City of Veils (30 page)

When Osama came in, Ra’id quickly dropped his injured arm beneath the table and sat up.

“What happened to your arm?” Osama asked.

“Bumped it against the gate in the backyard,” he said.

Osama set a folder on the table and opened the box, glancing at the cassette tapes.

“Where did you get these?” he asked.

“Leila’s bedroom,” the boy replied. His skin was gray, the bags under his eyes a terrible dark brown.

“Are these her original cassettes?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get them?”

“She kept them in one of the spare rooms, in a hidden panel in a closet.”

“And the computer that was in the trunk of your car—whose was that?”

“Leila’s.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I took it from her room.”

“Is this why you ran away from the lingerie store that day?”

Ra’id nodded and sat forward, pressing his chest against the table as if expecting a whipping. Osama studied the boy. The family photographs they’d found in Leila’s room gave testimony to the fact that she and Ra’id were close.

Osama pushed the folder aside and sat down. “Can I get you anything?”

Ra’id looked surprised.

“Coffee? Something to eat?”

“No.” Ra’id blinked, frowning, but Osama could tell he’d made a dent.

“All right,” Osama said. He reached for the tape player. “Osama Ibrahim interviewing Ra’id Nawar. First of all, Mr. Nawar, tell me why you ran away.”

Ra’id glanced at the door again. “I knew where Leila’s video stuff was—her tapes, I mean, and all the stuff on her computer. I didn’t want you guys to find it.”

“Why not?”

This time his eyes met Osama’s. He gave a slightly derisive sniff and seemed to relax a little. “They’re listening to us, aren’t they?”

“No,” Osama said.

“What about that window?” Ra’id motioned to the one-way glass.

“No one is in there, least of all your uncle or his assistant, I promise you.”

Ra’id seemed to take forever to decide to trust him, but finally he said: “Leila’s stuff was… not exactly proper, you know what I mean?”

“Tell me.”

“She interviewed disgusting people. Prostitutes. Kleptomaniacs. I mean, I tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t listen. She went ahead with it, because she was so fucking stubborn.” This last word came out breathlessly, and he lowered his gaze.

“So you thought if you could hide the tapes, you’d be protecting her reputation?”

“I just didn’t want you guys to see it all. It’s going to give you this idea about Leila, make you think, I don’t know, maybe she deserved what she got —” He broke off with a choking sound.

“We have other copies of the videos she made,” Osama said.

“What? How?”

“Do you know why she was interested in those women?”

Ra’id paused. “She wanted to know how they got by,” he said. “Most of the women she interviewed supported themselves. Maybe their families had cut them off. Some of them didn’t have families. They didn’t want to do what they were doing, but they felt they had no other choices. Leila was interested.”

“I see. How did she meet them?”

“I’m not sure. She met one woman online…”

“And the others?”

“I don’t know.” Ra’id had begun to sweat.

“I get the impression that you and Leila were close,” Osama said. “That she might have told you things.”

The boy nodded.

“So you, of all people, would have some idea of how she did her work. And I do understand that it was a serious pursuit for her.” Ra’id met his eyes. “Did she walk the streets looking for these women?”

He shook his head uncertainly.

“Perhaps she knew a man who introduced her to some of them?”

Ra’id shook his head again, looking beleaguered. “Listen, I don’t know exactly. She didn’t tell me everything. She was the kind of person who would just get an idea in her head and follow it without stopping. She didn’t know any of these women, but once she decided to start interviewing prostitutes, she wasn’t going to stop until she’d found a dozen who’d be willing to talk on camera. That’s just how she was.”

“Do you think she was trying to make a comment on our society?”

Ra’id looked nervous. “Maybe, a little.”

“There’s a lot to criticize here,” Osama said, “especially for a woman. It seems like Leila was committed to making a statement.”

“Yeah, kind of.” Ra’id still looked nervous. “She didn’t like the way the women were treated, but she respected that they were taking care of themselves. She was just trying to show people that sometimes bad things happen here.”

Osama noted the delicacy of expression. The idea that Leila cared about the women wasn’t exactly in keeping with the behavior Leila had apparently shown on the clips of her interviews with them. The preliminary report that Katya had put on his desk said that Leila seemed more interested in exposing the prostitutes’ flaws and hypocrisies, even humiliating them.

“Leila wasn’t thinking of exposing these women, was she?” Osama asked.

“No! She was committed to their privacy.”

“But you have to admit, it would have been an ideal opportunity to create a sensation, for Leila to make a name for herself as a filmmaker.”

“That’s not what she wanted! She was going to blur their faces so you couldn’t recognize them. And she hardly ever told anyone what she was doing.”

Osama bristled at Ra’id’s innocence. He wanted to tell the boy that Leila the idealist might just have been Leila the sweet-talking girl who could convince her cousin that she was on a mission for a higher cause. He had the feeling Leila’s “higher cause” was fame or money.

“Did Leila ever talk about what sort of hopes she had for this film project?” he asked.

“Yeah, she was going to send it to film festivals in Syria and New York. She had them all picked out. And she had all the stuff already recorded. She just had to…” He stopped as if wounded by the reality that the project would never be finished. “She had to put it all together and make a documentary out of it. She just… she didn’t get the chance to do it.” He exhaled heavily, fighting tears.

The boy was pitiful.

“What about her video camera?” Osama asked. “The first one got destroyed when she was attacked at the Corniche, so she bought another one. How did she get the money for that?”

“I gave it to her,” he said somewhat nervously.

