KH02 - City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  Nayir nodded. “When do you want to go?”

  “Tomorrow at noon?”

  “I can meet you at your work.”

  She couldn’t help smiling.

  Abu came back a while later, and Nayir rose to leave. He thanked them for the meal and the conversation, but when Abu made to walk their guest to the door, Katya took her father’s arm and pushed him gently in the direction of the kitchen. She would escort Nayir to the street herself.

  It surprised her again to see that he was pleased to be alone with her. They walked in silence.

  At the bottom of the front stairs, he turned to her and said, “I always felt that you were the one who solved Nouf’s case.”

  She bit her lip and smiled. “We did it together, remember?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I remember it all.” She thought she saw him blushing but she couldn’t tell, because he turned and walked into the night.

  17

  Osama opened the front door to a ruckus of noise—blaring television, women laughing, and his three-year-old son, Muhannad, shrieking in delight. He smiled and entered the foyer.

  The women’s sitting room was just off the hall, and the door was open. Announcing himself with a tap on the wall, Osama took off his shoes and dropped his cell phone on the hall table. Muhannad came running into the hall and grabbed his father’s knees. Osama lifted him and covered his face in kisses. “Did you miss me?” he asked. Muhannad nodded frantically, then squirmed and kicked to be let down again. He raced back into the women’s sitting room.

  A door opened down the hallway and his wife’s grandmother emerged, shuffling slowly like a windup toy, looking around with the big, blinking eyes of the lost. Her headscarf was sliding down, and her balding head, sparsely covered with thin strands of white and black hair, shone in the overhead light.

  He approached and kissed her forehead, greeted her with a smile. She was deaf. She smiled back with a modest, happy look, patted him on the arm, and then seemed to forget what she was doing there or why she’d come.

  “Osama.”

  He turned. Behind him, Nuha stood in the doorway of the sitting room. She was wearing jeans and a thin little top that glittered with golden threads. He knew she’d put them on for him, and it made him want to take her in his arms, scoop her up right there in front of her grandmother and carry her straight to the bedroom. He wanted to ignore it all—dinner, Muhannad, everyone around them, and the house itself, a sizeable duplex they shared with his in-laws. He could see on her face that she wanted the same thing, and that although she’d been laughing with her cousins or friends, she’d also been waiting for him.

  She moved past him. The smell of her sent a shot of longing through him. Nuha took her grandmother by the hand and led her toward the sitting room. “Rafiq is coming soon,” she said over her shoulder. “And Mona.” Mona was Rafiq’s wife. On any other day he’d have been glad for their company, but he wasn’t in the mood tonight.

  “Jidda,” Nuha said, even though the old woman couldn’t hear her, “your scarf is falling again.” She fastened it securely and led her grandmother to the sitting room, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll be right there.”

  Osama went into the kitchen and slumped down at the table. It had been a depressing day. Faiza had interviewed Abdulrahman’s wife at the house that morning, and Abdulrahman had insisted on being present for the interview. An excellent observer, Faiza could see through the wife’s carefully respectful answers. Even so, her impressions were conflicting. Abdulrahman ruled his household like the average traditional guy: he expected his wife to stay home and raise the kids. But with Leila he wasn’t traditional at all. Leila went out to do whatever she liked. The wife didn’t seem upset by this apparent contradiction in Abdulrahman’s behavior; rather, she viewed it as the reaction of a man who understood that the two women were very different. His wife preferred to stay home with the kids. Leila would have hated it, so he let her go out. The wife also claimed that there had never been any tension between Leila and anyone else in the house.

  Osama doubted this. Nobody, nobody, lived their lives without feeling some antagonism toward a relative. But Faiza was the best interrogator they had, and if that was all she could learn in a two-hour interview, then for now they’d reached a dead end. He would have to get the truth about Leila’s living situation from somebody else, although who would have access to the family that Abdulrahman guarded so jealously, Osama had no idea.

