Finding Nouf (7 page)

"Will you take the family out again soon? The camels miss the desert, you know."

"I miss it myself," Nayir said. He'd come back into the city only this morning, but this trip out had not restored him in the least. All the fruitless searching had worn him down, and that, followed by the blow of Nouf's death, had created a tight knot in his gut—anger at the family for being so secretive and at himself for not having found her. A strong part of him wished he could go back to the desert tonight and spend a few days relaxing with no one to bother him. But he would keep his word to Othman and wait for the private investigator to call.

They were standing in front of a wide wooden door that led into the stables.

"How is the camel they found in the desert?" Nayir asked. "I heard she was having some problems."

Amad hesitated. Nayir could tell that he'd raised an awkward subject. "No problems," the keeper said. "She's fine. Who told you that?"

"My mistake." Nayir reached into his pocket for a miswak. Amad squinted, watching his movements. It was a wonder the old man didn't wear glasses.

"It's terrible what happened to the girl," Nayir said.

"Yes. I'm sorry for their loss."

Nayir was struck by the man's sudden reserve. He put the miswak in his mouth and took another look at the courtyard. "The Shrawi girl who disappeared—she spent a lot of time with the camels," he said.

Amad eyed him—suspiciously, he thought. "She liked animals. She was down here a lot, with her escort usually. Or she came with her brother. All the girls come down to visit the camels, but that one especially." Amad peered vaguely at the gate.

"But it's strange, isn't it?" Nayir said. "I can't imagine how she managed to get a camel into, what, a pickup truck? That seems a big job for a young girl like that."

"Well, don't go looking too carefully now." Amad spat on the ground and looked up at the house. "Ask me, this is one of those things better left in the dark."

"Why do you say that?"

"I've learned one thing here: when you enter the house of the blind, you put out your eyes. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to unload the last of the feed."

Nayir watched Amad enter the stable with one hand touching the wall and the other groping nervously. "Got to fix that light," he muttered as the darkness swallowed him.

Feeling oddly exposed, Nayir looked back at the garden gate, but Othman was still gone. From behind he heard a scratching noise and turned to see a woman striding out of the stables. She had a sturdy build, was about as wide as Nayir, and her movements had a confidence that he recognized in people who spent time in the desert. She was, he felt certain, the keeper's daughter.

When she saw him, she raised a hand to her face, which was unveiled. A black crest of hair fell over her cheek. Nayir couldn't help noticing the enormous bruise above her left eye before she skittered through a doorway in the stone wall to his right and disappeared.

Perhaps someone had overpowered her to steal the camel, but who would knock out the daughter when the father would have been so much easier to handle, being elderly and half blind as he was? It might have been a matter of necessity. Maybe the daughter stumbled on Nouf—or her kidnapper. He wondered anxiously if Othman knew anything about it, and if so, why he hadn't men
tioned it. Nayir wished there were a way he could talk to the girl.

The camel, however, wasn't taboo. Glancing one last time at the garden gate, Nayir crept behind the stable door and waited for Amad to leave. Propped against the building were half a dozen long planks and a clutch of lead pipes. The planks were lighter than they looked; it would have been easy for Nouf, or someone else, to use them as a ramp for getting a camel into the back of a truck. Nayir picked up a pipe. It was heavy enough to knock someone out. He studied each one, but none of them had traces of blood. It also looked as if none had been cleaned recently. They were covered with thousands of tiny, soft splinters from the cedar chips that were strewn on the ground, just like the chip Miss Hijazi had found in Nouf's head wound.

He heard Amad grumbling within. Moments later the keeper came out, calling his daughter's name and taking off in the direction she'd gone. Grabbing a handful of sugar from a sack by the door, Nayir slipped into the stables.

The interior was as dark as the folds of a woman's cloak. He fished out his penlight and switched it on against his palm in case he was standing too close to the animals. He didn't want to startle them. The scent of manure lodged in his throat.

