Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  “Ibrahim asked me to come here today,” Taleb said, “to look for some files that he had left in his office. I couldn’t find them. I’ve been told by the chief of Homicide that Ibrahim’s office was cleaned out when he was arrested and that all of his files were put into boxes and sent down to Records for sorting. I went down to Records, and they were unable to give me any information about the files.”

  “Which files does he want?” Katya asked.

  “They were old case files from Undercover that all had some relation to Sabria Gampon. Ibrahim thinks it’s possible she may have known the other two men on the videotapes—or at least learned about them—from her work in Undercover. He was eager to look at the cases again.”

  “Has he talked to his brother about this?”

  “Yes, it was his brother who had sent him the files in the first place and who told him yesterday that the files had not yet been returned to Undercover.”

  “So they’re still here,” Katya said.

  “Apparently so.”

  “And why are you telling me this?”

  “Ibrahim said that if I was unable to track down the files in his office, I ought to come to you and explain the situation. It’s possible that the records were turned over to another inspector in the department by accident. Ibrahim said he’d put them in the same drawer as the files he was keeping on the serial-killer case. So perhaps those files are in someone’s office here in Homicide.”

  Before Katya could ask her next question, Taleb raised his hand and said, “What do you know about Ibrahim’s case so far?”

  “You mean the charges of adultery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very little,” she said. “Why?”

  Taleb sighed. “Things have taken a bad turn.” He proceeded to explain that, thanks to a court order, Ibrahim had been forced to clarify his relationship to Sabria. And he had done the only thing he could do in light of the evidence being presented against him: he had declared that he was officially, although secretly, married to her. He said they had signed a legal certificate called a misyar, a marriage document that was presigned by a sheikh. Inappropriate though it was, it was not illegal.

  Ibrahim had also stated in court that they had married quietly so his first wife wouldn’t find out. If that could be shown to be true, then the worst he’d face was a lawsuit from his in-laws. His wife would file for divorce because he had married someone else without telling her. (Although their own marriage contract, written twenty-odd years ago, had said nothing about whether or not he was required to notify her of his plans to take a second wife.) Unfortunately, Ibrahim was unable to procure the paperwork to prove that he was actually married to Sabria. She had had the paperwork in her purse when she went missing, he said, and he had no idea what had become of it.

  “But at that point,” Taleb said, “someone in Undercover pointed out that Sabria was already married to a man by the name of Halifi and that the two of them had never divorced. As you know, the law is pretty flexible about divorce—for example, sometimes it’s done privately and not made official—so this investigator found Halifi, who told them that yes, he was still married to Sabria as far as he knew. We have tried to discredit his statement on the grounds that the police found him high on heroin, but his testimony was taken by the court nonetheless.”

  “This is horrible,” Katya said.

  “Yes, and it gets worse. At my suggestion, Ibrahim then countered that Sabria had been forced into the marriage, and it had been abusive. After leaving, she hadn’t seen Halifi in five years. The judge seemed to think this didn’t matter. A marriage is a marriage. As long as they hadn’t got divorced, she was still Halifi’s wife, thus making Ibrahim an adulterer even if he was genuinely married to her.”

  “So let me guess,” Katya said, “everyone’s saying that Sabria lied to both of them.”

  “Exactly,” Taleb replied. “The judge assumed that Halifi and Ibrahim might be telling the truth and that Sabria lied to both of them. In other words, she married Ibrahim without telling him about Halifi. Now, I’ve let the situation stand, because it serves my client, but he’s absolutely panicked about it. He has been since the beginning. It took quite a bit of work to convince him that this was the only way he could save his own neck and that Sabria, who is missing, has a lot less to worry about than he does. But he’s more afraid than ever that the police are going to find her and charge her with adultery. No matter how the situation plays out, she’s going to be found guilty of one crime or another.”

  “And that’s why he wanted you to come to me,” Katya said. “We have to find her before the police do.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Taleb said. “He trusts you more than anyone else in the department. You’ve done a great deal to help find Sabria, and you seem to care what happens to her. He feels very strongly that one of the men from the videos had something to do with her disappearance. His brother has kept him updated on the situation with Ubaid, and at this point, the police aren’t ruling him out, but they’re not inclined to think that Ibrahim was the cause of her disappearance, since he was actively looking for her.”

  “I agree that we should look for those other men,” Katya said. “But what exactly does Ibrahim expect me to do? Go pry in the chief’s office?”

  Taleb pursed his lips. “I don’t know that he had any specific plan in mind, just the idea that when you want something, you often manage to get it.”

  Katya’s first decision was a spontaneous one: she took a cab back to Briman Women’s Prison. If anyone would know more about the men on the tape, it was Carmelita Rizal.

  Miss Rizal was once again kind enough to meet with her. They sat in the same meeting room, this time without Rizal’s son, who was playing in the nursery. Rizal was supposed to be in a ceramics class. Her tunic was spotted with paint, and she smelled like wet clay.