  There was still no indication of where Leila’s cousin Ra’id had gone. He hadn’t returned to Abdulrahman’s house the night before, and they’d been unable to hunt him down at friends’ houses. Feeling that he’d better let the Nawar household alone for a bit, Osama had gone in search of Leila’s ex-husband, Bashir. First he’d gone to the man’s apartment, only to find that Bashir had vacated the premises the week before. He and Faiza had managed to track down Bashir’s brother, Hakim, who owned the bodega on the building’s ground floor. He wasn’t at the store, of course. They’d had to spend the afternoon driving around the city, talking to friends, talking to strangers at last-known-addresses. After six hours of this they’d finally caught up with Hakim… back at the bodega.

  Apparently, Hakim was smarter than his brother. He’d heard about Leila’s disappearance—Abdulrahman had called to tell them, back when she’d gone missing—at which point Hakim had counseled his brother not to leave his apartment just yet. If it ever came down to a police investigation, his behavior would be flagged as suspicious. But Bashir had a mind of his own. He’d been planning on moving for six months, and he wasn’t going to let a little hypothetical police investigation interfere with it.

  Where had he gone? Osama wanted to know. Hakim had spread his hands to the sides, shrugged his shoulders, and turned his eyes to the heavens in an eloquent display of ignorance. “We didn’t get along. Aside from that conversation I just described to you, we hadn’t spoken in months.” It turned out that Bashir had been living on his brother’s dime for the better part of a year, and his brother was getting sick of it. What a terrible irony it was, Hakim pointed out, that after a year of suggesting—not asking, mind you, because it would have been unthinkable to actually kick his brother out of the apartment—but merely suggesting that Bashir try to find a decent job and get a place of his own, after a whole year of this, Bashir had finally decided to move out, at which point Hakim had practically begged him to stay. For his own good, of course. Just until they found Leila.

  Hakim went on and on about what a lazy man his brother had become, how Bashir had changed so much since childhood that Hakim almost couldn’t believe they were related. He was so much smarter than his brother that Osama began to wonder why Hakim was still standing around when Bashir had had the good sense to flee. Oh, but Hakim was wickedly smart, Osama knew from the outset. Every detail of his story was actually a clever way to convey his brother’s innocence. To hear it told, Bashir knew that his ex-wife was missing, knew that the police might come asking questions—but he remained untroubled by it, because he was innocent, and that was what innocent people did. They didn’t crumble with guilt. They went nonchalantly about their lives.

  But there was one thing Hakim didn’t know: Osama had heard it all before.

  Osama watched the entire act with a distant sense of appreciation but with growing annoyance. But Officer, I didn’t get along with my… brother. Sister. Uncle. Cousin. Whomever the police had come to arrest. Because everyone knew that if a suspect couldn’t be found, the police would happily take a relative as insurance until the suspect chose to turn themselves in. So most relatives attempted to portray an unhappy family—But sir, I haven’t spoken to my father in sixteen months—in the improbable hope that an officer would actually believe it. Osama sometimes had the impression that there were no happy families left in Jeddah.

  They’d arrested Hakim anyway. After getting him back to the station, they’d discovered that Bashir was actually a guest worker from Syria and his visa had exp
ired six months before. Hakim became indignant. “Do you really think that selfish bastard brother of mine is going to turn himself in when his visa is expired? Do you think he would do such a thing for me?” His hollow laughter still rang in Osama’s ears.

  Osama had handed him a cell phone and told him to call his brother. “Tell him that if he turns himself in, we’ll help him get his visa renewed. Unless he killed his ex-wife, of course.”

  Hakim had pushed the cell phone back across the table. “He’s too self-serving. Nothing I say will do a damn bit of good, I guarantee it.”

  He was pretty good, Osama had to admit. Most people jumped at the chance to use the phone, but Hakim was stubborn. Osama left him in the interrogation room.

