Finding Nouf Read online

  Nayir suppressed his exasperation. They were indeed two beautiful suras; they were also the only true wards against the evil eye, because they were the only charms that directly invoked Allah's assistance. "So why didn't Nouf just recite the Two Takings of Refuge?" he asked. "And for that matter, why would anyone use a symbol or an amulet when the Two Takings are always with them?"

  Samir sighed and sat back, a sign that he was about to launch into a lecture. Nayir sat up. "The short version, please."

  Samir chuckled. "Most symbols of protection rely on the number five. Five fingers. Five words. Some people even recite the Two Takings five times."

  "I know that." Nayir waved his hand. "Five pillars of Islam. Five prayer times a day."

  "The perfect Kaaba in heaven is made of stones from the five sacred mountains: Sinai, al-Judi, Hire, Olivet, and Lebanon." Samir looked as if he were preparing to discharge the longest list—or at least round it off to five examples—but Nayir was impatient.

  "All right," he said snappishly, "I know the magic meaning of the number. It doesn't answer my question."

  "You can only whisper the prayer during a moment in time, but a visual symbol is always with you, on guard even when you are not."

  "Isn't that Allah's job?" Nayir asked.

  "Yes, it is. But symbols are comforting too. So perhaps your Shrawi girl wanted that comfort. Perhaps she was afraid. It's even possible that she was trying to protect herself from a human eye. I think the question you want to ask is, who was with her in the desert?"

  "A kidnapper, a stranger, or someone not from the family. It would have to mean she was with someone she didn't trust. Or didn't know she could trust. If she did run away, then it was with someone she trusted enough to be alone with in the desert but didn't trust entirely. She could have made the lines just in case."

  "So you think she wasn't kidnapped," Samir said.

  "I don't know."

  "Why would someone kidnap her?" Samir asked. "There was no ransom demand."

  "Possibly to silence her. She was pregnant."

  Samir nodded. "Don't you find the cover-up suspicious?"

  "They want to solve this one alone. That makes them just like every other rich family—it doesn't mean they're guilty."

  "But you must consider that a woman of Nouf's station would not have known anyone but her brothers."

  Nayir frowned deeply. "Don't be ridiculous. You know her brothers. They wouldn't do this."

  "You're defending them as if you fear their guilt."

  Nayir bristled. Of course he feared their guilt. Whoever stole the camel knew the estate well enough to steal the camel. But he hadn't known it that well—he'd stumbled across the camel keeper's daughter.

  Samir's face was hard with annoyance, but slowly it resolved into a patient calm. "I have known the Shrawi men for many years, and you're right, this isn't the sort of thing they would do. But my logic stands—a woman like Nouf, who was from a good family, would have known only her brothers."

  Nayir sat regarding his uncle, the pipe, the tuft of gray hair and the diplomas that hung on the wall behind it. A faint halo of smoke clung to the view. He couldn't help feeling that he was still a young boy taking lessons from a patient old man.

  "Can we check on those samples now?" he asked impatiently.

  The corners of Samir's mouth lifted. He laid his pipe on its stand and rose to his feet, wobbling slightly. Without the desk to shield him, he suddenly seemed frail, but he regarded his nephew with a thoughtful eye.

  "I'm glad you're doing something productive with your time."

  Nayir bit his tongue.

  The basement was a dimly lit space with low ceilings and dusty stone walls. These days Samir spent most of his time in the cool, secluded room, conducting research into an obscure branch of chemistry that Nayir had never bothered to understand. The lab was an odd mix of old and new: a mass spectrometer stood beside a shelf of decaying books, while rows of sterile vials and pipettes shared space with an iron-plated boiling apparatus that might have been a relic from the Ottoman Empire. Above it all hung a faded poster of Jerusalem lit at night.

  It was here that Samir had spent the afternoon processing the samples that Nayir had brought. There were several samples from Nouf's body: swabs of dirt from her wrist and sand and other traces from her skin and her head wound, courtesy of Benson & Hedges, who'd received them from Othman, who'd apparently received them from Miss Hijazi.

