City of Veils (12 page)

Smile, you’re on camera!

Katya stood up.
Pretend you’re a man on the street.
She walked the length of the room. Looked at her cell phone.
You’ve just received a cryptic message from a stranger. What do you do?
Anyone, even a woman, would look around and wonder who sent the message. And what would they see? Perhaps a woman with a camera. That would enable the receiver to pinpoint who was sending the message. Then what? Most people would be upset to see that they were being filmed unaware. They might try to duck away; women would cover their faces. Only the intrepid man would respond. How?

Katya’s cell phone was relatively new, but she managed to figure out how to reply to the message. She wrote back
Show me your face
.

And like magic, another message came. Katya looked around the room. She hadn’t touched the burqa. She opened the message and let out a yelp. It was a woman’s face, a beautiful one, too. She had a long, fine nose and a pair of dark brown eyes framed by thick lashes. There was something both geeky and seductive in her expression. In the center of her forehead was a small brown bump, a birthmark most likely, but it only made her face more endearing.

The door opened and a woman came in. She introduced herself only as Um-Kareem, the Syrian facial reconstruction analyst Adara had mentioned. Katya welcomed her and slipped the cell phone back into her purse.

The woman didn’t take off her iron curtain of a burqa. It wasn’t exactly unusual; women had come into the lab before and been reluctant to take off their face coverings for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that there were men in the building. But for some reason, Um-Kareem’s burqa suddenly struck Katya as the height of pomposity.
Dear viewer,
it said,
I can read a face from a shapeless blob, but you cannot
. She handed Katya the sketch, rendered in pencil and ink on a plain sheet of art paper.

The face was touchingly pretty. Katya could see a strong resemblance to the Bluetooth picture, and her heart gave a thump. She looked up at Um-Kareem. “Beautiful.”

“Hmmmf,” Um-Kareem said. “I didn’t
make
her that way, if that’s what you’re trying to suggest. My work is based on a computerized skeletal analysis and tissue-depth samples. You do realize that this department has spent lavishly on your machines, and you have some of the finest computer modeling software in the world. Unfortunately, I am one of the few people who know how to use it.” She let this comment linger so that Katya would have time to feel pummeled by its subtext:
How can you possibly be raising the standards for women in this department when you don’t even know how to use your own computers?
Or perhaps she blamed Katya for the insufficient education of women in general. “The facial interpretation,” she went on, “is derived from a number of understood variables regarding the facial structure of any given person within a certain age and ethnicity.”

Katya was in a devilish mood, so she decided to toy with her. “Which ethnicity was she?”

“If I had to be specific,” the woman intoned grandly, “I’d say she was a Bedouin.”

“That’s pretty specific.”

“Of course, generally I’d say she’s from the greater Arabian peninsula.”

“How can you —?”

“Supraorbitally, there’s an excess of tissue between the nasion and glabella in a pattern consistent with certain Bedouin tribes.” Um-Kareem pointed to the picture. “Personally, I’ve theorized that it developed as a reaction to the brightness of the sun. All that squinting,
generations
of squinting, the brow furrows eventually with a certain degree of permanence.” Katya imagined that Um-Kareem’s face was very sleek. She would never have tolerated a glabellar anomaly. Only camels had humps. “Based on the underlying tissue, you understand,” the woman said, “I was able to reconstruct this fold.”

“Yes, I understand.” Katya saw that she had drawn a protrusion above the woman’s forehead that probably resembled, from the side, the profile of a chimpanzee. Katya hated to tell her that the protrusion was exaggerated, that Eve was in fact quite lovely.

“What’s this spot here?” She had also drawn a tiny knob in the center of the woman’s forehead, slightly above the eyebrows.

An ever so slight shifting in the burqa, right where the cheekbone would have been, revealed that Um-Kareem smiled with one side of her face. “That, my friend, is a
zabiba
.” A “raisin,” a bump on the forehead that formed over a lifetime of prayer. Katya knew people who wore them proudly. She was grudgingly impressed that, despite Um-Kareem’s biases against the Bedouin forehead, she had still managed to reconstruct a detail as fine as a
zabiba
.