Once his eyes had adjusted, he raised the penlight, approached the first stall, and peered inside. A camel was asleep on its belly. Nayir backed away and an instinct kicked in, telling him to speak softly to the beasts; they weren't awake, but they would hear him anyway and know he was friend, not foe. He whispered as he crept down the aisle. He passed stalls on each side, most of them locked, some stirring with life. Peeking into each one, he saw its prisoner sleeping, and he crept on to the next. He was looking for the camel that wasn't asleep, the camel that was too anxious to rest. He picked his way through the stable, annoyed for once that the Shrawis kept so many camels on a useless island in the middle of the sea.

Finally he found her. The camel was white, her fur yellowed by the penlight. Nayir stood back from the stall door, murmuring a soft lure for the animal inside. It seemed to take a very long time, perhaps a full ten minutes, for the camel to climb to her feet with a rustle and a groan, blowing another whiff of dung in his direction.

He continued to whisper phrases until he heard the beast nudge the stall door. He stopped whispering. The camel nudged again.

With enormous care he unlatched the door and let it drift open. He kept his eyes on the floor and mumbled pleasantries until the camel shook her head with a delicate whinny, indicating that Nayir could approach.

He looked at her then and saw an elegant lady standing knock-kneed on a tuft of straw. Thick lashes accentuated her wide brown eyes, and she seemed to gaze at him with a mixture of bashfulness and curiosity.

"
Salaam aleikum
" he said. She nuzzled his arm. The keeper was right: this was not a traumatized camel, so who had told Othman otherwise? Nayir didn't think he would lie about the camel; it seemed more like the natural exaggeration of rumor.

He opened his palm, revealing sugar tablets in the penumbra of his penlight. She threw back her muzzle and gave another ladylike snort. When he raised the sugar to her nose, she gobbled it down faster than he'd ever seen a camel eat, and when she finished, she let him stroke her shoulders where the nerves and joints merged in a sensitive knot. She was tense—not as tense as he'd expected, but she'd had some exercise lately, more proof that she hadn't been kept in a cage. Finally, standing close enough to inspect her, he went over every centimeter of her fur with his light, looking for signs of injury or abuse. He found nothing. She was as happy and fit as if she'd just won a race, save for a lingering sense of alertness that had been easily quelled by a few soft words.

He patted her, stroking the nape of her neck, the shoulder, and down the left foreleg, where his fingers encountered something odd. It felt as if gelatin had dried in her hair, but a closer look revealed that lack of grooming had not caused the marks. He directed the penlight to the spot, and pushing aside the longer hairs, he found a place where the hair was shorter than the rest. It was a series of lines—five, to be exact, each no longer than his thumb. They looked like burns.

Five lines on the leg of a camel meant what? He thought for a moment, then it came to him. After tucking her in again and saying goodnight, he crept back out to the empty courtyard, baffled by his find.

K
ATYA HIJAZI SAT
in the back seat of the Toyota as her driver, Ahmad, steered through the darkened streets. He stopped fully at every corner, sipped coffee from his favorite white mug, checked the side streets (which were always empty), and eased forward, content to travel like a snail. At one intersection he rolled down the front window to let in the cool air, and stealthily Katya rolled down the back window too, just enough to reveal a portion of the night sky.

There was always a hazard heading out into the world, but on this morning in particular she was in a watchful, darkly expectant mood. The night before, she had called Ahmad to ask if he would pick her up before dawn. She didn't say why, and Ahmad, as usual, didn't ask.

But her father did. She had awoken to a quiet house and managed to tiptoe out without waking Abu, but just as soon as the car
reached the corner of her street, her cell phone rang and she spent five minutes explaining to her father that she had to be at work early, that she would be paid overtime, and that her boss wouldn't make a habit of placing such inhumane demands on her time. Lie piled upon lie, and even then Abu would worry. His concern, however remote, now hung in the car and made her guilt even heavier.

She didn't want him to know just how much she was working on Nouf's case. He supported her pursuit of the truth about Nouf's death, but she didn't want to have to explain that she was going to be sneaking around the laboratory and hiding things from her boss and coworkers. Abu wouldn't like it—both because he didn't like the idea of Katya's breaking the rules and because he didn't approve of the way the examiner had closed Nouf's case without looking carefully at all the facts. Either way he would have something negative to say, and the less criticism he directed at her job, the better.

