City of Veils Page 10

  “Yes,” Miriam blurted, “he’s gone missing before, but he always managed to get in touch with me. One time he was picked up by the religious police. Another time he got stuck in the desert.” A childish panic was rising in her throat as she spoke.

  “Okay, Mrs. Walker,” the woman said kindly. “We’ll look into this immediately. But bear in mind, it’s entirely possible that the religious police have picked him up again, and they’re just holding him longer than they did the last time. I know this must be very frustrating for you, but believe me, the best course of action is for us to locate him through official channels. And I’m confident that we will. The best thing you can do is try not to panic.”

  The woman was speaking to her as if she were a child, but Miriam was grateful anyway.

  “Meanwhile,” the woman went on, “is there anything you need—money? food? a ride somewhere?”

  Miriam hesitated. “No. No, thanks. I’ve got some cash and there’s a store nearby.”

  The woman continued asking questions about Eric’s job, his schedule, and the people he spent time with. It was comforting to answer questions, as if somehow the simple acknowledgment of facts would bring Eric back, a cozy delusion that was reinforced when the woman said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Walker, we take disappearances very seriously. Most of the time it turns out to be a misunderstanding. I’m sure we’ll get your husband back.”

  Miriam spent the rest of the afternoon washing the shirts that Eric hadn’t managed to clean himself and hanging them on the clothesline on the roof. With a flicker of guilt, she remembered the new shirt he’d worn at the airport: he had run through so much laundry that he was forced to wear something one of his clients had given him.

  The conversation with the consulate had improved her mood for a few hours, but now in the silence, the doubt was creeping back in. She was determined to stay busy. When she finished the shirts, she went downstairs, bundled up the garbage, and dumped it out the kitchen window, into the alley where most of the neighbors dumped their trash. Women were discouraged from making the short trip to the dumpster at the end of the street. According to Sabria, she and her sisters were the only ones in the building who took their trash to the dumpster. She listened, waiting for the inevitable clatter, but when her bag hit the junk pile, it sounded flat, as if it had hit a mattress.

  She stuck her head out the window. The smell was enough to fur her tongue, but she held her breath and leaned farther out, craning to see past the stairs’ metal railing to the bed of garbage below. As far as she could tell, it looked the same as always, yellow plastic shopping bags spilling with leftovers, empty cans and bottles, orange rinds.

  The refrigerator was empty. She’d eaten the last can of fava beans for breakfast, and she knew better than to drink the desalinated seawater that came out of the tap—sometimes it was the color of apple juice. She crept to the front room and put her ear to the door. She listened for a long time but heard only the distant sound of mothers screaming at their children and the muted roar of the occasional car.

  It was getting harder to ignore her anger. Without Eric, the apartment became nearly intolerable. They really ought to have moved into the American compound, and right now their excuses for not doing so seemed ridiculously flimsy. It was too expensive and they’d come here to save money. It was a high-value terrorist target—but there hadn’t been an attack there yet. Most of all, it was not the “real” Saudi Arabia. It was, Miriam reflected, a place Eric would have enjoyed, but that didn’t suit Abdullah at all. Unfortunately, Abdullah was still married to Miriam.

  More than that, their whole reason for being in Jeddah seemed flimsy. Eric’s job was not unique to Saudi Arabia, although perhaps the paycheck was. He could be a bodyguard anywhere. They were here because he wanted to be here. Maybe he didn’t really know why, but considering how much she’d put up with, he’d better not have walked out on her.

  She picked up her cell phone and called the taxi service. She and Eric had an agreement that they wouldn’t spend money on taxis, but fifteen minutes later, it felt devilishly good to slip into the air-conditioned car. I had to find you! she would probably blather later with tears in her eyes. Or, if she was feeling tougher, You weren’t home. With a shrug. I had to get groceries. But it wasn’t to the grocery store that they were headed. The driver knew the compound she requested—Arabian Gates—and half an hour later, they were approaching the front entrance. The rebelliousness of being in a taxi felt so good that it quelled her anger.