“Couldn’t it be a birthmark?” Katya asked.

“Yes.” Um-Kareem’s eyes looked dangerously annoyed. “But I think it is a
zabiba
. As a callus, it didn’t burn away so easily.” She looked down at her sketch with an appraising eye.

“Hmm, yes.” Katya would have liked nothing more than to take the phone from her purse and show Um-Kareem the real picture of Eve’s face, but she sensed that it wouldn’t take much to make an enemy of this woman, and she didn’t want that.

“You’re lucky you have such computers lying around,” Um-Kareem went on. “Otherwise it would have taken me weeks to reconstruct her face, and I’m an expert.”

Katya glanced at her purse. She was getting sorely tempted. “How old was this woman?”

Um-Kareem hesitated. “The examiner and I have estimated twenty-four.”

“Wasn’t she too young to have a
zabiba
?”

“Apparently not.” Unruffled, Um-Kareem gathered her purse and left, but not before imperiously reminding Katya that she was to give the picture to her superior just as soon as Zainab returned.

Katya watched Um-Kareem leave, feeling a strange sense of deflation. The drawing was accurate, but it still brought them no closer to identifying Eve. The paper was thin, almost like onionskin. It was such a frail clue, and the impossibility of it washed over Katya suddenly: she was supposed to find a woman by her face. She almost laughed.

But they had one other clue: the Bluetooth burqa. There couldn’t be that many of them. The police should be able to trace her through the burqa’s retailer.

Katya sat down at her computer. She did a quick search on the Missing Persons database, looking for a female with a known birthmark on the forehead, and the result popped up on her screen so quickly that she gasped. There was one missing person in the Jeddah area with a facial birthmark. Leila Nawar. Katya’s stomach did a flip. The face looking back at her was the same one from the Bluetooth photo. According to the file, Leila had disappeared a week ago. She was reported missing by her brother Abdulrahman Nawar, who owned a fashion boutique in Jeddah. Leila was a filmmaker who, according to her brother, worked freelance for a local news station. So she wasn’t a housewife after all.

That’s really the end of first impressions
, Katya thought with a strange touch of pride. Yet why should it bring her satisfaction? She had only to look at her relationships with Othman and Nayir to feel affirmed of the point. Picking up the phone, she dialed Zainab’s number again.

T
he Amirs called that morning to cancel the trip. Nayir woke on his boat to the sound of his cell phone jangling. There was a hurried explanation, too many apologies. Five minutes later he stood staring at the bathroom sink, contemplating his situation.
We’re sorry, but too many things have come up. Family matters—you know.
Nayir hadn’t wanted to ask. He was too disappointed. And to think of all the money the family had spent on preparations. They had even bought new vehicles—twelve Land Rovers sitting in an empty garage, each car stocked with enough supplies to last an entire Bedouin camp for the rest of the summer. The waste wouldn’t trouble the Amirs, of course, but it troubled him. He decided that this morning he would say a prayer of forgiveness for the sins of profligacy.

His boat creaked unhappily when he stepped onto the pier. The paint was peeling on the hull, and the name
Fatimah
had faded to gray. It occurred to him that it might be time for a new name.

When he reached the marina parking lot, he found that someone had broken into his Jeep. The driver’s-side door was ajar, and there was a note on the dashboard. Nayir felt the first tug of dread.
In gratitude for all your work,
the note read.
From Mohammed Amir.
Wrapped inside the bottom half of the paper was a shiny set of keys. He looked and saw a Land Rover parked beside his Jeep.

It was one of the Rovers he’d packed three days before. They’d even stocked the salt tablets in the trunk. There were blankets, a two-person tent, a sleeping bag, and a brand-new cooler. Someone had thoughtfully filled it with ice—and recently, too. The cubes were growing slushy at the bottom, and the caviar and nonalcoholic beer were still cold. There was even a new canteen, one of the expensive Brookstone kinds, along with a folder of unopened topographic maps. He went to the front seat and saw a GPS navigation system on the instrument panel. A CD player. And the Quran on the dashboard was so new that its gold-rimmed pages crackled and stuck together when he opened it.

