under fences, and waded through swamps until, exhausted and lost, they stumbled into a group of armed military men.
    Despondent, believing they had been recaptured, Afundi tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist with a small blade from a razor. But he was saved by two of the men in green fatigues. It wasn’t until later, when Afundi’s own counsel general visited him in the hospital, that he realized that the men who saved him were Cuban soldiers, and that the American prison fortress was itself an island in the middle of a Cuban sea. Had his freedom fighters known it, Afundi believed they would have stormed the fences in the American compound even in the face of machine-gun fire.
    For weeks Afundi and his men remained as guests of the Cuban government, feted and entertained, waiting for the propaganda coup of their escape to be unveiled to the world. But this never came. The Americans, it seemed, were too embarrassed to admit their own incompetence, and therefore disclosed nothing regarding the