Kingdom of Strangers (11 page)

To Katya, it sounded claustrophobic.

“So yes,” he went on, “maybe she got sick of it. She never liked Saudi anyway. She couldn’t understand why anyone here did what they did. She was raised as a Muslim. She thought she was a good Muslim, until she came here. ‘This place has Mecca,’ she used to say, ‘but these people don’t practice the same religion that I do.’ It upset her.”

Katya finished dusting and got up. “I’m going to check the bedroom.”

Ibrahim came over and stood in her way. “I’ve thought about all of this. I’ve gone over it again and again. I was sure that something bad had happened. That’s what my gut was telling me, and usually when my gut tells me something, that’s it. I believe it. But now… I don’t know.”

“There’s one thing we haven’t considered,” Katya said.

“Trust me, I’ve considered
everything
.”

“Then you’ve thought that this may be connected to the case?”

“The serial killer?”

“Yes.”

Ibrahim let out a harrumph. “Okay, yes, it crossed my mind.” He shook his head. Katya could see he was getting tired, half of his mind still back on
What if she walked away?

She checked the bedroom, but it was as sparely decorated as the rest of the apartment.

On the way out, she noticed a shiny object protruding from the hallway carpet outside the apartment door. It looked like a
nail. She bent to inspect it and saw a smear of something. Quickly opening her kit, she took out a swab.

“It’s blood,” she said. He knelt to take a look. The nail was stuck into the floor. Someone must have stabbed a foot on it. Katya pried a small shred of plastic from the underside of the nail. It looked like material of flip-flops or cheap sandals. “This has to belong to someone who came to her apartment,” she said. They were at the end of the hall; there were no other doors nearby.

“It’s probably her blood,” he said.

“Did she wear sandals?”

“Yes. All the time.”

They stood up. “Just in case,” she said, “I’m going to need your DNA.”

He nodded and opened his mouth for a swab.

I
brahim drove them south to the neighborhood of Kandara and parked near the bottom of the Sitteen Street Bridge, a monstrous freeway overpass that housed a busy bus station.

Beneath the bridge, on a wide concrete walkway, there was a shantytown of the kind Katya had seen only in news footage—and even then, only in videos of impoverished, dejected places like the slums of Brazil or the lawless parts of Africa, where human life was treated as cheaper than that of an animal. But here, in one of Saudi’s wealthiest cities?

Most of the people in Kandara were women, and judging from the faces—most of them unveiled—they were predominantly Indonesian and Filipina, although among them were Africans, other Asians, and Indians. There were at least a thousand, probably more, stretching for blocks, most sitting with their backs against concrete walls in the shady spots. Corrugated metal panels formed lean-tos in places. Some people had built shelters from old boxes, mostly to protect themselves from the sun. Mothers sat with children heaped on their laps, their men in front of them, lying on cardboard or old blankets.

The police did not keep crime statistics on different neighborhoods, but it was well known that this was one of the worst. Thanks to the presence of the Philippine consulate a few blocks from the underpass, the masses had been gathering here for years, waiting for permission to leave.

“They say most of the people here overstayed their Hajj visas,” Katya said.

“Sure, that’s how some of them got into the country, but look at them as a group. What’s the first thing you notice?”

“They’re mostly women,” Katya said.

“Right…”

“And it’s difficult for women to come to Hajj alone.”

“Exactly. Most of those women are runaway housemaids,” Ibrahim said.

He was quiet for so long that Katya felt prompted to ask: “How do you know they’re housemaids?”

“This is where we found Sabria.”

“This place was here five years ago?” Katya asked.

“Yes, but not as bad.” They stared at the figures at the front of the crowd, women milling about in ratty black cloaks, their clothing plainly revealed.

It didn’t take much to end up on the street. Housemaids, street sweepers, gardeners, many of those who had come hoping for a better life found instead a system of indentured servitude. A headhunter would bring workers into the country for a fee—ten thousand riyals or more. A price high enough that, given the worker’s wages, it might take a decade to pay the debt. So the employer paid the fee, and the worker was under obligation to him until the debt was paid.

