City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  The tent was a canvas tarp with four poles; it formed a three-sided enclosure like the Bedouin tents he loved so well, and he was grateful to the Amirs for having thought to pack it. The open side of the tent had a dark blue screen that rolled down yet let in some air. It was sweltering, but it would have been worse without the screen.

  “No one’s coming,” she rasped, lifting her head.

  “They know I’m out here,” he said, sitting up at the sound of her voice. “They have the coordinates.” But as he said it, he felt the shame of lying. No one knew where he was, not even Samir. He at least ought to have called his uncle before leaving, but it had been too early in the morning, and by the time he’d thought it would be prudent—just as he’d reached Mabus’s house—he’d been out of cell phone range. The chances of anyone stumbling on them in this part of the desert were close to zero.

  He glanced at the sand outside the tent door. The ridges of their footprints were just beginning to move in the first stirring of wind. The fairy tales he’d heard as a child always began with the words kan ya ma kan—it was, and it was not. He’d come to associate those words with the desert. One moment a foot would break the sand and the next it would be gone, wiped away by an oblivious wind. Like his Rover, now sitting beneath three feet of sand. Like the camel, blackening in the sun. And like some part of himself that, two days ago, had thought prayer and propriety were antidote enough to what ailed the world.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “We’re in the desert,” he said.

  She shut her mouth and closed her eyes. Nayir did the same. He fancied he could hear something coming from the west, but after a moment he decided it was only his imagination.

  Outside, a noise.

  Nayir scrambled out of the tent. If it was a plane, it would already have gone past. He had one flare, and he didn’t want to waste it. He began systematically scanning the sky.

  Suddenly a Toyota Land Cruiser bounded over the dune in front of him. Nayir reached for the flare, his only weapon in case it was Mabus, but as the truck came closer he saw two uniformed officers in the front. They looked relieved, and one of them leaned out the window.

  “Salaam alaikum!” the man yelled. “Nayir Sharqi?”

  A few minutes later Nayir was lifting Miriam into the SUV.

  46

  Osama stared across the interrogation table at Apollo Mabus. The suspect held his hands at his temples in an aspect of prayer. He certainly wasn’t a Muslim, but that’s what it looked like. His eyes were shut and his mouth moved as if muttering to angels on his shoulders. Every now and then his head fell forward as if in submission.

  He didn’t seem so tough anymore. Fortunately, the police in Qaryat al-Faw had caught up with Mabus just before the sandstorm struck and just after he had unloaded two bodies from his trunk and left them lying in the desert. The police had actually spotted him driving away from the site. The tracks his truck left in the sand were enough to indicate that he was the only one who could have dumped the bodies there. When they’d arrested him, he’d claimed he had no idea what they were talking about, then that he’d gone out there only to find the bodies, because he’d received an anonymous phone call saying they were there. A forensics sweep of his trunk proved that he was lying.

  After the sandstorm, they had done a thorough search of his desert house as well. The storm hadn’t damaged the interior; it had only blown a truckload of sand into the garage. Osama hadn’t gone out there, but he had seen the photos of the sad little shed that stood behind the house, with one of the local forensics guys bent over the dirt floor. Mabus claimed he had no idea that Eric had been held there, but the hair and fibers they’d collected showed that he had.

  “It was an accident,” Mabus said softly.

  “An accident?” Osama responded. “You left Eric Walker in a shack in the middle of the Empty Quarter. You can’t call —”

  “I mean hitting him,” Mabus said. “It was an accident.”

  Osama was quiet. The autopsy had been unable to determine exactly when Walker had died, but Mabus didn’t know that. “Well, you see,” Osama said, bluffing, “on a normal day, you can hit a man on the head and he just needs a few days of rest to get over it. But when you hit him like that and then you take him to the desert, his blood volume goes up, the heat swells the body, and the blood vessels start to burst.”

  “He was dead when I took him out there.”

  Osama made a note.

  “I didn’t mean for him to die.”

  “And Jacob? Did you mean to kill him?”

  “That was self-defense. He was the one with the gun.”

  Mabus was right; the gun had belonged to Jacob. Osama looked hard at the man across the table. At his desert house they’d found two Swiss bank account statements and the deed to an apartment building in Jeddah under the name of Wahhab Nabih. Mabus had already confessed to using the alias. He had also revealed that he had a British mother and an Egyptian father. Apollo’s real name was Apollo Mabus Mansour, but he’d dropped his surname when his father had left twenty-five years ago, when Apollo was sixteen. The father had run off and taken a second wife, leaving his first wife with a large sum of money. She hadn’t used it, though. She’d died of cancer two years later, and the money had been left to Mabus. This had all come out in the preliminary interrogation. He’d also stated that he’d grown up in London, New York, and Jeddah, but that none of those places had ever felt like home. He preferred the desert.

