City of Veils Page 9

  Smile, you’re on camera!

  Katya stood up. Pretend you’re a man on the street. She walked the length of the room. Looked at her cell phone. You’ve just received a cryptic message from a stranger. What do you do? Anyone, even a woman, would look around and wonder who sent the message. And what would they see? Perhaps a woman with a camera. That would enable the receiver to pinpoint who was sending the message. Then what? Most people would be upset to see that they were being filmed unaware. They might try to duck away; women would cover their faces. Only the intrepid man would respond. How?

  Katya’s cell phone was relatively new, but she managed to figure out how to reply to the message. She wrote back Show me your face.

  And like magic, another message came. Katya looked around the room. She hadn’t touched the burqa. She opened the message and let out a yelp. It was a woman’s face, a beautiful one, too. She had a long, fine nose and a pair of dark brown eyes framed by thick lashes. There was something both geeky and seductive in her expression. In the center of her forehead was a small brown bump, a birthmark most likely, but it only made her face more endearing.

  The door opened and a woman came in. She introduced herself only as Um-Kareem, the Syrian facial reconstruction analyst Adara had mentioned. Katya welcomed her and slipped the cell phone back into her purse.

  The woman didn’t take off her iron curtain of a burqa. It wasn’t exactly unusual; women had come into the lab before and been reluctant to take off their face coverings for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that there were men in the building. But for some reason, Um-Kareem’s burqa suddenly struck Katya as the height of pomposity. Dear viewer, it said, I can read a face from a shapeless blob, but you cannot. She handed Katya the sketch, rendered in pencil and ink on a plain sheet of art paper.

  The face was touchingly pretty. Katya could see a strong resemblance to the Bluetooth picture, and her heart gave a thump. She looked up at Um-Kareem. “Beautiful.”

  “Hmmmf,” Um-Kareem said. “I didn’t make her that way, if that’s what you’re trying to suggest. My work is based on a computerized skeletal analysis and tissue-depth samples. You do realize that this department has spent lavishly on your machines, and you have some of the finest computer modeling software in the world. Unfortunately, I am one of the few people who know how to use it.” She let this comment linger so that Katya would have time to feel pummeled by its subtext: How can you possibly be raising the standards for women in this department when you don’t even know how to use your own computers? Or perhaps she blamed Katya for the insufficient education of women in general. “The facial interpretation,” she went on, “is derived from a number of understood variables regarding the facial structure of any given person within a certain age and ethnicity.”

  Katya was in a devilish mood, so she decided to toy with her. “Which ethnicity was she?”

  “If I had to be specific,” the woman intoned grandly, “I’d say she was a Bedouin.”

  “That’s pretty specific.”

  “Of course, generally I’d say she’s from the greater Arabian peninsula.”

  “How can you —?”

  “Supraorbitally, there’s an excess of tissue between the nasion and glabella in a pattern consistent with certain Bedouin tribes.” Um-Kareem pointed to the picture. “Personally, I’ve theorized that it developed as a reaction to the brightness of the sun. All that squinting, generations of squinting, the brow furrows eventually with a certain degree of permanence.” Katya imagined that Um-Kareem’s face was very sleek. She would never have tolerated a glabellar anomaly. Only camels had humps. “Based on the underlying tissue, you understand,” the woman said, “I was able to reconstruct this fold.”

  “Yes, I understand.” Katya saw that she had drawn a protrusion above the woman’s forehead that probably resembled, from the side, the profile of a chimpanzee. Katya hated to tell her that the protrusion was exaggerated, that Eve was in fact quite lovely.

  “What’s this spot here?” She had also drawn a tiny knob in the center of the woman’s forehead, slightly above the eyebrows.

  An ever so slight shifting in the burqa, right where the cheekbone would have been, revealed that Um-Kareem smiled with one side of her face. “That, my friend, is a zabiba.” A “raisin,” a bump on the forehead that formed over a lifetime of prayer. Katya knew people who wore them proudly. She was grudgingly impressed that, despite Um-Kareem’s biases against the Bedouin forehead, she had still managed to reconstruct a detail as fine as a zabiba.

