by Zoë Ferraris
“You think she might be here?” Katya asked.
“No. This place is a rat hole. Twice in the past month, the police have busted up a prostitution network. But what matters to us is that about fifty percent of the missing persons in Jeddah either come here or go missing from here.” He lifted a folder from the floor of the front seat and slid out a handful of papers, handed a bunch to Katya. They were sketches of the victims from the desert. “I thought this would be the best place to start to ID our remaining victims. You okay with doing that?”
“Yes, of course.”
Ibrahim got out of the car and Katya followed him across the street. The first thing she noticed was the smell, a putrid swamp odor of dirty bodies, rotten food, and mounds of feces lining a small trench that ran along the underpass, all of it ripening in the heat. She drew her veil across her nose and made an effort to breathe shallowly, but the stench was overwhelming, enough to make her eyes water. It was slightly cooler beneath the flyover, but it was an airless day and the stench stuck to everything.
They wandered through the crowd for two hours, an infinity of heat and sweat and disappointment. Ibrahim stayed in Katya’s line of sight, but she never managed to catch his eye. They were deep in a makeshift tent area when she came upon a woman who was bending over a small child.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for these women.”
The woman glanced at the pictures. “Never seen ’em. Try Aunie.” She motioned to a woman at the sidewalk’s periphery. Aunie was a petite woman, Asian, her black hair cut in a bowl shape. She was lying on her side on a half-rotted brown wicker chair, the nicest, perhaps only piece of furniture in the whole place. She wore a defiant short-sleeved shirt and a pair of loose trousers cut off at the knee. On her feet were plastic flip-flops.
She didn’t sit up as Katya approached.
“Excuse me,” Katya said, “I’m looking for these women.” She held out the sketches, and slowly, Aunie sat up.
“You’re police?”
“Homicide.”
The woman nodded. “So they’re dead.”
“Do you know them?”
The woman didn’t say anything. She reached into a worn plastic sack at her feet and began rummaging. Katya watched her extract a dirty piece of cloth, which she used to wipe the sweat from her face and neck.
“You going to arrest me?” she asked.
“Not unless you want me to.”
Aunie gave her a smile that looked more taunting than amused. “I’ve never seen them,” she said, and lay back down.
“Maybe a cup of coffee would stir your memory?”
The woman eyed her.
“Or lunch?”
After some thought, Aunie sat up. “No,” she said. “I already ate today. But I’ll need money for lunch tomorrow.”
Katya nodded. “Tell me their names.”
The woman squinted and reached for a sketch. She frowned while studying it. “Looks like Mahal.”
“Does Mahal have a last name?”
Aunie shook her head. “Can’t remember. She’s Filipina.” She shoved the sketch back toward Katya, but Katya didn’t take it.
“Do you know if she had a job?”
“No.” Aunie gave a derisive snort. “No job. Here? What do you think this is, a hotel?”
“Before she came to the bridge,” Katya said somewhat impatiently. “Do you know what she did?”
“No.”
“How about money for lunch the day after tomorrow?”
Aunie snorted again. “All right, maybe she was a housemaid. I can’t remember. Some brutal family.” She waved her hand.
“And why was she here at the bridge? Did they abuse her?”
“Of course they abused her,” the woman said, although for the first time her words sounded false. “She ran away from them. From all of them!”
Katya nodded and took the sketch back. “And you?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
Aunie shut her eyes and sat back in the chair. It wobbled unsteadily. “Most people here have the same problem.”
“No passport?” Katya asked.
“No!” Aunie sat up and opened her eyes. “They have passports. But their employers didn’t give them permission to leave. They need permission. And if they ran away, they’re not going to get it. So that’s the Saudis creating the problem! You can’t buy a plane ticket unless you have a recommendation letter from your employer. You need your employer’s permission to leave? What kind of screwed-up country is that?”
“So Mahal didn’t have her employer’s permission to leave?”
“No, she didn’t. If someone killed her, it was her employer. I guarantee it.”
“And you don’t know who that was?”
“Can’t remember. There are too many names. How am I supposed to remember?”
Katya reached into her purse and took out a twenty-riyal note. She folded it and slid it into Aunie’s bag.
Katya was exhausted. Ibrahim had had no luck identifying the women, and there wasn’t much they could do with the name Mahal except inform the junior officers who were responsible for getting IDs from the consulates.
Back near the office, they stopped for fruit juice at an octagonal kiosk that was decorated with bright blue Pepsi logos. Ibrahim went to buy the drinks while Katya waited in the car, still utterly paranoid that someone would see her. She got as close as she could to the backseat’s only air-conditioning vent and let it blow straight across her burqa. When Ibrahim returned, he was carrying two bottles of juice and two small plastic tubs of cut fruit; he handed one of each to Katya.
“Thank you.” Father, she wanted to add. He was beginning to remind her of her father’s friends—the two or three who spoke to her directly and whom she actually liked. They had a way of defusing any possible sexual tension with a casual paternalism that always made her feel formal and awkward.
