Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  It took Ibrahim a moment to notice that Saffanah was laughing. She straightened very slowly, the smile still in her eyes, and when she saw that the Bedouin had politely turned his back to her, she actually looked happy.

  “Dirty bastard,” the Bedouin muttered to the camel. “You’re a dirty old man.”

  Two other camels were still at the fence, sniffing interestedly at Saffanah’s neck. Ibrahim watched her, half listening to the Bedouin scold his camel. Suddenly Saffanah nuzzled her nose into one of the camels. It was a miraculously small gesture that conveyed something quite grand: neediness and sadness, the desire to give comfort as much as receive it, and a kind of pleading quality that said: Please forgive me.

  Maybe it was the gesture, maybe the vomiting, but a sharp thought cut straight through his mind. She’s pregnant. It wasn’t rational. Saffanah was too religious to have gotten herself into something like that. It didn’t make sense. But fifteen years of police work had taught him to trust his intuition. Pregnant? All of the blood in his arms seemed to come to the surface. He jammed his hands into his pockets and wrapped one around his cell phone. His skin prickled. Saffanah?

  He wasn’t angry, exactly. He felt amazement and chagrin. When did she meet the man who had deflowered her? He felt certain it wasn’t Zaki—his son complained far too much about her frigidity to leave much room for doubt. Zaki left the house as often as he could; God, she could have been meeting any number of men!

  She had noticed the change in his demeanor and was now petting the camel in a nervous way. As soon as the Bedouin was far enough away, Ibrahim moved toward her. He removed her hand from the camel’s face and held it. It was the first time he’d touched her.

  “Saffanah. Look at me.” He said it kindly, but she turned to him as if he were holding a whip. He squeezed her hand reassuringly. “You’re pregnant.”

  She jerked back, a spasm of shocked denial.

  “It wasn’t a question,” he said, squeezing her hand harder now. “How far along are you?”

  “I am not—”

  “I’m a cop, Saffanah. I know when someone’s lying. Just tell me; I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

  She stared at him. She did a damn good job of pretending indignation. In fact, she’d done a damn good job of pretending everything. And she was stubborn. There was no way she was going to admit to the truth, and bullying would only entrench her resistance. He sighed.

  “All right,” he said, letting go of her hand. “I just thought—with you throwing up back there…”

  She turned back to the camel pen. The camels kept nudging her, and she continued to pet them, but her hand worked mechanically.

  He realized that they could never send her back now. If her father found out, he’d make Zaki pay for the child forever. If Jibril found out that it wasn’t Zaki’s kid, he would have his daughter tried for adultery.

  Ibrahim’s arms were still tingling and he realized he was afraid for her now. “Well,” he said, “after what happened today, I think the best idea is to go home and have sex with Zaki.” At the word sex her hand froze on the camel’s ear, then slowly continued. “After a while, you get pregnant and have a baby. If you want to do it differently, Zaki’s going to realize that it’s not his. Does my wife know?”

  She gave him a look of outright disgust.

  “Well, thank God for that,” he muttered.

  Something was forged between them in that moment, the magnetism of shared secrets. She stopped petting the camels, curled her arms around her waist, and stared at the fence. If this were his own daughter—one of the twins, say, because Farrah was hopeless—and if she weren’t already pregnant, he’d tell her she’d better get an education before ruining her lovely figure with pregnancies and the kind of slovenly overeating that comes from boredom and from being stuck at home like a good Saudi housewife. He’d tell her she’d better get a career in case her husband turned out to be a jackal and left her with kids to raise on her own. He’d try to forge some strength in her, the kind of fierce, dignified personal power that was, in his family at least, the most highly regarded quality in a woman. But he sensed that Saffanah would recoil at these sentiments.

  The Bedouin brought back her burqa, and Ibrahim thanked him. It was wet with camel spit and torn at the edge, but Ibrahim insisted it was fine. Saffanah took it gratefully and put it on at once.

