Finding Nouf

by Zoë Ferraris

  "Can you tell how much water there was?" Nayir asked.

  Mutlaq considered it, but shook his head. "You want to know how far she traveled with the flood?"

  "Yes."

  "It's hard to say." He stood and gazed up the wadi's length. "It would depend on the volume of the water. We'll have to follow the wadi to see how far the flood might have taken her."

  They marked the place with a stake on the bank and continued up the wadi. Suhail lingered behind and kept stumbling on the sand. Twice they stopped to make sure he was drinking enough water, but he insisted he was fine. Eventually Mutlaq sent him back to the Jeep, and Suhail went willingly, clearly exhausted.

  They headed up the wadi, walking slowly for an hour. Judging by the condition of the sand on the banks, it hadn't actually rained in this part of the desert. They decided it could be a much longer walk than they had thought, so they went back to the vehicles to drive farther up the wadi's banks. They retraced their steps. The sun was reaching its zenith, and as their shadows shrank around their feet, their steps grew slower and heavier in the sand. Mut laq pointed this out. "Tired feet," he said, "can announce the time of day." Nayir wondered if they would also be able to read Nouf's mood by the prints she had left.

  Back at the Jeep, he was surprised to find Suhail asleep. He reached in the window and touched his forehead. The investigator awoke with a jolt and stared uncomprehendingly at him. Nayir withdrew his hand. "You'd better drink some water."

  "I already did."

  Nayir spit out his miswak and went to the back. A sudden gust of wind blew sand in his face. He took his scarf, wrapped it around his head, and pulled the loose end across his mouth. After hauling the water jug out of the back, he refilled his canteen, all the while studying the wadi. It would be a bumpy trip, he guessed, but they'd drive upstream as far as they could. This may be where the Bedouin found her body, but it wasn't where she died. That was the real crime scene.

  Nayir followed Mutlaq's truck, wondering how his friend could see anything amid all of the dust blowing about. Suhail kept his head out the window, dutifully studying the sand for signs of recent rain. They drove until Nayir spotted acacia trees in the distance. They were set back from the wadi, a semicircle of trees enclosing a large boulder.

  The sight sparked a sudden familiarity. He had come here recently with Othman. He remembered the spot because of the boulder and the mysterious presence of trees in an otherwise total vista of gravel and sand. They had wanted to do a weeklong excursion, but Othman was too busy to be away for more than two nights, so they'd set up a small camp and spent their afternoons hiking down the wadi's trail, looking for signs of life. They'd spotted a fox, or so they thought.

  Nayir drove up to the trees and motioned for Mutlaq to stop. Everyone climbed out.

  "What is it?" Suhail asked. Nayir went closer, inspecting the trees, the boulder. It was indeed the same place. The stone had a distinct groove for sitting that could accommodate only one man. They had both preferred to sit on the sand. Mutlaq came up behind him and studied the ground.

  "These look like your prints."

  "They are," Nayir said, studying the tangle of prints in the sand. Despite knowing Mutlaq so well, he was still impressed.

  "Who was with you?" Mutlaq asked.

  "Othman ash-Shrawi. The brother of the victim."

  "Ahhhh. Yes." Mutlaq took a closer look, walking around the boulder and following the tracks, one hand held forward like a divining rod. "He's a nervous man."

  "Othman?"

  "Yes. But he follows you."

  Nayir couldn't make anything out of the prints. He was hot and tired. He sat on the boulder, tremendously grateful for the thin slice of shade. Unscrewing his canteen, he gave it a sniff, then took a long drink and stared at the wadi. Perhaps sensing Nayir's sudden discomfort, Mutlaq wandered off.

  Nayir took another drink. It was shocking that Nouf's body had been found in the vicinity of a spot he'd come to with Othman. What were the chances? It was the last visit they'd made to the desert—aside from the search for Nouf.

  He saw Suhail coming. He was carrying a shoe. "I spotted this beneath one of those flowers," he said as he approached.

  It was a rugged shoe with a well-worn sole. Nayir inspected it. He couldn't be sure, but a mild running of the color on the heel suggested that it had been wet and then dried. It was a size 36, the same as the stiletto.

