City of Veils Read online

  “Where are you t-t-aking me?” she stammered, receiving a prompt, nonverbal answer as he flung open a door near the passport lines. She saw a dark, depressing room. Three women were sitting on metal chairs, looking wilted in the heat. The guard pushed her into the room, and she stumbled, losing her grip on her suitcase. It thudded on the stone floor a second before the door shut behind her.

  4

  Detective Inspector Osama Ibrahim leaned into the trunk of his car, rummaging for his field shoes while surreptitiously watching the old fisherman drive away. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea to let him drive off alone, he had seemed so shaken—and who wouldn’t be, finding a body like this one? But there was something about the old man that had stirred his pity and reminded him of what his father would have been like, if he had lived longer.

  He remembered a shaft of green light, the golden halo of the mosque’s interior reflecting all around them. Madinah, the Prophet’s tomb, peace be upon him. His father’s soft whisper came back to him suddenly: You’re not allowed to touch it, it’s forbidden to worship the grave, because that’s what Mohammed wanted, salla¯ llahu’ alayhi wa sallam.

  The association of his father’s memory with the gruesomeness of a murder scene felt sacrilegious, and he might have written it off as the quirk of an anxious mind, but it had happened too often. He’d been working homicide cases for the past five years and had certainly seen corpses, but his father was the only person whom he’d ever seen die, actually been there to witness the passage from life to death. Or, if he was being specific, barzakh came next, the state of cold sleep after physical death but before the spirit ascends from the body, when the questioning angels, Munkar and Nakir, come to interrogate the dead. Of course that was silly, but he liked to imagine it.

  He walked down the sand, feeling naked without Rafiq. His partner was still on leave. He wished to hell there were some way he could have brought Faiza, but a woman had no reason to be here, and it would only have raised questions in the department.

  The beach was roped off at a generous distance with crime scene tape, but beyond that even greater barriers existed where the forensics team had set up an impromptu field office at the back end of a van, and where men were noisily talking and buzzing between the patrol cars and unmarked vehicles parked haphazardly up and down the road. There wasn’t much traffic here, especially this early in the morning, but they’d put up a roadblock to keep out the curious.

  The old man who’d found her had referred to her as Eve, and now the name was stuck in his mind. Strangely, the site where Eve was lying, although surrounded by workers, was almost serene. Osama approached with caution. Please, not another housemaid, he thought. Only the forensic tech’s face revealed what he thought: a great, upwelling pity, as if it were his own sister lying there.

  Osama had once been very proud of the country’s murder rate—it was one of the lowest in the world. He had always believed that the harshness of their punishments had the intended deterrent effect. But that was before he’d joined homicide.

  The number of murders was rising, and many were shocking enough to make him feel that the country was going to hell. Last year, a man had chopped off his one-year-old nephew’s head in a supermarket right in front of the boy’s mother and a handful of shoppers. He’d actually managed to sever the entire head. In the fruit and vegetable section. He’d been having an argument with the boy’s parents; they’d angered him, and that was his revenge.

  Osama forced himself to look at the body. There was no ringing in his ears, but the brutality of the scene made his skin prickle. Her hands had been destroyed by some kind of burn; he imagined that they’d been dipped in hot oil. The skin was swollen and blistered an angry red. The year before, the police had found a woman’s burned corpse stuffed into an abandoned refrigerator in the Al-Aziziya district, right in front of the Department of Women’s Education, but that wasn’t his jurisdiction, and he hadn’t seen the body, only heard that it was still smoldering when they found it.

  This was a different kind of horror. Osama knelt beside her gently, careful not to touch. The tide was at her feet, soaking the bottom of the jeans that were still tangled around her ankles. They had set up sand barriers to keep the water back while they worked, but that was merely for convenience. From the look of the corpse, she had been in the water for a while.

