City of Veils (21 page)

Getting up quietly, he went into the bathroom and did his ablutions. He was going to spend another day trying to track down Ra’id and Bashir. They had to profile the murderer, but their best profiler was out of town. And he could tell that it was going to be dripping hot. It was five in the morning, the air conditioner was on full, he was standing stark naked in the ceramic-tiled bathroom, and already he was sweating.

In the kitchen he found Nuha’s laptop and her work papers scattered on the table. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat down to eat a piece of bread. Her laptop was still on, power light illuminated but the screen dark. He glanced at the papers. She must have woken up in the middle of the night to finish an article. She worked in the kitchen at night, because her office was just off the bedroom, and sometimes the sound of her typing woke him. The newspaper could be demanding, but if he’d known she’d had a deadline, he wouldn’t have kept her in the bedroom half the night.

No,
he thought with a burst of pleasure,
the second time we made a baby.

From the looks of it, she was working on a story about the kingdom’s effort to encourage more women into the workplace. He picked up a printout of her article and read it. She was eloquent. To his small relief he found a typo and, reaching into her purse for a pen, having to dig to the very bottom and wondering why there was no pen on the table already, he corrected the mistake, adding a small heart shape in the margin for her to find later.

It was only when he put the pen back in her purse that he noticed the plastic canister. It was oddly shaped, like a flying saucer, and a strange green color that made him think of a doctor’s office. Feeling guilty, he took it out of her purse. It rattled slightly. He popped the lid and saw a spiral row of pills, half of them missing. Some where white, the rest were blue. He stared at them stupidly. It took him a moment, not to recognize what they were, but to believe where he’d found them.
Nuha?
He’d seen these pills before—once on a prostitute he’d interrogated and once in the hands of a violent husband who’d killed his wife over a little disc almost exactly like this one.

Birth control pills.

He set them on the table while his thoughts began to swarm. Had something happened—was she seeing someone else, and that’s why she needed to avoid a pregnancy? She would never do that. She’d said she wanted more children. In fact, she was upset that she hadn’t become pregnant again. She had even talked about going to the doctor to find out why. It had all been a lie. But why? Was it something at home? Did she hate children so much? Did she hate Muhannad? Why hadn’t she told him about any of this? Did she think he was so irrational that they couldn’t have a conversation about it?

He looked back inside the purse, just a stupid double check. It was her purse; he recognized the wallet. He was overreacting and he knew it, but for an awful moment he remembered the long-ago murderous husband who’d thrown his wife out a fifth-story window over a discovery of birth control pills. He had thought the man was insane at the time, but here he was, experiencing the same blind fury. He had a right to be angry. He’d been lied to. Worse yet, Osama remembered thinking how stupid it was to kill a woman over a small case of pills. Pills! They were tiny; the man was a backward fool. It was crushing him now to discover that he’d been the ignorant one, that the killer’s understanding was more nuanced than his own. Discovering something like this—oh, he saw it so clearly—opened a terrifying chasm of fury and distrust.

It took a few minutes, but eventually Osama’s hands stopped trembling. He stood up from the table, fighting the impulse to storm into the bedroom and confront Nuha. It wouldn’t be fair. She would be vulnerable, sleepy. And he would be full of rage. Instead, he slammed his fist into the container, shattering it, crushing the pills. A tiny shard of plastic hit her keyboard and bounced to the floor.

A few minutes later, he heard the toilet flush in the other room, the sound of Nuha washing herself in the bathroom sink. She’d be out any minute.

He left the pills on the table, the plastic container like a broken oyster with all of its pearl-like irritants destroyed.

K
atya stood just outside the entrance to the station. It was lunchtime, and her burqa was down so that no one would recognize her. She didn’t want people to start asking questions if they saw her getting into Nayir’s Jeep.
Is that your husband? Why do we never see him pick you up after work?
The only problem was that, with Katya’s burqa down, Nayir might not recognize her either.

