Kingdom of Strangers (9 page)

Chona pursed her lips. “We discovered that she was stealing handbags from our back room.”

“Oh no!”

“Yes.” She shook her head. “I knew there was a problem from the beginning. She was always late for work, and sometimes she didn’t show up at all. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom, claiming she was sick. She was here for six weeks before we discovered what was going on. People can really fool you.” One of the other women began walking in their direction and Chona quickly said: “Could I interest you in one of our handbags?”

“No,” Katya said, “but thank you.”

She left, sparing a glance at some of the more ridiculous handbags near the front of the store. One of them cost half her monthly salary.

She couldn’t phone Ibrahim from the car or her home without being overheard by either her cousin or her father, so she sat on a bench in the crowded courtyard just as the call to prayer was ringing out. Some women moved slowly toward a praying area, but most women sat on benches and drank their coffees, oblivious to the forced meditation of
maghrib
.

Ibrahim answered on the first ring. “Katya,” he said breathlessly. “Thanks for calling.” She heard street noises in the background. “What did you find?” he asked.

“I’m not sure you’ll want to hear this, but according to women at the boutique, Sabria hasn’t worked there for over three months.”

This was met by silence, the distant honking of a car horn.

“Did you tell them you weren’t there about her visa?” he asked.

“Not directly. I said I was a friend.”

“I knew this wouldn’t work,” he said almost to himself. “Her friends are protecting her.”

“They didn’t seem like very good friends,” Katya said. “They told me they didn’t like her from the start. She was always late and she didn’t do her job. Six weeks into it, she was caught stealing handbags from their stock. They didn’t seem happy about her at all. My instincts are telling me that the woman I talked to wasn’t making this up.”

“No,” he said. “I often took her to work myself. She was going to that shopping mall.”

“Maybe she didn’t tell you about what had happened at the boutique and she was going somewhere else in the mall? A different store?”

“No,” he said more firmly. “She wouldn’t have lied. She said it was that store.”

Katya felt sorry for him and wondered how Sabria had managed to deceive him so completely. It wouldn’t have been that hard to lie about her job, but to sustain his trust, to lie to him so knowingly—that seemed much more difficult to pull off. She remembered that Sabria’s last sponsor had been the Jeddah police. She had worked with Ibrahim in Undercover. She probably knew how to lie well enough, but if she’d managed to convince Ibrahim of her lies, he must have been crazy about her, willing to overlook the warnings of his intuition.

“I know you think I’m deluded,” he said, “but I know her. I know her better than anyone. And you’re right. It’s possible she was doing something else in the mall. I can’t think what. It could be anything. But she would have told me about the stealing. I know it doesn’t make sense, but you just have to trust me.
She
trusted me. And I know for a fact that she was going to the mall every day.”

“All right,” Katya said. “Do you have a picture of her? I couldn’t get one from the visa file.”

“You checked the visa?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Thanks. And yes, I’ll get you a photo.”

Katya went outside to search for Ayman in the parking lot. She was shaken, and it surprised her. There was no reason to be shocked that a woman would lie to her lover. It probably happened all the time. But something in Ibrahim’s voice was firm and knowing. He wasn’t splintering from the blow of Sabria’s disappearance; he was worried. He knew that something was wrong.

J
amila was standing at the
majlis
door. She was layered with fat in great solid hunks, her belly, her wide hips, all of it showing quite plainly thanks to the tightness of her dress. On the front, where a regular housedress would display a delicate trim of embroidery, this one sported a large, square mat of faux animal fur that sprang out at odd angles and was, in one corner, indecently long. He called it her gorilla dress.

It was too early in the morning for this. But clearly she’d been out. She was still wearing her black
abaaya
over the dress. The cloak hung wide open. Her headscarf displayed a similar neglect. It was hanging halfway down the back of her head, showing all of her thin, scraggly hair, its color bright purple and red, an ambitious combination of henna and
karkadé
dye from hibiscus. He wondered where she’d gone so early on a Monday morning.

