Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  “Yes, of course,” he replied.

  “And we tend to investigate these things, since there is always the chance that this kind of disappearance could be related to the work she used to do for us.” The way he said us managed to exclude Ibrahim.

  “What leads do you have?”

  “We’ve been looking for her husband,” Ubaid said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find him.”

  Ibrahim shot a glance at Riyadh, who had put on a charming mask of hospitality and concern.

  “As far as I remember,” Ibrahim said carefully, “she was married by force. She hadn’t seen her husband for a few months when she came to work for us, and that was what—five years ago?”

  “Yes.” Ubaid looked prissy when he pursed his lips. “However, she remains married to this man—and not for visa purposes. Her visa has expired.”

  “I see. So how can I help?”

  “Did you ever meet her husband?” Ubaid asked.

  Ibrahim shook his head. “No. I believe they were completely estranged.”

  Ubaid looked as if he might remark on the inappropriateness of hiring single women. “Well, apparently Miss Gampon was not working. Her neighbors have confirmed this.”

  Ibrahim realized that the neighbors had been trying to protect her. They knew her visa had expired. What they didn’t know was that any investigation into a missing woman, no matter how earnest, was always going to come down to the woman’s virtue.

  “Yet she lived in a nice apartment,” Ubaid continued. “We spoke with the landlord, who confirmed that she had never missed a rent payment.”

  Mash’allah, alhamdulillah, and triple thanks to God that he had never paid the rent himself, that he had insisted on giving her cash every month, that he had never let himself be seen by the landlord.

  “… And we wondered how she was paying for it, so we looked into her banking records and discovered unusual amounts of money.”

  “How unusual?”

  “Tens of thousands of riyals being deposited—and then withdrawn—every month.”

  Ibrahim could not have been more baffled.

  “That is an unusually large sum of money for an immigrant woman who has no job,” Ubaid said.

  “Yes, so you think this money…” Ibrahim waved his hand, but Ubaid didn’t fill in the rest. “Well, what?”

  Ubaid’s fussiness, the little uptilt of his frowning face telegraphed instantly that he was going to make a case out of this; that he had enough evidence to convict Sabria in absentia of virtue crimes; and that he was going to do it, was even excited about it, because something like this would make his cock stand up as hard as granite for the rest of his life.

  “We found evidence of multiple men at her apartment.”

  “You suspect prostitution.” Ibrahim’s voice sounded far away to him now. They have the evidence from her apartment.

  “The deposits to her account were large,” Ubaid said. “And they were relatively consistent.”

  Ibrahim wanted to tell them that Sabria had come to Undercover after a year of rape, torture, and abuse; that by some perverse law of human evolution, this had given her the cunning, bullheadedness, and fury she needed to perform undercover work; and that in that work she had found a way to rescue herself. He wanted to grab skinny little Ubaid by his neck and make sure he understood that women who went through such an experience had only one thing to be afraid of: men like Ubaid who sat on their dainty little asses intellectualizing virtue.

  “Where did the money come from?” Ibrahim asked.

  “We don’t know. It was always deposited as cash. The withdrawals were also taken out as cash.”

  “Did she make a large withdrawal before she went missing?”

  “No. In fact, she did not make any withdrawals this month.”

  Ibrahim nodded. “So she probably didn’t run away.”

  “No.”

  Ibrahim glanced at Riyadh again. The chief wore a look of polite regret that Undercover should have hired such an amoral woman and found out about it in such a scandalous way.

  He had to proceed with caution. They were already looking for a way to implicate him in this. A woman doesn’t become a prostitute overnight. And wasn’t he the one who’d fought so hard to keep her on the force? Did he know back then that she was a whore?

  “I’m sorry to hear this,” Ibrahim said. “All I can tell you about her is that she was an excellent worker. She helped us take down a shoplifting network that we’d been after for a long time. She went into some very risky situations and managed to gather enough evidence for us to implicate a number of high-value criminals. We were sorry when she left.”

