City of Veils (40 page)

Nayir refrained from pointing out that there were obviously a lot of things she didn’t know about her husband. Still, he was struck by her loyalty.

“And it doesn’t make sense,” she went on. “If Eric killed this woman and ran away, then why would he leave that marriage document in his briefcase? And why would he —”

“Pick you up from the airport,” Nayir finished. “I know.”

She looked surprised. “So I don’t think he ran away. He must have known this woman, but maybe he —”

“Found out who killed her,” Nayir said. “Yes, I’ve thought about it. But you also have to think about this: why did he lie to you about what he was doing that whole month?”

“Well, obviously, I was out of town.…” She sat back in her chair. “Maybe he couldn’t.” Nayir looked skeptical. “I don’t know,” Miriam went on, her voice rising. “Okay, maybe he
was
cheating. And of course, if that’s true, then he wouldn’t tell me about it. But just because they were together,
if
they really were together —”

“It doesn’t mean that he killed her,” Nayir said.

They looked at each other in silent agreement. She slid the napkin off her head and used it to wipe the tears that had started running down her face. He returned his gaze to the safety of the bookshelf. “I have to do something. I have the feeling that he’s out there and he’s hurt —” She broke off.

“First thing in the morning,” he said, “I’m going to take you down to the police station.”

“What? No!”

He raised a hand. “You have to go. They need your help.”

“They’ll arrest me!”

“I’ll be honest,” he said, “they might do that. But regardless, they need your help finding Eric. He might be guilty, he might not, but they have to find him. And you want to find him, too.”

Her nostrils flared, but she didn’t say anything.

“And once you’ve talked to the police, I’m going to go try to hunt down this property manager. As far as we know, this man —”

This time it was her turn to interrupt. “This is about Katya, isn’t it? She wants you to bring me in.”

“Yes,” he said. “She’s going to get in trouble if you don’t go in.”

Miriam slumped. She gave him a doleful look. “What if I give you something else?” she said. “Something that might help the case. And in exchange, will you promise not to make me go to the police?”

“No.”

“Listen, it might be important, and if you make me go to the police, and they arrest me —”

“Okay, okay,” he said, cutting her off.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out a small piece of plastic. “I found this in my purse when I got back from the States,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a memory card for a phone or a camera. I thought it was Eric’s, but I can’t imagine why he would have put it there. I don’t know why anyone would, but it’s not mine.”

“Who do you think it belongs to?”

She explained how she’d met Mabus on the plane and then discovered at Jacob’s house that Mabus knew Eric.

“This is the same Mabus who is your property manager?” he asked.

“Obviously,” she replied. “How many could there be?” Looking slightly self-conscious, she went on more lightly. “All I know is that something was going on with the three of them—Eric, Jacob, and Mabus. What if Mabus put this card in my purse? He would have had the opportunity, because I went to the bathroom on the airplane and left my purse behind.”

He nodded, thinking.

“When I found it,” she went on, “I didn’t think it was important. But this morning, when I knew someone had been in my house, I figured they were looking for something.” She held up the memory card. “This was the only thing I could think of. And of course whoever it was couldn’t find it because I was with the neighbors.”

“Let me see the card,” he said. She handed it over. He fished through the desk drawer and found the converter Samir used for downloading digital photos. The converter had various input slots, and the memory card fit into one. He plugged the device into the computer and waited.

T
here was a time when Monday nights meant basketball practice, the sound of whistles, referee horns, the squeak of sneakers against a polished floor. That was before the kingdom had banned organized sports for girls, and before the girls’ school where Katya had tutored chemistry students had enforced the ban. She had coached their basketball team for six years, and even if the girls ranted about the injustice of not being recognized internationally because the Saudis wouldn’t send women to the Olympics, they still enjoyed the sport itself, playing it with a kind of churlish ferocity that helped them prove they were just as good as boys. In their complaints she heard only the uninspired echoes of their parents, immigrants from Lebanon and Syria who were appalled by Saudi culture, who felt it was backward and a disgrace to Islam, and who would have given anything to pick up dear Mecca, holiest of cities, and move it away from these righteous louts whose beliefs still lurked in the dark ages of the Bedouin.

The team had quietly been moved to a women’s center across town, although technically it was still illegal to play. The problem became transportation. Because so few of the girls could coerce their brothers or fathers into driving them, the team roster fell by three quarters, and the few who could come were inconsistent. Finally, they had disbanded.

Tonight, Katya entered the apartment alone—Ayman had gone to a friend’s house to study, and her father was visiting Abu-Walid. She laid her purse on the kitchen table, helped herself to a plate of leftovers from the fridge, and stared emptily at the front of the oven. A delayed revelation had occurred to her that evening after leaving Nayir at Starbucks.
He is just like my father
. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Both men were conservative. Devout. Both hid things from her—Abu failing to tell her about Abu-Walid coming to dinner the other night, and now Nayir doing all these things with Miriam behind her back, only telling her afterward, and probably because she forced him to. She understood logically that she was the one who had brought him into the investigation and that Miriam had called him to ask for help, but she was frustrated anyway at being left in the dark.

Finishing dinner, she went to her room. It was a terrible mess; she didn’t have time to clean. There were old coffee cups on the dresser, clothing jumbled on the closet floor. The bed hadn’t been made in days, the sheets hadn’t been washed in weeks. She went to her desk, pushing aside a stack of boxes that leaned precariously against the wall. Waiting for the computer to power up, she cleared a space for Leila’s DVDs. She didn’t want to lose one in all the clutter.

That afternoon she’d called Farooha again. The girl had assured her that she knew nothing about
Pilgrimage
. Yes, Leila had brought the disc to the house, but she had never talked about the new documentary, or even about Mabus. She only talked about Eric Walker.

