Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  “Yes.”

  “And where does he live, this killer?”

  Talib smiled. “What a funny question. What makes you think I can answer it?”

  Ibrahim shrugged.

  “He lives in the city. Nothing wrong with his back. He’s much taller than me, probably heavier.” With a small pair of hands, Talib cupped a gesture around his gerbil-size paunch.

  “And are you going to tell me how you came to this?” Ibrahim asked.

  “He uses his right foot differently than his left. And the way that he uses it differently means he either has an injury or drives a car. The right is more flexible, all the way along the bottom of the foot and even the ankle. Twists side to side a little when he walks. It’s the stronger leg too. He’s probably right-handed.”

  “And he’s a man because?”

  “Only men drive cars.”

  Ibrahim smiled, then let out a laugh. “Yes, sorry. Glad someone’s using logic.”

  The Bedouin waved his hand in a courtly gesture that said I’m quite certain you’re better at logic than I am.

  Ibrahim unlocked his office door and said good-bye to Talib. He barely had time to switch on the lights before the other men came in: first one of the junior cops, Shaya, then Daher and his followers. He saw a flash of black in the hallway and wondered if Katya had wanted to speak to him as well.

  The office was small—two tables and a desk, the best the department could come up with for now. It was totally inadequate for meetings. The men sat on the stools, perched on his tables. They wanted direction, he realized. He sat down.

  “Well, the American was helpful,” Daher said. “Nothing like a woman’s face to focus the mind.”

  “It wasn’t your mind being focused,” one of the others said.

  “No, no,” Daher replied. “I now have a very clear sense of what we should be doing. We should be sitting in a conference room staring at a white shirt.”

  The men had been pushing the boundaries since Ibrahim started at Homicide. They had realized that he wouldn’t take offense at their joking. In the car riding out to the desert, before they had found the bodies, Daher, who had been reading something on his cell phone, boomed out: “Gentlemen, it’s time to move to Malaysia!”

  “Oh no.” Shaya had rolled his eyes.

  “Oh yes! And do you know why? Because Malaysia has taken the remarkable step of banning bras. Yes, indeed. They are—and I quote the sheikh who made the ruling—‘devil’s cushions.’ And no good Muslim woman should wear one, because they exaggerate the shape and curvature of the breast.” He tossed his phone on his lap with satisfaction. “Imagine, please, a whole nation without bras!”

  It had made Ibrahim laugh then, but now he was beginning to get fed up.

  “We ought to be ashamed,” he said. “This man has been killing for over a decade and we haven’t found out about it until now.”

  The room fell silent.

  “I’m sure someone noticed these women were missing,” he went on, “but whoever they were, they didn’t nag us. No one’s been showing up at our office for ten years running. That’s because they probably live on the other side of the world and they can’t show up. They don’t have the means.”

  He hoped he wasn’t going too far—or revealing his own angst. They had to find a killer; he was supposed to coordinate these overgrown boys with intelligence and a knowledge he didn’t really possess, yet the only thing he could think of was Sabria. Nothing like a woman to focus the mind.

  “So basically it’s our job to find out every single thing that we can, because someday we’re going to meet all those people who noticed and we’re going to have to tell them what happened.”

  He looked around. They all knew the situation: the Homicide Department had a 90 percent success rate in capturing and prosecuting murderers. Never mind that the figure might have been a little bloated by those zealous officers who “encouraged” confessions by any means possible. The fact remained that the department had a lot to live up to. And right now, Ibrahim was ten years out of practice.

  “Do you think they’ll keep us on this case?” Daher asked.

  “Until I hear otherwise, it’s our job to find the man who did this.”

  He tried to conjure up protocols from long ago, but the decade between then and now had eroded most of his memory, and anyway the rules had changed. They had better forensics now. They had computers for everything. And the job of an investigator was to oversee the machinations of it all. But one thing hadn’t changed: the dread.

  “Why is it always the housemaids?” Shaya asked. He was the same age as the other men but had none of their youthful energy and more than his share of naïveté.

  “Look around, man,” Daher said. “We have too many foreigners. Pakistanis, Indians, Africans. And with this many, you get the bad ones too.”

  “They’re certainly responsible for more than their share of crime,” Shaya replied.

  “That’s because they’re poor,” Daher said. “Do you ever see a fat foreigner? No. Most of them don’t make enough money to eat. Of course they’re going to start stealing and killing each other—”

  “They do commit crimes,” Ibrahim interrupted. “But stealing and killing are two totally different things. Most of the time, it’s their employers who commit the crimes. And those would be Saudis.”

  No one replied.

  “Now, what’s the latest word from forensics?”

  “Nothing interesting yet,” Daher said.

  Ibrahim looked at his men and thought of Sabria’s hair, much thicker and shinier than Charlie Becker’s. It had a weight to it. She would climb on him and drape it over his face and fill his nostrils with the smell of shampoo and sex.

  “We know the heights, weights, and presumed ages of our victims. We also have the pictures from the sketch artist, so let’s start with that. Daher and Ahmad, I want you two at the Filipino and Indonesian consulates today. Go over their records yourselves if you have to. Shaya, you’re in charge of contacting Missing Persons. Same drill: do it yourself if you have to. The rest of you go down to Records and start looking through the computer files on missing persons. The national database.”

