The weekend after I purchased a new Honda sedan, I hired a small construction crew. They arrived at my apartment, in Cairo, early on a Friday morning. The foreman told me that it was important to work quickly, because the police weren’t likely to be active before Friday prayers.

With my wife, Leslie, and our twin daughters, I lived on the ground floor of an old Art Deco residence that I called the spiderweb building. It was impossible to enter or leave the place without passing a series of decorative wrought-iron webs. A six-foot-high webbed gate stood at the building’s main entrance, and then, inside the lobby, an old-fashioned elevator was encased in a web-shaped cage. The front door to our apartment was marked by little black spiderwebs. At the back of the apartment, another door led to a small garden with a webbed fence. This fence ended in a pair of spiderweb gates that were large enough to admit a car.

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Hussein soon suggested that they toss the body out on the roadside, asking his brother and sister how confident they were that they would pass other checkpoints without trouble. They would be right back where they started if the next checkpoint agents discovered that their father was a wanted man. He added that the dogs were eating plenty of bodies nowadays, so what difference did it make? Why didn’t they just leave it or bury it anywhere and go back to Damascus?

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