When Bobby Farid Hadid, an Algerian merchant marine, was twenty-three, he discovered that a pay phone in a train station near the Algerian shore was broken. He could call anywhere in the world free. He dialled the country code for the United States, followed by ten random numbers. Sheilla Jean-Baptiste, a young Haitian-American in New York, picked up the phone. “Hello, America?” Hadid said.

They both spoke French. They discussed their ages, their jobs, and their races. Hadid described himself as “light.” Jean-Baptiste said she was black, and asked if that was O.K. She was eager to “make a friend from far away,” she said. Hadid began sending her postcards and calling her from ports around the world.

They corresponded for four years, and in 1994 Hadid applied for a visa to America, where he hoped to find work. Two marines on his company’s boat had been assassinated by Islamist insurgents, and he no longer felt safe in the shipping industry. He didn’t know English, but he said that “it sounded like music to me: the rhythm, the way they pronounce the ‘h’ sound using their throats.”

A week after arriving in America, Hadid, who was Muslim, met Jean-Baptiste at her parents’ home. “He had one of the most welcoming faces,” Jean-Baptiste said. “He wanted to know about every little thing—who, what, why?” Within a month, they married. To understand her husband’s upbringing, Jean-Baptiste, who was Catholic, began reading the Quran.

Hadid rented a pushcart and sold hot dogs at Thirty-ninth Street and First Avenue. A few people mocked his accent, slipped him fake money, or threw buns at him, but for the most part Americans were “open-minded, funny, beautiful,” he said. After working as a vender for a year, he was hired by Pitney Bowes to repair copy machines. On his days off, he drove a cab. At night, he lay in bed replaying the events of his day, thinking, What did I do today—did I achieve something?

On September 11, 2001, four of his colleagues at Pitney Bowes died in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Hadid watched the television for hours, crying. He thought, I have to protect this beautiful country of ours. I want to move this country forward, even if it’s just by a millimetre. He enrolled at the training academy for the New York City Police Department, which was seeking Arabic speakers. As a child, he had hidden under his bed when he heard police sirens, but now the N.Y.P.D. sounded like “paradise on earth—the money, the shield,” he said. He became an officer in July, 2002, at the age of thirty-five. On the wall of the couple’s living room, in Astoria, Queens, he hung a two-foot photograph of the Twin Towers.

Jean-Baptiste was skeptical about his new career, but, she said, “I kept my opinion to myself.” His friends were less discreet. “The N.Y.P.D. is against minorities,” one told him. “Why are you going against your own community?” Hadid explained his reasoning by describing American traffic court. “Even the person who gets a parking ticket can confront the cop in front of a judge,” he told them. “That’s democracy, that’s freedom. In this country, you can fight anyone.”

Hadid thrived within the police hierarchy. The captains and lieutenants, whom he always called Cap and Lou, felt to him so superior that they seemed otherworldly. He was promoted from monitoring traffic at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge to translating and transcribing wiretaps, and then to the vice team. In 2005, he was one of only forty officers to receive a nearly perfect score on the department’s language exam, earning the title “master linguist” in Arabic and French. A year later, he won a meritorious commendation from the commissioner for infiltrating a high-end prostitution ring. He dressed in a suit and a tie, exaggerated his accent, and persuaded a madam to lead him to a room where twenty Japanese teen-agers were being held. “He brings to the Police Department a special talent,” a supervisor wrote.

In 2007, Hadid was promoted to the rank of detective and approved for a top-secret security clearance. He became a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cell of investigators and analysts who work with the F.B.I. “I think I fulfilled my American dream,” he said. He had a jolly, exuberant presence, and he easily cultivated confidential informants. He warmed them up by chatting about shared holidays and wedding rituals. In Algeria, he had taught himself a dozen Arabic dialects by watching movies with subtitles. In an evaluation that year, he was described as “an accomplished linguist who utilizes his Arabic language skills to the benefit of all” and “maintains the highest level of Police Ethics.”

Hadid often prayed during his lunch breaks. His family had never been particularly religious—his sisters didn’t cover themselves, and, aboard the marine ships, he used to drink and gamble—but Jean-Baptiste had converted to Islam four years into their marriage and now wore a hijab. When she began studying the Quran, he decided to reread it. They had three sons who went to Islamic Sunday school, and he wanted to be able to answer their questions. “It was embarrassing that I come to America, and they end up showing me my religion,” he said. “That’s my ego.” He tried to adhere to the five pillars of Islam, but only when they didn’t interfere with his work. He explained his approach by repeating a French saying: Il faut suivre la mode ou quitter le pays—“You have to follow the fashion or leave the country.”

After five years on the force, Hadid was asked to work as a French interpreter on his first homicide. The body of a young Sicilian waiter, Angelo Guzzardi, had been found in a dumpster in Brooklyn a few days before 9/11. The case had gone cold.

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Hadid flew to France with two Brooklyn detectives, whose parochialism made him self-conscious. “They could not even use the bathroom without me,” he said. Working alongside French officers at the Paris Police Prefecture, they interrogated a Congolese-Frenchman, Marien Theophile Mbossa Kargu, who had shared an apartment with Guzzardi in Brooklyn during the last week of his life. Kargu had drawn suspicion after he falsely told friends that Guzzardi had died in the Twin Towers. For nine hours, Kargu insisted that he knew nothing about his roommate’s death.

The next day, the detectives interviewed Kargu’s girlfriend, Leïla Grison, who had lived in Brooklyn with Kargu and Guzzardi. She was half Algerian. Hadid told her in French that he, too, was Algerian. Her son was biracial. Hadid had biracial sons, too. “I was using everything I had,” he said. The detectives gave her coffee, food, soda, and cigarettes, but she wouldn’t talk.

After three hours, Hadid tried what he called his “last resort,” focussing on hannana, an Arabic word for the love a mother feels for her child. “I am giving you my word right now,” he told her. “If you tell me exactly what happened, I promise you are going to spend tonight with your son.” She started crying and asked for another cigarette. Then she began speaking more slowly. “I could feel it in her voice,” Hadid said. “She is tired and wants to get it over with.” She confessed that her boyfriend, who was angry at Guzzardi for giving her cocaine, had inadvertently killed him in a fistfight while she was at the laundromat. When she returned to their apartment, Kargu was on his knees, sobbing. “It was an accident,” he told her.