by Zoë Ferraris
Nayir felt his cheeks getting hot. “The other reason she called me is that she believed that someone had broken into her apartment. She was frightened and wanted to get out of the house.”
“It was probably the police,” Katya said. “They’ve been trying to find her.”
“In any case,” Nayir said, “she wanted a ride to her husband’s work, because she felt that they might know something.” He explained what they’d learned about Eric’s leave of absence and the possible theft of surveillance equipment. “Obviously,” he went on, “Eric hadn’t told her about any of this.” Then he reached into his pocket and took out the misyar. He paused a fraction of a second before handing it over to her. “After you and I left her apartment, Miriam went looking through his other papers and found this in his briefcase.” Katya opened the paper and read it. She took a breath but didn’t seem surprised.
“You should have called me,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I knew you were at work.”
She sighed and seemed to soften a bit. “Yesterday morning,” she said, “I went to interview one of Leila’s friends, and she told me that Leila had been seeing an American named Eric Walker.” She went on to explain that Osama had finally pulled the Walkers’ cell phone records and discovered that Miriam had called Nayir this morning.
Nayir was struck with a potent admixture of guilt and betrayal. “You told them about her?”
Katya looked at his face. “I didn’t have a choice. After what Farooha told me, I knew there was obviously a connection to the Walkers, and I had to tell Osama.”
The way she said his name made Nayir’s chest feel like a meat grinder. He took a sip of coffee, found it too weak, and set it down with a grimace. “What are they going to do now?” he asked.
“The police want to talk to her,” she replied evenly. “They know she had nothing to do with the murder. They checked her immigration records, and she was out of the country when it occurred. But obviously, her husband was involved.”
Nayir was trying to stay rational. Somewhere deep down, he agreed that Eric knew something about Leila’s death.
“I know what you’re wondering, and the truth is, I don’t know what’s going to happen to her,” Katya said, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. “Probably they’ll want to hold her until they find her husband.”
He pointed to the misyar that Katya was still holding. “This doesn’t mean that Eric and Leila were… together.”
“No,” she said slowly, “but it does place them together. They obviously had some kind of relationship.”
“But a few things don’t make sense,” he said.
“Like what?”
“First of all, let’s say Eric killed Leila. Why would he let his wife come back into the country? She was in America when it happened. He could just as easily have let her stay there.”
“Maybe he had to make it look like everything was normal,” she suggested.
“But then the minute she gets back here, he runs away?” Nayir said. “That doesn’t make sense either.”
“Not unless he learned something at the last minute, something that made him realize he had to run, and it was too late to send his wife back to the States—that is, if he even thought that hard about it. It could be that he didn’t care what happened to Miriam.”
“Yes,” he agreed grudgingly, “that’s possible. But what do you think he might have learned at the last minute? Let’s say, while Miriam was on the plane Eric gets what piece of information?”
“That the police have made a connection between him and Leila,” Katya said.
“Did they?” he asked. “Did they make that connection? It sounds like you just made that connection yesterday.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “All right, then maybe someone else put the whole thing together. A friend of his? A colleague? They figured out that Leila was dead, and they suspected Eric and threatened to go to the police. So he had to run.”
“But if he’s a cold-blooded killer, why not just kill the friend or the colleague?” Nayir asked.
“Maybe he already has, and we don’t know it. Or maybe it was easier to run away.”
“And leave your wife to face the police alone, in a country where she doesn’t speak the language?”
“If he’s a killer,” Katya said, “that might not seem so cruel to him.”
“If he did run away to avoid the law,” Nayir said, “then why would he leave this marriage document in his briefcase, where his wife could find it?”
Katya hadn’t tasted her coffee. She set it on the table as if only just remembering it was there, but he could tell she was withdrawing into her thoughts, and he had the uneasy feeling that she wasn’t going to share them.
“You have to admit,” he said, “that it’s equally possible that someone else killed Leila, and Eric found out who it was. Maybe Leila’s killer has killed him, too.”
“In either case,” she said, looking at him in a pointed way, “we need to talk to Miriam.”
Perhaps it was the we in the sentence that riled him so much—it meant her and Osama. It took an effort to compose himself for a reply. “Of course,” he said. “And I think she should talk to you.”
“She hasn’t been at her house all day,” Katya said in an eerily mechanical tone. “Do you know where she might be right now?”
He hesitated for much too long; he wasn’t going to lie to her. “Yes.”
“So perhaps you could bring her down to the station tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” he said. Was it anger on her face or disappointment?
“Good.” She reached into her purse for her cell phone. “Sorry, this will just take a minute.” She placed a call to her cousin, he deduced from the conversation. Midway through, he said, “I can give you a ride home,” but she shook her head.
“Ayman will be driving home from school,” she explained once she’d hung up. “This is on his way home. It’s just easier this way.”
I thought he was bad with directions, Nayir wanted to say, but he stood up instead, and Katya did, too, leaving her untouched coffee on the table. As they walked to the door, an enormous rift was opening between them. He realized with a crushing pain that he didn’t want to lose her, but he felt her pulling away, and he was powerless to stop it.