“That was very generous.”

“She needed it, and she was going to pay me back someday.”

Osama nodded. “How much did your uncle know about her activities?”

“Nothing.” Ra’id snorted. “If he had…” Ra’id seemed to think better of finishing that thought.

“But Abdulrahman let her go out,” Osama said.

“No. He tried to keep her home, but she went out anyway. He said it was okay for her to film B-roll if she brought me along as a chaperone. She hated working for the news station. It was boring. Abdulrahman was at work all day, so he didn’t know what she was doing. Occasionally, he’d find out that she wasn’t home, and he’d call her cell phone. She’d always tell him she was at her friend Farooha’s house, and Farooha would cover for her.”

“So he never knew what Leila was really doing? He never found out, not even once, that she was going around the city filming things other than B-roll?”

“No.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“If he had found out, believe me, we would have known.”

“He has a temper,” Osama offered.

“Yeah,” Ra’id said. “But he would never have hurt her, even if he was angry. He would have screamed at her, that’s all.”

Osama nodded. “According to witnesses, Leila and your uncle fought quite a bit.”

“Well, yeah. He was always trying to force her to stay home, and she’d go out anyway. She was always asking for more money, and he would never give her any. He thought she was just going to go out and spend it on clothes. Obviously, she never told him that she needed it for her film projects.”

A cool expression settled over Ra’id’s face. “He wasn’t her father. He acted like it sometimes, but he couldn’t control her.”

Osama decided to change the focus. “Where were you on the morning she disappeared?”

Ra’id sat up. “I was at the store all morning. Why?”

“No one at the store seems able to verify that you were actually there.”

“I was there!” he insisted, voice rising. “I was there all day!”

“Were you supposed to be with her—you know, being her ‘chaperone’?”

“I didn’t go out with her every single time.”

“Did your uncle know this?”

“No.”

“So wouldn’t your uncle have found it suspicious if you showed up at the store?”

Ra’id was squirming. “Yeah, but he wasn’t going to be at the store that morning.”

“Still, one of the staff members might have noticed and mentioned it to him. Fuad, for example.”

Ra’id was chewing his lip. “Well, Fuad wasn’t there either.” He said this with a mild look of triumph that gave Osama the idea that he’d just stumbled on the answer.

“But you would have known where Leila was going that morning,” Osama went on. “Was it to see someone in particular?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.”

It was as if the conversation had hit a wall. Osama waited, watching. Ra’id sat staring at the box on the table.

Osama sat back and made a show of reflecting. “You must have really cared about her. You gave her a lot of money. You supported what she did and kept her secrets. And you even risked becoming a murder suspect by stealing these tapes and the computer from the house to protect her reputation. You have definitely committed a crime by erasing her hard drive.” Ra’id struggled not to seem too panicked. “And yet these tapes may be the only evidence we have of who killed her.”

The boy had the grace to look stricken.

“So it raises the uncomfortable question,” Osama went on, sitting forward now, “of what your real motivation was for stealing those tapes.”

Ra’id’s mouth hung open, and he sputtered, “I don’t know what you mean. I told you why I did it.”

“It didn’t bother you, for example, that Leila was seeing an American man?”

For just a moment, Ra’id’s eyes flickered with hostility. “Who? That Eric guy? She wasn’t
seeing
him. They were friends.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t believe me?” Ra’id was getting more tense by the second. “They were friends, nothing more.”

“It seems to me she knew this Eric guy pretty well. She went out with him quite a lot.”

“They hung out sometimes, that was it.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“It’s none of your business!” Ra’id shot out of his seat, surprising Osama.

“Mr. Nawar, sit down.”

Ra’id remained standing a few seconds longer, then reluctantly took a seat. The look on his face told Osama that he was done cooperating.

“Was she going to meet Eric that day?” Osama asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did it upset you that she didn’t want you to come along?”

Ra’id jutted out his lower lip. Despite the proliferation of coarse black hairs it was a boy’s chin, and he seemed more juvenile every minute. “Like I said before: I don’t know where she went that morning.”

Nothing more was said for a cold few minutes. Osama thought of Nuha’s birth control pills lying shattered on the kitchen table and of the shameful feeling he’d had after smashing them, that he wasn’t able to control himself, that there was something very traditional inside him that couldn’t be so easily dismissed. Instead of thinking of it as a character flaw, however, he began to imagine that everybody had a secret trigger. Had Leila, like Nuha, done something in particular that had brought out her cousin’s surprising wrath?

Osama stood up. “Mr. Nawar,” he said, leaning over the table. “We’re going to find out what’s on these tapes, and we’re going to put all our information together, and I want you to know that there’s simply no chance at all that we’re going to let this killer get away. Is that clear?”

Ra’id didn’t reply, and Osama made as if to leave.

“Wait,” Ra’id said. “Are you going to let me go?”

“No,” Osama said.

“But why? I didn’t do anything!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Nawar, you ran away once before, and I’m not convinced of your innocence.” Osama waited for more protest, but Ra’id didn’t speak, and Osama left him looking furious.

B
efore Dhuhr prayers on Sunday was the best time to catch Imam Hadi alone. It was supposed to be the hour when his older students practiced their recitations, but they always came after ‘Asr, leaving him a brief period to inhabit his office and enjoy a cup of tea with those congregants who knew him well enough to take advantage of this gap in his schedule. He was usually studying or writing, sitting behind the great oak desk, glasses perched on his nose, his
shumagh
draped on the chair behind him.