Hajji Qais Anni had only been dead for six days. His blackened store is a monument to the assassination and also a warning to other Al Mutanabbi Street vendors. On Sunday, three days before I met his son, another man selling cassette tapes of the Quran was assassinated by gunmen. He worked in a store a block away from Hajji Qais' place.

Two days later, on Friday, in the faint hope of finding the Shabandar open, we went back to Al Mutanabbi Street to meet Hamid Mokhtar, but the cafe was shuttered. The street was filled with booksellers and book buyers. At 10 in the morning, it was 115 degrees, while street vendors yelled out, "Drinks! Cold! Drinks! Pepsi! Miranda!" It was hard to move in the crowd. There were hundreds of men in the street shopping for books spread out on carpets, buying religious tracts, technical manuals. Copies of pirated software were placed respectfully by ornately bound Qurans.

We found Mokhtar waiting in front of the Shabandar. He said, "We can't stay here." So we walked to a bookstore called Adnan's Library where we drank tea, while Mokhtar scouted for a safe place. He led us through winding streets below Al Rasheed Street, small alleys that branched off Al Mutanabbi, narrow canyons whose walls were white in the sun. Mokhtar was worried that we would be attacked; he'd taken this route many times before, trying to ditch the Mukhabarat (secret police) men in the old regime days. On Rasheed Street, there is a dark pit of a place called Hassan the Foreigner. Men who couldn't get into the Shabandar were there drinking tea and smoking. Students worked at a nearby table taking careful notes. It was impossible to see what they were working on. The place was ancient, unimprovable and collapsing down into itself in slow motion. A faint rectangle of light came through the windows and died long before the back wall where we found a free bench.

"I discovered that a girl I knew from college was writing reports on me [for the secret police]. I was surprised but this gave me an idea for a new book." I asked him if he was able to write these days. Mokhtar got upset with the question. "No, I can't write under these conditions, I have to calm down. I need some time to think. It's too soon." Like all other Iraqis, Mokhtar has been pushed into the rapidly splintering future without time to cope with the past.

As he was talking, other middle-aged men gathered around us very quietly and sat down after long ritual greetings. They were all poets and former political prisoners; they were all Mokhtar's friends. All the prison men are the same. They talk about prison, how they survived, and they carry pictures of those days like wedding photos. In the photos, taken on the special occasions when their families were allowed to visit, they are hunched in groups and hollow-eyed. Prisoners form tight-knit groups and the photographs showed the circle of men whom Mokhtar trusted. It is a special honor to see these pictures. Mokhtar carries them with him. We were being allowed inside Mokhtar's cell.

We talked and drank tea until a loud man sidled up from nowhere. I never even saw him coming. He was a loud Arab-American from Indiana in a business-casual shirt who said he worked with the International Republican Institute. (IRI states that no one fitting that description has ever worked with its organization.) We got into a conversation about what he was doing, none of which made a great deal of sense, and then he explained I couldn't write any of his information because he doesn't want to be targeted by the resistance. The Indiana man also said all these things at the top of his lungs in English in the depths of a cafe that the insurgents control or at least monitor. It was a terrible mistake in Hassan the Foreigner and there was nothing you could tell him. Mokhtar looked over at me with suffering eyes and left for another appointment.

Minka Nijhuis, a brilliant Dutch journalist, was sitting next to me and said we should go look for some people who she thought might know more about the bombing and the threats to the cafe. It was also safer to keep moving.

We walked out into the crucible sun and found the bookseller street deserted, the vendors packing up. A dwarf passed by us pushing a handcart full of empty boxes.

Minka's contacts were members of a secular pro-democracy group called the Cultural Gathering. We walked to the end of Al Mutanabbi. Next to a covered market stood a large building with a courtyard. Inside the courtyard were men selling books and pamphlets on tables. The second floor had piles of dead copiers, a graveyard for dead office equipment. We walked to the gates, where Minka spoke to a man who asked us to wait for a moment. That was when we realized that the group was using observers, who made sure that no one who didn't belong there could get through the gates. If there was a problem, one of the men would run to the group and tell them to scatter. The office is deep off the courtyard, so controlling the gates is not difficult.

Men on the street selling cigarettes, soft drink salesmen, and other people who stay in one place for long periods of time often work as lookouts for underground groups in Iraq. You see it everywhere. The Cultural Gathering was worried about being attacked by insurgents and they had their eyes open.

The Death of Al Muntanabbi Street was originally published in Salon.com in 2005. In 2003, I was lucky to meet Hamid Al Mokhtar, an Iraqi novelist and poet who had been persecuted by the old regime. Al Mokhtar was returning to freedom after his long stretch in Abu Ghraib prison, only to find that the literary culture he loved was under threat by armed groups. Al Mokhtar took me on a tour of Al Muntanabbi street and explained what was being destroyed. Much of the story takes place in the Shabandar cafe, the center of Iraqi literary life. The book market runs along the street right outside the cafe.

The Shabandar cafe was destroyed on March 5th, 2007 when a car bomb exploded on al Muntanabbi street killing dozens and injuring as many as a hundred people. An Iraqi judge traveling through New York told me that the owner of the Shabandar had been killed in the blast.