  "It might be hers," Nayir said. "It could have been knocked off in the flood. I'll take it back to the family, see if they recognize it."

  Suhail nodded and walked off again as Mutlaq returned.

  "May I see?" Mutlaq asked. Nayir offered him the shoe, and he studied it carefully but without comment. He handed it back to Nayir.

  They spent the next few minutes walking up and down the place where Suhail had found the shoe, looking for footprints, animal prints, anything. Aside from a few bird tracks, the ground was smooth.

  "Look," Mutlaq said with excitement. "A houbara was here."

  Nayir saw the telltale claw prints in the sand and felt strangely comforted that at least something survived out here.

  "So how can you tell the difference between a man's prints and a woman's?" Nayir asked.

  Mutlaq lifted his head and regarded him.

  "I mean"—Nayir waved his hand—"I'm sure women tend to have smaller feet, but what else?"

  "It's not just the size of the feet," Mutlaq replied. "It's never one thing." From his canteen, he took a quick drink and looked out over the heat-distorted horizon. "I've been doing this for so long, I don't remember the rules anymore. I judge on instinct. When I see a woman's footprints, I just know it's a woman."

  "They walk differently from men?"

  Mutlaq squinted. "Well, yes. Their bodies are different. Their hips are different. But I would say they walk differently for other reasons as well."

  The three men got back in their vehicles and drove on. They had gone only a few kilometers when Mutlaq stopped and leaned out his window, calling over to Nayir, "The rain fell here, so we won't find more footprints beyond this."

  Disappointed, Nayir got out of the Jeep, leaving Suhail asleep in the passenger seat. Mutlaq was right: the sand had been smoothed down by the rain. Mutlaq got out and joined him. They went to the edge of the wadi and peered down. It wasn't very far—a three-meter drop to the bottom. Someone could have tossed her down there after hitting her on the head, in which case she would have woken up and started walking down the wadi, not realizing that it was going to rain...

  Or perhaps she never woke up.

  He and Mutlaq scanned the area one last time for footprints. They walked slowly, following the wadi. Fifty meters downhill they saw a lump of fabric lying by a shrub, but it turned out to be a man's scarf, and judging from the dust and the fading, it had been there much longer than Nouf. Beyond that, there was no sign of activity.

  "I'm sorry I can't be more help," Mutlaq said. "I suspect that the shoe you found is hers. If you can verify that, I'll be glad to help you hunt around for more prints. She had to have left them somewhere."

  Back at the Jeep, they found Suhail awake and fidgeting with the GPS. The investigator's fingers were shaking, and he seemed to be having trouble with hand-eye coordination. Nayir studied his skin; he wasn't sweating anymore. Reaching through the window, he took Suhail's wrist.

  "What are you doing?"

  Nayir took his pulse rate. It was 135.

  "Something wrong?" Suhail asked.

  "Yes. You're dying."

  Suhail let out a sarcastic snort. Mutlaq went to the back of his truck and took out a two-gallon jug of water. He brought it back, opened it, and dumped it on Suhail.

  "Damn you!" Suhail wiped the water from his face. "This was a nice shirt!"

  Nayir gave him a bottle and told him to drink it, a little at a time, until they reached Jeddah.

  The sun was setting as he said goodbye to Mutlaq, started the Jeep, and drove back down to the road. It wasn't very oft
en that the desert depressed him. The day had brought back all the frustration he'd felt searching for Nouf, and it taunted him.

  It wasn't until he was on the freeway that he realized Suhail was unconscious. Well, there was nothing he could do except take him to the hospital when they got back to Jeddah. Some investigator, this one, little Benson & Hedges. It was going to take a bigger man to find Nouf's killer; this shrimp couldn't find water in a cooler.

  8

  ALTHOUGH NAYIR'S UNCLE SAMIR had devoted his life to science and balked at superstitions that used possession by the djinn to explain and treat every ailment—"a regrettable heritage," he called it—he kept one conviction intact: he believed in the power of the evil eye.

