by Zoë Ferraris
Nuha told him these things with a disgust kept carefully in check—for Osama’s sake—but she finished by saying how grateful she was that her own life was nowhere near as controlled, that her husband respected her for who she was. It would never have occurred to him to treat Nuha that way.
Osama had been vaguely annoyed that, in the face of Rafiq’s tragedy, Nuha was criticizing his marriage. On one hand, Rafiq’s behavior was normal. It was very like him to boss people around. And Osama always had the impression that Mona was a special case, one of those helpless girls who never quite became women. Rafiq, who had once been attracted to her, had grown annoyed over the years, and no doubt willingly filled the vacuum of her nonexistent willpower. And anyway, there were plenty of men who micromanaged their wives. It didn’t mean Rafiq was also a liar, a thief, an extortionist, and a thug.
Osama rationalized it this way for a while, until he realized that he couldn’t stop thinking about what Nuha had said. Finally, during a conversation about women, he found the opportunity to ask Rafiq, “Why are you always telling Mona what to do?”
Rafiq had given him a strange look that Osama hadn’t understood at the time, but that he was able to interpret now with frightening clarity. It said My wife tells you our secrets, and your wife tells us yours. “If you don’t keep an eye on your wife,” Rafiq had said in a pointed way, “she’ll betray you one way or another.”
Osama stared miserably at the glass of orange juice, hating that Rafiq had been right.
Katya was just leaving Farooha’s room when she heard footsteps in the hallway. As they passed outside the door, there was a thump on the wall, and a man’s voice said, “Stay in your room, you little freak. You’d better not come out until I’m gone.”
Katya glanced at Farooha.
“My brother Jamal,” Farooha muttered. “He must have just come in.” Katya was torn apart by the look on her face. She expected an expression of fury, but there was a wounded quality there, something much too raw and fresh. At the very least, Farooha’s brother should have worn her down over the years.
Katya swung open the door and went into the hall.
The man spun around with a vicious fury. “I said stay in your —” When he saw Katya, he snapped back. His face wore a look of horror of the fairy-tale kind, where a djinn slips into your house at night and replaces your ugly sister with a young princess. She might be a beauty, but then she casts a spell to switch your fingers and toes, and causes you to bleat like a sheep for the rest of your life.
He recovered quickly. “Cover your face, woman,” he snarled.
Katya recoiled. She would have given anything for an ID badge to flash in his skinny, pathetic face. Instead, she had Osama, who poked his head out of the majlis door, flashed his own badge, and called to Katya, “Officer Hijazi, when you’re finished, I’d like you to help me take care of this man.”
Katya nodded stiffly, watching with satisfaction as the man spun between them, trapped like a fox on a freeway between two oncoming trucks. Osama motioned him into the majlis with a threatening look, and the man went grudgingly.
Farooha was facing her computer, clicking idly on her mouse. “Is that all?” she said over her shoulder. “Because if you’re done, I have work to do.”
Katya wanted to say: You spend all your time in your room. Your parents want you locked up here, and your brother threatens you if you so much as open your bedroom door. Aren’t you longing to get the hell out? Instead, she wrote her cell phone number on a piece of paper from the notebook Farooha had given her and set it on the desk.
“Please call me if you think of anything that might be helpful.”
Farooha pinched the piece of paper between two fingers and looked over her shoulder at Katya. “Please call me when you find her killer.”
Back in the car, with Leila’s DVDs sitting heavily on her lap, Katya found herself suppressing the urge to thank Osama again for appearing in the hallway and without missing a beat making her his equal. The feeling was ridiculous, swelling in her throat, making her giddy. But the more she attempted to fold it away, the more another feeling ballooned in its place, a fierce kind of loyalty, warm and satisfying.
After dishing out a short but heavy dose of intimidation, Osama had learned that Farooha’s brother was an auto mechanic, that he lived down the street with his wife, who was expecting their second child, and that he thought his parents had made a huge mistake not giving his sister up for adoption when they had the chance.
“You fit our profile for the killer,” Osama had said with a serious face.
He’s married, Katya had to remind herself when her admiration for him threatened to burst out, and apparently so am I. She told him everything about the interview with Farooha, raising her biggest concern: that it was going to take forever to get through all the video footage Farooha had given them. She was also worried that these were backup discs.
“You didn’t find the originals at her house?” she asked.
“No,” Osama said. “And we still haven’t found her computer.”
“Farooha mentioned that Leila would have hidden them well.”
“We stripped her room, but maybe they’re in another part of the house,” he said. “I’ll make sure to send someone back there to broaden the search.”
When Osama asked about the girl, Katya admitted that Farooha, intelligent and charming, was also an introverted, self-conscious homebody who seemed possessive of Leila, her gregarious, edgy, courageous friend. The biggest revelation she had imparted was that Leila and her brother didn’t get along and that they were fighting about Leila’s work.
Osama looked troubled by this but didn’t interrupt.