  “What about profiling the killer?” Shaya asked.

  Ibrahim rubbed his face and wondered if the boy had understood a single thing that Dr. Becker had just said. “That is what we’re doing,” he replied.

  Groans, sighs, some friendly slapping and shoving got them out. Ibrahim shut the door behind them, switched off the light, and sat down at his desk. Maybe Riyadh wasn’t taking him off the case because he was too busy dealing with his higher-ups. It was only a matter of time before the ministry’s Special Investigations shouldered their way into it. There was no telling what would happen then. It might get taken out of police hands entirely.

  More important to him now was finding Sabria. He needed his own plan. There was no battalion of men who would go charging forward on her behalf. She wasn’t in any of the hospitals he had called, although it was possible she had been admitted anonymously. The only way to find out was to go to every clinic and show her picture around, but even then, a doctor could see a female patient without ever seeing her face. Checking them all would be a monumental task.

  He looked at the phone, thought of dialing Missing Persons himself and reporting her, but he knew what they would do: protocols. Once they found out she’d worked in Undercover, Omar, assistant chief of Undercover, would be notified, and he would undoubtedly open an investigation, which meant that they would search her apartment with some of the finest forensics technology in the world. They’d find out about Ibrahim. He’d be an adulterer, at least until they took off his head. Undercover would close down the investigation. No sense wasting energy searching for a prostitute. And while all of that was going on, it could turn out that she’d been unconscious in a hospital the whole time. Or maybe she’d just run away. It wasn’t worth the risk of reporting her yet. He had to find her himself.

 
6

  Clutching her cell phone, Amina al-Fouad stepped onto the third-floor balcony overlooking the street. It was bright, and out of habit she wrapped a plain scarf over her nose and mouth. She scanned the street for any sign of Jamal’s GM but all she saw were the neighbor’s children tearing into the alley and a few stray cats. She shut her eyes, listening for the giant rumble of the new SUV her husband had foolishly bought for their son Jamal. At last she heard a familiar sound and watched expectantly as a truck turned onto the street. It wasn’t his.

  She flipped open her phone and tried calling him a second time. No answer. If she had bothered to listen to her daughter’s instructions, she would know how to text him, but it was too complicated. 10:40 a.m. She had to go to the grocer’s, the florist’s, the art-supply store, and she still had to pick up a birthday present for her niece. The party was at one o’clock. She had promised to bring soda, napkins, streamers, and balloons. She tried calling Jamal again and got the same response.

  Now deeply annoyed, she watched two women making their way down the street. They had just stepped out of a cab. If she hurried, she might be able to catch it. She grabbed her purse and abaaya from a hook behind the door and raced down the stairs.

  The taxi had waited. It was parked at the corner like an animal catching its breath after a run. The driver had gotten out to buy cigarettes at the corner store. When he saw Amina racing toward him, he swung open the back door and invited her in. She thanked him, told him to take her to the Jamjoom Center, and they were off.

  Rashid hated it when she took taxis. It was unsafe to get in a car with a strange man, especially a foreigner. It wasn’t so bad if she was with friends, but she was absolutely never allowed to do it alone, and yet here she was, squirming in the backseat while the driver blew smoke into every corner of the car and refused to roll down the window because he didn’t want the hot air coming in. The AC wasn’t strong enough, so Amina was sweating, and every time she tried to open the window just an inch, the driver rolled it back up. She thought of Rashid finding out and simply decided that he wouldn’t. She tried calling Jamal again and this time left a message: “I’m in a cab going to the Jamjoom Center, and you’d better meet me there in two hours or I’m going to tell your father and he’ll take away your car.” Rashid would not take the car away. He had never punished the boy in his life. But Jamal might want to spare her from his father’s anger if he were to find out she’d taken a cab.

  Two hours later, she stood on the sidewalk outside the Jamjoom Center with three enormous shopping bags at her feet. She hadn’t bought the soda, but she’d found everything else, plus three gifts for her niece now wrapped in floral paper with gold ribbon. She’d also found a dozen things she hadn’t meant to buy and decided she’d run the rest of her errands later. There was no sign of Jamal. She called twice and got no answer.

  He has absolutely no understanding of things, she thought, glancing at the taxi queue. She wanted to take a cab—had put aside the money to do so, just in case—but Rashid was going to be at the party, and she couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t see her getting out of a cab, or even coming through the door with all of the shopping bags and Jamal nowhere in sight. He would know at once what she’d done. She tried calling her nephew. This was becoming an emergency. She had to be at her sister’s house in ten minutes, and it would take thirty to get there. Her nephew didn’t answer. What was it with these teenagers? They were the mobile generation. They used phones like a third hand. But if you called them, they never answered.

  She tried again and again. She wasn’t going to call her sister. Johara would be frantically preparing for the party so would delegate the problem to someone else and word would get back to Rashid.

  Finally, annoyed beyond belief, Amina tossed the phone in her purse, picked up the bags, and headed for the queue.