  “Couldn’t it be a birthmark?” Katya asked.

  “Yes.” Um-Kareem’s eyes looked dangerously annoyed. “But I think it is a zabiba. As a callus, it didn’t burn away so easily.” She looked down at her sketch with an appraising eye.

  “Hmm, yes.” Katya would have liked nothing more than to take the phone from her purse and show Um-Kareem the real picture of Eve’s face, but she sensed that it wouldn’t take much to make an enemy of this woman, and she didn’t want that.

  “You’re lucky you have such computers lying around,” Um-Kareem went on. “Otherwise it would have taken me weeks to reconstruct her face, and I’m an expert.”

  Katya glanced at her purse. She was getting sorely tempted. “How old was this woman?”

  Um-Kareem hesitated. “The examiner and I have estimated twenty-four.”

  “Wasn’t she too young to have a zabiba?”

  “Apparently not.” Unruffled, Um-Kareem gathered her purse and left, but not before imperiously reminding Katya that she was to give the picture to her superior just as soon as Zainab returned.

  Katya watched Um-Kareem leave, feeling a strange sense of deflation. The drawing was accurate, but it still brought them no closer to identifying Eve. The paper was thin, almost like onionskin. It was such a frail clue, and the impossibility of it washed over Katya suddenly: she was supposed to find a woman by her face. She almost laughed.

  But they had one other clue: the Bluetooth burqa. There couldn’t be that many of them. The police should be able to trace her through the burqa’s retailer.

  Katya sat down at her computer. She did a quick search on the Missing Persons database, looking for a female with a known birthmark on the forehead, and the result popped up on her screen so quickly that she gasped. There was one missing person in the Jeddah area with a facial birthmark. Leila Nawar. Katya’s stomach did a flip. The face looking back at her was the same one from the Bluetooth photo. According to the file, Leila had disappeared a week ago. She was reported missing by her brother Abdulrahman Nawar, who owned a fashion boutique in Jeddah. Leila was a filmmaker who, according to her brother, worked freelance for a local news station. So she wasn’t a housewife after all.

  That’s really the end of first impressions, Katya thought with a strange touch of pride. Yet why should it bring her satisfaction? She had only to look at her relationships with Othman and Nayir to feel affirmed of the point. Picking up the phone, she dialed Zainab’s number again.

  12

  The Amirs called that morning to cancel the trip. Nayir woke on his boat to the sound of his cell phone jangling. There was a hurried explanation, too many apologies. Five minutes later he stood staring at the bathroom sink, contemplating his situation. We’re sorry, but too many things have come up. Family matters—you know. Nayir hadn’t wanted to ask. He was too disappointed. And to think of all the money the family had spent on preparations. They had even bought new vehicles—twelve Land Rovers sitting in an empty garage, each car stocked with enough supplies to last an entire Bedouin camp for the rest of the summer. The waste wouldn’t trouble the Amirs, of course, but it troubled him. He decided that this morning he would say a prayer of forgiveness for the sins of profligacy.

  His boat creaked unhappily when he stepped onto the pier. The paint was peeling on the hull, and the name Fatimah had faded to gray. It occurred to him that it might be time for a new name.

  When he reached the marina parking lot, he found that someone
had broken into his Jeep. The driver’s-side door was ajar, and there was a note on the dashboard. Nayir felt the first tug of dread. In gratitude for all your work, the note read. From Mohammed Amir. Wrapped inside the bottom half of the paper was a shiny set of keys. He looked and saw a Land Rover parked beside his Jeep.

  It was one of the Rovers he’d packed three days before. They’d even stocked the salt tablets in the trunk. There were blankets, a two-person tent, a sleeping bag, and a brand-new cooler. Someone had thoughtfully filled it with ice—and recently, too. The cubes were growing slushy at the bottom, and the caviar and nonalcoholic beer were still cold. There was even a new canteen, one of the expensive Brookstone kinds, along with a folder of unopened topographic maps. He went to the front seat and saw a GPS navigation system on the instrument panel. A CD player. And the Quran on the dashboard was so new that its gold-rimmed pages crackled and stuck together when he opened it.