Instead of heading to the office, he swung over to the Corniche. She thought they might be going back to Sabria’s apartment, but he drove south until he found a beach parking lot that was relatively empty. He pulled up facing the sea and left the engine idling so that the AC could continue to make a dent in the heat. He opened his fruit box and began eating.
Katya opened hers and slid a slice of watermelon beneath her burqa.
“Maybe you’re right,” Ibrahim said. “I should report her missing.”
“I think you should.”
“But first I’d have to remove any trace of myself from her apartment,” he said. “What do you think my chances are of doing that?”
“You’d have to hire someone to do it. A professional, I mean. It would be a lot of work.”
They continued eating. She knew they were both thinking the same thing: that by reporting Sabria missing, they’d be condemning Ibrahim to charges of adultery. That is, if the police took it seriously enough to send a forensics team to her house. Sabria used to work for the police, so the chances were good they’d investigate thoroughly.
“I’ll look into hiring a cleaner,” he said. He collected the plastic containers and the empty bottles, threw everything out the window. He put the car into gear.
“Thank you for letting me assist on this case,” she said. “The serial killer, I mean. I want to be working on it.” She hoped that hit the right note, not sounding too desperate.
He nodded. “I’ll give you some more work if I can, but right now I have a responsibility to keep up appearances at the station. I’ve got to make sure my team stays organized—at least until the chief takes me off the case, which I still think he might do. Obviously I’m being distracted by this whole thing with Sabria. And that’s what really counts for me right now. Catching a killer can take a long time. Finding a missing person is much more urgent. I can’t tell anyone that, and it may be selfish, but it’s the truth.” He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at her. “I’m sorry. I know you want to be a part of this, and I think you should be. But there’s a lot to consider.”
“Sure,” she said, hoping it sounded normal. “I understand.”
“I really appreciate your help.”
14
The Thursday–Friday weekend passed with painful slowness. Ibrahim arrived at work on Saturday morning just after fajr prayer, when the building was still nearly empty. He was intent on tackling the pile of paperwork on his desk. He found that Omar had sent al-Warra’s files from Undercover. They must have arrived after he’d left the office on Wednesday. They were wrapped in paper and stuffed into a plastic delivery bag labeled CLOSED CASES and HOMICIDE to make them look innocent. Ibrahim tore them open and spent the whole morning reading through them.
There was a joke in Undercover that if you went into a situation and didn’t bump into somebody whose third cousin recognized you from your neighbor’s uncle’s wedding, you were probably spending all your time jacking off in the desert. They’d had so many covers blown that for a while they could hire only men from other cities, and even then a few operations went south because no matter how big Jeddah became, their men couldn’t seem to get away from familiar faces.
Ibrahim tended to take a dim view of these things, and he suspected that most cases were just rotten luck. But the sense of persecution that comes with a terrific streak of bad luck had driven him a little crazy for a while, crazy enough to come up with an absurd idea for an operation that, he suspected, would never be successful even if they could get it by the undercover chief. They would infiltrate a female shoplifting ring.
Ibrahim and two of the junior officers in Undercover certainly had trouble explaining it to him. Even after they were able to convince him that there was indeed a network of wealthy women working together to steal high-priced luxury items from upscale department stores (diamond bracelets were a favorite), they spent weeks working out what a successful operation would entail. They would infiltrate the ring, gather enough evidence, and—what? Throw a dozen wealthy mothers in jail? A good half of them were pregnant at any given time. None of them had fewer than four kids. Most of them were married to upper-middle-class donkeys, guys who imagined that all those new clothes and jewels their wives were sporting were of course paid for by the master moneymakers themselves, whose ministry wages easily stretched all the way to the runways of Milan. They didn’t realize that their wives weren’t stealing because they were poor; they were stealing because they were angry and powerless and probably compulsive.
When Ibrahim first made the suggestion to the chief, the chief became very quiet. Then he looked at Ibrahim like he’d just laid an enormous horse turd on his desk and tried to pass it off as a Bedouin ritual of welcome. And instantly Ibrahim knew what he was thinking: No way are we arresting a bunch of wealthy mothers.
Someone quickly pointed out that they could always arrest the husbands in lieu of their wives. Nobody would bat an eyelash if they held the men accountable for their wives’ conduct. The tension in the room broke for a minute. Someone joked that they’d be saving those poor women from their idiot spouses. They’d be like those domestic-violence units in other countries, the kind that Jeddah was trying to have and sort of pretended it had, if the politicians were to be believed.
At first the chief didn’t want anything to do with the ring. “Back to drugs with the lot of you!” But they worked on him, choosing vulnerable moments, because they were sick to death of drugs. And they would never have admitted this, but they liked the challenge. Infiltrate a closed group of women.
Eventually the chief acquiesced. Even he had been impressed by the three-hundred-thousand-riyal broad-daylight diamond heist at the al-Tahlia Jewelry Center. The women had clearly done surveillance of the store’s security. They knew how to distract the female security guards and how to get into the display cases. And they did it all without the slightest regard for the battalion of video cameras that operated nonstop even when the store was closed. Why? Because their faces were covered, their bodies shrouded in shapeless black cloaks.