  Again Mabus shut his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. Nayir had brought most of Mabus’s academic work from the desert house. Fortunately, he’d thought to drag it out of his Land Rover before leaving the site where the SUV had been buried. From a colleague of Mabus’s in London, Osama had learned that Mabus’s work was not fashionable in academic circles, and that these days most critical scholars were reluctant to publish his articles, fearing a backlash from Islamic sources. The colleague also said that Mabus was not religious. He described Apollo as an intellectual “crusader” whose research had pushed him to the fringes of the academic world. He’d lost his teaching post in Britain the year before, and there did seem to be zealotry in his ambition. He had devoted himself quietly for many years to a single goal: trying to show that the Muslim holy texts were not as pure as people believed.

  “Let’s talk about Leila,” Osama said.

  For the first time, Mabus met his eye. “I had nothing to do with that. That was all your people. Hell, that was why I fought with Eric in the first place.”

  Osama narrowed his eyes and listened.

  “Haven’t you figured out yet why they got to Leila?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because she was working with me. Because a Muslim woman shouldn’t touch what I’m doing. That’s why Leila was killed. They got to her.” He had a mad look in his eye now.

  “Who got to her?”

  “Who the fuck do you think? The religious freaks who run this country.”

  “Are you talking about someone in particular, Mr. Mabus?”

  Mabus looked at him as if he were a total idiot. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how these men think. Someone steps out of line, someone breaks their little rules, and they go for the jugular. That’s all. That’s their answer.”

  Osama cut him off. “Did anyone ever threaten you because of your work?”

  “They didn’t have to —”

  “Did anyone ever threaten Leila?”

  “I don’t know. Sure, she was threatened all the time!”

  “Because of your work?”

  “Probably!”

  “Do you have any proof—any proof at all—that anyone else even knew what you were doing?”

  “I didn’t need proof!” Mabus exploded. “Leila’s death was proof!”

  Osama felt sorry for the man. He was totally paranoid. It was true that his work was deeply blasphemous, and if some fiery cleric found out about it, he might have felt it his duty to silence Mabus. But wh
y target Leila? Just because she was a Muslim?

  He couldn’t bring himself to believe it. The whole thing seemed ludicrous. Yes, occasionally there was violence in the name of religion here, but in his experience, there was more violence in the name of everyday things: a broken wedding vow, a quiet theft. What was it with these foreigners? They could live here for years and still think only the worst of the place.

  Mabus had been alienated from his academic peers because his work did not please prominent British scholars and because it might upset Muslim scholars as well. At the same time, Mabus was an Arab man who seemed to feel more at home in the Saudi desert than in the cool libraries of a Western university. Yet he acted as if the Saudi establishment was out to get him. He holed up in the desert and conducted secretive research. He was a man without allies, and Osama pitied him.

  But for someone so reclusive, Mabus had been surprisingly bold in allowing Leila to film him, influenced, no doubt, by the hope that one day his work would be made public.

  “I warned Eric and Jacob,” Mabus said. “I warned them both that if they told anyone about my work, they’d be in danger. I guess I warned the wrong people, because the freaks went for Leila instead.”

  “Let’s go back a little bit,” Osama said. “How did you first meet Leila?”

  The sudden shift to a practical question took Mabus by surprise. He tried to make a casual gesture, but his hands were shaking. “I met her through Eric.”

  “And how did you meet Eric?”

  “Jacob introduced us. I’d known Jacob for years. I met Eric when he first came here; he needed an apartment and I own a building here in Jeddah, so I rented him a place.”

  “And you became friends with him?”

  “No. I didn’t see him at all until just about five weeks ago. Jacob brought him over. Eric’s wife had just left town, and they wanted to spend a week at my house in the desert.”

  “I see.” Osama glanced at his notes. “So the three of you planned a trip to the desert?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did Leila get involved?”

  “Eric wanted to bring her along. He had just met her. He described her as this young, passionate woman who wanted adventure and couldn’t seem to get enough of it in Jeddah. I said it was all right, so she came with him to the desert. That’s how we met.”

  “And how did the documentary idea come about?”

  Mabus sighed. “Eric was right—she was passionate. I’d only known her for a couple of hours before she started asking about my work. Most people don’t give a shit—except highly righteous idiots who get paranoid that I’m going to insult their religion. She wasn’t like that at all. She was damn smart and curious, and she wanted to know everything. She was fascinated, that was obvious. After our first conversation, she was already planning the documentary.”

  “And you agreed to it?”

  “Yes, I agreed to it. I was sick of being sidelined by conservatives and by academic cowards who are afraid to look at the truth. I decided it was time to take the whole thing in a different direction—to the public. Making a documentary was the perfect way to do it. And all those academic bastards? I figured they could go to hell. They’re just afraid of pissing off the Muslim world anyway. They live in fear, and you can’t find the truth when you live in fear.”

  “Is that why you live here?”

  “I don’t live here. I live in different places.”

  “Fine,” Osama said. “Then why do you come here, probably the one place your theories could get you into trouble?”

