City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  Katya forced herself to watch the rest, the smugness of the woman’s face as she took Leila on a tour of her brand-new villa, showing off a teakwood bar, the living room’s enormous cathedral windows, and a kitchen that looked like it belonged in a restaurant—not to mention three lavish bedrooms with king-size beds, each room with a closetful of clothes. Two chihuahuas nipped at Leila’s heels as they walked. Katya had to give her some credit; Leila didn’t criticize or make her subject uncomfortable. She simply recorded everything, and only once they were back at the sitting room sofa, having tea, did Leila begin to ask the difficult questions.

  “Do you think of yourself as a prostitute?”

  Johara seemed prepared for this; her face remained cool. “No,” she replied somewhat mechanically. “This is not prostitution. Prostitutes can sleep with a man without a marriage contract, and that is not acceptable to me. I am a traditional woman.”

  “Do you ever think of yourself as a slave?” Leila asked. Katya was taken aback by the strong words.

  Johara looked shocked, and replied in an icy tone: “Of course not. When I am married to these men, I am their legitimate wife.”

  “But your marriage is only temporary,” Leila said, her voice neutral. “And you’ve said it yourself: you’ll never have children with these men. So you’re not really a traditional wife.”

  Johara looked as if she might stand up and leave, but then she turned from Leila and glanced sharply at the camera. “Turn that off,” she said.

  Leila didn’t move; the camera remained fixed on Johara’s face.

  “I said turn it off,” Johara snapped, reaching for the camera. There was a tussle and the screen went black.

  Katya sat staring at the screen. She couldn’t be sure who angered her more—Johara for being so smug, or Leila for going into the woman’s home, nodding and oohing at her lovely house and her cute little dogs, then confronting her with critical questions that would obviously offend her host.

  The next few sequences on the DVD were similar to the first. Leila was interviewing a prostitute in each one. Johara was apparently the only one who did summer marriages; the other prostitutes were more pedestrian than that. The location changed every time, and it was always the inside of somebody’s house. But in each instance, Leila managed to either alienate or upset her subject, and the interviews tended to become very tense.

  As Katya ran through the rest of the footage, the reality of the situation began to settle over her. Leila spent all her time invading the privacy of others. Whether or not her work took place in public, the presence of a video camera was seldom taken lightly. There were too many people who would feel that her camera was not just a nuisance but a dangerous assault. And she did this kind of work every day. Johara had nearly punched her camera, and there were other instances of minor assault. Most likely at least one of her subjects had felt that Leila deserved worse than a public beating. They had decided that she deserved to be physically punished in a brutal way. The potential pool of killers was looking very wide. It was an investigator’s worst nightmare: there was a very good chance that the killer was a stranger, one of the many Leila had encountered in the past year and a half.

  It was getting late, the office was emptying—Katya heard people walking down the corridors outside her door, talking in loud, end-of-the-day voices. She checked her watch. Ayman would be here in fifteen minutes. He was on the road already, but she could feel the prickling, electric sense of a revelation about to happen, and she wasn’t ready to go home. In the box beside the computer, the remaining DVDs were neatly queued. She had gone through only five and a half, and it had taken most of the afternoon. Unless she took some of them home, getting through the rest of them was going to take forever. And she hadn’t even looked at her other cases today. Slipping the next three DVDs casually into her purse, she locked the rest in her file cabinet and left the room.

  She met Majdi on the stairs. “Heading home?” he asked.

  “Yes, my ride is waiting.”

  “Lucky you,” he said. He looked exhausted. “We just picked up Leila’s cousin. He’s in interrogation right now, and apparently there’s more evidence to process. It looks like it’s going to be a long night.”

  “I’ll stay if you need me.”

  “Well… what about your ride?” he asked with concern.

  “I can stay,” she said.

  “No, it’s okay. I think we can do —”

  “I’m staying,” she said firmly, taking out her cell phone to call Ayman and turning back up the stairs. “Let me just put my purse away.” She looked back once to see Majdi’s look of gratitude and relief. “You’re welcome,” she said.

  He gave a smile. “Thank you.”

  Turning away, she felt a mixture of excitement and frustration. The reason he hadn’t expected her to stay was that she was a woman and that, in his mind, there was a husband at home waiting for her to cook his dinner and prepare his tea and pleasure him in the bedroom. It was her fault for lying about the imaginary husband. Still, she couldn’t help but feel sad. She and Majdi had been working so closely on Leila’s case that she had almost—almost—forgotten who she was supposed to be.

  23

  When Osama arrived at the interrogation room, he found Abdulrahman and Fuad standing outside the door. Both men looked upset.

  “I’m sure they won’t keep him,” Fuad was saying in a half whisper. “Just as long as he explains himself.”

  “The stupid boy,” Abdulrahman said loudly, looking ready to burst.

  Osama came upon them, and Abdulrahman turned with a start.

  “Salaam alaikum,” Osama greeted the men warily. After Fuad’s phone call, Osama had waited an hour, then gone with two of his most trusted men to Abdulrahman’s house, their only pretext an elaborate errand that no one but forensics was likely to comprehend. Ra’id must have seen their cars pull up in front of the house, because he’d attempted to escape through the backyard. They had caught him and promptly arrested him.

