City of Veils (29 page)

She spent the rest of the day in front of her computer. She knew she ought to get to some of her other cases, but Leila’s DVDs were irresistible evidence. She slid the first one into the computer’s drive half expecting that the killer would appear on the screen with a gruesome confession, but the picture that came up was only the inside of a women’s department store.

The camera was focused on a circular clothing rack that held shirts and dresses. The rack seemed to be moving, but it was hard to tell because Leila had been filming the whole thing from inside another clothing rack across the aisle. At least that’s what it looked like; there was something obstructing the left side of the frame, like the sleeve of a woman’s shirt. Across the aisle, a woman was inspecting the items on the rack. Her burqa was up, and Katya could see her profile. She looked very young. All of a sudden, the woman screamed and backed away. A security guard came running, and at the same time a man bolted from the inside of the clothing rack. He took off to the left just as the security guard came from the right. And in a flash, Leila was after him, jerking out of her hiding space and galloping down the aisle. The screen went haywire for a moment, then it steadied, showing the man lying flat on his face on the carpet. Behind the camera, Leila’s voice whispered “Dammit!” Two women were standing over the perpetrator, who had apparently stumbled over their strollers. Leila had missed filming his fall, but the scene was still amusing. A moment later, a security guard came rushing up to arrest the Peeping Tom.

The disc was full of such scenes. In one, a religious policeman was chasing a woman down the street, yelling at her about the sinfulness of walking a dog in public. “They are devices of flirtation!” he shouted. “They are like jewelry, or makeup. The bedizenment of the time of ignorance!” Katya rolled her eyes. But the man managed to catch the woman. First he grabbed her arm, but she swung her purse at him, so he went straight for the heart of the matter: he seized her tiny dog by the neck and yanked it free of the leash. Then he ran off with it. The dog began barking. The woman screamed.

Katya told herself to start taking notes, but she couldn’t stop watching. She went through the whole disc, eating lunch at her desk and ignoring her cell phone. There were a few more professional-looking cuts, probably work Leila had done for the news station, filming old buildings and new construction projects and city beautification events like tree plantings with grade-school children. She skimmed through those. Leila had done a special report for a major media network in Dubai about Boy Scouts serving as guides during the hajj. But clearly her real interest lay in exposing the obscenities and clashes in her favorite city, and these took up most of the next two DVDs.

Every cut had a time and date stamp in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and so far they had all appeared in chronological order, starting about a year and a half ago. Farooha had said that Leila went out almost every day, and judging from the time stamps, she seemed to catch interesting things—things worth saving on disc—every third or fourth day.

The fourth DVD that Katya placed in the drive was different. Chronologically, it was out of sequence—there was a two-month gap between this and the previous one.

The first segment was titled
Summer of Love
. The minute it opened, a woman appeared on the screen. She was in a sunlit sitting room on a soft pink couch. Posters of Audrey Hepburn decorated the wall behind her. The woman was wearing a modish black skirt, stockings, high heels, and a short pink blazer that made her look Parisian. Her hair was short, black, and wavy, and her face, pretty in a plain sort of way, was covered with too much white makeup. Katya figured she was trying to look European, even altering the color of her skin.

A sign appeared at the bottom of the screen reading
“Johara,”
the girl’s pseudonym, and
Almesyaf Zawaaj
, summer marriage. Katya groaned. The “summer holiday marriage” was a disgusting arrangement. A man, usually a businessman, would marry a woman for the summer so he could take her as a traveling companion overseas—to Egypt or Europe or America. They would pass themselves off as man and wife. Once the vacation was over, the couple would return to Saudi and terminate the marriage.

Katya had seen want ads Bluetoothed to her cell phone from men looking for summer wives, and it was these more than anything that made her feel that the whole arrangement was dirty. The ads were almost all the same. Men were looking for women who could speak English well, who were pale skinned, slender, and sexy, and who came from good families. The pay was upwards of one hundred thousand riyals, sometimes even a new villa or a brand-new BMW. That part always made her laugh bitterly. Giving a woman a car! It was prostitution, plain and simple.

When the religious establishment got wind of this new trend (which was probably just an old trend that few had known about before), one noted cleric stepped forward to approve of the practice. He spelled it out: summer marriage was acceptable in Islam because it prevented men from falling into the sin of prostitution while they were spending so many months abroad without a woman. It was preferable for the man to take a Saudi woman along—at least she was Muslim and his wife. The sheikh pointed to another underlying concern: the fact that so many Saudi wives didn’t devote enough time to their husbands anymore—because they had found jobs outside the home—required men to look elsewhere to satisfy their needs. If a husband happened to be a businessman who traveled, well, there was nothing wrong with him taking a young woman along, since he couldn’t take his wife. She had to stay home and work.

Katya felt the first twinge of an emotion more violent than disgust. Not a single person she knew would approve of this kind of marriage. In fact, if the subject came up, most of her friends expressed outright fury, because to their minds it was disgusting. It cheapened both the sacred vow of marriage and Islam. It was just another way that the religious establishment used the Quran to support its own warped vision of the world.

Johara was facing the camera, her face masked with makeup and something stronger—defiance or pride. Leila was asking her to describe her latest summer marriage, and Johara was saying that she did it every year, and that she enjoyed having to work for only two months and then having the rest of the year to herself, spending her money as she liked.

Katya forced herself to watch the rest, the smugness of the woman’s face as she took Leila on a tour of her brand-new villa, showing off a teakwood bar, the living room’s enormous cathedral windows, and a kitchen that looked like it belonged in a restaurant—not to mention three lavish bedrooms with king-size beds, each room with a closetful of clothes. Two chihuahuas nipped at Leila’s heels as they walked. Katya had to give her some credit; Leila didn’t criticize or make her subject uncomfortable. She simply recorded everything, and only once they were back at the sitting room sofa, having tea, did Leila begin to ask the difficult questions.

