Kingdom of Strangers (21 page)

He started at the upper right-hand corner. Beneath the body, he drew a simple shape.

It was the letter
B
. It was also the shape the body was positioned in, with the head and feet slightly turned upward. The point beneath the stroke was where the hand had been buried.

“Allah,”
Katya whispered. “It can’t be.”

Nayir continued drawing. On the next photo to the left, he wrote
S
.

He wrote it without the left-hand tail because it was meant to connect to the following letter,
M
.

From a bird’s-eye view, the body had been buried with the torso bent to the right, arms curled to the chest to resemble an
M
.
He wrote the entire photo collection out in letters, but they had already figured out the phrase. It was as familiar to them as breathing.

Bism’allah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim
.

“In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful.” The beginning of every prayer.

Katya had to sit down. Samir, who looked rather pale himself, brought her a cup of tea and sat beside her. She had a fleeting moment of regret that this should be their first meeting. She took an unsteady sip.

“Monstrous,” Samir whispered.

Nayir set down the marker and came to his uncle’s side. Ayman was unable to move, his eyes fixed on the wall with a look of amazement.

“I didn’t realize that this is what you did at work,” he said.

“Drink your tea, young man,” Samir said. “This is nothing to marvel at. It is evil, and when you see it, you should turn away.”

Surprisingly, Ayman obeyed. He sat down next to Katya and drank his tea. “But just because you’ve worked out his mad genius, so what?” Ayman said. “It doesn’t mean anything. He said something we all say every day. I mean, it would have been nice if he’d left his address or something.”

This won no smiles.

“I’m sorry about this,” Katya said. “I shouldn’t have brought these here.”

“Don’t apologize, my dear,” Samir replied, patting her on the arm. “Nayir has solved a puzzle for you. It is also remarkable to see firsthand what sort of challenges you face in your work. Now we will have an even higher respect for what you do. And no one here”—he looked around—“lacks the stomach for it, least of all yourself.”

She gave him a half smile and refrained from pointing out that Ayman was right: it all meant nothing. They had simply pulled
back the rock and looked down at the teeming insect colony of a psychopathic mind.

On the way back to Ayman’s car, Nayir said, “When I struggle with things, especially things I can’t understand, I find it’s best to search for the answer in a dream.” He gazed at her face, a phenomenon rare enough to make her feel flustered.
“Istiqara,”
he said. “Ask for an answer and Allah will oblige.”

She smiled. She had forgotten that there was a fourth type of dreaming—
istiqara
. “Maybe I’ll try that.”

“I’ll e-mail you the prayers.”

She thanked him and climbed into the car beside Ayman.

This was her earnest petition just before bed. It led to an agonized darkness of heat and sweat and bedsheets twisted around her feet like chains. It led to hellish caverns of al-Balad where half-human creatures from the age before man were born of the blood of murdered women. They sprang, fully formed, from a touch of fire into the stunted forms of
efreet
, their skin blackened, crisp and peeling from the flames, their eyes yellow and malevolent and all-seeing. They chased her into alleys and set her clothes on fire. They were born of the blood of women, and they craved her. They surrounded her in the alley on Falasteen where Amina’s
hand had been found, and they dragged her screaming down the sidewalk, their swords chopping off first her feet, then her hands, her body bouncing helplessly over the corpses of countless other women. All the women of Jeddah were lying there dead. Daher was there too, and Ibrahim. They were talking. She screamed, but they couldn’t hear.

And then the dream changed. She was in a world of hills and rain, gray skies and green fields. She was being dragged across the ground, over thorny bushes. Then the
efreet
were shoving her into the earth, a cold, black, fertile, insect-laden earth from an ancient imagining. It had crossed continents to reach them, this fairy tale of black earth. They shoved her in, filling her mouth with it, forcing fistfuls of dirt down her throat, and she woke with a horrified gasp and rolled out of bed and cried.

In the tale of the porter and the princess,” Katya said, “the princess kills the
efreet
, am I right?”

“Yeees.” Her father was giving her a dour look. “Why do you ask?”

“I had a dream last night that a bunch of
efreet
shoved me underground. It makes me think of that story.”

“I don’t remember what happens,” he said, “except that the
efreet
attacked the princess because the porter sneaked into the underground lair to rescue her, and the two lovers wound up kissing. The
efreet
are jealous creatures.”

“She kills them all, in the story,” Katya said. “She burns them to cinders.”

But it made her feel no better about the dream.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look very pale.”