“Show your father. Show your father what the sheikh has done.” She dragged their oldest daughter, Farrah, into the room, pushed her toward him. Farrah stumbled forward, a vague smile on her face.

“My back pain is gone,” she said.

Farrah’s back pain had been going on for years. Four pregnancies had only aggravated the matter. While Zaki was having his marriage arranged, this was the battle Ibrahim had been waging with Jamila. He wanted to take Farrah to Cairo for better treatment, but Jamila insisted that they had come to the end of what medical science could offer and that it was time to seek spiritual
counsel. A hundred thousand riyals in doctors’ bills was evidence enough that Farrah wasn’t simply ill; she had been possessed by a
djinni
. Until it was called out, Farrah would suffer.

“I can move,” Farrah said, holding out her arms and twirling around.

“And how is that?”

She turned her back and lifted the tail of her shirt. He held the shirt while she unpeeled the bandage, exposing a grotesquerie that nearly made him gag. The soft skin of her back had been maimed by a branding iron. A one-inch-deep welt, red on the edge, black at the center, was suppurating just above her left hip bone.

“What the hell did they do?” he asked.

“This is how they removed the spirit,” she said, refastening the bandage. “By adding outside pain, it takes away the inside pain. Do you know what I mean?”

“Do
you
know what you mean?”

“It worked,” she said simply. Then she turned back to her mother, to the protective aura she offered.

He fought the volcanic fury that was building in his forehead, dripping its black lava into his eyes so that all he could see was a muddled portion of the room.

“
That
is the real medicine,” Jamila said, pointing at Farrah’s back as she escorted her out of the room.

He refused to react. He went to the bathroom for ablutions. Cold water. Warm tile floors. Hands hot with fury. His prayer rug was practically bald from years of kneeling. He faced the balcony door. Prayers spilled from him unconsciously, his mind absent, suppressing the real prayer building inside him, too painful to think about.
Please, God, give me Sabria, give her back
.

Before he could finish, Jamila set herself up outside the sitting room door. She was annoyed by his silence. She began to sweep the stairs. And the carping began. Something about the twins
being left to do their homework all by themselves and how they shouldn’t have gone to the exorcist with her because they might have caught a
djinni
themselves, but their father was never home, so what choice did she have? But it didn’t surprise
her
. He was obviously hiding things. He couldn’t even see to it that his son got a divorce—something that should have taken a few seconds. How long does it take to say “I divorce you” three times in front of two witnesses? If he couldn’t manage that one task for the week, how was he going to manage anything else?

The only time it stopped was when he shut it out.

He walked right past her and went down the stairs, out the door, and onto the stifling street.

About twenty years ago, and for reasons totally obscure now, his brother Omar had withdrawn his entire savings in cash. Ibrahim remembered the bank. It was in a busy strip mall with a large parking lot, permanently crowded because of a restaurant that sold the best curry in the neighborhood. His brother had left thirty thousand riyals in a plastic bag on the front seat of his car and gone into the curry joint. He’d come back half an hour later to find that he’d forgotten to roll up the windows and had left the doors unlocked. The money was still on the seat, bills hanging seductively out of the plastic bag. Not a single riyal was missing. Omar sometimes used that story as proof that the Saudi punishment of chopping off a hand was an effective deterrent to theft, but Ibrahim didn’t agree. He believed that honesty came from the impulse to please others. Unfortunately, so did lying. And that day, his brother had just been lucky.

Omar’s building was right next to Ibrahim’s, identical to every other building on that side of the street: a flat concrete front, recessed balconies, and high upper walls surrounding an open roof. The joke—a dumb one, but surprisingly common—was
that the brothers had bought identical houses because they both worked in Undercover, so if someone came after one of them, it would be nearly impossible to tell them apart.

Omar came into the
majlis
looking disheveled.

“Remember the time you left a bag of money on the seat of your car?” Ibrahim asked.

“Of course I do, why?”