  They walked back to the car, but Ibrahim forced her to sit in the front seat, and he wouldn’t start the car until she put on her seat belt, which she did slowly, like a reluctant child. They didn’t talk, but he could tell that she wanted to say something. Probably: You don’t really think I’m pregnant, do you? He wasn’t in the mood.

  By the time they reached the main road, the sun was setting. It filled the sky with a dazzling pink and for a moment he felt cocooned in a spool of cotton candy. It reminded him of being a child and going to the funfairs in the evenings. He’d gone to those same funfairs with his own kids, but Jamila had always made it a torturous experience. And now what would happen to Zaki and Saffanah, going to funfairs openly hostile to each other with a child that wasn’t even theirs?

  He reached into the door pocket and found his cigarettes, lit one, and dropped the pack on the dash. He felt vaguely guilty for smoking around a pregnant woman, but lo, the surprises weren’t over that day. Saffanah picked up the packet and took out a cigarette. He was too amazed to speak. Saffanah—smoking? She didn’t even shoot a guilty look in his direction before lighting it, inhaling right through her veil.

  In that moment, everything became clear. Saffanah as he knew her was a total lie. Her religiosity looked like a pretense now, a shield to keep Zaki away—perhaps because she was in love with someone else? Hell, she’d been trying to alienate the whole family. Who she genuinely was, he couldn’t have said.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” he said lamely. “Not if you’re pregnant.”

  She didn’t reply. Glancing over, he saw that her veil was sticking to her face; a wet trail was streaking down each cheek. She was crying.

  “Oh, Saffanah.”

  Ibrahim parked on the corner farthest from the house. He wanted to give her a chance to collect herself before facing the family, should any of them happen to be lurking outside. The street was empty. They sat quietly in the car, Saffanah facing the window and probably seeing nothing. It was dark, and he knew from experience that wearing a face veil in the dark made you the equivalent of blind. He had actually tried it himself one night—he and his brother Omar had walked up and down the block with their wives’ burqas on their faces, trying to settle an argument about whether Omar’s wife, Rahaf, could possibly have walked into the neighbor’s car accidentally, thus setting off the car alarm and infuriating the neighbor. Omar had insisted she’d done it on purpose, but Ibrahim argued that even if your burqa had eyeholes, it was hard to see what you were doing. So Saffanah’s being turned away from him seemed like a silent plea for privacy—or forgiveness, he couldn’t say which.

  Once he finished his last cigarette, they got out of the car, Saffanah fumbling in the dark. He came around to her side of the car and said, “Walk beside me. I don’t want you setting off any car alarms.” She obeyed and they made their slow way down the street, Ibrahim watching her every step to make sure she didn’t trip. When he got her to the house, he heard his wife’s voice as she came down the staircase, a low grumble that was unintelligible but which he implicitly understood. She was complaining about something, probably Ibrahim’s inability to get his son a divorce.

  Saffanah refused to remove her veil until they reached the second-floor landing. (The downstairs neighbors were a constant threat to propriety.) So he walked her to her door. She gave him one last frightened look before she went inside.

  Ten minutes later, he was driving back into the city. He took the Corniche road. Roundabouts and their statuary glittered in the lights—from traffic, streetlamps, floodlights, and apartment buildings, a flowing river of light at the edge of the dark Red Sea.


  He parked in his usual space beneath Sabria’s building, the space allocated to her apartment and that she might have used had she been allowed to drive. If the neighbors paid any attention to him at all, they assumed he was her father. He looked old enough. (Although once a female neighbor had mistaken him for a driver and asked him for a ride.) In paranoid moments, he considered parking on the street so no one would suspect that Sabria had a male visitor, but parking was scarce here. It was a relief to have a dedicated slot, because it seemed the more he came here, the more urgent he was to see her. In the beginning, she had needed him more—for sexual fulfillment, for comfort, and even for simple things like going to the doctor. They weren’t married, yet she had become, in essence, his second wife. Over the past two years, his need for her had grown greater than he had expected.

