by Zoë Ferraris
“Perhaps Mu’tazz told Zahrani about all of this, and Zahrani just hasn’t told you?” Nayir asked.
“I’m pretty sure if he knew, Zahrani would have told me.”
“You talk to him often then.”
What could she say? Yes, we meet alone in the third-floor bathroom, where he tells me about his adulterous affair?
“Inspector Zahrani has been supportive of women working in the crime team,” she said. “And it’s a good thing. Remember, I was the one who worked out the relevance of the positioning of the bodies.”
“Ah.”
“Thanks to your falcon’s eye,” she added.
He nodded to acknowledge the compliment.
“I know you want to do more to solve cases,” he said, “but it seems to me that the people who solve those cases are mostly men.”
“Yes.”
“And so, to become part of that, you’re going to be in closer contact with these men.”
“Yes.”
“There are no Homicide teams made up solely of women?”
“No. Just men, with women assisting.”
He fell silent. She looked at him again, hoping to register a flash of affection, something that would soften this feeling between them and remind her why she was marrying him, but his face was dark and frowning.
28
Ibrahim and Daher were in the hallway talking to Chief Riyadh when Shaya came striding up, looking energized.
“I’ve found something about that name you got from the exorcist,” he said.
“Yes?”
“We have a list of employees from different cab companies. All the men on the list have a criminal record and they live or work near Sitteen. Sheikh Hajar is on the list.”
“Our guy may be a sheikh?” Riyadh asked.
“Well, as far as I can tell, he’s never worked as a sheikh,” Shaya said. “But get this—before working for the cab company, he was an emergency responder for the Red Crescent.”
Chief Riyadh raised a hand and Ibrahim knew he was preparing to say Go bring this guy in, but Shaya went blundering on. “There’s more,” he said excitedly. “Sheikh Hajar’s father was imprisoned for stabbing his wife.”
“How did you get that?”
“The precinct that arrested him sent over a file. There’s something in the report about Hajar’s early home life. His father was totally abusive, used to hang him from the rafters of the house and whip him. The father died in jail. Hajar was raised alone by his grandmother here in Jeddah. Apparently, after the father was imprisoned, the mother ran off and killed herself. A few weeks later, they found her body in Muscat—that’s where she was from. I’m still checking the story, but so far I’ve managed to get a confirmation of the mother’s death, the father’s prison sentence, and his death in prison.”
“What about Hajar’s grandmother? Is she still alive?” Ibrahim asked.
“I’m looking into it,” Shaya said.
Chief Riyadh turned to Ibrahim. “I want this man brought in.”
Ibrahim heard the subtext: I’m keeping you on this case because you obey me, and if you don’t, I’ll find someone else.
“Do we have anything linking him to the crimes?” Ibrahim asked Shaya.
“Bring him in anyway,” Riyadh said. “I just want you to talk to him. Find out what he has to say about his record. Find out everything you can. He’s not under arrest, this is just you asking questions, you understand?”
Ibrahim decided not to argue.
Katya knocked and Daher opened the door. She could see over his shoulder that files were strewn all over the office.
“I need to speak to Inspector Zahrani,” she said.
Daher looked annoyed. “He’s busy.”
“It’s important,” she said. “It’s about the Angel case.”
Daher went back inside, and a minute later, Ibrahim came out.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “This afternoon I went to visit retired colonel Hussain Sa’ud. He was the one who took over the case of the dismembered hand that Dr. Becker and I found in the old case files yesterday.”
“Okay.”
“Back in 1989, Colonel Sa’ud found thirteen body parts—minus a head—all belonging to the same woman. They were scattered around Jeddah. There’s a much longer story behind it, which I won’t go into now. It was called the Osiris case. Here’s the file.” She handed him a copy.
