City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  This was met by a tense silence.

  “Personally,” Majdi said, “I don’t think anyone should have a problem with it. There have obviously been variations of the holy book over the centuries, or ‘Uthmaan wouldn’t have had to burn anything in the first place. And if the Quran was written down in error, then it’s human error.”

  “The Quran says Allah corrects His errors,” Nayir replied and quoted: “And for whatever verse We abrogate and cast into oblivion, We bring a better or the like of it; knowest thou not that Allah is powerful over everything?”

  “Right,” Majdi said. He looked as if he were making an effort not to roll his eyes. “But as a person who cares about the Quran, shouldn’t you be curious to know which version is correct? Wouldn’t you want to know better what Allah really said?”

  “This is what Allah said,” Nayir replied, touching the printed Quran.

  Katya was quick to intervene. “But Majdi, just because the document is old doesn’t mean it’s not full of errors. What you’re saying raises the possibility that the whole text is full of human error. But then how can you know which parts of it are authentic?”

  “Exactly,” Majdi replied, “and don’t forget that the Quran was originally written in Aramaic, so it was translated on top of everything else.”

  Katya bit her lip, looking worried.

  “Actually, I don’t think this should matter so much,” Majdi went on, seemingly immune to the tension around him. “What’s really important about the Quran is already there, isn’t it? Love Allah, love your neighbor. And the idea that there’s only one way to read it reduces the whole book to something flat. It’s not dynamic anymore. It can’t keep up with the changes in humanity. It just becomes an ornament.”

  Nayir stared uncomprehendingly at him. He almost couldn’t believe what the young man had said. Arguing that the Quran was some sort of human project was insulting enough, but going on to say that one of the Quran’s finest aspects—it being mubeen, its purity, the fact that it hadn’t been altered since its inception—was actually a detriment seemed over the top.

  “It all comes down to this,” Katya intervened. “We don’t really know anything about these documents. They could have been falsified. Until we find out who their owner is, and what they were doing in Leila’s bedroom, we should avoid speculation.”

  21

  It was too early in the morning for a stern conversation. Osama tried not to squirm. Sitting across from Chief Inspector Hassan Riyadh was the career equivalent of being beaten by an ‘iqal; it would leave marks, but it wouldn’t necessarily deform you. Riyadh was a master of courtroom silences that would alternate, awkwardly, with a false paternalism. He was a man with seven children and two wives but seemingly no comprehension of how to handle people. Osama had visited him at home during past Ramadans, and the man had been just as awkward in his own house. On a normal day, Osama could keep a cool façade in the face of whatever beating he was about to take, but today he felt weak.

  He blamed this on the fact that he’d slept for only four hours on the unforgiving rug of his sitting room floor. When he’d arrived home last night, Nuha had met him at the door with a terrible expression of fear and apology on her face. Obviously she’d found her birth control pills lying scattered on the kitchen table. He could still see it now, still feel wounded by the tears welling in her eyes and the image of himself turning away. Seeing Abu-Haitham come in the door behind him, Nuha had fled to the women’s sitting room, which is just what Osama had intended by inviting the most devout man in the department over for dinner. It had ensured that Nuha would not have a chance to speak to her husband all night. Of course her mother had come in to bring dinner and to shoot him nasty looks, but otherwise he’d managed to avoid the whole family.

  He and Abu-Haitham had stayed up until two in the morning making a futile and often confusing attempt to profile the Nawar killer. He had woken up this morning on the floor of the men’s sitting room. The call to prayer was ringing through the neighborhood’s loudspeakers. Abu-Haitham was asleep on the sofa above him.

  Even though it was the weekend, Chief Riyadh had called him in anyway. Osama dreaded the meeting, but he dreaded staying at home even more. Across the desk, Chief Riyadh sucked on his lower lip and regarded Osama coolly. They’d been discussing the Nawar case, the chief demanding to know why they hadn’t found the victim’s cousin or ex-husband yet. Osama reassured him that it was still early in the investigation and that they were working on a number of promising leads, but that it was going to take some time. Now the chief was glowering at him.