  He saw a woman going into the elevator, so he took the stairs. The neighbors were mostly foreigners—a doctor from India, a few Egyptian couples, not the kind of people who gave much thought to Sabria’s marital status or to the man who visited her every night and left before dawn. All the same, he thought it prudent to avoid talking to them.

  He took the stairs two at a time and wasn’t even out of breath when he reached the fourth floor. He went straight to her door. When she didn’t answer, his chest started to feel tight. His heart was pounding. He should have taken the elevator. He knocked again. No answer.

  Fishing in his pocket, he found the key. She had given it to him a year ago, and he kept it on his key chain, dangling there as innocently as his own house key. He had never used it. He wasn’t even sure it would work. But it slid into the lock, and the door opened.

  The apartment was dark. The stillness made him nervous. She always had music playing, the television on, Al-Jazeera flickering silently in the background. Food cooking on the stove. He stood in the quiet and launched a single question at the universe: Where is she?

  Feeling oddly like an intruder, he sat on the sofa and tried to reach her on her cell phone. It went to voice mail on the first ring, which meant that it was off.

  He went directly to the neighbors. Iman and Asma were a blatantly lesbian couple who claimed they were sisters. They had a wall in common with Sabria’s apartment, and on quiet summer nights when the noises from their bedroom strained through the wallboards, Ibrahim would lie there wondering if the women would ever get caught and who would miss them if they were executed. They seemed to exist in a world of their own.

  They were the only neighbors who ever came to the apartment, who ever exchanged more than an occasional hello with Sabria. Asma opened the door and gazed at him with the diffidence she had demonstrated ever since Sabria told them he was a cop.

  “I’m just wondering if you’ve seen Sabria today?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Not since yesterday.”

  “Did you hear her go out?”

  “No. Why? She’s not there?” Even Asma seemed to find this odd. “Maybe she went to the store?”

  “I thought she’d be here.”

  Asma called to Iman, and the two women stood there puzzling out the last time they’d seen Sabria. It had been two days, in fact, once all the details were straightened out, but Iman was certain that she’d heard noise coming from Sabria’s apartment late this afternoon.

  “It sounded like she was at home,” Iman said. “I heard the television.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Ibrahim said. “If you see her, tell her to call me.”

  He went back to the apartment. He hadn’t talked to Sabria since the night before, but she’d been just as ever. Happy to see him. Smiling. Plying him with chicken and rice and a bowl of halawa mixed with cream. Sliding into his arms as he sat in a postdinner coma watching her; arousing him with the warmth of her hands, the power in her thighs as she climbed onto him.

  He took another look around. No sign of forced entry on the doorjamb, the handle. Windows locked. Nothing out of place. Only her purse, keys, and cell phone missing. She had gone somewhere. There’s going to be a stupid explanation. But he couldn’t think of one. Every time he’d toss out an idea, he’d feel a skipping panic, little splashes of excitement before each notion sank. He was surprised that it could happen as easily as that—that the most important thing in your life could vanish so quickly and quietly.

  4

  The worst part was that there was no one to tell.

  He lay awake, staring at the wooden window screen of the men’s sitting room. Dawn hadn’t broken, they hadn’t even sounded the first call to prayer, but he’d woken up anyway, panicked about Sabria.

  In the five years he’d known her, she’d never been on time for an appointment. Yet in the two years since they’d been together, she’d never missed a date. They didn’t have a date per se, but they saw each other three to four times a week. If he could only tell Omar what was happening, his brother would, by his very embodiment of authority, provide an answer. But what was Ibrahim going to say: I’ve had a mistress for two years and now she’s gone?

  It was tempting to blame his paranoia on the discovery of the bodies. He remembered this from before, working Homicide in his late twenties. Every time there was a murder, he grew panicky if something went wrong at home. Now more than ever, he needed the rest of his life to retain its delicate, secret structure.