  "The samples are interesting," Samir said. He handed Nayir a printout, but Nayir set it on the table.

  "Just tell me what it says."

  "The first one is dirt."

  "Yes, thanks."

  "And manure." Samir regarded his nephew with a thoughtful eye. "The sample was contaminated by blood and sand, but manure is manure."

  The dark substance on Nouf's wrist had contained traces of manure? "Can you tell if it's from a camel?"

  "Only if camels eat Apocynaceae. In the manure I found traces of cardiotonic glycosides, prussic acid, and rutin, the active poisons in the Nerium plant, commonly known as oleander."

  "What?"

  "It's a flowering plant. It's not indigenous to Jeddah, but I'm sure you can find them here and there."

  "I know what it is. I'm just surprised."

  "Ah. Well, they don't need a lot of water. They're sturdy plants—they like sand and sunshine, but you probably won't find them in the desert." He hauled a textbook down from the shelf and fluttered the pages. "This is oleander."

  Politely, Nayir glanced at the black-and-white sketch. "So whatever ate this plant probably ate the sample in Jeddah."

  "Yes. In a sandy place with little water."

  "That should narrow it down."

  Samir disliked sarcasm, and he frowned deeply. "It's a poisonous plant. Highly toxic."

  Nayir registered this piece of information with mild interest.

  "The second sample may be more helpful," Samir went on. "I looked at the sand from her head wound. It was rough, almost like gravel, and dark orange in color."

  "I didn't see any dark sand in the wadi," Nayir said. "How dark was it?"

  "Well, I only had a small sample, but it was darker than most sand. There were traces of clay in the mixture as well."

  "So sand and dirt?"

  "It seems that way." One by one, Samir began shutting down his machines, and as he traversed the room, he also began collecting items for Nayir: a box of plastic gloves, sterile swabs, baggies and hard plastic containers. "You'll need these," he said, piling the items into Nayir's arms. "There's more work to be done."

  Distractedly, Nayir let Samir stuff the goods into any pocket that would take them. "Thanks, that's enough. I really don't need all this."

  "What's wrong?" his uncle asked, studying his face.

  "What kind of animal eats a poisonous plant?" Samir gave the question some thought. "It must have been a desperate act."

  9

  THE NEXT MORNING Nayir stood in the cabin of his boat, the Fatimah, and tried to forget his dream from the night before. He'd dreamed of Fatimah again. It had been almost four years since he'd seen her, but the dreams were more vivid every time. She was the only woman he'd ever courted.

  His desert friend Bilal had introduced them, saying that Fatimah was the sort of woman who wanted to choose her own husband. Nayir was hesitant about meeting a woman, but she was Bilal's cousin, and Bilal assured him that she was a good Muslim. Right away Nayir saw that he was right. Fatimah lived modestly in a two-bedroom flat with her mother. She did a yearly hajj and lived by her prayer schedule. Her calm disposition and the sweet, tickled way she laughed at his jokes gave him the sense that she was decent and modest.

  They spent a few weeks getting to know each other. They met in her sitting room, a cool, quiet gallery overlooking a courtyard. On the coffee table was a gorgeous leather-bound Quran, open to a different sura every day. Despite the nerve-racking presence of her mother, Nayir was grateful for the chaperone; it made the visits fe
el less inappropriate. But as he got to know Fatimah and he realized just how virtuous she was, the motherly chaperone seemed superfluous. Fatimah loved to debate the finer points of Islamic interpretation, like whether or not the veil should cover the face or just the hair. She quoted generously from the Quran without ever touching the book. One time she recited the whole four-page section from sura An-Nur that dealt with the veil: Believing women, it said, should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands. She believed that covering the bosom was a literal prescription but the rest was up to the individual. She covered her head, she said, because it was the modest thing to do, and then she joked that her face wasn't pretty enough to cause much disturbance among men but she would veil it to spare them the fright. Nayir smiled at the joke, although he privately disagreed. Her face didn't dazzle, but it drew him in anyway, becoming lovelier as the days went by. She was half his height, and from what he could tell through the black cloaks she always wore, voluptuous as well.