  Eve was lying on her side, one arm exposed, the hand open like that of a person about to supplicate in prayer. Her face was a mutilation of tissue and skin—probably from fish, although it was hard to be certain. The lower half of the black cloak she was wearing was tangled around her waist. One of the sleeves was torn. And the scarf that had perhaps been covering her hair was wound around her neck like a garrote. Had she been strangled?

  The coroner, Ibrahim, was staring down at the body with a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Washed up on shore this morning,” he reported. “This beach is busy. Someone would have noticed if she’d washed up last night.” Although the coroner shared the name of Osama’s father, Osama often noted that the two men had little else in common. This Ibrahim, who was soft and dough-faced and missing an ear, had served as one of Osama bin Laden’s mujahideen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s. For that the officers gave him respect, but Ibrahim’s behavior could be abrupt and crass, and sometimes downright menacing. Osama tried not to feel like an upstart. He was only thirty, the department’s youngest detective inspector, as Ibrahim often liked to point out.

  “The water’s pretty warm,” Osama said. “She would probably have died, what—seven days ago?” Ibrahim scowled, prompting Osama to ask: “Do you want to revise that?”

  Ibrahim glared at him. “Not until we cut her open.”

  “Cause of death?” Osama asked.

  The coroner jutted out his chin, an unmistakable sign of annoyance that said I’ll tell you when I know, now leave me the hell alone.

  Osama had to admit there were too many options. She might have drowned, or died from loss of blood from the many stab wounds covering her body. Perhaps she had been choked by the fabric around her neck. The burns probably wouldn’t have killed her, but it was possible that the pain from the burns had rendered her unconscious and caused her to drown after someone had thrown her in the ocean.

  “These burns look premortem,” Osama went on.

  “Yes,” Ibrahim said, then added, almost as an afterthought, “I’ve seen worse.”

  Osama was giving up. He knew that anything he asked now would be subject to future revision anyway. Ibrahim was always tense at a crime scene, especially when women were involved.

  “And I’m guessing that her hands were dipped in something,” Osama said. “Kitchen oil, maybe?”

  Ibrahim walked away without an answer.

  Osama turned to Majdi, who was kneeling in the sand a few feet away.

  “What has forensics got for me?” Osama asked.

  Majdi was combing a quadrant of sand with a gloved hand, his glasses sliding down his sweaty nose. He looked up, but like a child who can’t stop playing, he compulsively turned back to the sand and kept combing. “Up the shore, behind you a bit, we’ve got a spot of your usual beach detritus—cigarettes, bottles, pieces of Styrofoam—but not much of it, frankly. And I’m not finding anything here. It looks like nothing else washed up on shore with her.”

  “Are you certain she washed up?”

  “Yeah.” Majdi glanced at the girl’s body and Osama knew what he was thinking: A sea-bloated corpse isn’t proof enough for you? “Well, you never know,” Majdi said. “I’ve already been in touch with the coast guard; they’re faxing us the ocean current reports for the past two weeks. We should be able to get an approximate location of where she entered the water, but I can’t make any promises.”

  “Any ID on the body?”

  “No,” Majdi said. “There’s no cell phone, no ID card or anything. You saw the condition of her hands. I hold out a little hope for fingerprints, but just a little.” He gave a dry rasp
and shook his head.

  Osama began to feel the dread of having to deal with Missing Persons. The reports were almost all of women—housemaids, mostly—who had left their employers because of bad pay, brutal conditions, sexual or psychological abuse, or in some cases just because. Slavery had been outlawed in the kingdom in 1962, but that hadn’t changed the fact that it still existed in some quarters under the less charged name of domestic help. There were about fifteen thousand runaway housemaids in the country, plenty of them in Jeddah and not half of them reported. But even if there were only two, that would still be too many single women running around without money, food, shelter, or proper domestic visas. And anyway, if Eve had been killed by her employers, chances were they wouldn’t have reported her missing. Please, not another housemaid. Rationally, he knew it was no worse than any other kind of murder, but with housemaids there was the added horror of the victim being so far from family and home and, in most homicide cases, of having been physically, sexually, or emotionally abused, or at the very least subjugated by strangers who thought they were superior.