But what if you hated your job? What if your employer stopped feeding you? What if he refused to let you leave the house or call your family or even talk to the headhunter who had brought you there? What if you were being raped or abused? There were few laws to protect you—most laws protected the employer from losing his investment, having purchased you. Your only option was to flee, and you wound up at Sitteen, begging the consulate to give you a new passport, even a temporary certificate, and a plane
ticket home. You stood in line for the three paltry buses that appeared at Sitteen a few times a week and that would take you to the Saudi-sponsored Passport Department to try to straighten out the mess.

You fought to get on the buses, and even if you couldn’t get on, you fought anyway, because if the police thought you were a problem, they’d want to send you home first. If you weren’t enough of a problem, they’d simply fine you for overstaying your visa and throw you in a prison cell from which you would not be likely to emerge without royal intervention. And you would hope to God that you didn’t wind up in a consular detention center, where you might be shoved into a room and left to rot. Five Ethiopians had died that way a few weeks ago, locked in a toilet cell without a window, asphyxiated by morning.

Thank God for the mosques that brought daily food and water to Kandara. You couldn’t comfort yourself with the fact that the buses came back every few days. The population under the bridge was like water from a faucet you couldn’t turn off. No matter how many buckets you put beneath it, the water just kept flowing. As soon as the buses left, the place filled right back up again.

“You think she might be here?” Katya asked.

“No. This place is a rat hole. Twice in the past month, the police have busted up a prostitution network. But what matters to us is that about fifty percent of the missing persons in Jeddah either come here or go missing from here.” He lifted a folder from the floor of the front seat and slid out a handful of papers, handed a bunch to Katya. They were sketches of the victims from the desert. “I thought this would be the best place to start to ID our remaining victims. You okay with doing that?”

“Yes, of course.”

Ibrahim got out of the car and Katya followed him across the street. The first thing she noticed was the smell, a putrid swamp odor of dirty bodies, rotten food, and mounds of feces lining a
small trench that ran along the underpass, all of it ripening in the heat. She drew her veil across her nose and made an effort to breathe shallowly, but the stench was overwhelming, enough to make her eyes water. It was slightly cooler beneath the flyover, but it was an airless day and the stench stuck to everything.

They wandered through the crowd for two hours, an infinity of heat and sweat and disappointment. Ibrahim stayed in Katya’s line of sight, but she never managed to catch his eye. They were deep in a makeshift tent area when she came upon a woman who was bending over a small child.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for these women.”

The woman glanced at the pictures. “Never seen ’em. Try Aunie.” She motioned to a woman at the sidewalk’s periphery. Aunie was a petite woman, Asian, her black hair cut in a bowl shape. She was lying on her side on a half-rotted brown wicker chair, the nicest, perhaps only piece of furniture in the whole place. She wore a defiant short-sleeved shirt and a pair of loose trousers cut off at the knee. On her feet were plastic flip-flops.

She didn’t sit up as Katya approached.

“Excuse me,” Katya said, “I’m looking for these women.” She held out the sketches, and slowly, Aunie sat up.

“You’re police?”

“Homicide.”

The woman nodded. “So they’re dead.”

“Do you know them?”

The woman didn’t say anything. She reached into a worn plastic sack at her feet and began rummaging. Katya watched her extract a dirty piece of cloth, which she used to wipe the sweat from her face and neck.

“You going to arrest me?” she asked.

“Not unless you want me to.”

Aunie gave her a smile that looked more taunting than amused. “I’ve never seen them,” she said, and lay back down.

“Maybe a cup of coffee would stir your memory?”

The woman eyed her.

“Or lunch?”

After some thought, Aunie sat up. “No,” she said. “I already ate today. But I’ll need money for lunch tomorrow.”

Katya nodded. “Tell me their names.”

The woman squinted and reached for a sketch. She frowned while studying it. “Looks like Mahal.”

“Does Mahal have a last name?”

Aunie shook her head. “Can’t remember. She’s Filipina.” She shoved the sketch back toward Katya, but Katya didn’t take it.