“She also told me that Leila’s ex-husband was abusive,” Katya went on. She took out Farooha’s notebook to remind herself of the details. At the next stoplight Osama asked to see the notebook, so she handed it over. As she blathered on, her mind was secretly still reeling with the news that Eric Walker knew Leila. When she reached the point of having to explain who Walker was and how Leila knew him, Osama seemed to notice the skip in her voice, because he looked at her suddenly.
She blushed, and sighed. “There’s something you should know.”
He studied her coldly, as if expecting the worst. She had to force herself to continue.
“I know this probably wasn’t a good idea,” she said, “but I heard that Chief Riyadh was planning to cut back your staff.” He looked confused by this, and stung. She had the feeling that she’d learned about it before he had, and that she’d just made a very big mistake admitting it. “So I wanted to help. I learned from Majdi that Leila was working on two things before she died—the B-roll for the news station, and photographing a private art collection.”
Osama waited.
“Because Majdi was having trouble getting in touch with the art collector, I went with a friend of mine to the apartment, just to see if we could track him down. There was a woman there,” she said quickly, hoping he would catch the implication: It’s a good thing I went, because we wound up having to interview a woman. But Osama didn’t blink. “An American woman,” Katya went on. “It turns out the art collector was her landlord. She gave us another address for him.”
“This is the guy we think might be connected to the Quranic documents we found in Leila’s bedroom.”
“Right,” Katya said. “Mr. Nabih. Anyway, this American woman was helpful, but she also seemed nervous. Here’s where the story gets odd: we learned that her husband had disappeared. He’d been gone for three days, and she had no idea where he was. She seemed… scared.”
Katya, who had been unconsciously turning her engagement ring in circles, stopped when she noticed him staring at her hand.
“The husband’s name,” she said, “was Eric Walker.”
All the coldness left Osama’s face, replaced by a look of meaningful surprise. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t sure that it meant anything to
the investigation. This art collector was only their landlord.”
Osama nodded. “So Leila was probably lying to her brother. Maybe the landlord was an art collector, but it could have been a fabrication. She was actually going to meet with Eric Walker?”
“I think it’s possible,” Katya said. “Farooha said that Leila had met Eric the way she met everyone—by filming them. She met Eric at a mall, and he may have introduced her to his landlord for this photography job. In any case, I doubt she would have told her brother that she was seeing an American.”
“I’ll find out,” he said, and immediately fell into an uncomfortable silence.
“I’m sorry, I know it was taking a lot of liberties —” Katya said. Osama cut her off with an impatient wave of the hand, but she blurted: “I want you to know that I haven’t done anything else, it was just the one thing.”
When Osama turned to her, she saw relief on his face. “That’s all right,” he said. “You did the right thing telling me. But in future, be aware that every single detail is important, even the stuff that doesn’t seem like it at the time. Don’t ever keep secrets.”
She nodded. They were just pulling into the station lot, but instead of parking, he pulled up to the door. “Take those discs to Majdi. Or actually, start looking at them yourself. He’s working on a lot of things right now. But first, do you have this American woman’s address?”
She fished around in her purse until she found the slip of paper, which she handed to him.
“And what about the landlord’s address?”
“It’s in Al-Aziziya,” she said.
“All right. I’ll check that out.”
“You did very well,” he said, closing her notebook, which had been sitting on his lap. “Mind if I borrow this?”
“Go ahead,” she said. “I have another one in my desk.” She cringed at the presumption that he’d ever be taking her out on another interview.
Distractedly, Osama nodded.
Dhuhr prayers had just finished and the sky was a blinding white, draping the city in a blanket of nuclear heat. Osama was sitting in his car in the parking lot of his favorite Indian restaurant when his cell phone rang. It was Fuad, the assistant from the lingerie boutique. He sounded nervous, and it was difficult to hear what he was saying over the background noise of rushing cars. Osama had an image of him walking furtively down a busy street.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jamia, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Ra’id is back,” Fuad said, finally loudly enough.
“Leila’s cousin?”
“Yes.” Fuad launched into a plea. Osama could only make out every third word, but it sounded as if he was saying Don’t tell my boss.
“Of course not,” Osama said, but the line was dead.
22
The address Miriam Walker had given them for Mr. Nabih turned out to be useless. Katya spent half the afternoon on the computer before discovering that it was an address for a postal store in Abu Dhabi. When she finally reached it on the telephone, a voice told her they didn’t have a box registered to anyone named Nabih. She had reached a dead end.
She spent the rest of the day in front of her computer. She knew she ought to get to some of her other cases, but Leila’s DVDs were irresistible evidence. She slid the first one into the computer’s drive half expecting that the killer would appear on the screen with a gruesome confession, but the picture that came up was only the inside of a women’s department store.
