Michael Gisick/Tribune

Sgt. Harry Adams, a member of Palehorse Troop, 4th Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, does the math after soldiers discovered more than 5 million Iraqi dinar hidden in a closet during a patrol in central Baghdad. The money eventually was returned to its owner.

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BAGHDAD — She has heard stories about the hospitals, the Iraqi doctor tells the soldiers. "Such awful things," she said in English, passing a plate of homemade sweets around her fourth-floor apartment.

A floor down, a woman said her son was killed by so many bullets it made an old Iraqi army captain cry. The son was a Sunni in a Sunni neighborhood, but his name - Haider - was a Shiite name, and so he was shot from a passing car, she told the Americans. They were looking for information about a sniper who shot at them.

Downstairs, a group of soldiers kicked in the door of an apartment belonging to a man described as the building's security guard. Another resident said the guard left the day before, the same day the gunman fired at Palehorse Troop from - the soldiers said - this apartment block. That coincidence is enough to warrant the intrusion, they decide, and in the guard's apartment they find more than 5 million Iraqi dinar wadded in a purse in the closet - another small mystery in a place where almost nothing seems straight-forward.

The soldiers came back to the apartments on Haifa Street on Wednesday, not because they expected to find the sniper who fired three rounds at them the day before, but because they hoped to send a message with their presence, said Capt. Marcus Melton, commander of Palehorse Troop, part of the 4th Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment.

Indeed, they did not find the sniper. And if their message - that it's a bad thing to have someone shooting at Americans from your apartment building - got through, it had plenty of competition among residents whose lives are creased with worries.

As the soldiers moved through the once-exclusive apartments in central Baghdad, many occupied now by squatters, they tried to draw out concrete intelligence, things they could act on. But in a city of tragedy and rumor, they were met with stories.

One resident - who, like the other people interviewed by U.S. troops, is not being identified for security reasons - said he was sympathetic to the Americans but knew nothing about the shooting. Pressed by a military intelligence specialist over why he hadn't taken more of an interest in finding something out, the man finally gestured at the thick drapes covering his windows.

"If I'm sitting over here," he said through an interpreter, "a bullet comes off that checkpoint. A bullet comes off the other checkpoint. A car goes by shooting some bullets. What can I do? Open my window and find out what's going on?"

"Yes," said Staff Sgt. Frederick Ryan, a psychological operations specialist.

"And if it's a car, what kind of car?" Ryan added. "What color? And is it a two-door or a four-door?"

The translator related this, and the Iraqi nodded, smiling thinly, retreating.

"He says he doesn't see anything like this," the translator said.

In most of the apartments they visited Wednesday, the soldiers were greeted warmly, or at least courteously. Where they found young men, they took biometric scans for entry into a database. The soldier who carried the combination digital camera and fingerprint reader joked, in English, either that his photos were for Rolling Stone magazine or a "dating site for American women who want to marry Iraqi men."

The jokes were lost on his teenage subjects, but most managed a smile as they held their eyelids open for a retinal photograph.

Haifa Street, whose multistory apartment buildings were once reserved for favored doctors and engineers under the old regime, is in its fourth reincarnation since the 2003 American invasion. It was an early stronghold for insurgents. American forces moved into the area in early 2005 and then turned it over to the Iraqi Army. That plan did not work, and as an orgy of sectarian killings swept across Baghdad in 2006, Haifa Street became a sort of barbarous centerpiece. American patrols sometimes found dozens of bodies stacked like wood on the sidewalks, according to published reports.

After a major battle in January, U.S. forces retook the area again this year.

Most of the residents interviewed Wednesday said the security situation on Haifa Street was not bad now, and some acknowledged that they had only recently moved into the apartments from more dangerous areas. But all of them, like one young married woman who was home by herself, expressed virtually no faith in the Iraqi government and said they doubted the relative stability would last if the Americans left.

"It would be bad - a disaster," a translator said, recounting the young woman's assessment. "That was the word she used."

A floor down, soldiers asked a woman home with three female relatives and two young boys whether she had any older sons. She had two, she said, but one was killed on the first day of Ramadan on account, she believed, of the name she had given him.

Six other men were killed in the same area the day he died, she said.

"A car went by shooting and they were yelling, `Allahu akbar,' " she said. Allahu akbar, an Arabic phrase sometimes used by Islamic militants, means `God is great.'

The woman said she was afraid to say where her other son was.

Fears of sectarian violence appeared to have permeated every aspect of life, even in these relatively safe apartments. The English-speaking doctor, who said she taught medicine at a university, recounted the stories she'd heard of patients injected with acids or diseases after winding up in the wrong hospital.

"They're just stories," she said. "But everyone has heard them, and maybe they are true."

It should not be this way, she said, offering visitors tea and water that, she emphasized, had been filtered.

"If someone wants to go be a soldier, fine, but not while they are in the hospital," she continued. "The hospital is for healing. It's a matter of ethics."

A 20-year-old man in one of the upper apartments said he sometimes went to medical clinics but would never go to a hospital.

"Some hospitals, if a Sunni goes there, a Shiite militia is going to kill him,' " he said through a young interpreter named Freddie. "Another hospital, if a Shia goes, a Sunni is going to kill him."

Asked if he was Sunni or Shiite, the young man, wearing a T-shirt that said "Latino," shook his head and exhaled cigarette smoke.

"I'm Muslim," he said. "I don't care."

But the city cares. Like most other essential services, the medical infrastructure in much of Baghdad is defined along sectarian lines. In Palehorse's area of central Baghdad, there is a Sunni and a Shiite hospital, but to get from Haifa Street to the Sunni hospital, Sunnis have to go through a Shiite neighborhood, and many aren't willing to do that, Melton said.

"Sometimes, they go without medical care because they're afraid to get to it," he said. "It's not that it's unavailable; it's that they're unwilling to make the trip."

Army Sgt. Elizabeth Carroll, a 24-year-old psychological operations specialist from Denver, said the mixture of sectarian fears and distrust of government encountered in the apartments was "pretty much the norm around here."

"Whether it's just rumors or that stuff actually happens, it's what people believe," she said. "Corruption is the big problem. It's like back in the states when the mafia ran everything. Corruption kills their faith."

The soldiers asked most residents whether they've had contacts with their neighborhood advisory council, a small local governing body that Melton describes as "awkward" and, so far at least, largely ineffective. Most of the residents said they'd never heard of it. Melton said residents do have growing confidence taking their problems to the Iraqi Army, but that confidence is hard won.

"You have to remember, people our age and younger lived their whole lives under a totalitarian dictatorship," he said.

The mystery of the 5 million dinar, meanwhile, unraveled slowly.

The security guard, a slight 17-year-old wearing a blue track suit, made his way home with his mother, father and younger brother. They said they'd tried to come home earlier but found the way blocked by an American cordon.

The money, which translates to several thousand American dollars, belonged to the father, who said he is an Iraqi police officer. As his wife sobbed and his younger son waved to the Americans, the man explained that he was saving the cash for medical care for his mother, who lives across the street.

"It's my salary," he said. "I have never taken a bribe in my life."

"Then we need more like you," one of the soldiers said.

All things considered, a man keeping his savings hidden in a purse in his closet isn't all that out of the ordinary, Melton said later. After confirming that the man was a police officer, the soldiers returned his money and promised to fix his door.

"We try not to break down doors, and if we have to, we try to make it right," he said back at his troop's headquarters.

By the traditional measures of military action, it had been another relatively quiet day out in the nebula for Palehorse Troop. And from where Melton stood, a quiet day was a good thing, at least.