  Before he knew what he was doing, he was behind the wheel and driving the Land Rover out of the parking lot. Having become accustomed to the thumping rhythms of the Jeep, he was amazed by the smoothness of the ride. It was going to break his heart.

  Twenty minutes later, he reached the Amirs’ garage. He pulled inside, parked the Rover beside the others, and went looking for one of the Amirs, but only servants lingered in the air-conditioned office, smoking and drinking coffee. He gave them the keys and instructions to thank Mohammed Amir for his extraordinary kindness, but to explain that Nayir could not accept such a fine gift. For what? he wondered. For having spent two weeks doing a job for which I’ve already been paid generously? The servants understood, and one of them offered Nayir a ride back to the marina.

  It was only after Dhuhr prayers that he began to regret his decision. He was back at his boat, coiling ropes on the pier and broiling in the midday heat, desperately wishing he could go for a ride in anything air-conditioned. A woman walked by with a small dog on a leash. He’d never seen her before. She wasn’t even wearing a headscarf, and her black, frizzy hair seemed to blow around her head despite the notable absence of a breeze. Her dog, small and equally black and frizzy, began to yip at Nayir as they passed. The woman laughed, bent over, and scooped the dog into her arms.

  “He’s afraid of tall, handsome men,” she said.

  Nayir didn’t look at her. He kept his attention on the ropes. As the woman walked off, he made a mental note to complain to the residential office. He could have sworn that ever since the kingdom’s ban on walking cats and dogs in public—under the not-so-inaccurate notion that pets were just another device of flirtation (or was it that they were more of a showy accessory, like a Gucci purse or a pair of high heels? He couldn’t remember)—more people than ever were walking dogs. Also there were definitely more cats lurking around the piers at night. The city was beginning to feel too foreign, and that was always a sign that he needed the simplicity of the desert again. His plans had fallen through, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t go there himself. He already had all the supplies at hand. He had money in the bank. And although not perfect, his Jeep was still running.

  Half an hour later, he was on the freeway to Wadi Khulais. Boring, yes, but it wasn’t so far out that he couldn’t receive cell phone calls, or, if his Jeep decided to quit on him, that he couldn’t catch a ride home with someone else. He had just had his first glimpse of open space when his cell phone rang, setting off a small explosion in his chest. Katya. He pulled to the roadside and checked the caller ID. He didn’t recognize the number, but it could be her. He fumbled to answer it, trying not to sound breathless.

  “Hello, Nayir, it’s me.” She sounded casual, almost bored, as if they talked every day.

  He felt the first tug of discomfort. In the short time since he’d seen her, he had managed to hold on to the feeling that had overcome him at their meeting—that he was being given another chance, and that he’d do anything not to mess it up. But the practicality in her voice made the first hole in his confidence, and a sudden, automatic anxiety made the second. Katya. Should he be saying her name? Wouldn’t it be more proper if he reverted to calling her Miss Hijazi? Figuring that she might be offended by that, he said simply, “Hello.”

  “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

  Camping, he should have said, or I’m heading out of town. Instead he found that magic hedge spot that was neither a lie nor the truth. “Tomorrow night? I had some plans, but I’m not sure yet. Why?”

  “So you could be free?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Then I’d like you to come over for dinner—at, say, seven o’clock?”

  It was happening too quickly. She gave him no time to back away, and he had the sense that she had planned it like this. And that he deserved it, after all his previous waffling. Sweat was trickling down his scalp and onto the phone, rivulets running down his arms and back. His determination had vanished, and all that was left was automatic courtesy.

  “I’d like that,” he said, knowing that somewhere deep down he would like to go to her house for dinner, even if he didn’t know it right now, even if the thought of meeting her father and having to acknowledge his previous relationship with Katya made him feel as if someone were drilling nails into his neck. “Seven o’clock, then.”