  The taxi inched forward, and she glanced at the street. The backseat windows were heavily tinted. In fact the taxi service sold itself as a company for “decent” women, its motto Our windows are darker. Peering through the filmy shield, Miriam saw that they were approaching the compound gates. Like the others she had seen, it looked like a prison, with its street blockades, blast walls, concertina wire, video cameras dangling from every post, and armed guards patrolling the gates. It took them fifteen minutes to get clearance from security and another fifteen minutes before Patty showed up, looking concerned. Miriam paid the taxi driver and followed Patty to her villa.

  Conversations with Patty had always been awkward. Miriam blamed Eric for this. He was the one who’d told her about Jacob’s philandering. She and Eric had just moved to Saudi, and Eric had only just met the Marxes when Jacob confessed that he preferred Arab women, virgins if he could get them, although any prostitute would do. Back then, it had disgusted Eric as well, but it hadn’t stopped him from hanging out with Jacob. Miriam, on the other hand, had found it impossible to face Patty.

  She recognized the irony of coming to Patty now for information, and she had to beat down an upsurge of guilt. Miriam entered the kitchen and saw a plate of fresh fried doughnuts on the kitchen table. The air smelled of warm cooking grease and powdered sugar. “Have one!” Patty said nonchalantly. Miriam wanted to stuff the whole plate into her mouth. While Patty bustled around making coffee, Miriam seated herself carefully at the table and took a delicate bite of pastry. It was scrumptious. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. Trying as hard as she could to keep up a light conversation, she ate three more doughnuts in quick succession.

  “You poor thing,” Patty finally said. “When was the last time you ate?” Not waiting for an answer, she began pulling plates of food from the refrigerator, offering up a buffet of leftovers, and Miriam, ravenous, began to eat.

  “Miriam, I’m sure it’s nothing.” Patty was not quite the panicked woman she had been on the phone, but her attempts to calm Miriam’s fears were, perversely, stoking them. “He’s probably just been picked up by the religious police. I’m sure they’ll let him go.” Patty poured her a cup of coffee and set it on the table. “You know, this happens to me all the time,” she said brightly. Miriam stopped chewing. “Okay, well, not all the time, but it has happened.”

  “What has happened?” Miriam asked.

  Patty came to the table and sat down, cradling a cup of coffee. She wore a look that she probably thought was sly but that made her seem grandmotherly and quaint. “A couple of years ago, we arranged to have our anniversary dinner at a posh new restaurant downtown. I had to talk him into it, you know, since Jacob’s idea of a nice dinner is something over a campfire. Preferably something he killed himself.” She took a sip of coffee and narrowed her eyes, obviously enjoying drawing out the suspense. “So he was supposed to come straight home from work and pick me up. We had a seven o’clock reservation, but he didn’t show up. By eight o’clock I had to call the restaurant to apologize. Meanwhile, I had called his work, his cell, half a dozen friends, and compound security on top of it, but nobody knew where he was! You know, he didn’t come home that night at all. So I know exactly how you feel. It’s horrible not knowing and fearing the worst.”

  “What happened to him?” Miriam asked.

  “Oh! He was fine. Turned out the police had pulled him over for running a red light. Well, you know Jacob. He hadn’t run the red light, but when he told the off
icer that, the officer got angry. I think Jacob lost his temper a little bit. In any event, they hauled him off to jail. He spent the night in prison for a traffic violation, can you believe it?”

  Miriam nodded, mindlessly eating. She wanted to believe that something like that had happened to Eric, but somehow she couldn’t.

  “How long was he gone?” she asked.

  “Only a day,” Patty said. “But you know, a few months later, we found out from a guy who’s lived here for something like twenty years that at this one traffic light where Jacob was pulled over—guess what? The police can actually control the timing of the light! So they sit at the corner and switch the light whenever a foreigner drives through the intersection. I mean, they’re targeting Americans.”

  Miriam wasn’t sure whether she felt comforted by this.