  Someone had to know where she was. She didn’t have many friends. She worked during the day, in a women’s-only shopping mall. Her coworkers were as mysterious to him as any stranger in a niqab. Her family was in Indonesia, or maybe they’d moved back to the Philippines by now. She never talked about them, only about her mother, who was dead.

  His mind tore through the possibilities, cutting intersections, ignoring pedestrians, hitting wide-open freeways that circled him back around a whole metropolis of problems that hadn’t existed before last night. Had she grown sick of him? Had she left for someone else? Why not a good-bye note? Had someone taken her? She was anonymous. Who even knew she was there?

  He could think of a few people who might want to hurt her. Her old employer, the bastard who had raped her when she was working as his housemaid. But the bastard had fallen into dark history, was never mentioned anymore. And why would he come after her? If there was a reason, or even the hint of a threat, she would have told Ibrahim first thing.

  Maybe someone from one of her Undercover jobs might be looking for revenge. She had been hired for Undercover five years ago, which was how they had met. She’d done a number of assignments with Ubayy al-Warra before being transferred to Ibrahim. He’d been working a female shoplifting network and needed an infiltrator. It was hard enough finding a woman for such a task, let alone a proficient one. Sabria had been excellent.

  She’d eventually decided that the job was too taxing for her. He knew all the cases she’d worked on with him, but there were dozens more she’d done in the two years with al-Warra that he knew very little about. She hadn’t talked about them much except to say that they were uninteresting.

  The house began to stir. He leaned his head against the wall and checked his phone. No calls. Few people would have understood that he was sleeping with a woman he hadn’t married, and those who would have understood were too close to his family. He couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t say something, and he didn’t like people carrying dangerous secrets around. Only Sabria had ever had that privilege.

  They weren’t married because Sabria was already married. She’d been forced into it by her former employer, the same man who had raped her, neglected her, and who was no doubt brutalizing some new young housemaid at this very moment. Mahmoud Halifi. He had disappeared over five years ago, shortly after Sabria had fled his house. It occurred to Ibrahim that if she ever saw Halifi again, she might do something rash. She carried pepper spray and was proficient at kung fu, but Halifi was twice her size, all raw muscle and fury and animal brutality. He could easily overpower her.

  Halifi had raped her multiple times, but it wasn’t until Sabria became pregnant that he fo
rced her to marry him. They conducted a two-minute ceremony in his living room, and the bastard had actually notified the records office, making it completely official. She had miscarried a week later. In order to divorce him, she would have to find him, and she hadn’t put any energy into that over the past five years.

  The fact that she and Ibrahim couldn’t marry didn’t bother her as much as it bothered him, but when he really thought it through, the conclusion ended somewhere with his wife having him killed quietly in his sleep or arranging for him to be ostracized by his family and friends for the rest of his life.

  He got up, got dressed, and managed to leave the house without having to talk to Jamila, even though it meant missing breakfast with the twins, who were ten. He sent them each a text telling them he’d see them after dinner and would they please remember that it was Thursday—they had a date for ice cream? They both replied with happy emoticons.

  He reached Sabria’s apartment and did another sweep. Still empty. He went back to the neighbors, who said she hadn’t come home the night before. So he returned to her apartment, sat at the kitchen table, and began calling hospitals.

  5

  It was clear from the chatter that the department was quite proud of not having a specialist in serial killers on hand. It was, in fact, a matter of national pride that they didn’t need one. And there was a certain hunger in the men’s faces knowing that an American was going to enter the room to explain something only an American would know. And they would, ever so politely (Ibrahim could see them planning their deftness), berate America for importing its violence to this virgin country; a country not immune to violence, but certainly one that had never produced a Hannibal Lecter. (He felt certain there were men in the room who didn’t realize Lecter was fictional.) There was an eagerness, too, that said Very well, we may have produced Osama bin Laden, but you produced a kind of viral Jeffrey Dahmer that has spread around the world, and apparently only you have the vaccine?