  They’d done a search of his room and found nothing, but the inspection of his car had been more fruitful: they’d found a small box of cassette tapes, the type that could be used in a video camera. Each one was labeled Leila Nawar. They’d also found a computer in the trunk. Forensics suspected that the computer was Leila’s, but according to Majdi, the hard drive had been wiped clean.

  “I understand the young man came back to your house on his own?” Osama asked, knowing that his involvement would get Fuad into trouble if Abdulrahman ever discovered that his assistant had called him.

  “He’s ready to talk,” Abdulrahman said. Osama disliked his tone. There was too much aggression in it.

  “Did he come to you?” Osama asked.

  “Yes,” Abdulrahman said. “He showed up this morning and explained himself. I told him he had to come to the police. He was a little nervous about it. I was about to convince him before your people showed up.”

  Fuad wore a look of careful neutrality.

  Inside the interrogation room sat a very forlorn-looking Ra’id, his head in his hands, his greasy hair hanging over his fingers. His shirt was rumpled, and there was a long cut on his forearm that looked fresh. On the table next to his elbow was an old brown box.

  When Osama came in, Ra’id quickly dropped his injured arm beneath the table and sat up.

  “What happened to your arm?” Osama asked.

  “Bumped it against the gate in the backyard,” he said.

  Osama set a folder on the table and opened the box, glancing at the cassette tapes.

  “Where did you get these?” he asked.

  “Leila’s bedroom,” the boy replied. His skin was gray, the bags under his eyes a terrible dark brown.

  “Are these her original cassettes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “She kept them in one of the spare rooms, in a hidden panel in a closet.”

  “And the computer that was in the trunk of you
r car—whose was that?”

  “Leila’s.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I took it from her room.”

  “Is this why you ran away from the lingerie store that day?”

  Ra’id nodded and sat forward, pressing his chest against the table as if expecting a whipping. Osama studied the boy. The family photographs they’d found in Leila’s room gave testimony to the fact that she and Ra’id were close.

  Osama pushed the folder aside and sat down. “Can I get you anything?”

  Ra’id looked surprised.

  “Coffee? Something to eat?”

  “No.” Ra’id blinked, frowning, but Osama could tell he’d made a dent.

  “All right,” Osama said. He reached for the tape player. “Osama Ibrahim interviewing Ra’id Nawar. First of all, Mr. Nawar, tell me why you ran away.”

  Ra’id glanced at the door again. “I knew where Leila’s video stuff was—her tapes, I mean, and all the stuff on her computer. I didn’t want you guys to find it.”

  “Why not?”

  This time his eyes met Osama’s. He gave a slightly derisive sniff and seemed to relax a little. “They’re listening to us, aren’t they?”

  “No,” Osama said.

  “What about that window?” Ra’id motioned to the one-way glass.

  “No one is in there, least of all your uncle or his assistant, I promise you.”

  Ra’id seemed to take forever to decide to trust him, but finally he said: “Leila’s stuff was… not exactly proper, you know what I mean?”

  “Tell me.”

  “She interviewed disgusting people. Prostitutes. Kleptomaniacs. I mean, I tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t listen. She went ahead with it, because she was so fucking stubborn.” This last word came out breathlessly, and he lowered his gaze.

  “So you thought if you could hide the tapes, you’d be protecting her reputation?”

  “I just didn’t want you guys to see it all. It’s going to give you this idea about Leila, make you think, I don’t know, maybe she deserved what she got —” He broke off with a choking sound.

  “We have other copies of the videos she made,” Osama said.

  “What? How?”

  “Do you know why she was interested in those women?”

  Ra’id paused. “She wanted to know how they got by,” he said. “Most of the women she interviewed supported themselves. Maybe their families had cut them off. Some of them didn’t have families. They didn’t want to do what they were doing, but they felt they had no other choices. Leila was interested.”

  “I see. How did she meet them?”

  “I’m not sure. She met one woman online…”

  “And the others?”

  “I don’t know.” Ra’id had begun to sweat.

  “I get the impression that you and Leila were close,” Osama said. “That she might have told you things.”

  The boy nodded.

  “So you, of all people, would have some idea of how she did her work. And I do understand that it was a serious pursuit for her.” Ra’id met his eyes. “Did she walk the streets looking for these women?”

  He shook his head uncertainly.

  “Perhaps she knew a man who introduced her to some of them?”

  Ra’id shook his head again, looking beleaguered. “Listen, I don’t know exactly. She didn’t tell me everything. She was the kind of person who would just get an idea in her head and follow it without stopping. She didn’t know any of these women, but once she decided to start interviewing prostitutes, she wasn’t going to stop until she’d found a dozen who’d be willing to talk on camera. That’s just how she was.”

  “Do you think she was trying to make a comment on our society?”

  Ra’id looked nervous. “Maybe, a little.”

  “There’s a lot to criticize here,” Osama said, “especially for a woman. It seems like Leila was committed to making a statement.”