  Ubaid hadn’t been listening, only waiting politely for Ibrahim to finish. He already knew his position on the virtue of Sabria Gampon.

  “Prostitution is a serious crime,” he said, his expression perfectly communicating his intentions: We plan to prosecute this. “We suspect that her husband was acting as her pimp, but if what you say is true and she hadn’t seen this husband for many years, then perhaps she had someone else. We intend to find out.”

  Ah, the double crime of prostitution and adultery. No wonder Ubaid was looking so smug.

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Ibrahim said, nodding.

  The men rose and shook hands, and Ibrahim surprised himself by walking out of there without fainting.

  I pulled the nail out of the floor before I left,” Katya said, “so there were no blood traces.”

  “Alhamdulillah,” Ibrahim snapped.

  He was pacing. They were in the third-floor bathroom, whispering by the sink. It was late and the building was nearly empty. Katya was frightened anyway—that he would explode, that he would draw someone’s attention and they’d get caught and things would look even worse than they were.

  “I know you think my son did it,” he said. “He was there. I saw the cut on his foot.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Why was he there?”

  “He followed me one day. But he didn’t talk to her. He was working on the day she went missing. I double-checked with his boss. My son had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance, I can guarantee it.” He gave her a wild look. “Someone is setting her up.”

  “All right,” Katya said slowly. “But she was hiding something.”

  “I know. Damn it!”

  “They must have sent evidence to Undercover before I got there,” Katya said for the third time. “I took all the evidence I collected to my house. I did that immediately. My cousin picked me up and I took it straight home. Later, I switched out the evidence. I stole hairs and fibers from other cases, relabeled them, and put them into Sabria’s file, so now it should look like the only other people at her house were women.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Undercover already has its damning proof. I think they were lying when they said they found evidence of multiple men at her house. That can’t be true.”

  “Do you think they would go that far in setting her up?” Katya asked.

  “Why not? It would be the easiest part. Plant some hairs in her bedroom. The question is, why are they doing this?”

  Katya was silent.

  “They know something about her. They want to stop something. It’s still going on, whatever it is, or they wouldn’t feel the need to do this.”

  “What about her banking records?” Katya asked.

  “They didn’t say how much, just that she made big deposits every month. Tens of thousands. And then she took the money out again later, in cash.”

  “Do you think they falsified that evidence as well?”

  “No. I don’t know. It would be a lot harder to do.”

  “It makes no sense,” Katya said. “Why would she deposit money and then take it out again? Why not just keep the money hidden somewhere?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m convinced that something bad has happened to her, and whatever it is, the answer is at the Chamelle Plaza. Those women she was meeting; so
mething was being transacted. And I can’t go there myself. Damn it!” His fist hit the wall. The mirror rattled.

  “I’ll go back there,” Katya said, “and find out what I can.”

  He stopped pacing. “Thank you, Katya. I’m sorry I’m so angry. I appreciate your help. And please be discreet. These people aren’t playing around. Undercover may have found out about the mall and they may have someone there already. Don’t let them see you.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “I have to make a phone call.”

  “All right,” she said.

  He was out the door before she could duck out of sight. She heard his footsteps march halfway down the hallway before he realized he’d forgotten to knock to let her know it was safe to come out. He came running back, knocked, and dashed back toward the stairs.

  Discovering that you are not unique is a charm that only works in certain situations. You’re rejected for a job, or you’re hurt by a friend. Don’t worry; it happens to everyone. Outside of the appropriate context, it’s shattering. I am not the only man she loved. I am not the only man who shared her bed.

  He wasn’t shattered by it yet because he didn’t believe it, but there was a growing crack in the glass.

  He called Fawzi, his contact at the ministry, to ask whether he had found an address for Sabria’s ex-employer. (He refused to think of him as her husband.) With an insouciance that was infuriating, Fawzi said, “Yes, as a matter of fact. Here you go.”

