City of Veils (9 page)

I
n the company of the crinkled take-out trays, Miriam sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of lukewarm tea and staring at her cell phone. There was still no word from Eric, and he wasn’t answering his cell. Although the muezzin hadn’t called noon prayer, she’d spoken to the office twice already, and both times the secretary had harped,
He is not in the office yet. Would you like to leave a message?

What could she say:
Tell him I’m waiting?
So what else was new? As humiliating as it was, she finally broke down and admitted to the receptionist that Eric was gone. Actually, she admitted that “Abdullah” was gone, because that’s what they called him. “Eric,” it turned out, was a slang term for “penis” in Arabic, so his boss had asked him to come up with a suitable alternative, and he’d chosen Abdullah. It meant “slave of Allah,” which troubled Miriam when she bothered to think about it.

The receptionist made nervous noises, the guttural equivalent of a plea to leave him out of her marital troubles, until she begged him to find Abdullah’s address book and give her all the numbers in it. She already had his partner’s number, but that was only because she knew Jacob’s wife, Patty, who’d promised to have her over for tea but who never seemed to have the time.

“I’m afraid I can’t get into his office,” the receptionist said.

Miriam fumbled.
Then find someone who can,
she wanted to say. She had never been to Eric’s office, so she had no idea what it was like. Did he have a separate address book or only his BlackBerry? He must have had a computer somewhere, so maybe there was a password—but there was no way he would have given it to a receptionist. Or anyone else, for that matter. He was doggedly private.

“Okay, thanks,” Miriam said. “Just let me know if he shows up.”

A short while later she called Jacob and acquired a single piece of data, not wonderfully interesting: Jacob had seen him the day before. They’d had coffee together, and everything had seemed normal. Eric hadn’t mentioned that he was picking up Miriam that evening from the airport.

Once she realized that Jacob was being his usual taciturn self, Miriam agreed to speak with Patty, who had stood beside her husband for the whole conversation, inserting her indiscreet comments:
Eric’s gone? Well, where on earth would he
go? and
Do you think he’s been arrested?

Patty didn’t say hello, she simply gasped. “Miriam, do you think he’s run away?”

“No. What? He wouldn’t do that.”

“I knew a nurse from Australia whose husband left her. He disappeared just like that.” Patty snapped like a gunshot. “Turns out he was having an affair with his
maid
. Some girl from the Philippines.”

Miriam swallowed her anger. “We don’t have a maid.”

“It doesn’t have to be a
maid
, honey.”

“I think something happened. An accident maybe. He could be —” She stopped, took a long breath. It was no good feeding her own paranoia.

“Have you called the police?” Patty asked.

“Yes. They said I had to wait two days before I could file a missing persons report. At least I think that’s what they said. The guy had a pretty heavy accent.”

“What about the hospitals?”

“No,” Miriam admitted.

“Then call the consulate,” Patty said. “You
have
to report this.”

Miriam didn’t want to tell her about the last time he’d disappeared. “Just call me if you hear anything, okay?”

“Sure bu—”

Miriam hung up. She could handle a hundred disappointing phone calls but she couldn’t handle her anxious mind, which attached itself to a problem like something vicious in a neighbor’s yard. Visions of Eric came quickly to mind: his corpse in a sewer, bloated and drowned. An eye torn from a socket. Spurts of blood from a sucking chest wound.

She stood up and went to the pantry. It was nearly empty, but stacking the few condiments would help her relax. She tried not to think about the story Sabria’s sister had told her. A Canadian man who was in Jeddah with his wife had fallen in love with a young Bedouin girl. They’d had a fling. Soon after, the girl had turned herself in to the police, begging for protection. She believed that her brothers had discovered that she’d had sex before marriage and they intended to kill her. The police, believing it possible, had offered her protection and also took the Canadian man to the station. Sure enough, that afternoon three of the girl’s brothers had shown up at the station door, threatening to kill her. The police had had to spirit the illicit lovers out of the country.

Miriam couldn’t be sure how much of the story was hyperbole, but Sabria’s sister had been firm on one point: it wasn’t that strange for Bedouin families to react with outrage upon discovering such a tryst. Young girls had been killed before, and sometimes their lovers with them…

Stop
, Miriam told herself. There was no reason to jump to worst-case scenarios. She remembered a story Patty had told her about an American guy who lived on the compound. His wife, who was still in the United States, had mailed him a care package with three DVDs of porn. The censors who opened mail in Saudi had discovered the porn and had the poor American guy arrested. He’d had to explain that his wife didn’t understand Saudi culture. The police had accepted the explanation but forced the American to break the DVDs right there at the station. Apparently, they didn’t want to get sued for destroying personal property. Of course, that hadn’t happened to Eric, but she needed a reminder that in Jeddah, people could be arrested for the strangest reasons.

Besides, Eric had “disappeared” before. One of his associates at work had decided to take a spontaneous trip to the desert. Eric had gone along, thinking it would be only for the day, and then had discovered that his host meant to stay for the weekend. He’d been too far out of cell phone range to call her and let her know where he was.

Another evening, the religious police had hauled him into one of their makeshift prisons—in this case, the back room of a local mosque—to give the dumb foreigner a lesson in proper conduct. Apparently, he hadn’t been wearing long sleeves, and his impatience had won him a few bruises from a bamboo cane. But that time, he had been held only for a few hours. He’d come home late that night.

Miriam took another calming breath and shut the pantry door. It was possible that the God Squad had arrested him for something. Perhaps his walk was too jaunty to qualify as pious. He would come home tomorrow, maybe bruised but unforthcoming as ever. She’d have to pry the story out of him, and he’d only reassure her that everything was fine and that, yes, the religious police could be overzealous but they were just doing their jobs. The police in America pulled foreigners over all the time, didn’t they? It was just something they had to put up with here, respecting other cultures, blah blah blah. The scenario was so real that it almost had to be true. At least it was the sort of explanation that Eric would devise if she had disappeared.