The camera was focused on a circular clothing rack that held shirts and dresses. The rack seemed to be moving, but it was hard to tell because Leila had been filming the whole thing from inside another clothing rack across the aisle. At least that’s what it looked like; there was something obstructing the left side of the frame, like the sleeve of a woman’s shirt. Across the aisle, a woman was inspecting the items on the rack. Her burqa was up, and Katya could see her profile. She looked very young. All of a sudden, the woman screamed and backed away. A security guard came running, and at the same time a man bolted from the inside of the clothing rack. He took off to the left just as the security guard came from the right. And in a flash, Leila was after him, jerking out of her hiding space and galloping down the aisle. The screen went haywire for a moment, then it steadied, showing the man lying flat on his face on the carpet. Behind the camera, Leila’s voice whispered “Dammit!” Two women were standing over the perpetrator, who had apparently stumbled over their strollers. Leila had missed filming his fall, but the scene was still amusing. A moment later, a security guard came rushing up to arrest the Peeping Tom.
The disc was full of such scenes. In one, a religious policeman was chasing a woman down the street, yelling at her about the sinfulness of walking a dog in public. “They are devices of flirtation!” he shouted. “They are like jewelry, or makeup. The bedizenment of the time of ignorance!” Katya rolled her eyes. But the man managed to catch the woman. First he grabbed her arm, but she swung her purse at him, so he went straight for the heart of the matter: he seized her tiny dog by the neck and yanked it free of the leash. Then he ran off with it. The dog began barking. The woman screamed.
Katya told herself to start taking notes, but she couldn’t stop watching. She went through the whole disc, eating lunch at her desk and ignoring her cell phone. There were a few more professional-looking cuts, probably work Leila had done for the news station, filming old buildings and new construction projects and city beautification events like tree plantings with grade-school children. She skimmed through those. Leila had done a special report for a major media network in Dubai about Boy Scouts serving as guides during the hajj. But clearly her real interest lay in exposing the obscenities and clashes in her favorite city, and these took up most of the next two DVDs.
Every cut had a time and date stamp in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and so far they had all appeared in chronological order, starting about a year and a half ago. Farooha had said that Leila went out almost every day, and judging from the time stamps, she seemed to catch interesting things—things worth saving on disc—every third or fourth day.
The fourth DVD that Katya placed in the drive was different. Chronologically, it was out of sequence—there was a two-month gap between this and the previous one.
The first segment was titled Summer of Love. The minute it opened, a woman appeared on the screen. She was in a sunlit sitting room on a soft pink couch. Posters of Audrey Hepburn decorated the wall behind her. The woman was wearing a modish black skirt, stockings, high heels, and a short pink blazer that made her look Parisian. Her hair was short, black, and wavy, and her face, pretty in a plain sort of way, was covered with too much white makeup. Katya figured she was trying to look European, even altering the color of her skin.
A sign appeared at the bottom of the screen reading “Johara,” the girl’s pseudonym, and Almesyaf Zawaaj, summer marriage. Katya groaned. The “summer holiday marriage” was a disgusting arrangement. A man, usually a businessman, would marry a woman for the summer so he could take her as a traveling companion overseas—to Egypt or Europe or America. They would pass themselves off as man and wife. Once the vacation was over, the couple would return to Saudi and terminate the marriage.
Katya had seen want ads Bluetoothed to her cell phone from men looking for summer wives, and it was these more than anything that made her feel that the whole arrangement was dirty. The ads were almost all the same. Men were looking for women who could speak English well, who were pale skinned, slender, and sexy, and who came from good families. The pay was upwards of one hundred thousand riyals, sometimes even a new villa or a brand-new BMW. That part always made her laugh bitterly. Giving a woman a car! It was prostitution, plain and simple.
When the religious establishment got wind of this new trend (which was probably just an old trend that few had known about before), one noted cleric stepped forward to approve of the practice. He spelled it out: summer marriage was acceptable in Islam because it preven
ted men from falling into the sin of prostitution while they were spending so many months abroad without a woman. It was preferable for the man to take a Saudi woman along—at least she was Muslim and his wife. The sheikh pointed to another underlying concern: the fact that so many Saudi wives didn’t devote enough time to their husbands anymore—because they had found jobs outside the home—required men to look elsewhere to satisfy their needs. If a husband happened to be a businessman who traveled, well, there was nothing wrong with him taking a young woman along, since he couldn’t take his wife. She had to stay home and work.
Katya felt the first twinge of an emotion more violent than disgust. Not a single person she knew would approve of this kind of marriage. In fact, if the subject came up, most of her friends expressed outright fury, because to their minds it was disgusting. It cheapened both the sacred vow of marriage and Islam. It was just another way that the religious establishment used the Quran to support its own warped vision of the world.
Johara was facing the camera, her face masked with makeup and something stronger—defiance or pride. Leila was asking her to describe her latest summer marriage, and Johara was saying that she did it every year, and that she enjoyed having to work for only two months and then having the rest of the year to herself, spending her money as she liked.