City of Veils (38 page)

They took a wide boulevard and drove past a roundabout ringed by squat, fat palm trees. In the center, protected by a corrugated fence, stood a cell phone tower disguised as a palm. Houses were streaming by, and apartment buildings that looked new. One was brick, reminiscent of a European castle, with turrets and towers and odd-shaped windows. It made her think of Disneyland, and she felt another pang of longing.

She didn’t know how much time had gone by when they turned onto a quiet street. On either side were high stone walls, with driveway gates every fifty feet. She felt a flicker of hope that Nayir was taking her to one of the large, stately homes that she glimpsed through the gates. She would feel safe in one of those homes, barricaded against the world. But they drove past, entering another quiet neighborhood and stopping finally at the end of a cul-de-sac.

In front of them stood a large villa built like an Italian palazzo, with a patio running the length of the house. An arcade hung above it, arched every few feet and supported by thick Grecian columns. Bougainvillea was draped over the arcade, like a carpet that a chambermaid had forgotten to retrieve. French windows lined the front of the building. The structure glowed in the dappled sunlight, a warm sandy color. As they approached the front entrance, it became clear that despite the grand first impression, the house was not as large as it seemed.

“This is your house?” she asked.

“It’s my uncle’s,” he said.

“Do you live here?”

“No, I live on a boat.”

“Oh,” she said. “What about your parents?”

“I never knew them,” he said.

He opened the front door and let her inside. It was cool and fragrant. A potted plant stood in the hallway, looking much healthier than any she’d ever owned. Nayir called out to his uncle and shut the door.

“Your uncle is the only one who lives here?” she asked nervously.

“Yes,” he said. “But don’t worry, he speaks English. And he’s had female guests before. He works for archaeologists. People come here from many countries, including women.” He didn’t look happy to be admitting this.

She gazed at a beautiful sitting room through a pair of double doors. “It’s okay with him that I stay here?”

“Of course. He would never turn a guest away. And anyway, he’ll be pleased to meet you.”

She was relieved to hear that Nayir’s uncle was not as pious as his nephew. It was probably why he’d brought her here instead of to his boat. But she still felt uncertain.

“Nayir?” A voice trailed down the staircase, followed by a small pair of feet wearing shiny leather loafers with gold tassels. A pair of brown slacks came next, then an elegant silk shirt tucked around a wide belly, and finally a head turned pleasantly in their direction.

Nayir said something in Arabic and then introduced Miriam to his uncle Samir. Samir was portly and slow, with tiny brown eyes and a succulent nose; his face was filled with kindness as he studied Miriam. His black curly hair was receding, and what was left ringed his ears.

“Welcome,” he said to Miriam in English. “You are welcome in my house.”

“Thank you.”

“First let me show you to a room,” he said. “And then we’ll have some tea.”

Nayir had disappeared into the kitchen. She followed Samir up the stairs, wanting to protest but feeling that it would be foolish. Where else was she going to go? Samir led her to a room on the second floor. It was small and clean and neatly furnished.

“This is lovely,” she said, turning to him.

“Thank you.” Samir smiled. “There is a bathroom through this door. Take your time washing up, if you like. Tea will be ready when you are.”

She thanked him again, watched him leave, and sat numbly on the bed.

F
or most of the day, a verse from Sura Fussilat had been running through Nayir’s head. He had memorized large portions of the Quran during childhood, and they often came back to him, rising up from his memory like those curls of dust in the desert whose sheen is only half perceived and scarcely felt. It had taken all morning for his conscious ear to pick out the familiar sounds of Ayah 39 from the other noises in his head:
And among His Signs is this: thou sees the earth barren and desolate; but when We send down rain to it, it is stirred to life and yields increase. Truly, He Who gives life to the dead earth can surely give life to men who are dead. For He has power over all things.

If Imam Hadi were there, Nayir would have been able to ask him what it meant that Allah could give life to men who were dead. How dead was dead? Did it mean physically dead? Or just those with dead souls, beggared by evil deeds? He was thinking of Miriam’s husband. He had the feeling that Eric was dead, physically or not.

He was waiting on his uncle’s patio when the phone call came. Katya’s number appeared on his screen, and he answered at once. The tension was apparent in her voice when she said, “We need to talk.”

N
ayir was quite comfortable having faith in the unseen, but believing that Allah could be known by His Signs was much easier than knowing a woman by hers. Katya was sitting in the Land Rover’s passenger seat, staring straight ahead. He glanced at her to read her eyes and wonder what expressions were hidden from him when the veil was down. He did not feel confident analyzing her voice, interpreting her eyes, or deciphering the secrets of her hands, and what he suspected of these actions could not be confirmed without a great deal of awkwardness. So they drove in silence.

He saw the engagement ring on her finger and immediately wished he’d looked.
You said we have to talk
, he wanted to say, but he dreaded the looming conversation, whatever it held. At the same time, he knew he had to tell her about Miriam and what had happened that day.

“What book are you looking for?” he asked, making another feeble effort to start a conversation. She had said that her cousin Ayman needed a textbook for school.

“Something about computers,” she said. “I have it on a slip of paper.” She went rummaging through her purse, which relieved him. By the time she found it, he was parking next to a huge concrete building with glass windows set between two large signs reading
Jarir Bookstore
in Arabic and English. Getting out of the car, he braced himself.

