Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  What surprised her was the relief she felt when he stood up and saw her and his face lit quietly with pleasure that even the neighbor noticed and that caused the man to excuse himself. Nayir coiled the last of the rope and dropped it on the ground, a gesture that said firmly that he’d lay down anything for her, and for a very brief moment, her million grains of doubt were blown clear away.

  Then she told herself not to be an idiot.

  “Sabah al-khayr,” she said. Good morning.

  He averted his gaze and greeted her with a simple “Good morning.” She wasn’t wearing a veil. She didn’t wear one at work, so why should she pretend to be more devout here?

  They had talked on the phone, but this was the first time she’d seen him since the night he proposed. He was wearing his favorite well-worn blue robe. He’d taken off his headscarf, and his short curly hair shone black in the sun. A slight redness on his cheeks, a coating of dust on his sandals, the confidence in his shoulders all told her that he’d recently been to the desert. He took families on desert excursions to help them get in touch with their Bedouin roots or simply to give them the experience of the wilderness. On occasion, he worked search-and-rescue.

  “I hope I’m not coming at a bad time,” she said.

  “Of course not.” He glanced past her shoulder, a gesture she understood at once to mean Who escorted you here? And is it all right with him that we’re talking?

  “My cousin Ayman gave me a ride,” she said. “He’s just gone to buy cigarettes.”

  Nayir nodded, perhaps better able to accept the impropriety of the two of them being alone now that a marriage proposal was on the table. He started walking toward his boat. It was too hot to stand in the sun.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” she said. “I’ve been working overtime on a big case.”

  “Oh,” he said. If he’d been worried about her lack of response to his proposal, he didn’t show it. Rather, he seemed relaxed, and the poise in his manner that she had ascribed to time spent in the desert might just as easily have been religiously inspired.

  He led her onto his boat and she saw, with some surprise, that he’d situated a large beach umbrella above the wooden bench on the top deck. She imagined that he’d planned for this: having Katya arrive at his boat and not wanting to lead her downstairs, where they’d be alone and out of sight. The neighbors might notice and begin talking. She sat beneath the umbrella, feeling oddly pleased, while Nayir bent to a corner and retrieved the next surprise: a small battery-powered fan. He switched it on and coolish air blew across her lap. She smiled.

  “This is very thoughtful of you.”

  He excused himself and climbed down the ladder, emerging a minute later with a small cooler full of ice, bottled water, and soda. She took a Pepsi. He sat across from her and turned slightly to the side so that he wouldn’t stare directly at her face. She sipped the soda.

  “It sounds like you’re busy at work,” he said.

  Yes, she wanted to reply, and I have no idea how I’m going to get married and have kids and be a mother and a wife when I’m supposed to be at work twelve hours a day, and sometimes more. Beyond that, how could she explain that the tedious lab work had lost its appeal? That she was struggling to push herself up a notch by getting more directly involved in investigations? That she had even, last week, taken the bold step of applying to the female police academy? What would he say to that?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I wanted to come by sooner, but yes, I’ve been extremely busy.”

  He nodded. “Actually, your timing is perfect,” he said. “I was in the desert. I just got back last night.”

  “Were you working?”

  “Yes. I took a family to the Empty Quarter.”

  “I’ve never been out there,” she said.

  “It’s beautiful. And safe enough, if you’re prepared for it.” He looked at her then, which she found quite bold. Then he returned his gaze to the sea. She realized that something had shifted in him, as if a deep tectonic instability had rumbled and tossed and was finally settling into place.

  She was struck suddenly with panic. She was twenty-nine and she ought to feel some urgency to get married, but instead she was terrified. She could see her father’s disappointed face as vividly as if he were standing in front of her. If her mother were still alive, she would cry to see Katya unmarried at this age.

  “Have you thought any more about my proposal?” he asked.

  “Yes.” They had reached this point too quickly. She felt them skidding into a crash.

  “Ah,” he said.

  She was outside all thought. Her only conscious awareness was that if she said no, she would hurt him irreparably.

  “I applied to the police academy,” she blurted.

  He studied her for a moment, which she found disconcerting. Then he looked down at his hands, and she caught the flicker of a smile. “That’s a big step,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He came to sit next to her. For a moment it seemed that he might take her hand, but he refrained. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “I’m sure.”

  “You don’t want to work in the lab anymore?”

  “No.”

  “But how will you be a cop?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I want to work in Homicide. I want to be a detective.”

  He looked into her eyes, which brought on a terrific swell of panic. “I’ve said this before, but I want you to know that whatever it is, we’ll find a way to work it out.”

  She took his hand, realized her own were shaking. He saw it, too, and squeezed her hand in his. His eyes didn’t leave her face, and their expression said Just say yes, yes….

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes, you’ll marry me?”

  She nodded. “That’s my answer—yes.”

  He smiled in a way she’d never seen before, a big delighted grin. He ran a hand down his face to try to soften it, but it sprang back like a cowlick. She smiled at him.

  Just then a neighbor came out of his boat. Nayir dropped her hand and quickly stood up. The neighbor scarcely noticed the two of them sitting there, but to Nayir he might have been God himself sitting in judgment of their public impropriety.