  Of course, not having spoken to his brother for so long, Hakim insisted he knew nothing of his whereabouts when Leila had disappeared. He didn’t know whether Bashir still held a grudge against his ex-wife, whether he had reason to, or what had happened in that marriage at all. Two men living in the same house for a year, and they knew nothing about each other.

  The final blow occurred after Osama went back in to offer the phone one last time. Hakim refused, looking prideful. When Osama moved to leave, Hakim called after him, “My father was always ashamed of Bashir, but if my father were still alive, Allah bless him, and he were here right now, I think he would be ashamed of you.” Osama hadn’t even turned around, but the words had done their job.

  Nuha came into the kitchen and began unwrapping the plates of food that had been waiting on the counter for him. When she saw the look in his eyes, she came closer. “This case is a bad one, I can tell.”

  “It’s getting worse,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He grabbed her waist, pulled her onto his lap, and kissed her hard on the lips. “I don’t want Rafiq to come tonight,” he said. “I want to go to bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He caught the side of her smile and leaned in to kiss her forehead, her temple, her cheek. She met his mouth.

  An hour later, the house was quiet. Muhannad was with his grandparents. Nuha’s cousins had gone to the other half of the house to watch their nightly soap opera. Nuha had canceled with Rafiq and Mona, so the couple had gone somewhere else for the evening. Osama ate a quick dinner, then went in search of Nuha.

  She was in the bedroom. The room was large, but she’d turned out the lamps and lit candles by the bedside so that it seemed as if the bed were floating in a golden bubble. The sudden, manic force that sprang up inside him was out of keeping with the tenderness of the scene, but it didn’t frighten him this time, only turned him on more. He was hard by the time he reached the coverlet, and when she felt the force of his grip as he stripped off her jeans, excitement flared in her eyes.

  The first time it was over too quickly; the second time was more satisfying, burying him deep in his body like an animal in a cave. This was what drugs must be like, he thought, this floating, subliminal, half-understood state. And somewhere in the darkness of the cave he felt himself becoming a different being, a collection of nerves, of cells and plasma and blood. Images appeared, borrowed from half-remembered college textbooks, of the strata of skin layers, of bright red blood cells furiously splitting and gray ganglia spreading like vines. It took him a while to realize that he also heard a beat, the distant thumping of a heart, the spill of blood rushing through ventricles. It was so extraordinary that he gasped.

  Later, he stroked her cheek and whispered, “I had a vision that you were pregnant.”

  “Oh, lover.” She turned to him, wrapped her arms around his chest. “I’m not pregnant, as far as I know.”

  “I think you are now.”

  She curled more tightly into his chest, and he fell asleep with his lips on her hair.

  He woke suddenly in the dark. He’d been dreaming of something but it slipped away so quickly that by the time he turned to look at the bedside clock, the dream was gone. The only thing that remained was an emotion in watercolor, sad grays and browns and pale greens, as if the evening before hadn’t happened at all.

  The previous few days, however, came back in sharp color. Leila’s body, the limp arm hanging over the side of a stretcher. Abdulrahman struggling with the manikin, his hands on her waist, the sudden hollowing of his eyes when he realized that his sister was dead. Hakim’s angry laugh, his sneering, self-righteous, pathetic face.

  Osama looked at his wife, lying on her back, one arm splayed to the side where she’d had it buried beneath his shoulders. Delicately, without waking her, he removed a strand of hair that was stuck to her mouth. There had been a time, years ago, when he’d wake up in the night just to watch her sleep, to indulge himself, to admire her without distractions. But now on the odd days when he woke before her, he found himself listening for her breath, watching her chest for a rise and fall, and fighting the impulse to disturb her so she would open her eyes and moan and give a sleepy half smile or bat at him with a tired hand. Some proof of life.

  Getting up quietly, he went into the bathroom and did his ablutions. He was going to spend another day trying to track down Ra’id and Bashir. They had to profile the murderer, but their best profiler was out of town. And he could tell that it was going to be dripping hot. It was five in the morning, the air conditioner was on full, he was standing stark naked in the ceramic-tiled bathroom, and already he was sweating.