Going into the superstore was like entering another world, with its vast aisles, overflowing shelves, and many foreign titles spread out among the Arabic ones. He followed Katya to the back of the store, watching what sort of people picked up the English titles. He saw a couple who were obviously American—the man skinny and blond, his wife’s face radiating whiteness against the black of her headscarf. They were giggling about something on the magazine stand. But the others, who were they? A tall, geeky boy wearing a sleek white robe and scarf that would have looked tailored on someone else but that only seemed to accentuate how small he was stood studying a computer manual. Three children pelted by, squealing and shrieking; they nearly ran into Nayir’s leg, but he sidestepped deftly and watched them chase one another down a long aisle of children’s books. He scanned the store for some sign of their parents, but the children had disappeared.

Katya led him through a large and obnoxiously colorful self-help section, whose titles immediately caused him to flush:
Fix Your Relationship, Now!
And
Why Women Are Unhappy, and What You Can Do about It.
The public admission that relationships were difficult and disastrous was bad enough, but insisting that the remedies could come from a book made him wince. What did they do before books? Suffer in silence? What would the Prophet have done, with his seventeen wives? On the bottom shelf he spotted
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
not sure he had read the title correctly, then feeling amazed by the blatant admission of vanity. He was distracted again as they passed a shelf of DVDs and he caught sight of
Cinderella,
all cartoon blond hair, and something called
The Fantastic Four
that showed a woman with ample breasts and long flowing hair, which the censors had apparently failed to ink out. For a terrible instant he couldn’t pull his eyes from the picture, revulsion and fascination sparring within him—was this a
children’s
movie?—until modesty forced him to turn away.

“Doesn’t your cousin have a car?” he asked, attempting desperately to keep his attention on Katya. The question he wanted to ask was
Why did he ask you, a woman, to go to a bookstore for him?

“Yes,” she said rather coolly, “he has a car. He’s not one of those people who thinks that women should do everything for their men. It’s just that he’s really bad with directions. It’s a miracle he gets to my office every evening.”

He got stuck on the words
women should do everything for their men
, which made him think that she had her men already—her father and her cousin—and that he wasn’t in this category.

Having found the book, she headed straight to the cash registers at the front of the store, keeping her burqa raised during checkout, which he pretended not to notice. It seemed that every time he went outside he encountered another woman on the street who wasn’t wearing a headscarf, or a woman who was bold enough to wear nothing but jeans and a T-shirt while bouncing happily down the sidewalk. He wondered if Katya would ever be like that. Two men in a nearby lane were staring openly at her face. He noticed, however, that she kept her eyes on the cash register, that she thanked the cashier without looking at him, and that as they left the store, she kept her attention to herself somehow, so that she was looking around but not really seeing the world at all.

“Let’s get coffee,” she said brusquely. Nayir followed her with mounting unease into the Starbucks next door. He had been into only one before, and the experience had been enervating. Samir had dragged him there—Samir, who was forever cluck-clucking about the boom in foreign restaurants, the pervasiveness of American chains like Applebee’s and Fuddruckers, and the scarcity of decent Saudi cuisine (“Where can you find a good
biryani
anymore?”). Crowds in any concentration made Nayir uneasy, and at the Starbucks he had seen too many women sitting at small bistro tables, sipping complicated coffees and clicking away at laptops in the Wi-Fi hotspot. The scene had provoked grim thoughts. What had happened to Jeddah, portal to the holy cities? This was Jeddah, but the name above the doorway seemed to make all the difference—so American sounding,
star
and
buck
.

But the Starbucks beside Jarir Bookstore was quiet. There were no women inside, just two young men drinking coffee and conversing quietly at a window table. Nayir ordered for himself and Katya, and they went to the family section at the back of the store, which was empty. They sat in pouf chairs. The way she held her coffee pointed the engagement ring right in his direction.

“I saw Mrs. Walker today,” he said. Katya’s face showed such an expression of relief that it threw him into momentary confusion. She didn’t explain.

“She called me this morning,” he went on, “because she talked to her neighbors and they gave her the name and address of the property manager.” He reached into his pocket and found the slip of paper. “She thought we would want it.”

Katya took the paper without shifting her gaze from his face. Then she looked at it.

“We know about Apollo Mabus,” she said. “We think that Wahhab Nabih is either a rich benefactor of his or an alias. We’re still looking into it.”

“Oh,” he said. “So you think that Leila was doing her photography work for Mr. Mabus?”

“She was definitely working with him.” Katya slid the paper into her purse and fastened the latch. She picked up her coffee again. “You said that you saw Mrs. Walker.”

“I picked her up in front of her apartment.”

“To retrieve a piece of paper,” Katya said.

Nayir felt his cheeks getting hot. “The other reason she called me is that she believed that someone had broken into her apartment. She was frightened and wanted to get out of the house.”

“It was probably the police,” Katya said. “They’ve been trying to find her.”

“In any case,” Nayir said, “she wanted a ride to her husband’s work, because she felt that they might know something.” He explained what they’d learned about Eric’s leave of absence and the possible theft of surveillance equipment. “Obviously,” he went on, “Eric hadn’t told her about any of this.” Then he reached into his pocket and took out the
misyar
. He paused a fraction of a second before handing it over to her. “After you and I left her apartment, Miriam went looking through his other papers and found this in his briefcase.” Katya opened the paper and read it. She took a breath but didn’t seem surprised.

“You should have called me,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I knew you were at work.”

She sighed and seemed to soften a bit. “Yesterday morning,” she said, “I went to interview one of Leila’s friends, and she told me that Leila had been seeing an American named Eric Walker.” She went on to explain that Osama had finally pulled the Walkers’ cell phone records and discovered that Miriam had called Nayir this morning.

Nayir was struck with a potent admixture of guilt and betrayal. “You told them about her?”

Katya looked at his face. “I didn’t have a choice. After what Farooha told me, I knew there was obviously a connection to the Walkers, and I had to tell Osama.”