  When Katya explained Ibrahim’s legal decisions and the fact that the police were now searching for Sabria so that they could charge her with adultery, Rizal became tense.

  “Have you seen the videos yourself ?” Katya asked.

  Rizal shook her head. “No. Sabria asked me to keep the password to the site for exactly this kind of situation. But I never saw the footage. She wasn’t going to bring it into a prison, believe me!”

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about the people involved,” Katya said. “It’s really important that I find Sabria before the police do.”

  “I don’t see how I can help you,” Rizal replied.

  “Would you mind looking at the videos now, to see if you recognize anyone?”

  Rizal shuddered and shut her eyes.

  “It may be our only way to find Sabria,” Katya said.

  Reluctantly, Rizal held out her hand. Katya gave her the phone and waited, watching as Rizal’s face grew red, the muscles in her jaw tensing under the strain of clenched teeth. During the second segment, she blurted: “Oh my God, that’s Jessica!”

  “Jessica?”

  “Yes.” Rizal looked stunned. “Jessica Camerone. She was a friend of ours.”

  Katya took notes. “Was?”

  “Well, we lost track of her a while ago. I did, at least.”

  “Did Sabria not mention her in relation to this?”

  “No, not about this.”

  “And you’re sure it’s her?” Katya asked.

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “How did you know her?”

  “We all worked for the same employer. Halifi.”

  “Jessica was also abused by him?”

  Rizal nodded. “She disappeared before Sabria did. We were all so messed up back then. It was only later that Sabria found her. She’d been telling me all about Jessica’s new life. I didn’t know she was part of this.”

  “What about the men?” Katya said. “Do you recognize any of them?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “I need to find their names. Do you think Sabria kept that information somewhere?”
>
  Rizal shook her head. “I know she kept nothing that would tie her to the blackmail. She was extremely careful. She never wrote anything down. Everything she kept was on that website.”

  “There was only video on the site,” Katya said.

  “I know!” Rizal was beginning to sound stressed. “I wish I could do something, but I don’t know anything!”

  “All right,” Katya said firmly. “Maybe you don’t know their names, but I bet you know other things. Sabria must have talked about the men at some point. Even if she didn’t tell you the particulars, she might have mentioned some generalities. Try to relax and think back. Did she ever say how she found out about the men in the first place? For example, did she know them personally?”

  “No, no, she never met them. She only knew the women involved.”

  “And aside from Jessica, how did she meet the women?”

  “At Sitteen, like I said before.”

  “What did she tell you about them?”

  Rizal looked up at the ceiling with a pained expression. “She talked about the fact that they’d been raped. That they were being raped on a regular basis by their employers, and that’s why they’d run away to Sitteen.”

  “How did she get the videos from the women if they’d already run away?”

  “She found the employers and…” Rizal took a breath, shut her eyes and crossed herself. “I guess you could say she sent in an undercover operative.”

  Katya was stunned into a moment of silence. “You mean that she sent women back to these employers, and these women knew up front that they were going to be raped?”

  “No,” Rizal said. “She sent a new woman into a household where an employer was known to be a rapist. I know it’s horrible. They went in just to get the video footage.”

  “Okay,” Katya said. “So Jessica was one of those operatives.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Rizal said breathlessly. “But yes, I guess so.”

  “These women—what did they get out of it?”

  “Sabria paid them. She gave each of them one payment—a big chunk of money from the blackmail. I don’t know how much exactly. She also promised to help them get out of the country, and in most cases that was better than the money. But these women, I think they also did it to help other women. To punish the men. All of the money Sabria was making from the blackmail went to help other girls get out of the country.”

  “How?”

  “They bought forged documents. They bribed officials….”

  Katya nodded. “So Sabria knew where the men lived, and she knew how to get a housemaid into each of their homes. She must have had some connections to do that.”

  “I don’t know all the details,” Rizal said. “She worked with a company that placed housemaids, but I don’t know what it was called and I’m pretty sure the company didn’t have any idea what she was doing. I just know that Sabria could do any damn thing she set her mind to. She was like that.”

  “Do you remember any details about the men?”

  Rizal shook her head.

  “Think back. There must have been something. It doesn’t have to be specific; maybe just a vague memory…?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Rizal said in a shaky voice. “I remember something about a vacation home. One of the guys had a home in Egypt. I don’t know if he was the same one who also went hunting. One of them was big on hunting. He kept guns.”

  “Do you remember what he hunted?”

  “No. I think he went bird hunting.”

  “Okay.” Katya sat back. “This is helpful, and you know more than you think.”

  “It’s all vague,” Rizal said. “I don’t know the details. When she was telling me this, all I really cared about was getting out of here—I wasn’t really paying attention. And she didn’t tell me names. God, she didn’t even tell me about Jessica’s being involved. She probably thought it would upset me.”

  “This Jessica—” Katya said.

  “Houbara!” Rizal said suddenly. “That was the kind of bird that guy used to hunt.” Katya wrote this down. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more than that.”

  “That’s fine. This Jessica, where is she now?”

