Kingdom of Strangers (33 page)

He wished Zaki would come home. No one knew if the boy’s absence was because of Saffanah or because he’d discovered what his father had done. Ibrahim suspected the former. He felt the need to explain himself, and somehow he wanted to explain to Zaki more than anyone else. Hamida was upstairs managing Jamila and her brother, but even she hadn’t been able to stop them from calling in the lawyers.

He couldn’t believe they were going to do it. They were actually going to take him to court. Surely Jamila was living in a fantasy believing that this would soothe her anger. She’d get over it eventually. But with her brother goading her, it was no longer just about her feelings. It was about her brother’s honor. And the kids? What would this do to them? He feared that in the end they would blame him. Now that the frozen block of their marriage had thawed, a gushing antagonism would run down the mountain, pure and cold and roaring with deadly force.

He was still on the balcony when a Land Rover pulled up in front of his building, and Katya and her husband got out. He whistled and they both looked up. He motioned for them to stay there while he went back inside, found paper and wrote a hasty note, then tossed it down to them. She caught it and read it.

Nayir wondered why she’d told him all of this now.

Just before they’d pulled onto Ibrahim’s street, she’d said, “I may need you to convey this information about the blackmail to Ibrahim. Everyone at the station is saying that he’s being held in a room without access to a telephone. That sounds a little extreme to me, but I have no idea what’s really going on. I also don’t know how segregated his household is. I suspect it’s not, but you never know. It may be doubly awkward if an unescorted woman were to show up. And obviously I can’t tell his family what I know.” She looked at him uncertainly. “I may need your help.”

Need
. Nayir felt the weight of that word. She needed him. She was going to need him for quite a long time. And now, in the aftershock of the conversation in the car, he wasn’t sure he was up for it.

The note Ibrahim had dropped from the balcony said
Tell my brother I need to get out of the apartment for a while. He lives next door
. So they’d gone to Omar and introduced themselves and explained that they were there on police business. They didn’t say what the business was, and Omar didn’t want to know. Katya simply showed him the note and said, “Your brother wants a break from the apartment, if possible.”

Omar had escorted them back to Ibrahim’s house and led them to the roof. They waited in the stairwell. Omar went back downstairs. They heard him arguing with the guards to let Ibrahim sit on the roof. Just for an hour. He needed some air. Even prisoners got to walk in the open once a day.

After arguments and phone calls and tedious bureaucracy, Ibrahim came around the turn in the stairs with a young woman beside him. She was completely veiled.

“This is my daughter-in-law Saffanah,” he said. “She needs some air too.”

When they opened the roof door, they were hit by the noise of thirty children—his grandchildren and their cousins and second cousins. All the children whose parents were downstairs comforting the wife and deciding Ibrahim’s fate. The children briefly registered their arrival. The boys were furiously engaged in a game of soccer, and the girls were jumping rope, squealing, or clumped in secret corners.

The adults sat on a carpet by the southern wall. There were floor pillows and dirty tea sets and ashtrays stacked beside a cold hookah. Ibrahim sat with his back to the wall. Nayir and Katya were across from him. Saffanah knelt, picked up the tea set, and carried it downstairs.

The children weren’t curious about Ibrahim, but they were struck by his guests. The minute Nayir and Katya sat down, the girls began to sneak closer. There were four of them at first. Ibrahim invited the youngest one to sit on his lap. His other granddaughters sat beside him, ages two, three, and four, staring up at Nayir. Ibrahim explained that their mother—his daughter Farrah—was staying at the house for a few weeks. Saffanah returned with a lit hookah, and Ibrahim took it gratefully. She went back downstairs.

Nayir studied Ibrahim. It seemed impossible that a man with such bounty—this enormous extended family, all these wonderful grandchildren, the joy of this scene—would turn his back on his wife and cheat with a woman from his work. Yes, perhaps the marriage had gone sour and he’d fallen for a younger beauty. But had it been worth committing one of the greatest sins—and one of the most serious crimes? Nayir chalked it up to selfishness, a foolish dissatisfaction with all that he had here, and not a little cruelty. And yet in Ibrahim, he sensed no foolishness or selfishness, just tragic despair.