“Do you know if she had a job?”

“No.” Aunie gave a derisive snort. “No job.
Here?
What do you think this is, a hotel?”

“Before she came to the bridge,” Katya said somewhat impatiently. “Do you know what she did?”

“No.”

“How about money for lunch the day after tomorrow?”

Aunie snorted again. “All right, maybe she was a housemaid. I can’t remember. Some brutal family.” She waved her hand.

“And why was she here at the bridge? Did they abuse her?”

“
Of course
they abused her,” the woman said, although for the first time her words sounded false. “She ran away from them. From all of them!”

Katya nodded and took the sketch back. “And you?” she asked. “Why are you here?”

Aunie shut her eyes and sat back in the chair. It wobbled unsteadily. “Most people here have the same problem.”

“No passport?” Katya asked.

“No!” Aunie sat up and opened her eyes. “They have passports. But their employers didn’t give them permission to leave. They need permission. And if they ran away, they’re not going to get it. So that’s the
Saudis
creating the problem! You can’t buy a
plane ticket unless you have a recommendation letter from your employer. You need your employer’s permission to leave? What kind of screwed-up country is that?”

“So Mahal didn’t have her employer’s permission to leave?”

“No, she didn’t. If someone killed her, it was her employer. I guarantee it.”

“And you don’t know who that was?”

“Can’t remember. There are too many names. How am I supposed to remember?”

Katya reached into her purse and took out a twenty-riyal note. She folded it and slid it into Aunie’s bag.

Katya was exhausted. Ibrahim had had no luck identifying the women, and there wasn’t much they could do with the name Mahal except inform the junior officers who were responsible for getting IDs from the consulates.

Back near the office, they stopped for fruit juice at an octagonal kiosk that was decorated with bright blue Pepsi logos. Ibrahim went to buy the drinks while Katya waited in the car, still utterly paranoid that someone would see her. She got as close as she could to the backseat’s only air-conditioning vent and let it blow straight across her burqa. When Ibrahim returned, he was carrying two bottles of juice and two small plastic tubs of cut fruit; he handed one of each to Katya.

“Thank you.”
Father
, she wanted to add. He was beginning to remind her of her father’s friends—the two or three who spoke to her directly and whom she actually liked. They had a way of defusing any possible sexual tension with a casual paternalism that always made her feel formal and awkward.

Instead of heading to the office, he swung over to the Corniche. She thought they might be going back to Sabria’s apartment, but he drove south until he found a beach parking lot that
was relatively empty. He pulled up facing the sea and left the engine idling so that the AC could continue to make a dent in the heat. He opened his fruit box and began eating.

Katya opened hers and slid a slice of watermelon beneath her burqa.

“Maybe you’re right,” Ibrahim said. “I should report her missing.”

“I think you should.”

“But first I’d have to remove any trace of myself from her apartment,” he said. “What do you think my chances are of doing that?”

“You’d have to hire someone to do it. A professional, I mean. It would be a lot of work.”

They continued eating. She knew they were both thinking the same thing: that by reporting Sabria missing, they’d be condemning Ibrahim to charges of adultery. That is, if the police took it seriously enough to send a forensics team to her house. Sabria used to work for the police, so the chances were good they’d investigate thoroughly.

“I’ll look into hiring a cleaner,” he said. He collected the plastic containers and the empty bottles, threw everything out the window. He put the car into gear.

“Thank you for letting me assist on this case,” she said. “The serial killer, I mean. I want to be working on it.” She hoped that hit the right note, not sounding too desperate.

He nodded. “I’ll give you some more work if I can, but right now I have a responsibility to keep up appearances at the station. I’ve got to make sure my team stays organized—at least until the chief takes me off the case, which I still think he might do. Obviously I’m being distracted by this whole thing with Sabria. And that’s what really counts for me right now. Catching a killer can take a long time. Finding a missing person is much more urgent. I can’t tell anyone that, and it may be selfish, but it’s the truth.” He
shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at her. “I’m sorry. I know you want to be a part of this, and I think you should be. But there’s a lot to consider.”