Before he knew what he was doing, he was behind the wheel and driving the Land Rover out of the parking lot. Having become accustomed to the thumping rhythms of the Jeep, he was amazed by the smoothness of the ride. It was going to break his heart.

Twenty minutes later, he reached the Amirs’ garage. He pulled inside, parked the Rover beside the others, and went looking for one of the Amirs, but only servants lingered in the air-conditioned office, smoking and drinking coffee. He gave them the keys and instructions to thank Mohammed Amir for his extraordinary kindness, but to explain that Nayir could not accept such a fine gift.
For what?
he wondered.
For having spent two weeks doing a job for which I’ve already been paid generously?
The servants understood, and one of them offered Nayir a ride back to the marina.

It was only after Dhuhr prayers that he began to regret his decision. He was back at his boat, coiling ropes on the pier and broiling in the midday heat, desperately wishing he could go for a ride in anything air-conditioned. A woman walked by with a small dog on a leash. He’d never seen her before. She wasn’t even wearing a headscarf, and her black, frizzy hair seemed to blow around her head despite the notable absence of a breeze. Her dog, small and equally black and frizzy, began to yip at Nayir as they passed. The woman laughed, bent over, and scooped the dog into her arms.

“He’s afraid of tall, handsome men,” she said.

Nayir didn’t look at her. He kept his attention on the ropes. As the woman walked off, he made a mental note to complain to the residential office. He could have sworn that ever since the kingdom’s ban on walking cats and dogs in public—under the not-so-inaccurate notion that pets were just another device of flirtation (or was it that they were more of a showy accessory, like a Gucci purse or a pair of high heels? He couldn’t remember)—more people than ever were walking dogs. Also there were definitely more cats lurking around the piers at night. The city was beginning to feel too foreign, and that was always a sign that he needed the simplicity of the desert again. His plans had fallen through, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t go there himself. He already had all the supplies at hand. He had money in the bank. And although not perfect, his Jeep was still running.

Half an hour later, he was on the freeway to Wadi Khulais. Boring, yes, but it wasn’t so far out that he couldn’t receive cell phone calls, or, if his Jeep decided to quit on him, that he couldn’t catch a ride home with someone else. He had just had his first glimpse of open space when his cell phone rang, setting off a small explosion in his chest.
Katya.
He pulled to the roadside and checked the caller ID. He didn’t recognize the number, but it could be her. He fumbled to answer it, trying not to sound breathless.

“Hello, Nayir, it’s me.” She sounded casual, almost bored, as if they talked every day.

He felt the first tug of discomfort. In the short time since he’d seen her, he had managed to hold on to the feeling that had overcome him at their meeting—that he was being given another chance, and that he’d do anything not to mess it up. But the practicality in her voice made the first hole in his confidence, and a sudden, automatic anxiety made the second.
Katya.
Should he be saying her name? Wouldn’t it be more proper if he reverted to calling her Miss Hijazi? Figuring that she might be offended by that, he said simply, “Hello.”

“What are you doing tomorrow night?”

Camping,
he should have said, or
I’m heading out of town
. Instead he found that magic hedge spot that was neither a lie nor the truth. “Tomorrow night? I had some plans, but I’m not sure yet. Why?”

“So you could be free?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“Then I’d like you to come over for dinner—at, say, seven o’clock?”

It was happening too quickly. She gave him no time to back away, and he had the sense that she had planned it like this. And that he deserved it, after all his previous waffling. Sweat was trickling down his scalp and onto the phone, rivulets running down his arms and back. His determination had vanished, and all that was left was automatic courtesy.

“I’d like that,” he said, knowing that somewhere deep down he
would
like to go to her house for dinner, even if he didn’t know it right now, even if the thought of meeting her father and having to acknowledge his previous relationship with Katya made him feel as if someone were drilling nails into his neck. “Seven o’clock, then.”