“And you think this is related to the Angel case?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “The body parts were scattered throughout Jeddah in a shape similar to the one we saw in the desert. But there’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“Originally, the dismembered-hand case was run by Inspector Mu’tazz. Apparently, Mu’tazz went to visit Colonel Sa’ud last week and got a copy of this file. It includes reports and photographs of each of the body parts. Mu’tazz told Sa’ud that he was going to interview the old suspects from the Osiris case. Did he say anything to you about it?”
Ibrahim simply glowered at her.
“I just wanted you to know,” she said.
29
Sheikh Rami Hajar, the client the exorcist had told them about, was not a sheikh, as Ibrahim had assumed. He was simply a man whose mother had decided to name him Sheikh. Ibrahim had cousins who had all been named for the days of the week, and he knew a boy in school whose siblings had all been named Mohammed, so why not Sheikh? Never mind that it was an insult to the popular understanding that when a man was called Sheikh, he was either a Bedouin elder or a religious official. Or perhaps he had studied Islam so earnestly as to deserve the honorific.
Mr. Sheikh Hajar seemed to be devoting his life to harassing women. He had been reported six times to the Committee for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for the crime of inappropriate touching. Having worked as an EMT, he claimed that he had only touched women when it was necessary to save their lives, but that was not the story the women’s families told. One young man—who was, in fact, an actual sheikh—claimed that his mother had been molested by Hajar, who had stuck his hands between her legs and “put his finger inside her” in the back of an ambulance. Unfortunately, in a traditional court, a woman’s word counts for only half of a man’s, and since the son had not witnessed the act himself, he was unable to support its veracity. That claim had been dismissed, as had every other one. But one man at the committee had stayed on top of the trend and eventually filed a report with the Jeddah police stating that Hajar was up to no good and should be watched. The police were far too busy to bother with an inappropriate toucher, but they obligingly created their first file for Hajar.
A phone call to the Red Crescent revealed that he had been fired the year before for inappropriate behavior. They declined to specify the behavior, saying only that Hajar seemed better suited to a profession that did not involve interacting with strange women. To that end, Hajar’s superior had promptly recommended him for a job as a taxi driver. The absurdity of this was not lost on the Red Crescent officer, who told Ibrahim, “Let us say that at least he has a talent for driving.”
Hajar, who had been born and raised in Oman, had moved to Jeddah at age fifteen to live with his grandmother. He retained his Omani citizenship but carried an ‘iqama, a Saudi residence permit, so it was easy to find his work history. He had dropped out of medical school and gone to work as an EMT. After leaving the Red Crescent, he had found a job with the city’s white-taxi service, which was slightly more upscale than the yellow-cab service, but his car was an older Toyota Camry and had no meter installed, so it was impossible to track his movements through the city. Or so the cab company claimed. He had a cell phone, of course, and a permit to operate, but no one knew where he went from day to day. According to a dispatch manager at the company’s head office, Hajar had a clean driving record and was considered a good worker.
The second police file on Hajar had one arrest, which had occurred at a western precinct. Hajar had been charged w
ith assaulting an officer and with unbecoming public behavior. Apparently an officer had seen him following a woman down the street, shouting at her, standing in her way, doing everything he could to stop her without actually touching her. When the officer tried to restrain him, Hajar had attacked the man, breaking his arm. Hajar claimed that this woman, like a certain number of women tended to do, had hired him for a fare and then revealed, once they’d reached their destination, that she had no money to pay him. It was simple for her to get out of the cab and walk away. It took a certain boldness to go after a woman, especially in a conservative neighborhood like that one, where the chances of getting caught by the religious police were higher than average. But Hajar had not been willing to let it pass, so he had followed her. Even after being thrown in jail, Hajar remained furious that women should “get away with such crimes.” Naturally, the woman’s name was not on file, but Hajar had told the officer that he often picked up fares at Jamjoom.