  “Let me give you our address.”

  He fumbled for a pen, couldn’t find one, and tried desperately to memorize what she was saying, all the while remaining stuck on that single word our. Our address. Me and my father. The gatekeeper.

  He was too embarrassed to ask if she had found out anything more about Samir’s friend Qadhi, and she hadn’t offered the information. It remained unspoken, but he imagined the words: Come and I’ll tell you. Don’t come and you’ll never find out.

  Once the phone call was over, he spun a U-turn on the road and went straight back to the marina. He wasn’t sure exactly why he was heading home. He had a whole day before he had to be at her apartment, and getting ready might take as much as fifteen minutes. He just knew that he had to get back to the boat.

  Pulling into the parking lot, he saw it at once. The Land Rover was parked just where it had been that morning. His stomach did a simultaneous plunge and whooping leap. How could they possibly have had the nerve to return it? And, Allah, they returned it!

  He parked the Jeep beside it and walked around the Rover, peeking in the rear windows. It was indeed the same car. The key was in the ignition, so he took it out and slid it into his pocket, telling himself that he would make at least one more attempt to return it, but not this afternoon. He knew that he would return the Rover again, and he saw just as clearly that they would bring it straight back, at which point it would become a war of attrition. He could not keep giving it back to them without risking offense, and their continued insistence was all the proof he needed that they meant for him to keep it. If he felt guilty about it later, he could always remind himself They practically forced me to take it. He wondered if he would feel guilty.

  13

  Miriam sat at the kitchen table, phone at her ear. The consulate was on the other end of the line. They had switched her from one bureaucrat to another, and now she was on hold. On the floor beside her feet, the broken sink disposal was lying in pieces. About that, she wasn’t sure whom to call.

  Eric hadn’t been missing for twenty-four hours yet, but with every hour that slipped by, Miriam’s panic grew worse. She hoped that calling the consulate would soothe her nerves.

  “Hello?”

  It was a woman’s voice, which relieved her. She sounded American, unlike the first two people Miriam had spoken with. She introduced herself and explained her situation. My husband is missing.

  The woman gave a sympathetic mew. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Mrs. Walker. Are you in a dangerous situation right now?”

  “Errr, no. I’m at home.”

  “Good.” It sounded as if the woman was riffling through paperwork. “First of all, I want to assure you that we’ll do everything we can
to help you find your husband.”

  “Thank you.” Although skeptical, Miriam felt a small implosion of relief.

  “It’s not uncommon for Americans to be picked up by the religious police, even here in Jeddah. Most of the time they don’t know the rules of proper conduct, or they don’t understand the importance of dressing modestly. I’m trying to pull up your file right now, but let me ask you, how long have you and your husband been here?”

  “Six months.”

  “Ah.” The woman sounded somehow disappointed by this. “And you say that your husband went out to buy groceries when he disappeared?”

  “Well, dinner actually. He came back with it—it was takeout from a local shawarma place. He left it on the kitchen table and then… I don’t know, I was on the roof. When I came downstairs a few minutes later, he was gone.” This was the part Miriam had dreaded; she could almost hear the woman’s thoughts coming down the line. Maybe he just walked out on you. That’s not uncommon either.

  “I see,” the woman said. Then her voice turned sympathetic. “Tell me something, does your husband own a car?”

  “Yes, a truck.”

  “Ah. Well, did he take the truck when he went to buy dinner?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I think he went to a local place. I recognized the food, and he could easily have walked there.”

  “Okay,” the woman said. “Do you know if his car is gone as well?”

  “Ah, I’m not sure,” Miriam replied, embarrassed. “He had parked it a couple blocks away, and I can’t remember where that was.”

  “I see.” The woman’s voice was kind and reassuring. “Mrs. Walker, it would help us to know if anything like this has ever happened before.” Hearing Miriam’s silence, the woman went on: “I mean, have there been unexplained absences —”