Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  It was just before dhuhr prayer. He was sitting on the sofa, listlessly watching Al-Jazeera, when he heard a noise outside the front door. The guard was saying something. Ibrahim looked through the peephole and saw Saffanah in the hallway. She was standing a mere foot from the guard, her head tilted slightly down and to the left, like an animal indicating its intention to move in one direction.

  “No one is allowed in or out unless they’ve been searched,” the guard said for what must have been the third time, judging from the strains of annoyance in his voice. Yet Saffanah inched closer. The guard was trying to make it plain that she was not allowed inside because there was no way he was going to pat down a woman, and Saffanah was making it equally plain that she was heading into Aqmar’s apartment and that there was absolutely no way she would let a strange man touch her. She wouldn’t even speak to the man. A pat-down would be unthinkable.

  Ibrahim opened the door. The guard turned. And Saffanah darted into the apartment.

  “Hey!” the guard shouted.

  Ibrahim raised his hands. “She’s my daughter-in-law. She’s a bit eccentric.”

  The guard was furious. “I’m going to have to report this.”

  Ibrahim shut the door as the man was reaching for his cell phone. The guard stuck his foot in the door and kicked it open. He stood in the door frame, phone to his ear, glaring at Ibrahim and Saffanah. “She’d better not have a cell phone,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, she doesn’t believe in cell phones.”

  The guard moved his conversation into the hall and Ibrahim shut the door. The guard must have been living in the lining of Ubaid’s sphincter. Ibrahim couldn’t imagine a normal duty cop acting so rigidly about something like this. Then again, he had never been a prisoner before.

  Saffanah was standing in the corner of the room by the sliding glass door that led to the balcony.

  “What’s going on?” Ibrahim asked. He’d just spent a few hours moping about and saturating every cell in his body with enough caffeine and nicotine to make him radioactive. He wasn’t sure he had time for this little drama.

  “I’m sick of being in the apartment alone,” she said.

  She went to one corner of the sofa and sat. After a while, he took the other corner, put his feet on the coffee table, and lit another cigarette. When Constance ambled in a while later, she greeted them and looked like she might offer tea but then seemed to decide it was a bad idea. Ibrahim felt pathetic. Eventually Constance left them in silence, two brokenhearted people propped up on a couch.

  On closer inspection, the building wasn’t so glamorous. The visiting room was small and reeked of industrial detergent and floor wax. Carmelita Rizal was sitting on a sofa. Her young son—probably two or three years old—was settling back into sleep beside her, his head on her knees. Rizal had a model’s face—high cheekbones, full lips, and big almond-shaped eyes. She was Asian; Katya guessed Filipina. She wore a long black cloak and a headscarf. Her son was wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a white shirt. Something about the outfit suggested government issue. Katya found it depressing.

  Katya sat in a metal chair. On the coffee table between them was a women’s magazine and a small basket of faded plastic flowers.

  “Miss Rizal,” Katya said, “thank you for seeing me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  Rizal was making an effort to appear brave. “What’s this about?”

  “I’d like to ask you about a woman named Sabria Gampon.”

  Rizal tensed and gave her son’s shoulder a squeeze.

  “Do you know her?”

  “Hmm.” She nodded. “We used to work together.”

  “Where was this?”

  “We worked in the same house.”

  Katya shook her head. “Can you explain that a little?”

  Rizal gave a nervous exhalation. She began rocking her knees. “Well, we both came here thinking we’d been hired as housemaids. Our employer was a man named Mahmoud Halifi. He is actually a criminal who brings women to Saudi and then sells them as domestic workers to rich men who want sex. For some reason he decided to keep Sabria and me in his own house. I guess he liked us.” The disgust showed plainly on her face. “In a situation like that, you rely on each other. We became very close.”

  Sabria was beautiful as well, and Katya could imagine how a scumbag like Halifi would want to exploit the women’s stunning looks.

  “We lost touch for a while,” Rizal went on. “She disappeared one day. I never knew what happened to her. Halifi told me he’d sent her back to the Philippines. I didn’t believe him, but I had no way to find her. I began to think she really went back.” She gave a sad, self-deprecating laugh. “It turned out she had run away. Halifi moved to a different house. She said later that she came back to find me, but we’d already gone.”

  “How did you find her then?”

  “I ran away. I did what Sabria did. I went to Kandara. I was living under one of the bridges there, asking everyone about her, but nobody knew who she was. Then I got thrown in jail.”

  “And may I ask,” Katya said, “what are you here for?”

  “Stealing and assault,” she said plainly. “I couldn’t find a job. I couldn’t get a visa to leave the country, so I was stuck here. I had no family. All my family is in the Philippines. I was living on a sidewalk. We had to eat.” Her son stirred and she rubbed his head gently. “Someone caught me stealing, and I stabbed him.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Three years,” Rizal said without much bitterness. “This is my last month.”

  “How old is your son?”

  “Three. He was born just before I came here.”

  It was breaking Katya’s heart to think that the boy had only ever known the inside of a prison. “So how did you find Sabria?” she asked.