  They began to meet more frequently, sometimes twice a day. She was a miracle to him, the first woman he'd ever gotten to know well and yet the most perfect woman of all. After seeing her for three months, he couldn't imagine not knowing her. She had been meeting other men, however, and one day announced that she had chosen her husband—a doctor.

  He took it with surprising aplomb. After leaving her apartment that day, he stood on the street, looked up at her shuttered window, and realized that he would never go back inside. She would become another man's wife. He wanted to preserve something, anything, of their friendship, but it was simply too improper. Oddly, he was proud of himself. It felt as if his rationality existed to sustain him through difficult times. Over the next few weeks he spent long hours in prayer and thought that maybe his isolation was Allah's real plan for him—to what greater purpose, he didn't know, but he would have faith.

  The heartbreak happened only slowly, over the course of years. He began to think of her with ever-greater sadness, so that each time he did, the wound opened wider. His dreams of her grew more frequent. She appeared exactly as she'd been in the sitting room: questioning, sweet-tempered, cloaked in black, with the Quran open on the table before her. Sometimes she was having sex with gentlemen callers while Nayir watched. She would strip for them, tease them. He wanted her, and he would try to have her, holding her, crying, begging her to turn to him, but she never did. The men always noticed Nayir's failure and laughed. The dreams were so real that they left him feeling that he'd actually traveled in a ghostly body through the night and seen the real Fatimah by dream magic. When he woke, it was with a deep disgust for his yearnings and, later, for the way he had been fooled.

  Now, swaying gently with the water's rhythm, he stared into the tiny closet that held all the clothing he never wore. Most of the items were piled on the floor, but a few remained on hangers, and among those he stared at one in particular, the brown suit he'd often worn to Fatimah's house. He took it off the hanger and thought about his dream, trying to chase away the shame. Quranic interpretation said that the body was like a garment for the soul; it was good and pure, endowed with gorgeous flaws. Only in excess did the human delve into sin, and he was certainly not guilty of that, unless one considered his chastity excessive.

  He smelled the suit; it was musty, no trace left of the frankincense she sometimes burned in the sitting room. Searching the pockets, he found a miswak, a spare key for the boat, and his old misyar. The latter he took out with an ache of nostalgia. It was a fake marriage license signed by a sheik and left blank for the casual bride and groom; it protected a hedonistic couple in case they were discovered having sex out of wedlock—they could hand it to a cop as proof of marriage. The law was not kind to unmarried lovers. The punishment for having sex out of wedlock—for even being caught with a single woman—was arrest, charges of prostitution and public indecency, a trial without a lawyer, and, if the parties were found guilty, a public beheading. Of course, the chances of being found with Fatimah in her apartment were practically zero, but he'd always dreamed of taking her somewhere, to the desert perhaps, or a quiet beach. It was for such an outing that he'd bought the misyar.

  It looked flimsy now, wrinkled from sweat and worn from being folded and tucked away. In the box for "groom" he had long ago printed "Nayir ibn Suleiman ash-Sharqi" in his finest handwriting, but the box for "bride" had been empty since he bought it from an Egyptian sheik who doubled as a butcher in the old town.

  How many times had he almost written Fatimah's name in the box? How close had he come to marrying her? He must have been crazy, trusting a woman he had no reason to trust. But with a vividness that stung him, he remembered the coolness of her sitting room. It was the reason he'd bought the suit in the first place. No matter the weather, the room was always cool, as if she didn't really live in this sweltering world where everything else wilted and died.