Then again, if she disappeared, Eric could probably do something about it.

She glanced at the cell phone sitting on the table. The truth was, she had thought of calling the consulate all morning, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself.

She began walking through the house, pacing really, wondering if she was ready to face the world and go to the corner store. She got distracted by the bathroom sink, which was filthy. While she cleaned it, darker possibilities began to loom in her mind. The secret police also hauled people into jails, except that the locations of these bunkers were known only to insiders and a handful of Saudi bigwigs. The foreigners who vanished didn’t reappear for months, sometimes years. They languished like women, waiting for lawyers, for trials that never came. If she went to the consulate, they’d probably zip her out of the country faster than anyone could say “indecent.” Then Eric would be stuck in an underground bunker, waiting for a court date that would never be set…

Stop
, she told herself.
Jesus! Think of something else
.

She went back into the kitchen. A sickly sweet smell was emanating from the broken sink disposal, so she went to work, clearing out the cabinet beneath the sink, unscrewing the trap with the flashlight dangling from her mouth, feeling frustrated and competent all at once. When the trap finally came down, a few weeks’ worth of gunk spilled onto her hands. Tea leaves. As far as she knew, Eric had never so much as touched a cup of tea in his life before coming here, but now he spent all his free time in the sitting room drinking tea with his friends. Not with Jacob or the other Americans he worked with. Eric hung out with Arab men who were friendly enough but who would have considered it rude to strike up a conversation with a woman. They thought it was strange that she didn’t know how to make tea, that Eric boiled it himself because he wanted to master the art of making tea Saudi-style. She even took a picture one night of Eric with a teacup in his hand. When she’d teased him about it, he’d shrugged sheepishly and said, “It’s what the guys prefer to drink.”

She watched the ease with which he adopted these new rules of manliness. Kissing other men on the cheek. Hugging. Sitting around gossiping and laughing for hours like teenage girls who shut down the moment a parent walks into the room. At first she reacted to these changes with tenderness and gratitude, even if she did think they were a little weird. It seemed that the girlish transformation applied some balm to the broken man who had come home from Iraq caged in a crushing hypermasculinity. And for him there seemed to be something deeper still—was it good old-fashioned Protestant guilt?
I killed Muslims, now I’m redeeming myself.
Whatever the reason, despite his occasional agreement that it wasn’t quite the ideal place for a woman to live, Eric had fallen hard for Saudi Arabia.

She remembered the conversation they’d had on the porch at their house in Fayetteville when he’d signed the contract for his job here. He’d popped a bottle of champagne, spilling it all over the love-seat swing, and she’d teased him about his excitement. “Are you sure there’s not another reason you’re wanting to go there so badly? Maybe a female reason?”

He’d grinned devilishly and kissed her neck. “I love you, Miriam,” he whispered in her ear. “And you have to know that no matter what happens, you’ll always be wife number one.”

She’d smacked his arm, and he’d burst out laughing. She couldn’t help laughing herself. Then he’d wrapped her in his arms. “That won’t ever happen,” he whispered, serious now.

Yeah, yeah
. She washed the tea leaves from her hands and realized belatedly that it wasn’t a joke. She’d feared that some exotic beauty would snatch him away, but the real secret lover was the city itself, the countryside, the desert, and the sense of companionship he’d found among the men here. Finding another woman in Jeddah might be a natural extension of…

She shut down the thought immediately. It was good to see Eric so excited about a place. And his newfound companionship wasn’t so different from the kind of closeness he’d always felt with his army buddies back home. Sure, their marriage wasn’t doing so well, but were they doing so poorly that he would run away?

Maybe she shouldn’t have been gone for so long. For weeks she had vacillated between thinking it was a good idea to give Eric a break and thinking that her leaving would give him a convenient opportunity to forget about her. She had decided to trust him. And she had needed the time away.

But what if, in the month she’d been gone, Eric had grown even more addicted to this place? Perhaps even come to visualize a future here without her? They both knew she would never fit in here. She had tried very hard, for the first few months, not to complain too much. Then abruptly it had all come spilling out.

The disposal gave a pathetic whir. She heard a crack, something shot out of the trap, and she knew without bending over that it was
really
broken. Picking up a wrench, she knelt down to see what she could do.

K
atya tried to avoid looking at the bloated red and blistered skin of the woman’s hands and face. She kept her eyes on the clean white walls of the new autopsy room, on the metal sinks and the locked gray cabinets where the examiners stored their textbooks.

They still hadn’t identified the woman, but the police who’d brought her in had dubbed her “Eve.” Katya alternately wondered if she would have to sit through the entire autopsy and—if she did survive it—whether she’d ever be able to eat meat again.

It was the second time Adara had invited her into the autopsy room. The first time Katya had become sick almost immediately. She wasn’t used to the sight of corpses; she dealt with samples on slide trays, hairs and fibers, and occasionally pictures of death. Now she was being given a second chance. She didn’t have to watch the full autopsy. Adara had already done it. But there were things she wanted Katya to see for herself. And the circumstances were convenient: her boss and the other men in the examiner’s office had gone out for their lunches. Zainab, unofficial boss of the women’s laboratory, was home tending to a sick child. The body was on the table —

Ocean fish had eaten away one of the woman’s eyes and most of her cheeks and lips, exposing the tissue and bone beneath. Now only the forehead and the hairline edges of the face showed where she’d been burned. Where the skin remained, there were traces of blood.