Saffanah came back with tea for the adults, and biscuits for the girls. Katya seemed uncomfortable. She wanted to talk to Ibrahim
but couldn’t bring herself to say anything important in front of the children. While she attempted to make small talk, Nayir watched the kids play. It wasn’t often that he could sit somewhere and stare at children without appearing creepy or improper, but children were all he thought about these days. He saw them everywhere, whole flocks racing through grocery stores, picnicking on the Corniche, piling into minivans, and screeching at the funfairs. It had come to feel like God was inviting him into this world, saying,
This is what you shall have
.

The excitement and anticipation had been a glowing core inside him. He imagined his own children, how they would look, what their names would be, their personalities. And he wondered how they were going to raise those children. It had become clear to him over the past few days that he was going to have to do a lot of the work. Katya would be at the station all the time. He’d be the one to pick the kids up from school, cook their dinners, and put them to bed. That was not the setup God had intended, but it was going to be the thing that actually worked, and he suddenly wanted to tell her that:
I’ll do whatever it takes, if you’ll give me this
.

Ibrahim began to smoke. His granddaughters slipped around, fidgeting, and one of the girls slid into Nayir’s space. The others followed. The smoke from the hookah was blowing in their faces. Two planted themselves at Nayir’s knees, one of them holding a Barbie, the other holding a plastic toy cell phone, which she used to touch the sole of his sandal probingly, to see if he would react. Finally, one plucked up the courage to slide into his lap. Ibrahim frowned at her, and she ducked her face in her hands. Then she looked up at Nayir, saw that he was fine, and settled in. He was afraid to touch her at first, but when she slid backward into his arm, he had no choice.

“Their father is in Dhahran,” Ibrahim said. Nayir understood what he meant:
They miss the comforts of a man
.

The night sky emerged faintly, while beneath it the city shone.
As the neighborhood darkened and the hookah coals burned out, the children grew tired and began, finally, to listen to their mothers, who had come upstairs intermittently, stood inside the rooftop door, and called to them:
Come in, it’s time to leave
. The children had blithely ignored them, knowing the women wouldn’t come out while Nayir was there (although Nayir suspected, from Ibrahim’s disturbed face, that they were avoiding him as well).

The girls went down first, sliding out of his lap, saying good night and nodding when their grandfather told them to listen to their mothers. The boys went with much more prodding. Finally, the rooftop was empty and Ibrahim put the hookah rope aside and said, “Whatever you’ve come to tell me, you can say it.”

Katya glanced at Saffanah.

“She’s fine,” Ibrahim said. “I take it this isn’t good news, or you would have spoken up before now.”

“It’s not horrible news,” Katya said. She explained what she’d discovered at the women’s prison. Ibrahim, who until then had seemed resigned to defeat, sat up with more interest.

“Did you go to the website and look at the videos?”

“Yes,” she said, glancing at Nayir. She hadn’t given much detail about the videos in the car, and she seemed embarrassed now, from which he gathered that they were obscene. “The problem is,” she went on, “I don’t recognize any of the men.”

“I need to see them.”

She took out her cell phone. It had a touch screen and she fiddled with it for a moment before handing it to Ibrahim. He sat up, fumbled automatically for reading glasses that weren’t in his pocket, then held the phone at a distance, squinting.

Horrible screams shot out of the little speaker. Katya leaned over to turn the volume down. Ibrahim barely noticed. His attention was riveted on the screen. Nayir couldn’t help glancing at the screen himself, but the angle made it difficult for him to see, and anyway all he could think about was Katya watching the video.
Katya seeing a woman being raped by a stranger. He realized then that
this
was the cold reality of her job.

Ibrahim set the phone on his lap. Saffanah, who had sat this whole time in the corner so no one would be tempted to drag her into the conversation, was now staring intently at Ibrahim through a very narrow slit in her burqa.

“Do you recognize any of those men?” Katya asked.

“Yes,” Ibrahim said. His hands were shaking. He looked brutally amazed. “Yes, I do.”