  It took Mabus a minute to gather his thoughts. “I come here for research. And to check on my properties. But I also come because I have to know—I have to prove to myself that I’m not afraid of this bullshit.…” He trailed off. Osama sensed that the real reason Mabus came back here would be forever out of his ken, and that even if he did comprehend it one day, he had too much pride to articulate it. It wasn’t a tough reason, whatever it was. It felt soft, like nostalgia for a mother’s caress.

  “So Leila started filming you in the desert,” Osama said.

  Mabus nodded firmly. “I wanted to do most of the filming there.”

  “Why?”

  “It was safer that way. Nobody was going to come nosing around.” He looked to Osama as if expecting he would finally see sense, that he would come to understand, through this simple pragmatic discussion, that Mabus’s view of the world was justified. Osama wanted to tell him that he might be able to claim insanity.

  “Was Jacob there that weekend?” Osama asked.

  “Yeah. Eric really wanted to get out to the Empty Quarter. I think Jacob just came because he was attracted to Leila and because he never says no to a trip to the desert.”

  “So Leila filmed you, and then what?”

  “She came back here, to Jeddah. We did some more filming the next weekend at my apartment. She took pictures of the codex.” He paused, swallowed hard. “She was supposed to put together a sample cut of the documentary, but she never got back to me. A week later, I called her. She said it was taking longer than expected but she’d have it for me soon. The next week she disappeared.”

  “How did you find out she had disappeared?”

  “Eric told me. He kept calling her cell but it wasn’t working, so he called her cousin. He told Eric she was missing. You can imagine I freaked out. Eric had no idea where she was. He was closer to her than I was, and he couldn’t find her. He seemed to think it was my fault, and gave me an earful on the phone.”

  “Why did he think it was your fault?”

  “Because he knew what I was doing, and I’d warned him it was dangerous. But you know what I think? He didn’t listen to my warning. He’d told somebody, and he was feeling guilty about it, so he went off on me—I mean, that night at his house, he got really angry, started accusing me of endangering his wife. But it was all to hide the fact that it was his fault for blabbing.”

  “So you got angry at him?”

  Mabus sat back and crossed his arms. “This is bullshit,” he said. “I’m not admitting to murder.”

  Osama tried a different tack. “Were Eric, Jacob, and Leila the only ones who knew about your work?”

  “Yeah, and whoever else Eric told.”

  “Did you suspect Jacob of revealing your secrets?”

  “No, Jacob wasn’t smart enough to get it, and he didn’t give a shit about the implications.”

  “And you trusted Leila,” Osama said.

  “Yes. Leila respected my work. She believed in what I was doing. I knew she would never tell anyone until she was ready—I mean, until the documentary was ready.”

  “But you have to admit that it’s possible she could have —”

  “No.” Mabus shook his head resolutely. “She would never have told anyone.”

  “Why did you trust Eric?” Osama asked. “His wife says he would never have supported anything that would denigrate Islam.”

  Mabus let out a sarcastic snort. “What does she know about anything?” he barked. “I’ll tell you this, I only knew Eric for a month, but I knew more about her husband than she did.”

  “Apparently, Eric was very sympathetic to Saudi culture, and to Islam,” Osama said. “He didn’t like anyone speaking ill of it. So tell me this, Mr. Mabus. What happened when this sympathetic man came with you to the desert, spent a weekend watching Leila film you while you explained what exactly your research was all about?”

  “He got disgusted, that’s what happened!” Mabus snarled. “I see where you’re going with this, but you’ve got it wrong. He didn’t threaten to expose me, he did expose me. And as I just said, that’s probably what set this whole horrible thing in motion.”

  “Why did you leave the country?”

  Mabus hesitated, still looking flushed. “I had planned that trip for a long time,” he said carefully. “I figured it was better if I left anyway. In case something was up—you know, they might come after me next.”

  Osama regard
ed him. “Yet you came back from New York a few days later and sat next to Miriam Walker on the plane.”

  Mabus looked angry again, his face reddening, his shoulders tighter. He lowered his head bullishly. “What’s your point?”

  “You slipped something into her purse.” Osama pulled the memory card out of the folder and held it up. Mabus didn’t say a word. “We know what’s on this card. You were bringing false copies of the Quran into the country illegally.”

  Mabus glowered at him. “I purchased some research materials that I’d been wanting to get my hands on for a long time. And they are not false copies of the Quran. They are authentic early copies—the earliest copies ever found—and just because it doesn’t agree with your perspective doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” His tone had all the juvenile defensiveness of a man who knew he was guilty but would never admit it.

  “And you bought these in New York?” Osama asked with just the right tone of disbelief.

  “That’s where the seller chose to do the transaction,” Mabus barked. “And it had nothing to do with Leila, okay? Nothing. It was something I’d been trying to get my hands on for a long time.”

  “You already had similar documents in your desert house.”

  “These were very different,” Mabus said, motioning to the memory card. “They’re from a totally different cache than the ones at the house. I was comparing the two sets. Like I keep telling you, this was for my research. It had nothing to do with Leila.”