She had stashed the biological samples from Nouf's body in her purse, and she wanted to process them, which she could do only when no one else was in the lab. But she had never been to work so early and wasn't sure that the women's entrance to the building would even be open, or that the security guard would let her pass. She had the skin sample from beneath Nouf's fingernails, the wood chips from her head wound, the mud from her wrist, and some mud traces from her skin and hair. She also had a blood sample from the fetus. Processing it all surreptitiously would take a few days. The women's section of the lab didn't open until eight, but it might give her enough time to prepare the evidence.

If her boss found out that she was running samples from a case that had been closed, she would lose her job. It didn't matter that it was the family who had asked them to close the case and that she was in fact working for the family, at Othman's request. There were too many problems with the situation. Could the examiner admit that he had been bribed? Could Tahsin admit to paying him? Could the family admit that they'd hired a woman? There was no discussing any of it.

Ahmad crept along, the Toyota's headlights glowing weakly. As they left the old town, the streets grew wider and felt emptier, the buildings newer and less friendly. The comforting sight of old wooden window screens and elaborately ornamented doors gave way to the travesty of rusty iron grilles and decayed air conditioners hanging from windows like crooked teeth dripping with saliva. There were streetlamps here, but they gave off a dull gray light.

"Everything all right?" Ahmad asked.

"Yes, Ahmad. Thank you."

At once he turned left and they entered what felt like a women's street. All the storefronts displayed perfumes and sweet oils,
abaayas,
jewelry and baubles. Lights filled the shop windows, but as the Toyota crept past, they flickered off here and there in preparation for morning prayers. The only other movement came from black shapes flitting through the streets. Normally men inhabited these sidewalks, but this early in the morning there were women, as quiet and alert as deer, stealing the opportunity to wander unmolested. A man would be a blot on the picture, his robe glowing whiter than the moon, chasing away the dark shapes of night.

Ahmad stopped at a corner. Katya asked him to inch into the intersection and wait. Down the length of the cross street she could see the palest foam of light rising up like a wave on the horizon. She watched it, waiting for the translucent, ghostly glow that would mark the technical first point of dawn. Thanks to college astronomy, everything she knew about the universe had some relevance to the calculation of prayer times. It was a monumental task, that calculation. For such things one had to understand latitudes, solar declinations, azimuths, apparent solar times, and equations of time. Armies of men spent their lives observing the heavens just to calculate and predict the exact moment of dawn and the precise number of minutes and seconds that would elapse between dawn and sunrise, for it was in those minutes that Fajr prayers were performed. She held her breath, still staring at the horizon, curious to see if the muezzin's call would synchronize with the break of dawn.

Indeed, the distant glimmer of light appeared just as the first
Allahu akbar
rang from the speakers of a nearby mosque.
God is great.
The simultaneity of events sent a chill through her.

Then, less happily, she thought that while those armies of men had turned their eyes toward the heavens, the great sky was only ever visible to her from her rooftop or through the slit of an open car window.

Ahmad drove through the intersection, pulled over to the curb, and grabbed his prayer rug from the passenger seat. He got out and spread his rug on the pavement, standing to begin his prayers. Katya watched, feeling uneasy. She hadn't stopped thinking of Nouf all night, and now, like the flickering of storefront lights, she felt illumination dying inside her. The day before, she'd been certain that Nouf had been murdered, but what if the scratches on her arms and the wound on her head had happened during the drowning? Or been caused by an accident? Katya had also felt certain that she understood the family. They wanted to handle the investigation quietly; she respected their need for privacy. But what if they were hiding something?

They might never have told her about the cover-up if she had not called Othman to warn him that the examiner had done a shoddy job. Othman quickly asked for her help. She agreed, of course, but technically it was too late to collect evidence—Nouf's body was already being returned to the house. Surreptitiously, Katya had saved samples from the examination, but Othman didn't know she was going to do that. He didn't even know she was stepping in for the regular examiner. Did he just assume that she was all-powerful at work?