On the surface, Hajar seemed like a minor nuisance on the streets of Jeddah, but Ibrahim remembered the strength of Imam Arsheedy’s unease about him. Minor crimes sometimes indicated deeper currents. Not to mention that Hajar was a cabdriver who worked near Jamjoom. Looking at the mug shot, Ibrahim saw what Arsheedy had been talking about. Hajar’s face was undistinguished, even normal, but there was something off about it. There was a blankness in the eyes, a void deeper than the typical hate-filled mug-shot look. It was an animal gaze and belonged to someone unintelligent, not a man who had entered medical school. The police report indicated that he carried drugs on his person: chlorpromazine. Hajar refused to say anything about the medication, but his doctor had verified that the prescription was legitimate. A quick Internet search revealed that chlorpromazine was an antipsychotic.
Unfortunately, they had no address for Hajar. Certain neighborhoods of Jeddah had no postal service, street names or numbers. According to his boss, Hajar lived in one of those. So Ibrahim and Daher sat in an unmarked car across from the dispatch office of the white-cab company. Dispatch had called Hajar asking him to come into the office to pick up a paycheck bonus, but clearly Hajar hadn’t fallen for the bait because they’d already waited for two hours. Ibrahim knew it was ridiculous that they were doing such lowly work. It was also the weekend, which made it feel even more pathetic. But he was determined to do something.
Daher reached his third cup of coffee before complaining. “Seems we could get the younger men to do this.”
“We could.” Ibrahim had put all of his attention on the taxis and had kept it there relentlessly. “But I don’t want to leave this one to chance.”
The truth was, he was trying to control his anxiety. Most missing persons were found within the first forty-eight hours or not at all. He should have bowed out of the responsibility for the Angel case—handed it to Mu’tazz, who probably deserved it—and focused his attention on finding Sabria, even if it meant taking time off work. He had no idea how he could have explained that to his family, especially to his brother, who would have found out about it. But he should have tried.
He kept telling himself that it wasn’t going to do Sabria any good if he got thrown in prison for adultery. If his entire home life got wrecked because his family found out he’d been seeing her. If he lost his job—and thereby his ability to stay informed about the search for her. And yet in quiet moments the truth was unavoidable: he had made cowardly decisions to protect himself, his career, and a marriage that had died twenty years ago.
It was killing him that, aside from the tenuous link to a strange woman at Chamelle Plaza, he had no leads whatsoever. He should be doing something—anything. Katya called him every day with another disappointing update. He was completely dependent on her, so he forced himself to trust her. Meanwhile here he was, sitting in a car, sipping coffee, and doing mindless police work while there was still a chance that she was out there, maybe in somebody’s basement prison or storage shed or desert shack, dying if not already dead. Undercover was after her now too, and Ibrahim could only pray that Ubaid didn’t find her first.
“Why did you leave Undercover?” Daher asked.
Ibrahim turned to him. “They let me go.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t follow the rules.”
“What rules?”
Ibrahim sighed. “I thought it was okay to hire women. I pushed to keep them on the force. I fought with my boss about it all the time. And there were just too many people in the department who didn’t like it and who thought I was improper.”
Daher looked skeptical, as if he knew there were more to it than that.
“It’s ridiculous,” Ibrahim went on. “All this arguing about what women can and can’t do is a waste of time.”
Daher nodded. “Yeah, I just don’t think it’s entirely comfortable for women to be working so closely with men. It’s not that I mind it so much, it’s just—”
Ibrahim raised his hand. “I don’t care what anyone’s personal feelings are about women, and you shouldn’t either. If a preoccupation with virtue starts to get in the way of you doing your job, then something is wrong. And trust me, even in this city, something is always wrong.”
Nayir has a lot of family,” Samir was saying. “For example, my cousins and their families will be here for a few months visiting. And there is Imam Hadi’s family to think of. I do feel that it would be rather unpleasant, considering that Nayir is their favorite and he’s never been married before, to exclude them from the ceremonies.”
So that’s it, Katya thought. The reason she found herself eating an endless dinner at Uncle Samir’s house with Nayir and Ayman on a quiet Friday evening. Her father was at home fighting off a cold.