  Ibrahim copied down the address. Fawzi had probably been sitting on it for days, too lazy to pass it on. Ibrahim couldn’t explain how important it was. He was already taking an enormous risk just asking for it.

  “Thanks for keeping this quiet,” Ibrahim said.

  “Sure. Is this part of that serial-killer case you’ve got?”

  “No. It’s an old case.”

  “I won’t say anything.”

  Ibrahim wasn’t sure he believed him but thanked Fawzi anyway.

  The address was in Karantina, which wasn’t that far from its sister neighborhood Kandara. The slum area had gotten its bastardized English name from the fact that it had been a quarantine zone for a few hundred years when periodic epidemics swept through the city. It used to be far enough from the city center to be considered safe. Today it was closer, linked by an ugly freeway. The overpass cut a slash through the neighborhood and provided the only separation from a giant oil refinery that spewed petro-filth into air already miserable with mosquitoes and the smell of raw sewage.

  Beneath the freeway were shantytowns of the kind that made Kandara’s Sitteen Street Bridge look upscale. Most of the residents were Africans, men and their multiple wives, their innumerable children who ran naked and blighted through the trash-choked streets. They were men who had burned their passports when they got here so as not to be sent back to even worse places. At least here there was a market for drugs and prostitution. At least here the police would turn a blind eye. At least here the government would leave them alone, even if they had been abandoned under a flyover where the infestation of mosquitoes led to outbreaks of malaria and dengue, and rampant prostitution brought hospitals new cases of AIDS every day. The modern quarantine was government neglect.

  Who says that the government doesn’t understand justice? Ibrahim thought bitterly as he drove through the streets. The government knew just how to handle Karantina. They ignored the scale as one side of it tipped lower and lower—heavy with theft, illegal substances, brothels, and the kind of ruined morality that accounted for Jeddah’s highest murder rate. When the law sought justice, it would balance the scale with a sudden, vicious downstroke like the swing of an executioner’s blade. That was how they had taken down the flourishing Friday markets on Yazeed Ibn Naeem Street, where the locals dealt in food, clothing, furniture, and home appliances—all of it stolen. The police had rounded up thirty-five hundred thieves in a single operation. Ibrahim knew it was only a pretense of justice. There was nothing worse than an abrupt smack from an otherwise absent father’s angry hand.

  It didn’t surprise him that Halifi would end up here, in the city’s graveyard of hope, but it made him uneasy. Every time Sabria had talked about him, she had given the impression of a man who went to great lengths to appear wealthy, stable, and respectable. He ran an import company that was clean all the way down to the figures on its books, but on the side Halifi imported women, luring them with the promise of well-paid jobs as housemaids and then selling them to wealthy clients who wanted discreet sex—the kind that lived in your house and also did the cooking and cleaning. In some cases, Halifi would sell women to escort services, or even to independent pimps. He seldom turned down an offer if the price was high enough, and there were plenty of unsuspecting women coming from abroad.

  Ibrahim might have tracked down Halifi years ago except that Sabria hadn’t wanted it. She didn’t want to try to unwind herself legally from this man because it would only bring back the past. In the first few months that she and Ibrahim began seeing each other, she’d talked about Halifi only three times before casting him into the void of nonexistence.

  The apartment building didn’t have a posted street number but nearby buildings did, so he was able to determine that he’d found the right place. It was an old concrete structure, dirty and plain. In a normal neighborhood, two families might have lived there. In Karantina, it was probably a drug den.

  He had the feeling that Halifi wouldn’t be there, that he was about to walk in on some lesser office of Halifi’s operations. Ibrahim was so full of rage that he had to sit in the car for five minutes and remind himself that he was only there to find Sabria, not to do anything foolish.