  “She found me. One day, she came here. Someone who had heard me talk about her at the bridge finally found her and told her about me. It was amazing. I was so happy to see her I cried the whole time.” She laughed at the memory. “Has something happened to her?”

  “She’s gone missing,” Katya said.

  Rizal nodded. The smile disappeared. “I knew something was wrong.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a month. That’s a pretty long time, even for her.”

  Katya explained about the accusations being leveled against Sabria by Undercover. “I met a woman at Chamelle Plaza who said that you might be able to explain some of the activity in her bank account. It might help exonerate her from these charges.”

  Rizal laughed, and then she became steely. “How do I know that that’s true? Maybe Sabria is in prison right now and you’re asking me to say something that’s going to be used against her.”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” Katya said. “The man she loves has just been arrested for adultery. If we can’t prove that Sabria isn’t a prostitute, then Ibrahim is going to be charged with being her pimp. If that happens, then the man your friend really loves is going to have his head cut off, and we’ll still be no closer to finding Sabria.”

  “He wasn’t her pimp,” Rizal said, sounding offended at the suggestion. “Halifi was a pimp. Why don’t they chop off his head?”

  “If you can tell me what Sabria was really doing, it would help to clear her name.”

  Rizal sat back, a look of dismay stealing across her face. “Maybe not.”

  “Okay, even if she was doing something illegal,” Katya said, “I bet it wasn’t worse than prostitution—at least not in the eyes of the law. And believe me, I will try to protect her in every way I can.”

  Rizal didn’t reply.

  “I know this might get her in trouble,” Katya went on, “but it may be the only way to find her. At the very least, it will help clear Ibrahim’s name, and I think that’s what Sabria would want.”

  Rizal pondered this for a few more minutes and then nodded. “All right,” she said. “There are w
omen at Kandara, see. Filipina girls, some Indonesian girls, who are like me. They’ve been raped. They’ve been beaten up. They’ve been treated so badly that sometimes they try to kill themselves, you know?”

  Katya nodded.

  “Every once in a while, somebody gets smart. They find out where this abuse is happening and they catch it on video. And then maybe they use the video to force the employer to let the woman go free—and pay for her to live by herself, so she doesn’t have to worry about money anymore.”

  “Are you saying that Sabria was blackmailing an employer?” Katya asked.

  “I’m not saying anything,” Rizal said. Her son began stirring. He rolled onto his back, and his head slid off her lap. “She was smart about money. And she cared about other people more than herself.”

  “And the woman at the mall,” Katya said, “she was getting money from this?”

  Rizal tilted her head. “I don’t know who that was. But yes, Sabria was meeting women at the mall, and they knew about this.”

  “Did Sabria keep the videos of the rapes?”

  Rizal narrowed her eyes at her. “There are backups,” she said. “In case something happened to her.”

  “I need to see the videos,” Katya said. “They may be able to tell us who kidnapped Sabria.”

  Rizal debated a moment longer, then said, “Do you have a pen? Write down this number.” Katya scrabbled in her bag for a pen and wrote the number on her hand. “That’s an IP address,” Rizal said. “The tapes are stored online. Here is the log-in code.” Katya scribbled more numbers. “Look at the site. You can see for yourself what horrible things these people have done.”

  Nayir had never spent so much time quietly dying anywhere. The fact that it was happening in the sitting room of Katya’s apartment only made it worse. It stirred all the memories of the last time he’d been there, when he’d waited for Katya’s father (a man he hadn’t met until then) so that he could ask for her hand in marriage. This new agony was no weaker. Fear was spilling over its barriers, heated by invisible toxins, preparing to contaminate everything.

  Finally, the door opened and Katya came in.

  “I’m wondering if you could give me another ride.” She shook her head helplessly. “My cousin is still out.”

  The freeway’s rhythm was soothing. She must have sensed that he was getting tired of being her chauffeur because she’d been squirming for the past fifteen minutes, chewing her fingernails and biting her lip. His more cynical friends had warned him about this. That getting married was conscripting yourself to servitude. You thought you were signing up for love and sex, but you were also signing up for giving rides, for waiting in the food courts of shopping malls, in the sitting rooms of doctors’ offices, in the lines at restaurants where they were not allowed to sit. You were signing up to spend a majority of your income on feeding, housing, clothing, and pleasing the woman you married. In other countries, the financial burden could sometimes be shared. In other countries, women could drive themselves places. But here, well, you did everything for your wife.

  “Nayir,” she said, her voice cracking a little, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  He surprised himself by pulling gracefully into the slow lane and onto the road’s shoulder. Only once the car had stopped did he feel the shaking deep in his spine. All the energy in his body vibrating from the sharp, sideways blows that lovers administer with the most delicate brutality.

  The car’s interior was dim, but he could see that she was upset, eyes filling with tears.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “There are all these things that I can’t tell you about because I’m afraid you’ll disapprove.”

  “Like what?”

  “Things at work.”

  “Tell me.”

  She was quiet for a very long time.

  It suddenly seemed ridiculous. They were going to end this because of her job? What could she possibly tell him? He felt he could forgive anything except the abrupt, inexplicable death of their plans.