  Rizal let out a shaky breath and gave her directions to a house in al-Andalus. “The house has a big garden in the front, that’s how you can tell which one it is. Sabria talked about going there. I almost died when she told me. I promised myself that one of the first things I’m going to do when I get out of here is go to that house and find Jessica.” She handed Katya her phone and smiled a little. “She’s going to cry when she sees my son.”

  35

  Al-Saqr al-Jazeera was a falconry-supply store at the southern end of Falasteen Street. The large store glowed a sandy desert brown in the streetlights. It was Wednesday evening. Katya and Nayir sat talking in the Land Rover, gazing at the windowless building and waiting for isha’ prayer to end. A local mosque’s loudspeaker was just calling out the adhan, so it would be a good fifteen minutes before the store was allowed to reopen. They weren’t sure that it would. No sign was posted about the hours and it was possible it had closed for the weekend.

  Rise up for prayer. Rise up for salvation. God is great.

  They had already gone to the apartment of Sabria’s friend Jessica. If anyone could help them identify the men from the rape videos, it would be her. But she wasn’t home. They had waited for an hour and no one had come or gone from the apartment. Katya felt bad making Nayir wait longer.

  It had been his idea to come here. While sitting in the car, she had told him about the houbara bustard. She knew it was illegal to hunt the birds, but according to Rizal, one of their suspects had been doing just that. Nayir said the falconry-supply store might be able to help them track down a poacher.

  He pointed out that it was still quite common among a certain well-to-do crowd to hunt bustard the old-fashioned way: with a falcon. It was the prey of choice for any falconer, and although the bustard population had been decimated by overhunting, he knew of wealthy sheikhs and businessmen who imported bustards to be released on private hunting grounds for the purpose of practicing traditional falconry. It was not technically illegal, since they imported the quarry themselves from Pakistan and disposed of it on private property. The royal family, who hunted their own bustards in Pakistan on holiday every year, certainly weren’t going to punish those few privileged citizens who were practicing one of the country’s most ancient traditions. In their view, falconry was a revered, almost holy activity whose extinction would be as much a disaster as that of the bustard’s.

  Katya suspected that the men they were looking for were wealthy. They wouldn’t have been worth blackmailing if they weren’t. She had brought still shots of the two unidentified men from the videos, hoping to show them to Jessica. But perhaps Nayir was right and someone at the local falconry store would recognize them.

  “They even have their own passports,” Nayir was saying.

  “Falcons?”

  “Yes. Some of them are worth more than half a million riyals. Their owners travel with them and want them to be safe.”

  “That’s crazy. Don’t all those princes have their own jets? It’s not like they’re sending their birds through customs.”

  “I suppose some of them do.” Nayir’s eyes were gleaming with an amusement she rarely saw, and she was struck again with the jealous thought that the things that really pleased him were all part of a man’s world.

  “In fact, a good friend of mine makes monthly trips to Abu Dhabi,” he went on. “They have the best falcon hospital in the world there, and even a four-star hotel for the birds.”

  She let out a snort. “Well, why hunt bustard when you can have caviar and champagne?”

  “Bustard flesh is considered an extraordinary aphrodisiac. Men have hunted it for that explicit purpose for six thousand years.”

  The jealousy was shape-shifting into a kind of yearning. She couldn’t believe how casually he’d used the word aphrodisiac
and she imagined that in conversation with men, Nayir became a very different person. She wished she could see him totally at ease more often.

  “Don’t you think they hunted the bustard for so long because it is one of the only birds that can survive in the desert?” she asked. “It’s not like they have a hundred birds to choose from.”

  He smiled. “Well,” he said slowly, “my personal feeling is that the bustard is mostly prized for its behavior.”

  “What is that?”

  “It has an arsenal of keen self-defense maneuvers.”

  “Such as?”

  “When it sees the falcon coming, the first thing it does is spread its wings and raise its tail. It’s a pretty big bird—probably three times as big as a falcon—and with its wings out, it’s even more intimidating. If the falcon still comes at it, the bustard takes off and flies straight into the sun, so the falcon gets blinded. If that still doesn’t work, the bustard ejects the contents of its intestines, which is an immediate deterrent.”

  Katya smiled. “So the hunters like watching the spectacle, then?”

  “Yes; in fact, they’ll always give the bustard a head start. It’s more interesting that way.”

  “Have you done it before?”

  “Yes, I’ve been hunting.” The amusement left his face, and for the first time he seemed sad. “It’s a beautiful thing, and too bad we can’t do it the way it’s supposed to be done anymore.”

  A car pulled into the parking spot beside them and two men got out. One of them opened the store. The other was carrying a hooded falcon in a cage. They noticed Nayir and greeted him. Both men spared a quick glance for Katya.

  The store owner was a man in his forties whom Nayir did not introduce to Katya. He looked Asian, perhaps Pakistani. He was too gruff for formalities. “Come in,” he said, “we’ve got to get this bird a new feather.”

  The bird was hooded and calm as he was carried into the store. Katya followed Nayir inside.