One of the things about seeing Katya—and he couldn’t simply blame Starbucks for this—was that afterward, he felt plagued by indecision. Should he go to the mosque or pray at home? Was it all right to watch an hour of satellite TV? He couldn’t even figure out what he wanted for dinner. With Katya, he was confronted with an obvious, nagging inconsistency: it was immodest and wrong to be in the company of an unmarried woman. But if it could put them on the path to a legitimate union, was it really wrong?
How had this confusion been brought about? It wasn’t just with Katya anymore. Having lunch with Miriam, even agreeing to pick her up in the first place—had that been the right thing to do? Imam Hadi would have told him to take Miriam immediately to one of the women’s shelters rather than keep her in khulwa, a sinful state of seclusion with an unrelated man. But he had taken her to Samir’s house instead—double khulwa. Why had he done it? He felt he had no other choice. It seemed that his looseness with Katya had primed him for this doubt. If he had to break the rules in order to get married, then why couldn’t he break the rules about less important things? How important were his little decisions anyway?
Until now, he had never realized just how much his faith had given solidity to his life. It had been as reliable and immobile as the holy Kaaba, which Allah had built for Adam and Eve to dwell in when they left Paradise, and which had stayed in its position throughout the ages. The Kaaba, the fixed center of the earthly universe, toward which all Muslims turned to pray five times a day, represented the unwavering strength and permanence of Allah. It would remain on this earth even after the end of time.
And it would probably take that long for Nayir to decide what to eat for dinner.
He went into Samir’s study and sat down at the computer. He didn’t do this very often. The Internet was overwhelming—buy this! read that!—but, desperate for distraction, he went to Fatwa-online.com. There he found updates on the latest pronouncements from sheikhs and discussion boards on existing fatwas. Apparently, the Saudi government had created the site to legitimize various religious pronouncements, hundreds of which were made every week. But if the Saudi government had hoped to control the cacophony of clerics, then they didn’t understand their own helplessness.
It was a wonderful diversion. For an hour he lost himself in the minutiae of Islam: Was Viagra halal? Should a man pluck the al-anfuqah, the hairs that grow beneath his lip but that aren’t officially considered part of the beard? In which cases is it acceptable for a man to urinate while standing? Most of the recommendations were common sense, and one or two made him feel a certain agony for the poor questioner: Was a sex change allowed? (No.) What should a mother do about her hermaphrodite child? (Pick one gender and surgically excise the rest.) And one or two of the issues threw him into reflection: Was it permissible to read fiction? (No, because fiction was full of lies that occupy the writer and reader without benefit, and good Muslims should use their time wisely.) He could think of a few sharp remarks Uncle Samir would have for that. However, the fatwa writer did concede that sometimes one can indulge in books if there was a higher reason for doing so.
Just as he was wondering what a higher reason might be, the door opened and Miriam peered in.
“Hi,” she whispered. She looked as if she’d just woken up. She wasn’t wearing a headscarf, and her hair was tangled and loose. He lowered his gaze to the floor.
“I don’t want to bother you,” she said groggily, but she came into the room anyway and shut the door.
His first thought was that she had forgotten where she was: this wasn’t America, where a woman could walk into a room, her head uncovered, her face exposed, and talk comfortably with a man who was no relation to her. But he simply couldn’t bring himself to point this out. She had been having this effect on him all day. If he’d had the chance to turn back and consult Fatwa-online, he knew what a sheikh would tell him: It was his responsibility to remain pious in the face of an infidel who had no understanding of things. It was his job to stay virtuous, and if virtue failed, then it would also be his fault.
But in this case, he could not submit to the duty of dissociation, because some deep part of him had never liked the idea, and because Miriam needed him. She was more dependent than he imagined a woman should be. Muslim women at least had their families, their friends, whole networks of people. But who did Miriam have? It was strange that she should appear so vulnerable; in his mind American women were so much like men, so competent and muscular, with their short hair and mannish clothing and lack of adornment. But here in the flesh was a real American, and she needed his help precisely because she was an infidel and had no one else to turn to. It wasn’t so much the sheikhs’ words as their sensible tones that prompted the thought that sometimes one has to do things that don’t agree with precepts, because there was a higher reason. And if murder was a higher reason, then shouldn’t compassion be one as well?
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said.
“How am I —?” He hadn’t even been looking at her.
“Like I’m the most pitiful creature in the universe.”
“You should cover your hair,” he said, motioning at her head, his eyes glued to the floor.
Looking around, she spotted a cloth napkin on an old tea service that was sitting on the desk. She unfolded it and draped it over her head. It scarcely reached her ears.
He raised a hand to his mouth to cover the nervous laugh that was forming on his lips. “What is that?” he said gruffly, attempting to pass off his covered mouth as a gesture of sternness.