“You were lucky then, but brother—”

“Don’t start with me. I don’t want to hear it. I’m tired.”

“Your luck is running out,” Ibrahim said.

“Oh, is it?” Omar raised an eyebrow.

Ibrahim noticed the weariness in his brother’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“Why is my luck running out?”

“I’m about to move into your spare bedroom.”

“Jamila again?”

Ibrahim nodded.

Omar made a noise deep in his throat, half chuckle, half grunt of disgust, and sat down next to his brother. “Let’s be honest: your luck with women ran out twenty-five years ago.”

“I don’t complain.”

“You should.” Omar shook his head. The men fell silent. They were poised on the verge of a familiar conversation, one that had previously led them into a jungle whose very vibrancy seemed deadly—a discussion of second wives. Specifically: Should they break their family’s long-standing tradition of never taking more than one wife? Ibrahim had once been in favor of breaking it and had even looked around (the Internet made this so much easier). Omar was completely opposed to the idea, not just because of tradition but because it was indecent—and a horrible thing to do to your wife, no matter how much you disliked her. Their argument had ended badly, with Ibrahim accusing his brother of having become completely subservient to his shrew of a wife—a charge
that Omar threw right back at him. They hadn’t spoken for a week after that—an eternity in brother time.

It came down to a deeper issue they had long ago recognized and never discussed: both men were in miserable marriages, and while it was possible to hide such things from society at large, it was nearly impossible to hide them from your family.

“I have a favor to ask,” Ibrahim said.

“I hope this isn’t about Jamila.”

“It’s about work.”

That surprised Omar. Although they’d worked in the same department, they scrupulously avoided letting work interfere with their home relationship. Omar had transferred to Undercover when Ibrahim was halfway up the ranks to chief, and in the space of three years, Omar had surpassed him. Now he was assistant chief.

“You don’t want to leave Homicide, do you?” Omar asked.

“No, no, I like Homicide. I’m just working on a case that I think may be connected to one of the older cases al-Warra did in Undercover. I was wondering if you could get me the files for al-Warra’s old cases.”

“Why don’t you just go through Records?”

“I can’t raise any red flags on this one. It would jeopardize our investigation.”

Omar grunted and sat back. Ibrahim knew he was going to say
You’re lying. What’s really going on?
But he must have picked up on Ibrahim’s panic, because he said nothing.

“I think one of the files may be classified,” Ibrahim said.

Now Omar sat forward again, looked down at his hands. “What’s this about?”

“I wish I could talk about it, but I can’t.” Ibrahim sat back. “I really can’t. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

Omar studied him.

“I’ve never asked you for anything like this before.”

“That’s why it’s weird—”

“And I wouldn’t do it now if it weren’t important.”

Omar exhaled. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

That afternoon as he was pulling out of the parking garage at work, his phone rang. It was Katya.

“I took the photo you sent me to the mall during my lunch hour,” she said.

“I’m impressed.”

“Well,” she said, “I wish I had some good news for you. I showed the photo to a bunch of retailers and nobody recognized her, so I took a risk and went back to the store where she worked. They didn’t recognize her either.”

“What?”

“The woman they know as Sabria Gampon looks nothing like the woman in the photo. Nothing. All three of the workers there said it wasn’t her. Not even close.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“I’m sorry. They pulled out her employment record for me too.”

“Did you tell them you were a cop?” he asked.

“No, I told them I was a private investigator looking into some theft issues another business had had with her. I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said that, but it got them to be helpful. Anyway, they gave me a copy of her job application and I thought you’d want to look at it. Maybe you can identify the handwriting—or not.”

“Yes, good. Can you bring it to my office?”

“I’ve already left it in your mailbox,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I really appreciate your discretion on this.”

“Of course,” she said. “And one more thing. I checked the job application against her previous visa information, and whoever
filled out the application knew the correct ID number for the old visa.”

“Okay,” he said, struggling to focus. “So whoever was posing as Sabria had access to her immigration information.”