  It was much more than a malicious gaze. The effects ranged from ailments as innocuous as hiccups to those as deadly as an embolism in a healthy young man. Because Samir was a chemist, his friends and neighbors considered him wise in matters relating to anything that required a good education—medicine, law, religious philosophy—and they often sought his advice. Over the years people had discovered that he wasn't much use for setting broken bones or understanding the nuances of jurisprudence, but he knew nearly everything about the human gaze—its history, its power, even its cultural peculiarities. Word spread that he was wise on this matter above all, and before long he could count on three to four visits a week, mostly from strangers, and most of them complaining of the evil eye.

  Samir obliged anyone who came to his door with the same serious questions a doctor might ask a patient. If he found it ironic that he, a legitimate scientist, should be delving into a subject with a greater history of fraud than witchcraft, telekinesis, and faith healing combined, he never shared this thought with his guests. He recorded their complaints and took care in transcribing each disease from its start. While he could generally offer his visitors nothing more practical than a pendant for protection and the name of a good Bedouin exorcist, he did manage, with his kindly tone and general air of professionalism, to assuage some of their suffering. He also pursued his pet subject at no great cost to himself. And with that he was pleased.

  Much as a doctor builds immunity from a constant exposure to germs, Samir had never suffered from the evil eye himself—although he claimed that this resulted from his excellent use of protection. He wore a blue glass amulet beneath his shirt, but more important, he preempted every threatening gaze with a subtle sign of five. It could come in any form. He scratched his chin five times. He blinked five times. He drew five strokes down his arm with his hand. On occasion he even protected Nayir, giving him five soft pats on the shoulder or repeating his name five times.

  For Nayir, the habit had never stuck. He had a secret scorn for impractical gestures; they generally drew attention and invited more evil. But a quiet part of him was willing to concede that the evil eye was not a mere myth.

  He was sitting in his uncle's study on the leeward side of a titanic oak desk, just where the ceiling fan dropped a gentle caress. They had lingered over a very late dinner, and the musky smell of lamb still clung to their robes. He could feel the miswak in his pocket jabbing his thigh, but he didn't take it out—there was nowhere to spit bristles in Samir's house—so he looked at the walls, at the map of the world and the Bombyx mori specimens all perfectly framed and labeled. To the right loomed a shelf of textbooks of various shapes and sizes, their only commonalities a certain outmoded chemistry topic and a very thin layer of dust.

  On the other side of the desk, Samir sat smoking a Western pipe, a stubby brown artifact that a British archaeologist had given him in 1968. He blew a smoke stream toward the ceiling fan—which blew it back down toward Nayir—and tapped the pipe's mouthpiece on his carbuncular nose.

  "How was the desert?" he asked.

  "Good," Nayir said, and they fell into one of the comfortable silences they often shared.

  After Nayir's parents had died in an accident when he was a baby, Samir had raised him. He was Nayir's father's brother, and the only family member wealthy enough to take in a young boy. Samir had fought the state for the privilege of raising Nayir. The only other option was to let him grow up in Palestine with Samir's sister, Aisha, who already had seven children but had no husband and no money. Samir liked to remind Nayir that Palestine was a terrible place to raise a child, and that if he had grown up there, he would likely be dead or imprisoned by the Israelis today.

  Samir had long ago found a niche for himself working with archaeologists all over the Middle East, analyzing artifacts and training archaeologists to use the latest chemical analysis equipment. Nayir remembered his childhood as a series of digs. They typically lasted for months at a time, and he often missed school to accompany Samir to the desert. As Samir had always been preoccupied with work, Nayir had been left to take care of himself. He became a loner but also an adventurer, even as a boy sneaking off on his own to explore the desert.

  Despite the independence, or perhaps because he had too much of it, his childhood had provoked an intense longing for a family, a longing that lasted well into adulthood and that he was certain would never be satisfied. His deepest fear was that he'd never marry. Parents arranged marriages. Parents had brothers and sisters who had children who needed to be married. They organized the complicated social visits in which a man got to meet a prospective bride—veiled, of course, but the groom could at least study her fingers and feet (unless she was socked and gloved as well) and learn what he could from those extraneous parts. (The best insight, of course, was a thorough study of her brother's face.) Samir could provide him with none of these things—there were no cousins to marry, not in Saudi at least—and even if he could have arranged a marriage for Nayir, Samir felt strongly that a man should "do some living" before settling down. Samir himself, now sixty-five, was still doing some living.