  “I’m cutting your support staff in half,” he said, forestalling Osama’s protest by soldiering on. “You don’t need this many men if you’ve only got these thin leads you’ve mentioned, so you’re going to have to make do.”

  Osama heard in this a familiar criticism—that he had been foolish enough to trust his partner Rafiq, and that he might even have been in on all the dirty dealing himself. It galled him that Rafiq had been scapegoated when so many other officers were corrupt. It was doubly annoying that Riyadh was now using Osama’s former partnership with Rafiq to keep him under his thumb.

  “All right,” he said. “Then I want to keep at least one woman.”

  “You can have access to one, but I’m not handing any of them over permanently,” Riyadh said. “We’ve got precious few of them; they get prioritized, too. Who were you working with?”

  “Faiza Shanbari,” he said.

  “You can’t have her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was let go this morning,” Riyadh said, emotionless. Osama managed not to give a visible reaction, but his mind was racing. Faiza had been fired? She couldn’t have done anything to merit that.

  “Turns out she wasn’t really married,” the chief said. “One of the detectives in the department met a cousin of hers at a friend’s house, and he put the matter straight.”

  Osama blinked, trying to believe it. “Her cousin?” he said. “What did Faiza say?”

  “She admitted that she’d lied.”

  Osama’s heart swooped. He finished the meeting as quickly as he could and left the chief’s office. The building was air-conditioned, and he was grateful for that, but his blood was still pumping as he made his way to the forensics lab. He wasn’t sure why he was going there, just that he needed to avoid his desk, the horrible emptiness of his office, as much as he needed to avoid the squad room with the crowding and loud laughter and telephones jangling. As he walked, he felt the flickers of grief give way to anger—at Riyadh for firing Faiza for such a small, stupid lie, at Faiza for being stupid and lying in the first place, and then for being stupid again and admitting the truth to Riyadh. And most of all anger at Nuha.

  Majdi was in the lab with a woman. When she turned, he saw that it was one of their newer hires, Katya, who had come to his attention recently for discovering the Bluetooth in Leila Nawar’s burqa. He was impressed that she was working on a weekend. He stood outside the glass-walled office for a moment, not in the mood to face a stranger right now. But when she saw him she didn’t lower her burqa, and he figured it was foolish to keep standing there.

  “Good morning,” Majdi said, getting up from his stool with a downcast expression that indicated he would have few new revelations to impart. Osama greeted them both.

  “Glad you’re in today,” Osama said. He turned to Katya: “Congratulations on the Bluetooth discovery.”

  “Thank you.” She looked pleased and a little surprised.

  “I just wanted to check on things,” he said to Majdi, realizing from the looks on their faces that his tension was showing. “Any more news on the Nawar case?”

  “Well,” Majdi said, “the victim’s blood test came back negative for drugs. It doesn’t really change Adara’s report, though. She still thinks that the victim was killed before she was dumped in the ocean and that she died from a broken neck. Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at the ocean current reports from the
coast guard, and it’s going to be impossible to figure out where the body was dumped. The problem is, we don’t know the victim’s time of death, and the currents vary so much on this part of the shore that we really do need to narrow it down. I’ve put that aside for now.”

  “What about the documents we found in the victim’s dresser?” Osama asked.

  Majdi motioned to a computer on a corner desk. “We had a specialist in yesterday afternoon, a friend of Katya’s named Nayir Sharqi. He noticed a few errors in the text that made him think that these documents were possibly early copies of the Quran that had been written down incorrectly, in which case they should have been burned. Apparently, early versions with mistakes in them were also buried, so I’m thinking it’s possible that if these documents are genuinely antique, they could be from one of those poorly copied Qurans that were buried instead of burned. We also had an archaeologist in this morning. He said it would be difficult to determine just how old the documents really are without seeing them. As you know, all we have are the photographs. Preliminarily, however, he thought there was a good chance they were authentic texts from early Islam. But none of this explains what the documents were doing taped under Leila’s dresser drawer.”