  Deflated, Katya stood up. “Well,” she said, “I’d better get back to work.”

  8

  Now it was a refuge, sitting at her computer, straightening up the files. She determinedly refused to think about what she’d just done. She would not admit that she felt the beginnings of suffocation, sand heaping around her while she made no effort to push herself free.

  She recognized Inspector Zahrani the moment he stepped into the lab. Behind her, three women quickly covered their faces, a flock of hens startled by a large human leg, but Katya had decided not to give in to that impulse anymore.

  She didn’t know very much about Zahrani, just enough to realize that he didn’t give a damn if a woman’s face was exposed. The first time she’d met him, he’d even extended his hand to shake hers and thanked her for processing evidence so quickly. There was a slight accent to his voice that suggested he was Levantine—probably Palestinian. But his face was classically Bedouin: dark skin, long nose, giant almond-shaped eyes. He was a recent addition to Homicide, had migrated from Undercover for reasons no one knew. He’d worked on two cases in the past weeks, both of them pulled from the department’s unsolved crimes. He hadn’t managed to solve either of them. Now he was in charge of the serial-killer case. Chief Riyadh was clearly willing to let Ibrahim do whatever he liked.

  He didn’t usually come into the lab, but that was because Katya preferred to bring her findings downstairs. It was part of her plan to stay visible, to get more involved.

  “Miss Hijazi,” he said. He was holding half a dozen files.

  “Good afternoon, Inspector Zahrani,” she replied. “I see you got the files.”

  “Yes,” he said, setting them on her desk. “And please call me Ibra
him. There’s one thing in your report I didn’t quite understand….”

  The women grew a little quieter at the back of the room.

  “I’d be glad to look at it,” she said.

  “You know…” He was flipping through the folders. “It looks like I’ve left one file downstairs. Sorry. Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not.” Katya was already logging off her computer and getting to her feet. “I’ll come down with you.”

  “Great.” He swept the files into his arms.

  Once the door to the lab had shut behind them, he stopped and turned to her. The hallway was empty, but only momentarily. “I have to ask you a favor,” he said. “It’s very important.”

  The change in his demeanor startled her. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “In private,” he said, looking around. “If you don’t mind.”

  He motioned her into the ladies’ bathroom. She hesitated. He could be setting her up, but his anxiety was palpable. She followed him inside, and he locked the door behind them.

  “A friend of mine has gone missing,” he said. “I’m very worried about her.”

  Katya waited for an answer to the obvious question: Why was he telling her?

  “I don’t know many women,” he said, “and certainly none I could trust with this information. Most people don’t even know that I am still in contact with this woman.”

  So that was it. He had a girlfriend. She was mildly surprised but guessed it was probably more common than she’d thought. “So you haven’t reported her missing.”

  “No. It could just be—she could have left.”

  “I see,” Katya said. “What do you need?”

  “She works at a clothing boutique at the Chamelle center. Do you know it? It’s a women’s shopping mall.”

  “Yes, yes, the one at al-Hamra.”

  “I can’t go in there, obviously, and I need to know if she’s shown up for work recently.”

  “Have you tried calling them?”

  “I’ve been trying for the past few days. You have to leave a message and sometimes they’ll call you back if you’re wealthy and you’re planning on spending large sums of money, but normally they don’t. They don’t know about me either, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I see.” Katya tried not to look at their reflections in the mirror. Being locked in a bathroom with a man at work would be enough to get her fired on the spot. She kept wondering how they were going to exit. “So you want me to go to the Chamelle center and ask if she’s been at work.”

  “Yes, but it’s tricky. I’ve never met her coworkers, but she told me that they’re snobs. Also, her visa is expired, and the owner hasn’t officially signed the paperwork to renew it yet, so you have to be really careful not to let them think you’re checking up on visa infractions. It’s best not to go in as a cop. You’re just looking for a friend.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’d be happy to do it, but it’ll have to be later this evening. I don’t leave work until six.”

  “That would be perfect,” he said. He’d been leaning over her in a kind of pushy panic. Now he stood back and exhaled. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “But I have a bad feeling.”

  Katya nodded. She wanted to ask if he’d tried calling friends, hospitals, but decided it would be condescending. “I’ll go straight after work.”

  “I’ll drive you,” he said. “You’re okay with that?”

  “No, my cousin drives me. He’ll think it’s odd if I’m late, and I’d rather that this didn’t get back to my father. My cousin will be glad to give me a ride to the mall.”

  They exchanged numbers and she promised to call once she learned anything.

  “I’ll go out first,” he said, reaching for the door. “If it’s safe for you to come out, I’ll knock once. If it’s not safe, I’ll distract them. You just keep the door locked.” He slid out before she could protest. A second later, he knocked.

  The brisk way he handled the exit both filled her with admiration and pissed her off. Men didn’t lose their jobs for indiscretion as often as women did. And she doubted, what with all the fear of being caught for this or that, that women were half as indiscreet.