  Osama glanced at the body again. Her jeans, twisted around her ankles, were caked in sand and salt. “The water wouldn’t have torn her jeans off like that. Someone tried to rip them off.”

  “Yes,” Majdi said.

  “Do you think you’ll find any hairs or fibers on them?”

  “Maybe.” Red-faced, Majdi got to his feet and wiped his hands together. “Of course the seawater washed almost everything away, but I’ll do a third check when we get back to the lab.” He gave a weak smile. “She’s also wearing a Metallica T-shirt.”

  Osama looked at the body again. “Housemaids don’t usually wear Metallica T-shirts,” he said with a twinge of hope.

  5

  Nayir knew he wouldn’t be able to eat, but he offered to make dinner anyway. His uncle was looking pale, and he felt that the older man could use the company. Earlier that day Samir had learned of the sudden death of his friend Qadhi.

  “The police won’t tell me anything,” Samir said, after half an hour on the phone with them.

  Nayir was standing at the counter mashing eggplant with a fork, preparing one of the two cold dishes he knew. It seemed to get hotter every week, which was difficult to imagine in a world of already scandalous temperatures. Nayir’s appetite, typically reliable, had shrunk by degrees so that now he ate only when he felt weak, or when Samir began commenting on his appearance.

  “Perhaps you’ll be able to find out more in the morning,” Nayir said.

  “Hmmph. Are we ready to eat?” Samir asked.

  “Not yet, I have to pray first.”

  “Oh.” His uncle’s face fell. “Why don’t you wait until after dinner? It’ll be more satisfying then anyway.”

  “Prayer time is now,” Nayir said, glancing at the clock. He left the room before his uncle could give him another lecture on the perils of taking one’s religion too seriously.

  “Eating ought to be like prayer to you,” Samir called after him. “You need the nourishment.”

  Once Nayir returned, they began the meal. A few months ago he might have been willing to fake a robust appetite to appease his uncle. But he was tired of pretending, and what with the sweat trickling down his back, he could barely manage to sit comfortably in the old vinyl chair. He couldn’t tell anymore if this lethargy was caused by the heat or by a more general discontent that, Samir had rightly noted, seemed to be getting worse.

  Samir took a piece of bread from the stack on the table and ate in the room’s heavy silence. “You know,” he said finally, “you might have better luck at getting some answers about Qadhi’s death than I. You could talk to the coroner’s office.”

  Nayir was fairly certain that he’d kept his face in control, but the mention of the coroner’s office instantly stirred an image of Katya from his memory.

  “It’s only been a day,” he told his uncle. “Maybe the police need time to get their paperwork in order.”

  Samir grunted. “You know, when your parents died, it took them six months to figure out what had caused the crash.” He looked at Nayir with sympathy, aware that this was always a sensitive subject. Nayir wanted to tell him not to worry. The conversation was triggering a much more recent pain.

  He hadn’t spoken to Katya in eight months. At first, she had continued to call him every week or so, but each call seemed only to push him further into an association he couldn’t justify—a relationship with a woman who was neither his relative nor his wife. The investigation into Nouf Shrawi’s death was over; Katya’s engagement had been broken as a result. And he knew from experience that the pleasure of seeing Katya in person was offset horribly by the anxieties that invaded him whenever he was alone with her. Without the approval of her father, Nayir could not continue to see her, and winning genuine approval would have been impossible. Nayir could never admit that he had been seeing Katya alone, and yet not to admit it was the worst kind of lie. In either case he would be a blackguard in her father’s eyes, should the truth come out. And it had to have come out. Her escort knew they’d been seeing each other. He must have told her father.

  Given what had passed between him and Katya, any modest, concerned parent would dismiss Nayir at once. He was certain that that was the right thing to do, and he was equally certain that he couldn’t take the rejection. It would have made permanent the very separation Nayir had imposed upon himself, half in the hope that it wouldn’t last forever.