  “My biggest fear,” Patty went on, “is not that something will happen to him, but that—well, this is really personal, but I’m only telling you because I think you’ll understand.” She gazed at Miriam, her blue eyes glittering with meaning. “I’ve always been afraid that Jacob would bring home a second wife.”

  Miriam hid her reaction by smirking. “Doesn’t he have to be a Muslim to do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Patty said, waving her hand dismissively and standing up. “There are plenty of non-Muslim women right here on the compound, but yes, she would have to be a Muslim to be a co-wife. I don’t think it would ever happen. It’s just me being irrational.”

  Miriam’s appetite had fled. She kept eating a piece of bread so that Patty wouldn’t become suspicious, but the words bubbled right there beneath the surface: Patty, he’s a jerk. He’s been cheating on you for years. Why don’t you get out? Patty dumped her fresh coffee in the sink, then seemed to realize what she’d done. She gave a nervous laugh. “What on earth am I doing?” she said, quickly pouring herself another cup. Miriam had the impulse to stand up and hug her.

  She had to admit that she understood Patty’s fears. It wasn’t that Eric might bring home a second wife, it was just that he spent so much of his time blowing freely through a world she had little access to and very little knowledge of. There had been plenty of times she’d wondered if he was cheating on her. It would have been so easy for him to get away with it.

  “I know what it feels like,” Miriam said. Patty stopped stirring her coffee. “But I’ll tell you what keeps me from worrying too much is the knowledge that, in this town, women are extremely difficult to meet.”

  She had hoped the remark would at least win a smirk, but Patty simply picked up her coffee and said, “Have you called the consulate yet?”

  “Yes. They said they’d help find him.”

  “Oh, good. They’ll find him, you’ll see.” The front door opened with a squeak and Patty went into a kind of fit of excitement and nerves. She set the coffee mug down so hard that its contents splashed onto the counter, and she practically went racing into the living room to greet her husband. Miriam heard Patty’s voice and winced. “You’re back early! Is everything okay at work?” Jacob grumbled a response and came into the kitchen and saw Miriam.

  “Ahhh,” he said. “The husbandless woman.”

  Miriam couldn’t be bothered to figure out why it was insulting, she simply didn’t like the comment, but then she didn’t like Jacob, and anything he’d said might have had the same effect. “Hi,” she said, picking up her coffee in case he said something worse and she needed to distract herself.

  Jacob came to the table and took the mug from her hands. “A woman in your situation should be drinking something stronger.”

  “No, thanks,” she said, but Jacob was already dumping the coffee in the sink. He set the mug on the countertop with a crack and pulled a beer from the fridge, opened it on the edge of the counter like some college kid, and slid it across the Formica tabletop so that she was forced to catch it or let it land on her lap.

  Drink it, she thought. In a few minutes, you’ll be glad you did. She took a long slug and set the bottle on the table with a thunk. Patty looked upset.

  “How was work?” she chimed, going back to the sink. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I wasn’t expecting you so early or I would have had dinner ready. I was going to make a roast.”

  Miriam had seen them together only a few times, twice at parties here on the compound, and once at a private beach for a picnic that had ended when the temperature had gone above 110. The two of them had lived here for seven years and had no plans to leave. Their house might have been a little less tense if they’d had kids or pets, but their one daughter, Amanda, had been sent to a boarding school in New Hampshire. She suspected it was Jacob’s idea.

  Miriam had always felt intimidated by him. He seemed to enjoy making her quail. She wondered how Patty put up with it, but Patty was all about nervous chatter, and that seemed to shut him up.

  To hear Eric tell it, Jacob was only a convenient friend. They worked at the same company. They were both former military. They liked to do the same things: fishing, scuba diving, camping in the desert. Not that they ever did much except work, but at least they had something to talk about.

