Finding Nouf (12 page)

T
HE 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 feel 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.

"The private investigator told me that you didn't find much at the wadi," Othman said.

Nayir was relieved that Othman had raised the subject. He explained what he'd learned from Samir—that the sand from the wadi didn't match the dirt found on Nouf's wrist.

Othman seemed agitated. "So what is it you think happened to her?"

"I wish I knew."

"I need to talk to her escort again. I've tried already, but he wouldn't open up. He's sticking to his story, but I'm sure he knows more than he's saying."

"He says he only spoke to her on the phone," Nayir prompted.

"Yes. She called him on the day she disappeared and said she didn't need him. He saw nothing. We don't get along. We never have, since we were kids. Perhaps he'd talk to someone else."

"I'd be glad to do it," Nayir said. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of pleasure that Suhail had proven such a wimp and that Othman still welcomed his help. The conversation was beginning to dispel his doubts.

"You've done a lot already," Othman said.

"It's no problem. I know you want to find out what happened. By the way, the camel that I saw at your stables wasn't traumatized at all."

"Oh." Othman looked surprised. "Well, I didn't actually see her myself. One of the servants told me about it. Did you find anything else in the desert?"

Nayir hesitated. "The place was familiar. It was the campsite we chose a few months ago."

His remark was met with a long, heavy silence. "Our campsite?" Othman asked finally. "With the boulder?"

"Yes. The same one."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Nayir watched his face closely, relieved to see it awash with confusion. Othman clearly had no idea how such a coincidence could have happened.

"That's not where they found her body," Nayir said. He explained that although they'd found nothing at the campsite, he guessed the flood had washed her downstream to the place the Bedouin had marked on the map.

Othman stared at the ground. "You didn't find my jacket by any chance?"

"Your jacket?"

"It's missing. The one I always take to the desert. I hadn't thought it was suspicious until now, but the maps from our last trip were in the pocket. There was also my portable GPS, salt tablets, all that stuff. Maybe she took it. That would explain how she ended up there, or anywhere near where we'd gone camping."

Nayir crossed his arms. It was possible that Nouf had stolen
the jacket, but the person most likely to have used it was Othman. Who else would know about it? Did Nouf typically poke through his closet? Would she have known about his maps? It was an unfortunate irony that in being transparent, Othman had managed to make himself look more suspicious.

Allah, forgive my doubting mind.
"How long has the jacket been missing?" Nayir asked.

"I just noticed it yesterday."

"Who else knew about the jacket?"

"A lot of people have seen me wear it, but who knew what I kept in it? I can't be sure."

The prayers finished, and Othman motioned him into the bazaar. They slid beneath a string of tasseled lights and found themselves in the fluorescent glow of a children's toy boutique—the only one on the lot—which sold
Star Wars
beach towels and GI Joe balloons and plastic Barbie umbrellas by the case. Cutting to the left, they passed a row of vendors hawking pirate cassettes of Um Kalthoum. Nayir stared distractedly at his surroundings as they headed into the jacket quarter.