  9

  The first victim was named Amelia Cortez. She was one of the two women whose hands had been found at the gravesite. The medical examiner had determined that she’d been the killer’s first victim, dead now approximately ten years. Forensics had identified her through a fingerprint match.

  Amelia had been twenty-four, and judging by the passport photo that came from the Philippine embassy, she had been lovely—high cheekbones; clear complexion; innocent, light brown eyes. She had been recruited in Manila and promised work as a personal assistant to a high-powered female journalist. Amelia had ambitions to become a writer. But when she arrived in Jeddah, her sponsor, a man named Sonny Esposa, told her that the only work available was as a nanny. She had no choice in the matter. In order to leave the country, she needed Sonny’s permission, and he had taken away her passport.

  She had also signed a contract promising to pay him for his services. The headhunter’s fee was much more than she could afford. She was going to give him a little each month and pay it off that way. Instead of working for six hundred riyals a month, Amelia wound up working for two hundred a month, taking care of five children, all under the age of ten. It would take her six years to repay the headhunter. She couldn’t go to the police; they would only enforce the contract. So Amelia ran away. The people who had hired her complained—they had paid for a year in advance—and Sonny disappeared. No one knew what had happened to Amelia, and no one cared enough to find her. Her family in the Philippines sent letters to the consulate, to no avail.

  Ibrahim himself went to interview the family who had employed Cortez. He took Daher and Shaya. They also interviewed the consular officials, who had kept notes on the case but had not filed a police report. The story was the same: the woman had run off. No matter what the employer told you, when a housemaid disappeared, she was usually looking for better work somewhere else or trying to escape an abusive situation. It was a common enough occurrence, and short of finding a dead body, the police had no way to prove foul play. They had no luck at all tracking down Cortez’s headhunter, Sonny Esposa. He had disappeared long ago.

  Ibrahim went through the motions of it all—the interviews, the car rides, the edgy conversations with his men—in a half state of panic. He saw Sabria in every living room, consular office, and police meeting room. He conjured up clear mental pictures of Cortez walking down the street, perhaps running a quick errand for her employer—Would you mind picking up some bread from the baker’s, some milk from the corner store?—and then Sabria slid into the frame, cloaked and veiled, and it was Sabria stepping into the wrong taxi, being held at gunpoint and frozen with terror. It was Sabria being driven to the edge of the desert, being immobilized by chloroform, then beaten and shot in the head and dismembered.

  He had no idea how the killer caught his victims, and he was still a little fuzzy on the horrors perpetrated on the women, but in Ibrahim’s mind, it was as clear as reality. Chloroform. Hard plastic restraints. A semiautomatic with a silencer. A small sword for cutting off the hands. He knew it was wrong to build mental pictures laced with assumptions and personal terrors, so he let the images play out like silent movies and reminded himself that it was too implausible that Sabria, a woman with a natural distrust of men, would be taken by anyone, even at gunpoint. Equally implausible that the killer noticed Ibrahim so quickly after they discovered the bodies—and that the killer then found out about his mistress. It was the ego’s darkest delight to assume it was the center of the universe.

  Chamelle Plaza was a women’s-only shopping mall made up of the kind of designer boutiques and spas that made Katya feel like a poor Indonesian street sweeper collecting empty bottles at the edges of a royal palace. Fifteen minutes shy of the day’s last prayer time, the place was bustling with Sri Lankan house
maids looking after whole flocks of children while mothers flitted between day spas and manicure salons, hurrying to finish their business before the call to prayer closed all the shops. The air was cool and clean, and Katya stood in the central courtyard waiting for the sheen of sweat to dry from her face and for her cloak to stop sticking to her clothes.

  Her first thought was that if Ibrahim’s girlfriend worked here, the chances were good that she had run away with a wealthy businessman or maybe even a prince. Not that she would have met him at the mall; simply that she would have been the type to trade in an old purse for a more flashy one when the time was right. Walking past the overpriced shops staffed with snooty-looking women in Armani did nothing to interfere with the stereotype.

  Before leaving the lab, she had run a search on the missing woman. It was probably redundant—Ibrahim would have checked already—but she wanted to be thorough. She discovered that Miss Sabria Gampon’s visa was indeed expired. She hadn’t been deported, at least not officially; sometimes it took a few weeks for the paperwork to catch up. She also discovered that Sabria used to work in Undercover herself.

  Katya found the boutique: La Mode Internationale. It was tucked between a jewelry store and a bustling café. She pushed through the glass door and crossed an enormous white marble floor with a self-important stride that she hoped matched the haute elegance all around her. Little nooks on the wall were lit with red lights, and each held a handbag that looked more like a child carrier with hardware than a purse. A woman approached and greeted her with a plastered-on smile and a perkiness that Katya would have been happy to see at the bank but that felt oppressive here.

  “Good evening,” the woman said. She was a middle-aged Filipina with an unnaturally high, girlish voice and lipstick so red it was impossible to tear your eyes from it. Her name tag said CHONA. “What can we do for you today?”

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine,” Katya said. “She’s been telling me about this place for a long time, and I’m finally in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop in to do some shopping.”