  But then Katya had stopped calling. She must have realized his position. She knew him, after all, and, more important, she knew her father.

  Or perhaps she’d simply stopped wanting to see him.

  “… so will you check it out?” Samir’s words brought Nayir back to the present.

  “What?” he asked with a note of alarm. “Check what out?”

  Samir looked exasperated. “I was hoping you would go to the coroner’s office and ask a few questions. You know people there.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “You’re going to tell me that you can solve a whole murder by yourself, and yet you can’t go down to ask a question about an old family friend for me?”

  Nayir was flabbergasted. He hadn’t solved Nouf’s murder on his own, he had solved it with Katya’s help. And he had never intended to get involved in the first place. He was a desert guide, he had only been investigating as a favor to his friend Othman.

  “The Shrawis,” he tried to explain to his uncle, “that was completely different.”

  “I know you’re concerned with seeing justice done. You’ve shown that you’re willing to work hard, even fight, to see that it’s accomplished. That is rare indeed. And now you’re acting like —”

  “It’s not rare,” he snapped, fighting to maintain control. “There are people who do it every day.”

  Samir took a bite of bread with dignity. He chewed slowly, watching Nayir, before saying, “I am very proud of what you’ve done.”

  Nayir, who was about to erupt for a tangled mass of reasons that he didn’t dare analyze, was suddenly cut short. His uncle had never said those words to him, at least never so directly, and although they had fallen on angry ears, this did not diminish their significance.

  Nayir abruptly stood up to refill the water pitcher and took his time before returning to the table. He had hardly touched his plate, and the lump of food now looked repulsive.

  “Of course I’ll go,” Nayir said gruffly. “I’ll see what the coroner has to say.”

  Samir nodded with satisfaction. Nayir began clearing off the table, taking away plates, even the one Samir was using. He busied himself with wrapping everything up and putting it in the refrigerator before it spoiled. It wouldn’t take long in the 45-degree heat.

  “You are getting thinner,” Samir observed from behind him, oblivious to his nephew’s anger. “You know, you don’t even look like yourself anymore.”

  Nayir didn’t respond, and that silenced Samir. But a little while later
the words carried him out the door and into his car, where they echoed uncomfortably in the cramped space.

  The Corniche was uncharacteristically empty. No families picnicking or strolling down the long boardwalk. Although it was dusk, it was still dangerously hot outside, and the air was so thick that it felt to Nayir as if it were actually slowing down his Jeep. He half expected to look over and see the ocean boiling.

  In the last phone conversation he’d had with Katya, she’d told him that she’d been promoted to a different branch of the ministry’s forensics department, where she was going to be given more responsibility. Instead of being confined to a basement coroner’s office, she’d be working in a new police building downtown. Everything was new—the machines, the offices, all the technology was up to date. Nayir wanted to ask if the attitudes were new, too, but instead he got right to the point. “Will you be working directly with men?”

  This was met by silence. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’m sure I will.” After that, she’d gone cold. The rest of the conversation had been awkward. He felt guilty, but it genuinely bothered him that she’d be working with strange men. Then again, who was he to complain? He wasn’t her husband.

  She hadn’t called him since. He understood why. She had contented herself with believing how backward he was, how his religious convictions kept him from treating her the way she wanted to be treated. She had finally given up on him. At first he had simply accepted it. He had unmoored his boat and gone out on the water and lain on the deck staring at the glorious stars. He could have stayed there for days, overcome with an unrepentant laziness, away from people and their discomforts. There was no call to prayer to break his thoughts, and for once he was glad. He realized then that the thing he loved most in the world was solitude, and that perhaps he wasn’t the sort of man who should be married in the first place. But sailing back to the marina, he knew that solitude would never satisfy him. And the words of the Prophet rang in his mind: Marry those among you who are single.