  Osama nodded.

  “So I switched tactics,” Majdi said, “and decided to scan them for fingerprints.”

  “Did you find anything?” Katya asked.

  Osama, who had opened his mouth to ask the very same question, snapped it shut.

  “Only the victim’s prints,” Majdi told her glumly. “But I think I may have a partial print that isn’t hers. I’m running it right now.”

  Osama watched them converse, knowing he ought to add something but feeling unable to rouse the spirit.

  Majdi sat down at the computer and then, on second thought, turned back to Osama. “Katya has something. Maybe.”

  She looked embarrassed. “Majdi gave me the discs of Leila’s work to look over. At the very end of one, there was a segment with a friend of hers. At least I think she was a friend.” Katya took a small piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to Osama. “That’s the girl’s name and address.”

  Osama received it with some embarrassment. “Yes,” he said. “Majdi told me about this. I’m sorry I haven’t followed up on it yet.”

  “Well, this girl’s face was showing on the film,” Katya said nonchalantly. “And I double-checked it with the ID photo, so I’m sure it’s her.”

  Osama nodded and tucked the paper in his shirt pocket. “Good work. I’ll check it out.”

  Katya nodded.

  Majdi said over his shoulder, “Did you hear what happened to Faiza?”

  “Yes,” Osama said.

  Majdi frowned, clearly disgruntled by the news. “That new woman they hired last month only works on Wednesday and Thursdays. I think Maddawi may come on Monday.” Osama knew the women’s schedules, for the most part. He had the feeling that Majdi was attempting to drop a hint—not to him, but to Katya. Osama glanced at her and saw that she was squeezing her hands together.

  “I’ll go look for someone,” Osama said. He was preparing to leave when Katya blurted, “If you can’t find anyone, I could go with you.”

  Osama stopped. Angry as he was at everything else, he made an effort not to sound too harsh. He didn’t want to crush her. “I’m afraid we really need someone who has experience interviewing people.”

  Katya kept her eyes on the tabletop, and he saw a slight blush creep its way up her cheeks. In an instant he loathed himself.

  “I have experience,” she said. Her voice was calm and even. “I helped solve a murder case a while ago.”

  It was a good thing she kept her eyes on the table. He didn’t want to see her face when he said no again. But as if she knew his thoughts, she looked up at him. “I know a lot about this case. I saw the body, I’ve watched two whole discs of the victim’s work, and I’ve gone over all the evidence. I might be able to help.”

  He got the message: I might know more about this case than you. It should have ticked him off but for some reason it completely deflated his anger.

  “And I’m pretty sure Maddawi won’t come in until Tuesday,” she said.

  He recognized the first flicker of rebelliousness in himself, and very quickly it blossomed into an outright determination. If the department wouldn’t give him Faiza, then he’d do what he damn well pleased.

  “All right,” he said to Katya, “come on.”

  “Now?”

  “Too early for you?”

  Her face broke into a smile, and she followed him out the door.

  With some effort, Katya calmed her breathing. After months of trying so desperately to prove herself, she had finally been given an opportunity. It wasn’t hard effort and determination that had brought her here, it was a lucky break, but she’d take whatever she could get.

  At first, she had attempted to get into the backseat, but Osama had motioned her into the front, pointing out that, even though it wasn’t a patrol car, he had grown accustomed to a world in which only criminals sat in the back. She knew that the other women who went out on these interviews sat in the backseat—she’d seen them getting out of the cars in the parking garage—but now that she thought about it, she’d never seen them with Osama.

  She kept her burqa up because she felt that he could handle it and because she didn’t want to put it down. She liked being out in the world and being able to see things. More discomfiting was the engagement ring on her finger. It seemed to loom large in her peripheral vision, an invitation to an unpleasant conversation.