  “Yeah, kind of.” Ra’id still looked nervous. “She didn’t like the way the women were treated, but she respected that they were taking care of themselves. She was just trying to show people that sometimes bad things happen here.”

  Osama noted the delicacy of expression. The idea that Leila cared about the women wasn’t exactly in keeping with the behavior Leila had apparently shown on the clips of her interviews with them. The preliminary report that Katya had put on his desk said that Leila seemed more interested in exposing the prostitutes’ flaws and hypocrisies, even humiliating them.

  “Leila wasn’t thinking of exposing these women, was she?” Osama asked.

  “No! She was committed to their privacy.”

  “But you have to admit, it would have been an ideal opportunity to create a sensation, for Leila to make a name for herself as a filmmaker.”

  “That’s not what she wanted! She was going to blur their faces so you couldn’t recognize them. And she hardly ever told anyone what she was doing.”

  Osama bristled at Ra’id’s innocence. He wanted to tell the boy that Leila the idealist might just have been Leila the sweet-talking girl who could convince her cousin that she was on a mission for a higher cause. He had the feeling Leila’s “higher cause” was fame or money.

  “Did Leila ever talk about what sort of hopes she had for this film project?” he asked.

  “Yeah, she was going to send it to film festivals in Syria and New York. She had them all picked out. And she had all the stuff already recorded. She just had to…” He stopped as if wounded by the reality that the project would never be finished. “She had to put it all together and make a documentary out of it. She just… she didn’t get the chance to do it.” He exhaled heavily, fighting tears.

  The boy was pitiful.

  “What about her video camera?” Osama asked. “The first one got destroyed when she was attacked at the Corniche, so she bought another one. How did she get the money for that?”

  “I gave it to her,” he said somewhat nervously.

  “That was very generous.”

  “She needed it, and she was going to pay me back someday.”

  Osama nodded. “How much did your uncle know about her activities?”

  “Nothing.” Ra’id snorted. “If he had…” Ra’id seemed to think better of finishing that thought.

  “But Abdulrahman let her go out,” Osama said.

  “No. He tried to keep her home, but she went out anyway. He said it was okay for her to film B-roll if she brought me along as a chaperone. She hated working for the news station. It was boring. Abdulrahman was at work all day, so he didn’t know what she was doing. Occasionally, he’d find out that she wasn’t home, and he’d call her cell phone. She’d always tell him she was at her friend Farooha’s house, and Farooha would cover for her.”

  “So he never knew what Leila was really doing? He never found out, not even once, that she was going around the city filming things other than B-roll?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “If he had found out, believe me, we would have known.”

  “He has a temper,” Osama offered.

  “Yeah,” Ra’id said. “But he would never have hurt her, even if he was angry. He would have screamed at her, that’s all.”

  Osama nodded. “According to witnesses, Leila and your uncle fought quite a bit.”

  “Well, yeah. He was always trying to force her to stay home, and she’d go out anyway. She was always asking for more money, and he would never give her any. He thought she was just going to go out and spend it on clothes. Obviously, she never told him that she needed it for her film projects.”

  A cool expression settled over Ra’id’s face. “He wasn’t her father. He acted like it sometimes, but he couldn’t control her.”

  Osama decided to change the focus. “Where were you on the morning she disappeared?”

  Ra’id sat up. “I was at the store all morning. Why?”

  “No one at the store seems a
ble to verify that you were actually there.”

  “I was there!” he insisted, voice rising. “I was there all day!”

  “Were you supposed to be with her—you know, being her ‘chaperone’?”

  “I didn’t go out with her every single time.”

  “Did your uncle know this?”

  “No.”

  “So wouldn’t your uncle have found it suspicious if you showed up at the store?”

  Ra’id was squirming. “Yeah, but he wasn’t going to be at the store that morning.”

  “Still, one of the staff members might have noticed and mentioned it to him. Fuad, for example.”

  Ra’id was chewing his lip. “Well, Fuad wasn’t there either.” He said this with a mild look of triumph that gave Osama the idea that he’d just stumbled on the answer.

  “But you would have known where Leila was going that morning,” Osama went on. “Was it to see someone in particular?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.”

  It was as if the conversation had hit a wall. Osama waited, watching. Ra’id sat staring at the box on the table.

  Osama sat back and made a show of reflecting. “You must have really cared about her. You gave her a lot of money. You supported what she did and kept her secrets. And you even risked becoming a murder suspect by stealing these tapes and the computer from the house to protect her reputation. You have definitely committed a crime by erasing her hard drive.” Ra’id struggled not to seem too panicked. “And yet these tapes may be the only evidence we have of who killed her.”

  The boy had the grace to look stricken.

  “So it raises the uncomfortable question,” Osama went on, sitting forward now, “of what your real motivation was for stealing those tapes.”

  Ra’id’s mouth hung open, and he sputtered, “I don’t know what you mean. I told you why I did it.”

  “It didn’t bother you, for example, that Leila was seeing an American man?”

  For just a moment, Ra’id’s eyes flickered with hostility. “Who? That Eric guy? She wasn’t seeing him. They were friends.”