The sunlight was crashing mercilessly onto the street, reflecting off the windows of the building opposite, springing up from the marble courtyard, and flashing straight into her face from the car windows zipping by. She had sunglasses on under her burqa but it wasn’t enough, and she kept having to raise them anyway to squint at the faces of the drivers who were parked on the street. Her eyes were watering, she was hungry, and there was no sign of the Jeep.

What if he couldn’t find her? What if he had to get out of his car and come looking for her, and someone saw them together and started asking questions? Carefully, because it was difficult to see where she walking, she made her way across the courtyard and down the three stairs to the sidewalk. There were people here but no one she recognized.

This whole thing was probably a bad idea. The police hadn’t followed up on Leila’s last job because they were too busy hunting down her ex-husband. Katya had gotten the address of the art collector from Majdi. The floaters didn’t seem to think it was important. Grudgingly she acknowledged that her real reason for doing this was that she had a fantasy of cracking the case. They’d be grateful if that happened. They’d be able to take all the credit, and she wouldn’t say a word. But they would know that she was invaluable, more than just a lab tech, and if they ever found out that she wasn’t really married, they’d think twice before firing her. It had been bothering her for months, this pathetic lie. As far as she could tell, there were no other women in the department who were single and lying about it, or if there were, they did an excellent job of hiding the truth.

She could never have gotten the job as a single woman. The men took it for granted, and never asked about her “husband,” but the women were more dangerous. It often seemed that if the workday could be divided into ten slices, they talked about their families—and particularly their husbands—for nine, and the tenth one was simply a resting period, a necessary “sleep” zone that enabled them to return, refreshed, to the same discussion later. On more than one occasion Katya had had to lie blatantly about her husband—that he was a businessman who spent much of his time overseas, that his family lived in Riyadh, that they had been trying to have kids but had no luck. Most of the time she avoided outright lies and hid instead behind little lies of omission, little hmmms and yeses that indicated assent, shared experience, insight that she didn’t really have and wasn’t sure she wanted. The truth was, even if she had been married, she still wouldn’t have wanted to talk about men all the time.

Five minutes later a Land Rover pulled up to the curb, Nayir at the wheel. He didn’t look over at her, in fact avoided looking at her at all, which struck her as ridiculous. Wasn’t the whole point of wearing a cloak and headscarf and burqa so that the man could look safely at a woman without committing a sin? But when he got out of the car, she realized from the tilt of his head that he’d already recognized her. It pleased her that he knew her well enough that he didn’t need to see her face.

She approached the car. His eyes flickered to her burqa.

“Hello, Nayir,” she said. “Nice car.” He ducked his head nervously and went around to the other side of the Rover to open the door for her. She followed slowly and carefully. Walking was difficult with only a single slice of vision, nearly impossible when that slice was inundated by light.

He shut her door and went around to the driver’s side. In that moment she realized that he had opened the front door, that she was sitting in the front seat, and—Nayir was definitely not the type to let a woman sit in the front—that he had done it all without apparent hesitation. She wondered if he knew it would impress her.

Once he had pulled into traffic and they were out of sight of the station, she lifted her burqa. He noticed but didn’t react. She glanced at him. He wore a long blue robe over a pair of white cotton pants. Brown leather sandals. A white headscarf with no
‘iqal
to hold it down. The ends of the scarf were flipped up to the side, revealing his face—his equivalent, she realized, of raising the burqa—with a few curls of black hair peeking out. He was freshly shaven but his face had a rough, textured quality that probably came from spending too much time in the sun. It wasn’t a handsome face per se, but in its ruddiness and stocky squareness it was incontrovertibly masculine. He smelled of sand and engine oil and something fresh and warm like baked bread. She lost all of the teenage giddiness that energized her in the lab with Majdi. Around Nayir, she felt a deeper sensation, a kind of spiritual tremor.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Fine.”