  She watched Jacob now. His thin face was slightly sunburned and grizzled-looking, even when he shaved. He had hazel eyes that she couldn’t look into without thinking of warm Vaseline. Like Eric, he was a security specialist, and his body showed it—it was well developed, meaty, tough. His gestures had the kind of precision that came from watching peripheries, guarding other people, and handling dangerous weapons for a living. Maybe that’s what kept Patty enthralled. Miriam could certainly sympathize. Yet ever since meeting Jacob, she’d had the uneasy feeling that he was the kind of man who had been drawn to Saudi Arabia because he appreciated its worst stereotypes, the treatment of women primary among them. Or perhaps she was being harsh, and it was only the segregation of women that appealed to him. How can you cheat on your wife if she’s always in your hair? Miriam had learned early on that Jacob didn’t want the women around when he hung out with Eric. At first she’d thought it was a work thing, that they’d had business to discuss, but Eric finally told her that Jacob was a man’s man who didn’t really like spending time with his wife in the way that Eric did with Miriam. That is, the way he had until they came here.

  Patty was still talking.

  “So, Miriam,” Jacob said, interrupting his wife and swinging his attention to Miriam like an interrogation light. Patty fell silent. “Did you find your husband?” he asked.

  Miriam shook her head, feeling an ominous tickle on the back of her neck. She took another swig of beer. “He wasn’t at work today?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t in the office,” Jacob said, all the while keeping his eyes on her face. “I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

  “You said on the phone you saw him that day he came to the airport to pick me up?” Miriam asked.

  “Yeah, but only for coffee. He seemed normal.” Jacob’s gaze narrowed. “Why? You think I had something to do with it?”

  “With what?” she asked, attempting to look arch.

  Jacob gave her a cold, eerie look that made her insides convulse.

  “I thought you might be able to tell me if there was something strange going on,” she said. “If he said anything to you…”

  “He said nothing.” Jacob’s tone was insulting, but Patty intervened by dropping a metal spatula on the floor. It startled everyone. She apologized, picked up the spatula, and set it in the sink.

  Miriam stood up and collected her purse. “Patty, thanks so much for the food. The doughnuts were delicious.”

  “He’s probably just been picked up by the religious police,” Jacob said, his eyes still boring into Miriam. “You live in that kind of neighborhood, you know.”

  I know, she wanted to snap. “I’ll see myself out. Patty, thanks again.”

  Patty looked awkward and stricken, as if she wasn’t sure what to do. It was Jacob who followed Miriam into the living room. She passed a side table in the
foyer and glanced down at the framed pictures. She hadn’t noticed them when she came in, but one of them caught her attention now. It was a picture of Jacob and Eric. She stopped to look at it.

  Jacob stood a little too close behind her. “Did he tell you we went camping?” he asked in a tone that said Bet he didn’t tell you anything.

  Miriam felt herself flushing with anger. Eric hadn’t mentioned a camping trip. “Yes,” she said, “sounds like you guys got into your usual trouble.”

  She could see from his face that Jacob wasn’t buying it.

  The table was strange. All the pictures showed Jacob and his friends doing guy things—fishing, surfing, hunting in the desert. No pictures of Patty or their daughter. Even the frames were masculine, grainy wood in dark browns and greens.

  At the back she saw a picture that stopped her heart for a beat. Three men stood in the frame. Each one was holding a hunting rifle, and behind them the mountains of southern Arabia were draped in a yellowing light. Eric was on the left, looking pleased with himself. There was a cut on his chin. Jacob looked thuggish in the middle of the frame, and on the right stood a man she recognized as Apollo Mabus.

  “How do you know this guy?” she said, pointing.

  “Mabus? Met him through a guy at work a few years ago. He’s a Brit. Kinda stuffy until you get him out to the desert. Why do you ask?”

  “He looks familiar.” She kept her eyes on the picture so she wouldn’t give anything away. She knew she looked nervous. All she needed now was for Jacob to start thinking that she was cheating on her husband.

  It shocked her to realize that Mabus had lied. He wasn’t from New York, he was British. He’d spoken English just like an American.

  “You met him here?” she asked, confirming.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re sure he’s British?”

  “Pretty damn sure,” Jacob replied.

  “Then it can’t be the same guy I’m thinking of,” she lied. “When was this hunting trip?”