“Do you think of yourself as a prostitute?”

Johara seemed prepared for this; her face remained cool. “No,” she replied somewhat mechanically. “This is not prostitution. Prostitutes can sleep with a man without a marriage contract, and that is not acceptable to me. I am a traditional woman.”

“Do you ever think of yourself as a slave?” Leila asked. Katya was taken aback by the strong words.

Johara looked shocked, and replied in an icy tone: “Of course not. When I am married to these men, I am their
legitimate
wife.”

“But your marriage is only temporary,” Leila said, her voice neutral. “And you’ve said it yourself: you’ll never have children with these men. So you’re not really a
traditional
wife.”

Johara looked as if she might stand up and leave, but then she turned from Leila and glanced sharply at the camera. “Turn that off,” she said.

Leila didn’t move; the camera remained fixed on Johara’s face.

“I said
turn it off,
” Johara snapped, reaching for the camera. There was a tussle and the screen went black.

Katya sat staring at the screen. She couldn’t be sure who angered her more—Johara for being so smug, or Leila for going into the woman’s home, nodding and oohing at her lovely house and her cute little dogs, then confronting her with critical questions that would obviously offend her host.

The next few sequences on the DVD were similar to the first. Leila was interviewing a prostitute in each one. Johara was apparently the only one who did summer marriages; the other prostitutes were more pedestrian than that. The location changed every time, and it was always the inside of somebody’s house. But in each instance, Leila managed to either alienate or upset her subject, and the interviews tended to become very tense.

As Katya ran through the rest of the footage, the reality of the situation began to settle over her. Leila spent all her time invading the privacy of others. Whether or not her work took place in public, the presence of a video camera was seldom taken lightly. There were too many people who would feel that her camera was not just a nuisance but a dangerous assault. And she did this kind of work every day. Johara had nearly punched her camera, and there were other instances of minor assault. Most likely at least one of her subjects had felt that Leila deserved worse than a public beating. They had decided that she deserved to be physically punished in a brutal way. The potential pool of killers was looking very wide. It was an investigator’s worst nightmare: there was a very good chance that the killer was a stranger, one of the many Leila had encountered in the past year and a half.

It was getting late, the office was emptying—Katya heard people walking down the corridors outside her door, talking in loud, end-of-the-day voices. She checked her watch. Ayman would be here in fifteen minutes. He was on the road already, but she could feel the prickling, electric sense of a revelation about to happen, and she wasn’t ready to go home. In the box beside the computer, the remaining DVDs were neatly queued. She had gone through only five and a half, and it had taken most of the afternoon. Unless she took some of them home, getting through the rest of them was going to take forever. And she hadn’t even looked at her other cases today. Slipping the next three DVDs casually into her purse, she locked the rest in her file cabinet and left the room.

She met Majdi on the stairs. “Heading home?” he asked.

“Yes, my ride is waiting.”

“Lucky you,” he said. He looked exhausted. “We just picked up Leila’s cousin. He’s in interrogation right now, and apparently there’s more evidence to process. It looks like it’s going to be a long night.”

“I’ll stay if you need me.”

“Well… what about your ride?” he asked with concern.

“I can stay,” she said.

“No, it’s okay. I think we can do —”

“I’m staying,” she said firmly, taking out her cell phone to call Ayman and turning back up the stairs. “Let me just put my purse away.” She looked back once to see Majdi’s look of gratitude and relief. “You’re welcome,” she said.

He gave a smile. “Thank you.”

Turning away, she felt a mixture of excitement and frustration. The reason he hadn’t expected her to stay was that she was a woman and that, in his mind, there was a husband at home waiting for her to cook his dinner and prepare his tea and pleasure him in the bedroom. It was her fault for lying about the imaginary husband. Still, she couldn’t help but feel sad. She and Majdi had been working so closely on Leila’s case that she had almost—
almost
—forgotten who she was supposed to be.

W
hen Osama arrived at the interrogation room, he found Abdulrahman and Fuad standing outside the door. Both men looked upset.

“I’m sure they won’t keep him,” Fuad was saying in a half whisper. “Just as long as he explains himself.”

“The
stupid
boy,” Abdulrahman said loudly, looking ready to burst.

Osama came upon them, and Abdulrahman turned with a start.

“Salaam alaikum,”
Osama greeted the men warily. After Fuad’s phone call, Osama had waited an hour, then gone with two of his most trusted men to Abdulrahman’s house, their only pretext an elaborate errand that no one but forensics was likely to comprehend. Ra’id must have seen their cars pull up in front of the house, because he’d attempted to escape through the backyard. They had caught him and promptly arrested him.

They’d done a search of his room and found nothing, but the inspection of his car had been more fruitful: they’d found a small box of cassette tapes, the type that could be used in a video camera. Each one was labeled
Leila Nawar
. They’d also found a computer in the trunk. Forensics suspected that the computer was Leila’s, but according to Majdi, the hard drive had been wiped clean.

“I understand the young man came back to your house on his own?” Osama asked, knowing that his involvement would get Fuad into trouble if Abdulrahman ever discovered that his assistant had called him.

“He’s ready to talk,” Abdulrahman said. Osama disliked his tone. There was too much aggression in it.

“Did he come to you?” Osama asked.

“Yes,” Abdulrahman said. “He showed up this morning and explained himself. I told him he had to come to the police. He was a little nervous about it. I was about to convince him before your people showed up.”

Fuad wore a look of careful neutrality.

Inside the interrogation room sat a very forlorn-looking Ra’id, his head in his hands, his greasy hair hanging over his fingers. His shirt was rumpled, and there was a long cut on his forearm that looked fresh. On the table next to his elbow was an old brown box.