She went to work feeling persecuted, unable to shake off the last remnants of the night. She had prayed to Allah, and the devil had answered instead.

Modern-day devils are not hard to spot. They pose as the most righteous. They live in fear of being found for what they really are.

This was Katya’s first, ungenerous thought when she passed Abu-Musa in the hallway on the way to Ibrahim’s office. He scowled at the floor as she went by. He might have scowled at her face, but that would have been improper.

One of the reasons she hated him was that he looked almost exactly like a salesclerk at Ikea to whom she had once given her address and phone number for the delivery of a desk and a set of shelves. He had then called her every day for a month, first leaving messages asking politely if she would meet him for dinner, then, when he realized she wouldn’t call him back, leaving hateful messages, accusations that she was a whore, that only a whore would give a strange man her number, and that he was certain she ought to be properly treated with a cock shoved violently between her wet thighs. She had had to get a new telephone number, and for months she had been afraid to go in or out of her apartment on her own.

She stopped at Ibrahim’s office door. He was standing behind his desk, frowning with aggravation at the stacks of papers piled there.

“Yes, Miss Hijazi,” he said when he saw her.

She stepped inside and laid a folder on his desk. “I’m sorry to add to your piles of paperwork,” she said, “but this is very important. I discovered it last night.”

“What is it?”

Abu-Musa appeared in the doorway behind her. He was still scowling. “Is it proper for you to be here, Miss Hijazi?”

She was taken aback. In all the months she’d worked here, she’d never actually been told that she was acting out of place. It was usually communicated via a gesture or glance, a whispered warning from her boss Zainab.

“Miss Hijazi has just delivered a very important case file,” Ibrahim said. “Can I help you?”

“Technically, Miss Hijazi should not even be in the building,” Abu-Musa replied.

She thanked Ibrahim and left the room.

She didn’t work that morning. She sat in front of her computer, one hand on her mouse, and stared at the screen. If someone passed behind her, she clicked the mouse to make it seem like she was busy, but her mind was the only thing in motion.

At eleven o’clock she left the building for an early lunch break. She had brought a bagged lunch, but she wasn’t hungry; she just wanted to be outside.

She headed away from the water, deeper into the city, and walked as if she had a purpose, even if it was only to be walking. She passed mothers shepherding children; young men leaning from car windows laughing, their music vibrating in her rib cage. Old men stood in front of their shops smoking cigarettes and talking. In front of a
boofiya
, men were perched on plastic chairs watching a television that was plugged into a generator, their only shade a feeble tree. Two young girls were sitting on a wooden fence, eating fruit and whispering over a shared cell phone. When a young man approached them, one girl threw a grape at him and hissed, and he turned away, flushing.

The sunlight hit her face, the heat enveloped her while the comforting sounds of traffic and laughing voices finally shook the last of the dream from her psyche. There was no death here, no blood and no
efreet
. But there was something else scratching at the edge of her consciousness. Amina al-Fouad. The alley. The dismembered hand. And she saw something plainly. It was irrational, fleeting. She stopped walking, grasped it, and quickly turned back toward the station. She began to hurry. It all became clear
because she did not believe that God would let the devil answer her unless the devil had something to say.

One of the reasons he’d left Undercover was that he hated working in a department where nothing ever seemed to get done. In a flurry of activity, you prepared your agents, then you sent them to their assignments and you waited. For weeks. Months. Pushed papers around your desk and kept an eye on situations. But you were the shepherd whose sheep had run off to play with wolves, and so you sang a lonely ballad by your campfire and told yourself everything was under control. You knew nothing, saw nothing, but every once in a while news would trickle back, and you’d celebrate or cry. In the end, it was as depressing as his family.

There were no shepherds in Homicide, only good old-fashioned Bedouins who banded together, formed alliances, and swore to protect one another against the unspeakable harshness of the world. Of course there were rivalries, but death was so close here, and all the paths you followed were designed to stave it off. Cover yourself. Move slowly. Follow the habits of the fathers, the men who died learning so that you could be wise.

Only now he was beginning to feel that there was something stifling in the camaraderie. That it encouraged closeness but not innovation. That the person who was accomplishing most on this case was a woman who stood outside the campfire circle, gazing in with a longing that, if fulfilled, would probably stifle her too.

The crime team was energized. He had only to send out word that they were meeting, and the rumors began to fly. There had been a breakthrough on the case! They could stop their drudgery and do something important! Maybe one of them would even get a shot at nabbing the killer! Dr. Becker could tell them a dozen times that it might take years to catch this one, but no one believed her.