  Nayir often remarked that the Quran encouraged marriage, in fact made it imperative, saying, Marry those among you who are single. But Samir always replied with another verse: Let those who find not the wherewithal for marriage keep themselves chaste until Allah gives them means out of His grace. And Nayir couldn't argue with that.

  He sometimes felt that what his childhood had most lacked was the presence of a woman. A mother or an aunt, even a sister. Samir had known one or two women in his time—foreign women who didn't think it was inappropriate to befriend a nonfamily man—but those relationships had been brief. The archaeology digs were almost completely male; it was rare to meet a woman in the desert, even rarer than meeting one in Jeddah. Nayir joked with his friends that everything he knew about women had been gleaned from rumor, the Quran, and an assortment of bootleg television videos: Happy Days, Columbo, and WKRP in Cincinnati. Although his friends laughed, it was sadly true, and Nayir was left with the depressing sense that the world of women was one that he would never be allowed to enter.

  It was Samir who had first set him up as a desert guide, arranging for him to take the Shrawis to the desert. Samir had met the Shrawis because the family donated huge sums of money to archaeological research. Soon other families began to request Nayir's services, and now he was involved in the business full-time, escorting tourists and wealthy Saudis to all corners of the map. Being a desert guide was satisfying—it gave him a sense of community and allowed him to live well, even if he chose to live on a boat, which was, in Samir's oft-stated opinion, "living like a teenager in a tin can." Nayir's job with the Shrawis had been intended as recreation, not a career, and however much he was enjoying himself now, there was the future to think about. Once he realized that he was no longer sixteen, he would have to get a proper house and a job that involved books, desks, and framed diplomas. Nayir would rather have suffered lifelong hiccups and an embolism than gone into a "legitimate" career, but he never said so to his uncle.

  That afternoon Nayir had brought some samples from Nouf's body that he had managed to obtain, hoping that Samir could help him analyze the finds in his basement laboratory.

  Samir broke the silence wit
h a gentle cough. "So you think the Shrawi girl didn't run away?" he asked. They had discussed Nouf at dinner, but only briefly.

  "It's confusing," Nayir said. "All of the evidence points to a kidnapping. She was hit on the head. The family thinks that she overpowered the camel keeper's daughter on the estate, but I caught a glimpse of the daughter..." He pressed a finger to his cheek to control a sudden twitch. "She was as tall as me, maybe even as strong, and Nouf was short. And how could she have driven off on her own? She would have had to navigate a whole network of freeways to reach the desert road. She could drive a jet-ski, but a truck? Honestly..." He shook his head.

  "Have they found the truck?"

  "No, not yet. Then there's the camel. She wouldn't have let it go—that camel meant the difference between life and death." He leaned back and sighed. "Maybe she was kidnapped with the camel to make it look like she ran away. The kidnapper dropped her in the wadi, hit her on the head, and the camel wandered off"

  "And then what?" Samir asked.

  "Then the kidnapper drove back to Jeddah? I don't know. I discovered the sign of the evil eye on her camel's leg. It looked about two weeks old, maybe less. It's possible that Nouf made those lines in the desert, but that would mean that she wasn't alone. She would have wanted to protect herself, and the five lines don't protect you from the desert or the sun—they only safeguard against the human eye."

  "That's not strictly true," Samir said. "Recite the Two Takings of Refuge for me."

  Nayir sighed. As far back as he could remember, Samir had asked him to recite the last two suras of the Quran in a situation of need. "I know the verses," he said.

  Samir began to recite. "'I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn, from the mischief of created things; from the mischief of Darkness as it overspreads; from the mischief of those who practice Secret Arts; and from the mischief of the envious one as he practices envy.' Do you hear that? 'From the mischief of Darkness as it overspreads.'" He ignored Nayir's sigh of annoyance and carried on. "'I seek refuge with the Lord and Cherisher of Mankind, the Ruler of Mankind, the Judge of Mankind, from the mischief of the Whisperer of Evil who withdraws, after his whisper, who whispers into the hearts of Mankind, among Djinns and among Men.' And djinns can take other forms, not just human. Remember, they are invisible forces of evil."