  The front door was off its hinges. When he pushed it, it fell against the wall behind it, and he had to step over the lower half to get into the foyer. It was dark, a long passageway with two doors at the end, both of them open. There were noises inside but nothing to indicate that the residents had heard an intruder.

  He entered the apartment on the right. The first room held only a sofa and a TV. The sofa had been gutted. In the second room he found Halifi. He was sitting cross-legged on an old mattress in the corner. A young woman was sitting on a cinder block beside him, taking a hit from a crack pipe. She was naked, her ass and lower back marked with red welts.

  “Mahmoud Halifi,” Ibrahim said.

  The woman turned. She was a migrant, probably Filipina. She blinked and looked back at Halifi, handed him the pipe, and stood up. She left the room just as a modest Muslim housewife might leave once her husband’s guests arrived. As she went past Ibrahim at the doorway, she grabbed her left breast with one hand and jiggled it happily in his direction.

  Ibrahim had planned all kinds of clever tactics to get Halifi to talk, but seeing the man’s state of consciousness, he knew they were useless.

  “I need to find Sabria Gampon,” he said.

  Halifi didn’t look alarmed, not even when Ibrahim dragged him to his feet and threw him against the wall. When Ibrahim asked, “Where is she?” Halifi let out a surprised laugh, a choked guffaw that said Oh yes, I remember her, that long-ago whore. Ibrahim delivered a punch that broke Halifi’s nose and sent him crashing into the wall, but he still didn’t seem to understand the severity of it. He simply rolled onto his stomach, climbed to his knees, and watched the blood dribble from his mouth to the cement floor. He looked up at Ibrahim.

  “Where is Sabria?” Ibrahim growled, although his gut was already telegraphing that this had been a mistake, that he was wasting his time.

  “How should I know?” Halifi drooled another clump of blood and sat down on his haunches. “Haven’t seen her in years.”

  Ibrahim wanted to kill him. Even now, after all the silence that Sabria had used to bury the man, Ibrahim’s disgust and hatred were still right there. It would have been easy. Take one of the empty syringes lying on the floor and inject an air bubble the size of a halala into his neck. Even if the police decided to investigate the death of yet
another Karantina junkie, they wouldn’t get farther down the suspect list than all the other junkies on the block. But he couldn’t risk it. There must be nothing to tie him to this man or this place.

  “If she’s gone,” Halifi said, “then she ran away. That’s what she always did.”

  Ibrahim kicked him to the floor and left.

  26

  On Monday, Katya spent her whole lunch break at Chamelle Plaza’s café. Ibrahim couldn’t risk driving her there himself, so he offered her money for a cab. Instead, she’d called Ayman, who was glad to pick her up.

  She ordered a latte and sat at a table with a newspaper open in front of her. She was drawing a bit of attention sitting there alone—most women came here with friends—but that was the idea. She wanted someone to notice her. Someone to think she was odd and look at her twice, maybe pause for a good study. And she wanted that person to know something about Sabria.

  It began to feel idiotic, so she got up to talk to the barista, the same young woman who had identified Sabria from the full-body shot. Her name was Amal and she recognized Katya.

  “Have you found her yet?” Amal asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Katya said. “You remember seeing her with other women, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you recognize any of the women if you saw them again?”

  “Yes. In fact, one of them keeps coming in here. She sits at that table in the corner and waits, but your friend doesn’t show up. She seems disappointed.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No. But I would know her if I saw her.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “This morning. She comes around ten o’clock. Maybe she’ll come tomorrow.”

  “Would you tell her I have something for her?” Katya said. “It’s important.”

  Katya had half of the files for the department’s unsolved murders. They were sitting in boxes on the floor behind her. Records had promised her the rest when she was ready for them. She also had all of the files for the current case—the photographs, sketches, and thin reports on the nineteen victims by various officers working under Ibrahim, plus the file for Amina al-Fouad. She’d spent so much time over the past week finagling to get her hands on these files, it was funny now to think that they had been the easiest ones to acquire.