“It’s a napkin,” she snapped. She was standing right in front of him, looking small and frail in her rumpled tunic and jeans. Her face was puffy from sleep, and a smear of makeup trailed down from one eye. “Something wrong with a napkin? Or does it have to be blessed by an ayatollah?”
“We don’t have ayatollahs.”
“Finally.” She snorted. “Something to like about this place.”
The napkin on her head and the juvenile way she crossed her arms kept him from getting upset about the remark. For a moment he thought that this was what it must be like to have a sister.
He kept his eyes on the bookshelf and said, “I think you could like this place if you gave it a chance.”
She snorted again and crossed her arms more tightly. He wondered how Eric would have dealt with this. Then he wanted to wring her stupid husband’s neck.
“I was going to tell you something,” she said, becoming serious. She took a seat on the room’s other swivel chair. Nayir turned aside so he wouldn’t have to stare at the napkin.
“I’ve been thinking things over,” she explained in a trembling voice. “Look, sometimes Eric did private jobs for people in the States. Escorting them, like a bodyguard. He said something to me once that made me think… he said something about how difficult it was to protect women here because he wasn’t allowed to be around them. He’d have to be married to them. He could have married that woman just on paper. Maybe to protect her?”
“Did he ever protect other women that you know of?” he asked gently.
“No. I don’t know. I’m just saying he could have.”
“Yes, but how would he have met her?”
“Probably not through his work. I’m pretty sure Shaw was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know her. Maybe privately, like through Eric’s friend Jacob. And Jacob knows all kinds of people. It wouldn’t surprise me if…”
“What?”
“If Jacob was sleeping with her,” she said. “Or if he met her at a brothel or something. Jacob, I mean. Eric wouldn’t do that.”
Nayir’s look of discomfort must have shown, because she said quickly, “Sorry. I don’t know this woman, I’m just guessing. It would also explain why he might have stolen the surveillance equipment. Maybe he was using it for a private job, and just waiting for whomever to pay him back, or maybe he was even planning to return it. Because I know Eric wasn’t a thief. He liked his job. He wouldn’t have jeopardized it without a really good reason.”
Nayir didn’t answer, so she went on. “And I know for a fact that he would never kill someone.”
Nayir refrained from pointing out that there were obviously a lot of things she didn’t know about her husband. Still, he was struck by her loyalty.
“And it doesn’t make sense,” she went on. “If Eric killed this woman and ran away, then why would he leave that marriage document in his briefcase? And why would he —”
“Pick you up from the airport,” Nayir finished. “I know.”
She looked surprised. “So I don’t think he ran away. He must have known this woman, but maybe he —”
“Found out who killed her,” Nayir said. “Yes, I’ve thought about it. But you also have to think about this: why did he lie to you about what he was doing that whole month?”
“Well, obviously, I was out of town.…” She sat back in her chair. “Maybe he couldn’t.” Nayir looked skeptical. “I don’t know,” Miriam went on, her voice rising. “Okay, maybe he was cheating. And of course, if that’s true, then he wouldn’t tell me about it. But just because they were together, if they really were together —”
“It doesn’t mean that he killed her,” Nayir said.
They looked at each ot
her in silent agreement. She slid the napkin off her head and used it to wipe the tears that had started running down her face. He returned his gaze to the safety of the bookshelf. “I have to do something. I have the feeling that he’s out there and he’s hurt —” She broke off.
“First thing in the morning,” he said, “I’m going to take you down to the police station.”
“What? No!”
He raised a hand. “You have to go. They need your help.”
“They’ll arrest me!”
“I’ll be honest,” he said, “they might do that. But regardless, they need your help finding Eric. He might be guilty, he might not, but they have to find him. And you want to find him, too.”
Her nostrils flared, but she didn’t say anything.
“And once you’ve talked to the police, I’m going to go try to hunt down this property manager. As far as we know, this man —”
This time it was her turn to interrupt. “This is about Katya, isn’t it? She wants you to bring me in.”
“Yes,” he said. “She’s going to get in trouble if you don’t go in.”
Miriam slumped. She gave him a doleful look. “What if I give you something else?” she said. “Something that might help the case. And in exchange, will you promise not to make me go to the police?”
“No.”
“Listen, it might be important, and if you make me go to the police, and they arrest me —”
“Okay, okay,” he said, cutting her off.
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out a small piece of plastic. “I found this in my purse when I got back from the States,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I think it’s a memory card for a phone or a camera. I thought it was Eric’s, but I can’t imagine why he would have put it there. I don’t know why anyone would, but it’s not mine.”
“Who do you think it belongs to?”
She explained how she’d met Mabus on the plane and then discovered at Jacob’s house that Mabus knew Eric.
“This is the same Mabus who is your property manager?” he asked.
“Obviously,” she replied. “How many could there be?” Looking slightly self-conscious, she went on more lightly. “All I know is that something was going on with the three of them—Eric, Jacob, and Mabus. What if Mabus put this card in my purse? He would have had the opportunity, because I went to the bathroom on the airplane and left my purse behind.”