  7

  Katya sat in a giant armchair, trying not to slide too deeply into its recesses, while she waited for the bank manager to finish her conversation, then her phone call, then her studious typing at the computer. Katya had been watching her for twenty minutes from behind the glass partition. The manager was oblivious to the presence of the six long-suffering customers seated in her waiting area. When one of them got up and said she’d been there for forty minutes and would appreciate being seen sometime this century, the manager looked as if no one had ever dared make such a brazen request.

  “How should I know how long you’ve been sitting there?” she cried. “I don’t keep track of these things. You’re just going to have to wait your turn!”

  At the counter, customers were arguing about deposits, credit amounts, late payments. The privacy screens were pathetic, and Katya could hear everything—even the bank clerk in the corner who hummed Nancy Ajram every time she counted bills. The front door opened with a whoosh of hot air, rustling the succulent leaves of the potted plants and swirling abaayas around bodies. A woman entered, her high heels clattering angrily on the polished marble floor. She walked straight into the manager’s office and was greeted with cloying adulation. The manager rushed out to fetch coffee and dates. The new arrival dumped an obnoxiously large Dior purse on the desk. A few of the women in the waiting area began to grumble, and one sighed loudly in exasperation.

  Were men’s banks so infernally slow and bureaucratic? Katya had been in a men’s bank on one occasion, when her mother (bless her), in a fit of outrage at the service in the women’s bank, had marched across the street and pushed past the guards with the intention of speaking to the notorious “man in charge” without whom, apparently, nothing could be decided in the women’s section. She had brought a black pall of silence to the bank’s vast interior. Fifty men had turned to stare at her, their faces cold with disapproval. Katya had scrambled after her, grabbing her arm and pulling her back outside, but her mother, then practically in the death throes of the cancer that had killed her, refused to budge until she spoke to the manager.

  Even if they wanted to work, even if their husbands and fathers agreed to let them interact with strange men, even if they had drivers and ID cards and babysitters, Saudi women struggled to find jobs. This grand country, which could import anything it needed, also imported 90 percent of its private-sector workers. She had heard the anti-immigration cry from other countries—Europe wanting to send its Muslims home; America keen to close its doors to the Mexicans—but Saudi had let itself become a kingdom of strangers. It welcomed its immigrants because they lent the illusion that all Saudis could afford hired help, because the immigrants did the jobs that most Saudis would never dream of doing—housekeeping, trash collecting, taxi driving—and because without them, absolutely nothing would get done.

  But these bankers were Saudi, part of a movement among more reformist companies to get Saudi women working (albeit in women-only banks). If this was the Saudi-ization of the workforce, Katya reflected, then the country was heading for trouble.

  She sat back in the armchair and shut her eyes. She ought to give up waiting and just go home, but this was the first time in a month she’d been alone and without any responsibilities. She hadn’t wanted to face this moment because what was waiting for her here was a marriage proposal and the man she hoped she loved standing patiently at the edge of her life. Here also was her mind-numbing terror at losing her job.

  If you don’t get married, she thought, you will lose your job. She had lied and told them she was married because in order to work in her department, she had to be. Only Osama had found out the truth. He hadn’t fired her yet, but the threat hung over her every day. It constituted the greater part of her antagonism for Daher, who had seen her at work late one night and said: “You don’t act like a married woman.”

  She knew he meant You’re acting like a man, but it chilled her anyway, and she found herself worrying about him most of all. Would he find out that she wasn’t married? It would be as simple as his heading down to the records office and running a search.

  But a marriage might just turn out to b
e a pretty, tree-lined avenue to the dead end of her dreams. She thought of Nayir and tried to remember the longing she felt for him, but fear had neutered her desire. Nayir wasn’t the type to be comfortable with her working such long hours. And what if they started having children? How would she work and raise kids—and clean house and cook and tend lovingly to her husband’s needs? He had proposed marriage a month ago. It was a painfully long time to make a man wait, and she still hadn’t given him an answer.

  She didn’t have one.

  It took her another hour to be seen, then another fifteen minutes of wrangling. They had accidentally closed her checking account, into which she had recently deposited her paycheck. The manager had no record of Katya’s ever having been a patron of the bank. Even the deposit slip Katya produced from her purse had no effect. The manager studied Katya, clearly wondering what sort of scam she was working. With typical efficiency, she drank another cup of coffee and fussed at her computer for ten useless minutes, then got up from her desk and went to talk to her boss, who was, apparently, the real manager of the bank. Half an hour later, she returned, reopened the account, and reassured Katya that all was well. But nothing was well, not when one’s livelihood was stored so tenuously in the memory of a machine, as if one’s livelihood didn’t already face a dozen more powerful forces bent on wiping it away.

  He was talking to a neighbor. When he hauled the rope from the water—bent over, one knee on the ground, and his head turned at an odd angle, like a man inspecting the underside of a camel—the fabric of his shirt pulled taut against his back. Even from five meters, she saw the muscles—a landscape of softly cut dunes, elegant, vast. She would normally have averted her gaze, but she let her eyes rest on his back for a moment. I could touch it, she thought, if we were married. I could fall asleep with those great arms around me. It was illusory, that form. As solid as it was, it would be subject to shifting winds all the same.