F
ouz Ubaid, the hypocrite who had spent so much time persecuting Inspector Zahrani, sat rigidly, his shoulders square, his hands folded neatly on the table in front of him. The interrogation room was quiet. He’d been alone since the guard had brought him in two hours ago.

They didn’t have to charge him or give him access to a lawyer, but through the one-way mirror, Katya could see that he was already preparing his own defense. Something happened to a person’s face when he began to justify his worst behavior, a complex arrangement of righteousness and defiance, calculation, and a tinge of fear. It wasn’t impossible that he would defend himself. Yes, they had him on film raping a young housemaid. She’d been restrained with ropes. When she began screaming for help, he’d taped her mouth. It seemed obvious that the woman was not a willing participant.

Yet the first thing Ubaid had said when they’d brought him into the room was “She wanted me to do that. It was a mutual arrangement.”

That was all it had taken to stop the legal machinery.

The woman’s complicity was a crucial question. If he was telling the truth and this had been a consensual, if violent, act, then the toughest sentence Ubaid faced was ten years in prison and a thousand lashes. He wasn’t married, so it wasn’t a matter of adultery. He would only be charged with the crime of illegal sex.

But if it could be shown that he had forced himself on this
woman, then he’d be facing a charge of rape, which would be punished by public beheading.

It was going to take a lot to prove rape, especially after the notorious Qatif case. A woman who had been gang-raped in the city of Qatif had been punished along with her rapists because a judge had decided that she’d gone willingly to meet the men who raped her and had thereby broken one of the tenets of civilized society: that women do not interact with strange men. All of them had been punished for illegal sex, although the men had not been prosecuted for rape. Because of the exposure that case had brought, it was easier for men to feel confident in claiming consensual sex, knowing how hard it would be to prove rape—and how difficult it was for a woman claiming she’d been raped to avoid punishment herself.

The burden was now on the investigators to prove that Ubaid had been actively stalking his victim with the intent of raping her. Katya’s first thought was that it would be possible to do this by proving that someone had used the tapes to blackmail him
and that he had paid the blackmailer
. It suggested an acknowledgment of his guilt. But looking at him now, she saw how squirrelly he was. He could claim that he’d paid a blackmailer merely because the footage was embarrassing, because it might have interfered with his career, and because it was, after all, illegal sex. It still didn’t mean he had committed rape.

Anyway, the case wasn’t going to be handled by Homicide. They were far too busy with the Angel murders to spend time searching for an unidentified Filipina while trying to build a rape case against a senior officer from Undercover. Even if they did find the girl and she had the nerve to say that Ubaid had raped her, she would still have to justify what she had been doing alone with him in the first place. If she claimed that he had abducted her, she would have to prove it—with tangible evidence. And that was nearly impossible. With no evidence, it would come down to her word against his.

Perhaps Ubaid had thought this through already, but it didn’t appear so. He looked to be working it out. So Katya was here now, watching expectantly, hoping that for the short while that Homicide still had possession of him, they might be able to squeeze out a little agony.

A few minutes later, the door opened and Inspector Mu’tazz came into the room.

The women in Katya’s lab always said that Detective Khouri, the one they called Abu-Haitham, was the most devout man in the department. He had earned the designation after repeatedly refusing to get into a squad car as long as any woman was inside, no matter how veiled and proper she was. He also had a preference for carrying a short camel whip like some of the more fanatical religious police used. The whip hung from his belt next to his holster and had actually become so fashionable that a few of the other officers, including Mu’tazz, had taken to wearing one as well, a silent pledge of allegiance to Abu-Haitham’s strict beliefs.

Mu’tazz was just as determined to prove that he was the purest of Muslim men, but unlike Abu-Haitham, he had a nasty edge. He had never spoken to Katya. She only knew what she had picked up from the gossip in the lab. Watching him now, she felt a quiet repulsion. He had a broad, square face; eyes that were jammed too tightly to his brow, and a large mouth that lacked all delicacy. When he opened his mouth, he could not avoid revealing a prominent set of teeth. They were ugly, yellow, widely spaced, with black around their edges. He wore a trimmed beard around his lips and jawline but it only served to highlight the bare cavity at its center.