  She glanced at Osama. He was sunk in his thoughts. The women in the lab discussed him with such giggly, unabashed infatuation that it had provoked in Katya a perverse dislike of him. But now, feeling more generous, she could admit that he was a well-built, well-groomed man, unselfconscious, a bit reserved but not arrogant. He had soulful brown eyes, the kind that teenage girls swoon for, but Katya suspected that he would find such reactions annoying. There was a small scar on his temple that he made no effort to hide. He kept his hair short, his cheeks shaven but slightly shadowed, and he didn’t wear a headscarf. His look was that of a typical professional, slightly on the Western side—she couldn’t picture him in a white robe—and she guessed that he wasn’t religious at all but rather the kind of man who didn’t pray except during Ramadan, and who thought that piety and devotion were slightly backward concepts, quaint, dangerous in a certain kind of person, but ultimately irrelevant.

  The silence in the car, although broken now and then by a crackle from the radio, was beginning to make her anxious. She knew she shouldn’t say anything. He might think she was nervous and change his mind. And who knew how he would interpret an effort at conversation? He didn’t seem like the sort who would perceive communication from a woman as an act of flirtation, but you never could tell. You didn’t have to be pious to have opinions about how women should act. She decided to play it safe and keep her mouth shut, her eyes on the window, and her hands folded to the side where he wouldn’t see them.

  “Did you get anything else from the DVDs?” he asked.

  She felt a small explosion of relief. “No. Most of it was B-roll, probably for the news station she worked for.”

  He nodded and fell silent. She glanced in his direction and saw that, despite his cold silence, there was a sadness in his eyes. She had the urge to tell him what she’d discovered with Nayir the previous day, but she refused to let her excitement get the better of her. Now was definitely not the time. Not only would Nayir be angry if he ever found out, but in his current mood, Osama might decide that it was presumptuous of her, perhaps even harmful to the investigation. She had, after all, been doing his job without his permission.

  The neighborhood was north of the city. It was a boxy place, newly built and austere, an ever-expanding grid lined with look-alike homes. Each house was white stucco, two stories high, with a garage in front and wood-screened windows. Some of the neighbors displa
yed potted lemon trees by their doors or an arbor of jasmine struggling in the sun, but otherwise the street was unadorned.

  They parked in the driveway and quickly determined that there were separate entrances. A small sign indicated that the women’s entrance was around the side.

  “Stay with me,” Osama said, a sudden gruffness in his voice that made Katya think he was annoyed by the two entrances.

  A woman answered the door, keeping the chain latched. She wore a burqa, and all they could see was one eye.

  “Police,” Osama said, showing her his badge. “We need to speak to Farooha Abdel Ali.”

  “About what?” the woman asked.

  “A friend of hers is missing,” Osama said carefully. “We’d like to ask her some questions.” He stepped aside so that the woman could see Katya, and when she did, that single eye went wide. “I’ve brought a female officer along,” Osama said, “to speak with Miss Abdel Ali, if we could.”

  The woman gave Katya an up and down, taking in her newish abaaya and hijab, the plain black shoes, and, lastly, Katya’s face, which seemed to put the woman at ease somewhat, because she opened the door and said “Ahlan Wa’sahlan” and then, out of modesty, made a race for the interior of the house, motioning them into the men’s sitting room with a wave of the arm. “Please make yourselves at home,” she said. “That’s the majlis, and the women’s sitting room is over there.” She waved to the opposite side of the hall before disappearing through a doorway.

  “Stay with me,” Osama said.

  Katya followed him into the sitting room and glanced around. The place was clean and elegantly furnished with a pair of ivory sofas and plush white carpets overlaid with brilliant red and orange rugs. There was a massive TV, an equally pretentious stereo system, and an entire shelf of CDs. Osama went straight to the shelf to read the spines of the CDs.

  A moment later, there was a tap on the door, and Katya went to answer it. The woman was standing in the hallway, her face still covered.