  “Just tell me,” he said gently. “I’ll try to understand. Because you’re right. This won’t work if we can’t be honest with each other.”

  She nodded reluctantly and began to explain about her behavior at work: sneaking around, stealing files, surreptitiously copying photographs. She told him how difficult it was to go into the situation room when the men were meeting there but how she forced herself to be brave so she could get information. She described the way she had presented her theory about the Angel killer working in the city, and she told him about the cloister they’d set up for her in the situation room and about how that was gone now. He tried to focus, but his mind flashed with confusion: This was getting in the way of their marriage? This?

  Then she got to the part about Ibrahim Zahrani and his illicit lover and her attempts to help him find her.

  “I was going to tell you,” she said quickly, seeing the shocked expression on his face. He tried to reassemble it and found that he couldn’t. “But it’s dangerous information. And honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it myself. I know it’s wrong. It’s very wrong what he did. But this woman is missing and he needed a woman’s help to find her, and, well, we work together. So he turned to me.”

  Then she explained the rest—that he’d been charged for adultery and was now under a very strict house arrest in which he wasn’t even allowed to use a cell phone. That she’d gone to the prison to flush out Sabria’s secrets and that she’d discovered the blackmail there.

  He knew he was upset. It was upsetting. She had been hiding things from him and acting inappropriately. But the only thing he could really feel in that moment was a spurt of anger that everything they’d been trying to build, the whole delicate structure, might come crashing down because of the depravity of a total stranger. It bothered him to think of her keeping all of this hidden, but what bothered him more was the realization that she didn’t trust him. That she had been concealing her activities at work. That she feared his judgment.

  She was looking at him now.

  “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “I don’t like that you’re working in secret with an adulterer. But a woman is missing and you want to help her. That’s brave of you.”

  “Yes, I want to help,” she said. “I also want to be able to help.”

  They were quiet for a long time. She was saying: I want to be able to do these things—to talk to strangers and keep secrets with adulterers and dash into prisons. I don’t want you to think less of me for doing them. He didn’t know what to say.

  They were both in shock. There was more to be said, but it was getting to the hour where it would be inappropriate to show up unannounced, so he pulled back into the traffic.

  The smoke had become so heavy in the apartment that Saffanah’s eyes were turning red. Out of respect for her condition, Ibrahim had moved his self-destruction to the balcony.

  It had been decided that afternoon that Jamila’s family would be pressing charges. He was going to be tried for adultery crimes. He had been suspended from the police force pending an investigation into his activities. They had already cut off his balls, now they were gearing up to cut off his head. And for what? For his pheromones, his chemistry, his sense of smell. For the way his heart beat hard in his chest when Sabria walked into the room. All those years he had quietly pined for her, all those years he believed he would never stand a chance, that he’d been saddled with Jamila and there was no way out. Until the day before Sabria left Undercover, when he had raised the nerve to ask her, Do you want to take a walk? Just to the kiosk. Let’s get a Pepsi. And she had said yes.

  He wished Zaki would come home. No one knew if the boy’s absence was because of Saffanah or because he’d discovered what his father had done. Ibrahim suspected the former. He felt the need to explain himself, and somehow he wanted to explain to Zaki more than anyone else. Hamida was upstairs managing Jamila and her brother, but even she hadn’t been able to stop them f
rom calling in the lawyers.

  He couldn’t believe they were going to do it. They were actually going to take him to court. Surely Jamila was living in a fantasy believing that this would soothe her anger. She’d get over it eventually. But with her brother goading her, it was no longer just about her feelings. It was about her brother’s honor. And the kids? What would this do to them? He feared that in the end they would blame him. Now that the frozen block of their marriage had thawed, a gushing antagonism would run down the mountain, pure and cold and roaring with deadly force.

  He was still on the balcony when a Land Rover pulled up in front of his building, and Katya and her husband got out. He whistled and they both looked up. He motioned for them to stay there while he went back inside, found paper and wrote a hasty note, then tossed it down to them. She caught it and read it.

  Nayir wondered why she’d told him all of this now.

  Just before they’d pulled onto Ibrahim’s street, she’d said, “I may need you to convey this information about the blackmail to Ibrahim. Everyone at the station is saying that he’s being held in a room without access to a telephone. That sounds a little extreme to me, but I have no idea what’s really going on. I also don’t know how segregated his household is. I suspect it’s not, but you never know. It may be doubly awkward if an unescorted woman were to show up. And obviously I can’t tell his family what I know.” She looked at him uncertainly. “I may need your help.”

  Need. Nayir felt the weight of that word. She needed him. She was going to need him for quite a long time. And now, in the aftershock of the conversation in the car, he wasn’t sure he was up for it.

  The note Ibrahim had dropped from the balcony said Tell my brother I need to get out of the apartment for a while. He lives next door. So they’d gone to Omar and introduced themselves and explained that they were there on police business. They didn’t say what the business was, and Omar didn’t want to know. Katya simply showed him the note and said, “Your brother wants a break from the apartment, if possible.”