  In the kitchen he found Nuha’s laptop and her work papers scattered on the table. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat down to eat a piece of bread. Her laptop was still on, power light illuminated but the screen dark. He glanced at the papers. She must have woken up in the middle of the night to finish an article. She worked in the kitchen at night, because her office was just off the bedroom, and sometimes the sound of her typing woke him. The newspaper could be demanding, but if he’d known she’d had a deadline, he wouldn’t have kept her in the bedroom half the night.

  No, he thought with a burst of pleasure, the second time we made a baby.

  From the looks of it, she was working on a story about the kingdom’s effort to encourage more women into the workplace. He picked up a printout of her article and read it. She was eloquent. To his small relief he found a typo and, reaching into her purse for a pen, having to dig to the very bottom and wondering why there was no pen on the table already, he corrected the mistake, adding a small heart shape in the margin for her to find later.

  It was only when he put the pen back in her purse that he noticed the plastic canister. It was oddly shaped, like a flying saucer, and a strange green color that made him think of a doctor’s office. Feeling guilty, he took it out of her purse. It rattled slightly. He popped the lid and saw a spiral row of pills, half of them missing. Some where white, the rest were blue. He stared at them stupidly. It took him a moment, not to recognize what they were, but to believe where he’d found them. Nuha? He’d seen these pills before—once on a prostitute he’d interrogated and once in the hands of a violent husband who’d killed his wife over a little disc almost exactly like this one.

  Birth control pills.

  He set them on the table while his thoughts began to swarm. Had something happened—was she seeing someone else, and that’s why she needed to avoid a pregnancy? She would never do that. She’d said she wanted more children. In fact, she was upset that she hadn’t become pregnant again. She had even talked about going to the doctor to find out why. It had all been a lie. But why? Was it something at home? Did she hate children so much? Did she hate Muhannad? Why hadn’t she told him about any of this? Did she think he was so irrational that they couldn’t have a conversation about it?

  He looked back inside the purse, just a stupid double check. It was her purse; he recognized the wallet. He was overreacting and he knew it, but for an awful moment he remembered the long-ago murderous husband who’d thrown his wife out a fifth-story window over a discovery of birth control pills. He had thought the man was insane at the time, but here
he was, experiencing the same blind fury. He had a right to be angry. He’d been lied to. Worse yet, Osama remembered thinking how stupid it was to kill a woman over a small case of pills. Pills! They were tiny; the man was a backward fool. It was crushing him now to discover that he’d been the ignorant one, that the killer’s understanding was more nuanced than his own. Discovering something like this—oh, he saw it so clearly—opened a terrifying chasm of fury and distrust.

  It took a few minutes, but eventually Osama’s hands stopped trembling. He stood up from the table, fighting the impulse to storm into the bedroom and confront Nuha. It wouldn’t be fair. She would be vulnerable, sleepy. And he would be full of rage. Instead, he slammed his fist into the container, shattering it, crushing the pills. A tiny shard of plastic hit her keyboard and bounced to the floor.

  A few minutes later, he heard the toilet flush in the other room, the sound of Nuha washing herself in the bathroom sink. She’d be out any minute.

  He left the pills on the table, the plastic container like a broken oyster with all of its pearl-like irritants destroyed.

  18

  Katya stood just outside the entrance to the station. It was lunchtime, and her burqa was down so that no one would recognize her. She didn’t want people to start asking questions if they saw her getting into Nayir’s Jeep. Is that your husband? Why do we never see him pick you up after work? The only problem was that, with Katya’s burqa down, Nayir might not recognize her either.

  The sunlight was crashing mercilessly onto the street, reflecting off the windows of the building opposite, springing up from the marble courtyard, and flashing straight into her face from the car windows zipping by. She had sunglasses on under her burqa but it wasn’t enough, and she kept having to raise them anyway to squint at the faces of the drivers who were parked on the street. Her eyes were watering, she was hungry, and there was no sign of the Jeep.