One of the techs had suggested they try a new software program—Undress—that could digitally strip the clothes from a person’s body and that was sometimes able to put a face to a shapeless burqa. But no sooner had he suggested it than the program was outlawed by a senior officer who was appalled that men were undressing women via computer and calling it law enforcement.
There seemed to be six women in the shoplifting group, but it was hard to tell since they always wore burqas. And it was nearly impossible to arrest a woman for shoplifting unless her husband was present and willing to let her be searched. The only way they could convict these women was by gathering proof of their crimes from other women—friends or family. What they needed was to get into the women’s homes, into their lives and secrets, and the only way they could envisage doing that was by planting a housemaid. They had women on the force, but very few Asians and immigrants—the ethnic groups that could reasonably pass as housemaids. The only person available at the time was Sabria.
The files Omar had sent were from her years working in Undercover before she busted the shoplifting network. And everything she had said about the cases had been right: there was nothing unusual. And certainly nothing that he could connect to the disappearance.
With the shoplifting case, she had been undercover for four months, and she had been such an excellent housemaid and had become such good friends with the family that even after the mother, Salima, was taken into custody and told how she had been set up, she refused to speak poorly of Sabria. Miss Gampon, she said with a spark of grudging respect, was a professional to the bone. Ibrahim wasn’t sure at the time if that was a good thing. He gave Sabria three months off. She had come back a week later asking if they had a new assignment for her. He said no, she needed some time to recover, get back to her life. She left his office obediently, but three months later she was back, ready for her next assignment, looking exactly as she had before. So he gave her a new assignment, and then another. And each one seemed to leave her unscathed. She did her work with a kind of completeness that frightened him now. She put all of herself into it. Everyone believed her. She could convince anyone that her intentions were genuine.
He shoved the files back into the bag and caught sight of Sabria’s job application for the Chamelle Plaza boutique. It was still lying on his desk, covered in treasonous handwriting. In all the time they’d worked together, he hadn’t known her at all. He had handled her with the robotic skill of a boss who could lose his job if he acted inappropriately with a female coworker. It was only later, after she left, that he came to know who she truly was. And he thought very resolutely about that person now. The real Sabria would only send someone undercover posing as her if it meant serving a greater good. If it meant helping someone. But he still had no explanation for why the real Sabria hadn’t told him all about it.
It was after noon prayers when Ibrahim stopped the car at the end of the alley. He and Daher got out. Already six cop cars were crowding the scene. The duty cops had shut down the street for two blocks in both directions and chased the last of the pedestrians from the sidewalks.
Ibrahim tried to force himself to walk a little more slowly. He wanted to run. He passed the street sweeper who’d made the discovery, heard Daher say, “Boss, this is the guy…,” before he rounded the dumpster and saw the crime scene tape. He slid under it and went straight to the tangled mass of fabric that lay on the sidewalk. It was a woman’s cloak. Empty. And lying beside it was a dismembered hand.
Subhan’allah. Bism’allah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim. His mind spiraled into prayer; he shut his eyes. The relief was so fierce it hurt.
He climbed back under the tape. “You said this was a body?”
“It’s not a body?” Daher stood anxiously beside him, trying to look useful and telling the duty cops to get on the other side of the crime scene tape.
“No, it’s a hand.” Should never have left Undercover. He moved to the shade beneath the shop awning and squatted on the ground, resting his head in his hands.
�
�They found this right next to it.” Daher was standing above him, holding out a woman’s purse. Ibrahim took it and looked inside. There was a wallet with an ID card in it. Amina al-Fouad.
“Make sure forensics gets this,” Ibrahim said. He barely had the presence of mind to consider that Falasteen Street in broad daylight without cars or shoppers was surreal. Aside from uniformed cops and a few business owners, the only figure in the area was the scrawny street sweeper. He was leaning against a dumpster looking nervous and perplexed, not like a man who had just discovered a dismembered hand.
Ibrahim got up and approached the man. “Was it in the dumpster?” he asked.
“No,” the sweeper said, “it was there. Just where you see it now. Some sinner’s hand…” He waved his hand and looked to the heavens.
“Did you see anyone near it?”
“No.”
It took fifteen minutes to establish what generously speaking could be called a crime scene. Two dozen officers were moving around. Shoppers were coming out of stores and stopping to gape. Abu-Musa arrived and pronounced the hand dead. Forensics arrived a few minutes later with a surprise: Katya stepped out of the van with her mobile kit and followed Majdi to the scene. Daher saw her and did a double take but kept his mouth shut.
Ibrahim’s thoughts slowly shifted into the rational. He had expected Sabria to be lying there.
Katya looked appalled as she knelt near the hand.
“Yes, Miss Hijazi?” Ibrahim asked.
“I’m having trouble imagining someone planting this here,” she said. “How did nobody notice?”
Daher snorted, as if the answer were obvious.
“This isn’t that far from the street,” Katya went on. “And this street is normally very crowded. Whoever put it here must have done it very recently. I’m sure it wouldn’t go unnoticed for long.”
Daher sniffed and looked away, fully intent on ignoring her remarks.