  He had spent the night before thinking about Nouf. Now that his dealings with the private investigator were finished, his interest in the case no longer seemed legitimate. But he wanted answers to the questions that were bothering him: Why had she died so close to the family's campsite? If she'd driven out there, why hadn't anyone found the truck? Where had they found the camel? Why did Othman think the camel had been traumatized? Each question about Othman seemed to spawn a dozen others: Were his brothers pressuring him to keep quiet? Was he hiding something, even from his family? Or did he not trust Nayir?

  Nayir's cell phone rang. He spent a surprised moment staring at it, but he answered.

  "What did you do to my detective?" Othman asked by way of greeting. Nayir heard the amusement in his voice. "He's out of the hospital, but he came by this morning to apologize. He's quitting. I tried talking him out of it, but he wouldn't hear it."

  "Stubborn guy."

  "I wish he'd been as stubborn about the case," Othman said. "What are you doing right now?"

  "Oh ... staring at my closet."

  "I'm free this morning—my meeting fell through, but I have to buy clothing for my fiancee's trousseau. Jackets—can you believe it? These days they want jackets."

  Nayir was too embarrassed to admit that he had heard about wedding jackets. "Do they come with instructions for handling heat stroke?"

  Othman laughed. "And not just one, but many jackets. I think they come with a promise of travel to cooler climates."

  "Ah."

  "Actually, I could use a jacket myself. I can't find my desert parka."

  Nayir looked into his closet again, wondering what had happened to the parka Samir had given him for his birthday one year. He'd dragged it out to the desert once, but the weather hadn't been cold enough, and he hadn't seen it since then. "I know about a good jacket bazaar," he said. "There's one at Haraj al-Sawarikh, but the better one is south."

  "You've been to a jacket bazaar?" Othman's voice was bright with amusement. "I didn't think you were the type."

  Nayir chuckled uncomfortably. Wearing a coat in the heat obviously meant you were not wearing anything else. "Yes, that sounds like me."

  "So I'll meet you at the marina in an hour?" Othman asked.

  He hesitated. "Sure. That should give me time for morning prayers."

  Hanging up, he wondered if he was doing the right thing. On the phone it was easy to pretend that things were normal, but it wouldn't be so easy in person. He picked up the brown suit. It was such an ugly thing, faded and dusty. One hem was ripping, so that even if it hadn't reminded him of Fatimah, it was too worn and out of fashion to wear again. He dropped the suit in the trash and went to the bathroom to wash.

  The jacket bazaar was on the outskirts of town, nestled inside a larger market that sold CDs, cassettes, hairpins, and sunglasses. Nayir always thought there must be a connection, but he had never figured it out. The whole area was cordoned off by high stakes strung together with floating green lights and red-tasseled twine. A neon sign at the entrance, lit even in daylight, gave a sum of the place: THE
ROYAL BAZAAR, WE ALWAYS HAVE CHANGE.

  They were in Othman's car, a silver Porsche. Although Nayir loved the car's looks, he was simply too large to enjoy its sweet size, and his knees knocked on the dashboard. They'd been silent for most of the ride. At the marina Nayir had shown Othman the walking shoe they'd found at the wadi, and Othman had recognized it as Nouf's. The information had dampened their spirits.

  Othman steered through the unpaved parking lot, tires kicking up gravel and dust, until he found a spot in the shade of an SUV and parked. Struggling to climb out, Nayir imagined he resembled a crustacean popping out of its shell.

  As they crossed the parking lot, a call to prayer rang through the air. They stopped and looked at each other. By royal decree, all the shops would close, and any man selling goods would be chastised and sent back to the Philippines or Singapore or Palestine, his permits and visa forever revoked.

  "You want to pray?" Othman asked.

  "I just did."

  "Me too." They headed toward a small wooden kiosk, which, had it been open, would have sold them two ice-cold orange Mirandas but could now offer them only a triangle of shade. They stood in silence, the heat rushing over their bodies in waves. Nayir wished he could provide the right kind of light banter, but he knew Othman disliked it, being forced to engage in it himself all the time. He'd once told Nayir that he liked the way the desert made silence seem honest.