City of Veils Page 16

  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.

  Nayir 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.

  “Do you
have any other suspects?” he forced himself to ask.

  She shook her head. “Whoever killed her felt a significant rage. I mean, they desecrated her body in almost every way they could. Knife wounds, physical beating with an ‘iqal, and then the burns on the hands and face…”

  “How do you know it was an ‘iqal?” he asked.

  “I tested the fibers from her wounds and found goat hair.”

  Nayir remembered as a boy confusing the word ‘iqal with ‘aql, intelligence. He thought that this was why men wore the cords around their heads, that somehow the black band bestowed a halo of wisdom. It was only recently that he had told Uncle Samir about his boyhood confusion. Typically, Samir had deflated the moment by explaining that the two words were actually from the same root, which meant they were related in a subtler way: fostering intelligence was much like hobbling a camel; you had to teach focus and restraint.

  “They’re not exactly scarce,” Nayir said, referring to ‘iqals, “but isn’t it unusual that she was beaten with one?”

  Katya shook her head. “A lot of bodies come in having been beaten with ‘iqals. It’s the easiest and quickest weapon most men have.”

  “More proof that the killer acted in the heat of the moment,” he said.

  “Yes. And the hot oil could have come from anywhere. I have this idea that Leila was in a kitchen, maybe cooking something. The guy comes in, they fight, it gets violent, and he starts beating her with his ‘iqal. Maybe she fights back and he gets so angry he throws hot oil in her face. At this point she’s beaten and bruised, burned from hot oil, but she’s still fighting furiously because he grabs a knife and starts slashing at her legs. Maybe he did it before the hot oil. But all these things happened to her while she was still alive, and they happened in quick succession. It had to be someone strong enough to overpower her, and someone vicious enough to keep going at her even though he’d already disabled her. Someone enraged. The question is why.”

  “Is it possible she was drugged?” Nayir asked.

  “We’re still waiting for the lab results on what was in her blood, but yes, she could have been drugged. Let’s say that she was, and that whoever did this did it just out of viciousness. Being drugged, she probably wouldn’t have felt as much pain. Maybe she wasn’t even conscious. But if that’s true, then we’re dealing with a psychopath, because the killer kept going at her without provocation. In other words, she wasn’t fighting back. The killer was just…”

  “Enjoying the kill.”

  She nodded. “But he didn’t just throw hot oil in her face, he covered her whole face in it, and then he did her hands. What’s so disturbing is that he seemed to have done it to erase her identity, so the police wouldn’t be able to get her facial features or fingerprints. Yet the killer did this to her while she was still alive. It feels calculated, like he knew he was going to kill her.”

  “Maybe he’d already realized how badly he’d beaten her, so he knew it was inevitable?” Nayir asked, cringing at the thought.

  “But think about it—the attack was so full of rage. People usually come down from that at some point. That’s when your brain starts to function again, when you start thinking. That’s when the calculation comes in, and the killer starts to get worried. He tells himself, Oh no, look what I’ve done. I’d better erase her identity, so the police will think she’s just another housemaid.”

  “All right,” Nayir said. “So at that point he kills her out of fear. He’s afraid she’ll survive to tell the police his identity.”

  “Right,” Katya said, suddenly alert. “It’s possible the killer just finished it off by snapping her neck.”

  “So you’ve got a killer in a rage,” Nayir said. “Maybe a psychotic person—someone with a history of mental instability?”

  “We’ve checked into that. No one in her family has a history of mental illness, and neither does her ex-husband, and he’s our primary person of interest right now. But only because he had a temper.”

  “So she probably didn’t know any psychotics,” Nayir said.

  “No, she probably didn’t. Which raises the possibility that it was a stranger who killed her.”

  “But how would it happen?” he asked. “The scenario you described had to occur in a kitchen. If she was in her kitchen —”

  “Her brother’s,” Katya put in. “She lived with her brother.”

  “Even then,” he went on. “How could someone do all those things to her in her brother’s house? She would have had to know him to let him in the door. Although I suppose it could have been a burglar, or someone who broke in.”