“So she really liked him,” Katya had said.

Farooha had fallen silent. “Well, he was exciting,” she finally replied.

Katya was inclined to believe Farooha about the documentary. About Leila’s feelings for Eric, she couldn’t be sure how much of the truth Farooha was revealing. The girl did confirm that Leila had never mentioned anything about Abdulrahman attacking her, although Farooha seemed troubled by the suggestion that it could have been her brother.

“If it was him, I don’t think she would have told me about it,” Farooha said after a heavy pause. “It would have shamed her to admit that her brother hit her.”

Katya had also called the doctor who had treated Leila’s leg injury. She remembered Leila vividly as “the girl who’d been attacked for filming strangers in public.” Leila had expressed fury at having her camera snatched away and said that she had fought her attacker. Some of his blood was still on her shirt.

Katya was still no closer to knowing if Abdulrahman had hit Leila or not, but at least one thing became clear: the doctor said that the leg injury hadn’t healed properly because Leila had refused physical therapy. Instead, she’d remained as active as usual. When the doctor had scolded her about it later, Leila had simply shrugged her off.

Forgetting where she’d left off, Katya picked a DVD at random and slipped it into the drive. The first cut on the disc showed a woman struggling to slip a doughnut through the eye slit of her burqa. Katya was in no mood to laugh. She watched through another half dozen short clips, none of them terribly interesting.

Eric Walker appeared on the ninth clip. It took her a moment to realize who he was. It was nighttime, and three men were sitting at a patio table, two of them Arab, the other American. They were drinking from glass tumblers, and the Arab men looked unhappy. When one of them spoke, Katya realized that he was drunk. His eyes looked like red onions frying in oil. Eric was grinning and shaking his head. Drunkenly, he said something in a weird mishmash of Arabic and English that she took to mean
They can brew the stuff, but they can’t drink it, can they?
And from behind the camera, Leila gave a short bark of laughter. She said something in English, the only part of which Katya understood was “Mr. Johnnie Walker!”

And Walker laughed.

The next scene showed Walker in his apartment. Katya’s chest tightened when she recognized the dingy lamp on the end table. Had he really brought Leila into his
house?
She checked the date stamp and saw that indeed, this had happened a full three weeks before Miriam had returned. Walker was speaking in Arabic now, describing his apartment in mock-grandiose style. He pointed to a book lying on the floor and said, “And that belongs to Miriam. She’s coming back in twenty-one days.”

It seemed a tactless thing to say for a man who was courting a beautiful young woman in his living room. Leila’s camera zoomed in on the book and then expertly back out to Eric.

Then another man waltzed into the room. He was tall with dark hair. The camera turned to him, focusing on his face. It was handsome, but there was something mean about his eyes. The men were speaking English and she couldn’t understand a word, she simply watched the dark-haired man’s expressions shift from attentiveness to discomfort. Finally, he stared straight at the camera. It was an unnerving, predatory look.

The disc ended, and Katya removed it from the drive. She labeled it with a sticky-note:
Eric Walker
. Over the next few hours she scanned through the other DVDs, going faster now that she knew what she was looking for: any sign of the Americans. They made no more appearances. As far as she could tell, there were only those two little segments.

She awoke a few hours later, her computer screen flickering. Before falling asleep, she had given up watching the DVDs and started watching television online. Now an infomercial for Islamic bathing suits was playing.
The Aquaburqa!
the announcer proclaimed.
Reasonable solutions for Muslim women
. She sat up, rubbed her stiff neck, and watched two women walking along a beach in three-piece swimsuits that covered their whole bodies. The drapey tunics had colorful tropical patterns, the black pants were sleek, and the headpieces were simple plastic hoods that covered the hair and neck, with a drawstring around the face so they wouldn’t fall off in the water. She wondered what it would be like wearing one of the suits, which the announcer described as a
burqa bikini, also called a burkini!

For a while, she’d had a fantasy of going sailing with Nayir, of him teaching her to scuba dive, of harpooning a shark. It was such a thrilling fantasy because it might have been real: of course he would approve, he loved sailing and diving, and no one would see her out in the middle of the ocean, so she’d be free to swim around. She had the feeling, however, that Nayir would not approve of the burkini. He would think of it as Islam Lite, the sort of fake piety that was everywhere now. He would tell any woman in a burkini to go back to the Hadith, where it says no wearing “form-fitting” clothing, period.

She wasn’t tired anymore. Instead, there was a dangerous energy rising inside her. It had been building up for days, and now, at two in the morning, she was ready to play a whole basketball game herself. Or clean the entire house. Or finally take care of those boxes stacked against the wall, the trousseau Othman had given her before she’d called off the engagement. She didn’t know what had prevented her from sending them back before, but tucking into the task, she sorted through everything, folded every last pair of underwear neatly, organized all the shirts by color, and packed every single dress and suit coat and shimmery negligee back into the boxes, taping them firmly shut and carrying them out into the hallway, where they would annoy her father and Ayman and force her to get rid of them once and for all.

F
or what felt like the thousandth time, Nayir lay in bed just before dawn pondering marriage. In particular, whether it was truly as bad as it often seemed to be. To his long list of miserable friends whose wives badgered and harassed them; spent all their money; failed to cook, clean house, or raise their children properly; stopped taking care of themselves and grew ugly, lost teeth, became depressed, bored, or even suicidal; to that very long list of miserable men he had a new addition: Miriam, whose husband had married another woman, possibly killed her, and then disappeared, while Miriam remained firmly attached to the idea that he was completely innocent. He wondered how he could possibly want something so much when all around him he saw proof of its disappointments.