For a shady deal or a tale of woe, go to the Palestine Hotel

A monkey chatters in a cage near the hotel reception. A man with a parrot is drinking tea. On the half-wrecked first floor, someone has dumped a broken horse-drawn carriage, a relic of Iraq's monarchy. A pair of white underpants flutters from an upstairs window. They are a flag, an appeal to US commanders.

Any one of these details would be extraordinary in peacetime. But American-occupied Baghdad is a wild place, whose inhabitants are numb. Television reports of normality returning to the capital are nonsense.

Near by, at the city's epicentre, is the Palestine Hotel, a Soviet-style tower block that long ago ceased to be able to meet the needs of the hundreds of journalists who inhabit it. The whiff of rotting garbage wafts through its corridors and the dimly lit lobby teems with hustlers.

"You want whisky," says a portly man. "Fifty dollars for whisky. You want two bottles?" You can buy an oriental carpet. For a hundred greenbacks, you can buy someone willing to take his life in his hands by driving around. (American troops have been regularly shooting into cars whose drivers fail to obey their often bewildering hand signals, and they shot at us as we arrived from Jordan.)

Yet you can't get chips or a cheese sandwich in the Palestine. Breakfast is one boiled egg, if you're up early enough, and the swimming pool has turned into a pond of slime.

None the less, the days are gone when the foreign press had to refer to Saddam Hussein by a nickname to discuss him in front of their minders. The British called him "Brian", the Americans "Eric" and the French "Maurice".

The American soldiers on hotel guard duty have the expression of men out of their depth in a land about which they know nothing. A clutch of Iraqis presses up against them. "Please, sir, please, I am a famous Iraqi actor," says one, asking to call a worried relative. He is turned away.

Drawn by the cameras, Iraqis bring their grievances to the Palestine. The hotel has become their stage, a portal to the world. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue took place just outside. Yesterday, a crowd gathered in the same place in the hope of catching the camera's eye. "We want an Iraqi leader, we want an Iraqi leader," they chanted.

Makarem Mikhail has also brought her grievance to the hotel. She hasn't been able to sleep for days because she has been guarding her possessions. "Some of the looters are people who already have big houses and cars," she says. "This is just about greed." Much as she disliked the dictator, she no longer blames Brian. She blames George.