  “Or a friend of the brother,” Katya said. “The day she was reported missing, the police went to the house and interviewed the brother. They also interviewed the neighbors, and nobody heard anything out of the ordinary—no screaming or banging around. And when my boss went to talk to the brother after we identified Leila’s body, we had full access to his house. It was clean. She didn’t die there.”

  Nayir nodded. “So the question is, what other kitchens did she visit?”

  Katya gave a grim laugh. “Women are always in kitchens,” she said. “I don’t know. According to her brother, she didn’t have many friends.”

  It hadn’t occurred to him until now how the discussion of the case had made his nervousness vanish. But he’d heard the darkness in her tone that came with the words women are always in kitchens.

  “What about someone she might have known through her job?” he asked, trying to stay on the subject.

  “The police talked to the news station. The woman who hired her told us that she hadn’t seen Leila in months. Apparently, Leila worked freelance. She did all her work with them over the phone and the computer. She wasn’t filming things that needed to be broadcast right away, she was only filming filler, so she uploaded everything to the station’s website. When they wanted something from her, they communicated by e-mail or called her on the phone. She had never even been to the station.”

  “Then how did she get hired?”

  “She responded to a newspaper ad. The woman who hired her came to her house—well, the brother’s house—to do the interview. I’m thinking she also wanted to find out if Leila had all the film and computer equipment she needed to do the job.”

  “That makes sense,” Nayir said. He wondered briefly if Katya could ever take a job like that, where she could work from home.

  “But I don’t think Leila was exactly modest,” Katya said. “I mean, I get the impression that she was comfortable being out in the world with a video camera. I told you she was attacked once, according to her brother.”

  “I remember,” he said.

  They drove in silence for the last few minutes of the journey, dismayed to see that the neighborhood they were entering was on the dingy side. Bags of trash lay scattered on the sidewalk. Two men leaning against a rusted-out Toyota gave the Rover an appraising look, but when the Rover slowed down, the men turned their backs and began walking away.

  The block was a mishmash of old apartment buildings, some of them leaning precariously over the street, others covered with graffiti and grime. Nayir parked in front of the building.

  “This doesn’t seem like the kind of place an art collector would live,” Katya said.

  He silently agreed. The foyer door was unlocked but its hinges were so rusty that it was difficult to open, and when they did manage to move it, it gave a shriek loud enough to alert the neighbors. He heard rustlings behind apartment doors, indications of women peering through spy holes. The foyer stank of old cooking smells, curries and beans in an airless room. The linoleum floor felt tacky against the bottoms of his shoes as he led the way up the stairs.

  They found apartment number six on the third floor. Before knocking, Nayir turned to her. “In case this man—what’s his name?”

  “Wahhab Nabih.”

  “In case Mr. Nabih doesn’t want to speak to a woman, what should I…?”

  “Just ask him what he knew about
Leila, what she was doing for him, that kind of thing,” Katya said. “He probably won’t mind talking to women,” she added. “He was working with the victim, remember?”

  “Right.” Nayir tapped on the door. They heard a stirring within, then a thump like a book falling to the floor. A woman’s voice cried out a muffled curse. Footsteps came toward them.

  “Who is it?” the woman asked. To their surprise, she spoke English.

  “We’re sorry to disturb you, Miss Nabih,” he said in English. “But we’re here on police business.”

  This was met by silence.

  “Miss Nabih?”

  “You have the wrong address,” the woman said. “I’m not Miss Nabih.”

  “What did she say?” Katya asked. He translated. “Well, tell her that this is about the murder of a young girl and that I’m a female investigator. If she’s home alone, I’ll come in by myself. I just need to ask a few questions and find out why we have the wrong address.”

  “But you don’t speak English,” he said.

  Katya slumped. “Just tell her what this is about.”

  Nayir did and translated the response: “She’s never heard of anyone named Nabih.”

  Katya looked crestfallen. “This is the only address we could find for him. If this woman can’t help us, we’ve reached a dead end.”