They had finished the meal an hour before and now sat on the patio overlooking a large garden of lemon trees and potted palms. Three of them sat in a row, and Samir sat opposite, like a judge holding court, albeit a casual, backyard one. He was leaning back, a cup of tea in one hand, a hookah rope in the other.
“I am sure that you have family and friends of your own who would be delighted to come. So I took the liberty of speaking to your father, who assured me that he has plenty of friends who would deeply disapprove if you two were to have a private wedding without even a reception at which they could celebrate your success.”
Katya was beginning to think that her father had developed a “cold” to avoid facing this conversation. He knew Katya would be angry that he and Samir had been scheming behind her back. Beside her, Nayir and Ayman sat frozen.
“And of course your friends from work,” Samir went on, “will want to share in the happy occasion.”
“Of course,” Katya blurted, hoping not to look terrified at the very thought. The people at work were the last ones who could ever find out about her wedding. She was afraid to look at Nayir, who knew all about the situation.
“We’re going to have a small wedding,” Nayir said firmly. “But you are right that a modest reception afterward would be a good idea. For the sake of our family and close friends. I’ll consider it.”
His tone was meant to end the conversation, but Samir, unaffected by his nephew’s stern manner, said cheerfully, “Well, Katya’s father and I have already discussed details, and it is all agreed. We will pay for the banquet, and Katya’s father will take care of the invitations and phone calls.” Katya knew immediately that this meant she would take care of these things. “We have drawn up a preliminary list of invitees and only need to know if anyone is missing from the list, which is something you must tell us.”
“How many people are on the list?” Nayir asked, looking more ragged now.
“Two hundred twenty-one.”
“What?”
“We didn’t want to leave anyone out,” Samir said. “You can make an enemy for life by forgetting to send a wedding invitation, remember that.”
Nayir looked exasperated and glanced guiltily at Katya. Ayman looked amused. “I know a good rock band if you want one,” he said. “Some friend
s of mine have a band called Silk Slave. They’re here in Jeddah.”
Nayir shook his head.
“Don’t you worry,” Samir said, “we’ve already arranged the music. All you have to do is sit back and relax.”
Katya went home, took a cold shower, and tried to kick her mind into gear. She was numb and exhausted. She climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling with the realization that she’d just committed to marriage. Not just to Nayir. This was much more complete. She’d committed to two hundred-odd people. And somehow that sealed it.
She drifted into a dream of swimming in the sea. The lightness. The floating. She swam among the bright coral and fish and admired the beauty of the water, the light pouring down, the smoothness of her skin. It thrilled her to be naked. Naked and outdoors. She thought of all the things she admired about herself: the lovely curve of her hip, the protrusion of her ass, the biceps that were both firm and delicate. It felt as if all her life she had wanted to be seen in her entirety, wearing skin-tight clothing or nothing at all, every curve of her not just showing but seen, admired. It was the worst of sins, this vain pride, but she allowed herself to revel in every moment of it. She woke up happy and embarrassed.
30
She ran the fingerprints of the Osiris victim without any hope of finding a match. Indeed, there were no hits. More than anything, she would have liked to be able to go down to Mu’tazz’s office and ask him what he’d learned in all his interviews with the boys from the fishing trip. Surely something, no matter how frail, would come up in that sort of investigation, some tiny lead worth pursuing. But she was absolutely certain that an impenetrable barrier existed between Inspector Mu’tazz and herself, a lowly lab worker. A woman trying to nose her way into a man’s case.
She had given Ibrahim a copy of the Osiris file and kept Sa’ud’s copy for herself. The file contained the names of all the boys who’d been on the boat when the box had been dredged up. It occurred to her that she could interview them herself, but there were eight names on the list. A task like that seemed too big. She would have to devote all her free time to it, assuming the men even agreed to talk to her, and was it worth it when Mu’tazz had done it already?