He glanced in her direction but not quite at her. She had resolved not to keep things from him anymore. She would plunge ahead, because if this was ever going to work, it had to work for the right reasons. She told him about the case, about discovering the Bluetooth burqa and the video footage of Farooha joking about the religious establishment, all the things she hadn’t told him yesterday because they might reveal Leila’s impropriety, or because they would lead inevitably to the fact of her own interaction with men like Majdi and Osama. She told him everything she could think of, describing Majdi as a youthful, distracted scientist with thick glasses and unkempt hair, hoping to make Nayir realize that he wasn’t sexual in the least, but halfway through the description she realized that she was talking about Majdi with obvious affection, and she stopped.

Nayir seemed to be cogitating. She waited expectantly, wishing
Please, please, say something. Anything
. She knew what he was thinking:
You work alone with a man?
She turned nervously to the window, watched the shops passing by, a Hyper Panda supermarket, a pair of gas stations looking greasy in the sunlight. Two women on the street with unveiled faces were laughing and talking, and one woman’s scarf was slipping down the back of her head. Nayir seemed not to notice; he was studying the car in front of him. An image popped into her mind of those crazy drivers they called drifters, which was just what this felt like. She was racing along at full speed on a flat, wide-open expanse of freeway, and she had just yanked the parking brake. Now she was skidding, skating past cars and spinning in curlicues. The last victim of drifting who had passed across the coroner’s table—and consequently beneath a forensic flashbulb—had been so badly damaged by a collision with a semi that his face looked like a purple pound of raw meat.

“So it could have been anyone who killed her,” Nayir said. Katya felt a small burst of relief. “If she wore this Bluetooth burqa, she could have met a man on the street…” He waved his hand at the passing sidewalk in a resigned way.

“We don’t have many leads,” Katya admitted. “But here’s what I think. Leila’s murder wasn’t premeditated, it was a passion crime. Someone acted in the heat of the moment. That usually happens with someone who had a relationship with the victim. We didn’t see any signs of long-term abuse. She had a fractured tibia, but according to her brother, that injury happened when someone attacked her in public. However, she did have a bad relationship with her ex-husband.”

“Have they arrested him?”

“They can’t find him,” she said. “But they’re holding his brother. The alternative is that the killer could be someone who was provoked by something Leila did just before she died. And there were two things she was working on: B-roll for a local news channel, and photographing a private art collection. The first assignment probably won’t lead anywhere; the footage itself is supposed to be boring—background stuff. But this art collector interests me more.”

“He collects old Quranic texts,” Nayir said.

“Well, that was a guess.”

They sat in silence for a while. The Rover had come to a halt at the edge of a roundabout, stopped by a tangle of traffic. They inched forward slowly in the outer lane. At the center of the circle she spotted the source of the congestion: a public whipping was taking place. A young man was kneeling on the pavement, naked from the waist up. Two officers stood above him, one holding a bamboo whip and a Quran under his arm. The book was intended to ensure that he didn’t raise his arm too high in the beating, but it didn’t matter. She caught a glimpse of the young man’s back, red and raw and scorching beneath the noon sun, and the sight of it immediately brought bile to her throat. She imagined Leila, face burned beyond recognition, fighting furiously with an attacker and being beaten to the ground, then stabbed again and again until her body was a limp mass of flesh.

N
ayir could catch only glimpses of the whipping through the sea of heads. He heard it, however, the young man screaming for mercy, the brutal smack of the whip. Then he noticed Katya reaching for the air vent and he realized she was anxious. Focusing on the road, he managed to cut out of the roundabout.

Ever since she had gotten into the car, her smell had enfolded him in a whirling cloud of distraction. It was all he could do not to stop the car and grab her. This was the worst kind of weakness because there was nothing for it, at least nothing that could put an end to the torture anytime soon, short of kicking her out of the car. They had another hour together at least, and so he immunized himself by cracking open the window, cranking up the cold air, and turning his attention to a silent prayer of forgiveness that somehow never got past the first refrain. Since they’d made the arrangement the night before, he had been looking forward to seeing her with a kind of obsessiveness. He had expected to be nervous. But now, unable to keep his mind from producing dangerous images of kissing her, touching her neck, her face, her hands, feeling the small of her back, the curve of her hips, he felt betrayed by his body, frustrated that it would spoil an afternoon with her, frustrated with her for smelling so good.