City of Veils (14 page)

Miriam wasn’t sure whether she felt comforted by this.

“My biggest fear,” Patty went on, “is not that something will happen to him, but that—well, this is really personal, but I’m only telling you because I think you’ll understand.” She gazed at Miriam, her blue eyes glittering with meaning. “I’ve always been afraid that Jacob would bring home a second wife.”

Miriam hid her reaction by smirking. “Doesn’t he have to be a Muslim to do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Patty said, waving her hand dismissively and standing up. “There are plenty of non-Muslim women right here on the compound, but yes, she would have to be a Muslim to be a co-wife. I don’t think it would ever happen. It’s just me being irrational.”

Miriam’s appetite had fled. She kept eating a piece of bread so that Patty wouldn’t become suspicious, but the words bubbled right there beneath the surface:
Patty, he’s a jerk. He’s been cheating on you for years. Why don’t you get out?
Patty dumped her fresh coffee in the sink, then seemed to realize what she’d done. She gave a nervous laugh. “What on earth am I doing?” she said, quickly pouring herself another cup. Miriam had the impulse to stand up and hug her.

She had to admit that she understood Patty’s fears. It wasn’t that Eric might bring home a second wife, it was just that he spent so much of his time blowing freely through a world she had little access to and very little knowledge of. There had been plenty of times she’d wondered if he was cheating on her. It would have been so easy for him to get away with it.

“I know what it feels like,” Miriam said. Patty stopped stirring her coffee. “But I’ll tell you what keeps me from worrying too much is the knowledge that, in this town, women are extremely difficult to meet.”

She had hoped the remark would at least win a smirk, but Patty simply picked up her coffee and said, “Have you called the consulate yet?”

“Yes. They said they’d help find him.”

“Oh, good. They’ll find him, you’ll see.” The front door opened with a squeak and Patty went into a kind of fit of excitement and nerves. She set the coffee mug down so hard that its contents splashed onto the counter, and she practically went racing into the living room to greet her husband. Miriam heard Patty’s voice and winced. “You’re back early! Is everything okay at work?” Jacob grumbled a response and came into the kitchen and saw Miriam.

“Ahhh,” he said. “The husbandless woman.”

Miriam couldn’t be bothered to figure out why it was insulting, she simply didn’t like the comment, but then she didn’t like Jacob, and anything he’d said might have had the same effect. “Hi,” she said, picking up her coffee in case he said something worse and she needed to distract herself.

Jacob came to the table and took the mug from her hands. “A woman in your situation should be drinking something stronger.”

“No, thanks,” she said, but Jacob was already dumping the coffee in the sink. He set the mug on the countertop with a crack and pulled a beer from the fridge, opened it on the edge of the counter like some college kid, and slid it across the Formica tabletop so that she was forced to catch it or let it land on her lap.

Drink it,
she thought.
In a few minutes, you’ll be glad you did.
She took a long slug and set the bottle on the table with a thunk. Patty looked upset.

“How was work?” she chimed, going back to the sink. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I wasn’t expecting you so early or I would have had dinner ready. I was going to make a roast.”

Miriam had seen them together only a few times, twice at parties here on the compound, and once at a private beach for a picnic that had ended when the temperature had gone above 110. The two of them had lived here for seven years and had no plans to leave. Their house might have been a little less tense if they’d had kids or pets, but their one daughter, Amanda, had been sent to a boarding school in New Hampshire. She suspected it was Jacob’s idea.

Miriam had always felt intimidated by him. He seemed to enjoy making her quail. She wondered how Patty put up with it, but Patty was all about nervous chatter, and that seemed to shut him up.

To hear Eric tell it, Jacob was only a convenient friend. They worked at the same company. They were both former military. They liked to do the same things: fishing, scuba diving, camping in the desert. Not that they ever did much except work, but at least they had something to talk about.

She watched Jacob now. His thin face was slightly sunburned and grizzled-looking, even when he shaved. He had hazel eyes that she couldn’t look into without thinking of warm Vaseline. Like Eric, he was a security specialist, and his body showed it—it was well developed, meaty, tough. His gestures had the kind of precision that came from watching peripheries, guarding other people, and handling dangerous weapons for a living. Maybe that’s what kept Patty enthralled. Miriam could certainly sympathize. Yet ever since meeting Jacob, she’d had the uneasy feeling that he was the kind of man who had been drawn to Saudi Arabia because he appreciated its worst stereotypes, the treatment of women primary among them. Or perhaps she was being harsh, and it was only the segregation of women that appealed to him. How can you cheat on your wife if she’s always in your hair? Miriam had learned early on that Jacob didn’t want the women around when he hung out with Eric. At first she’d thought it was a work thing, that they’d had business to discuss, but Eric finally told her that Jacob was a man’s man who didn’t really like spending time with his wife in the way that Eric did with Miriam. That is, the way he had until they came here.

Patty was still talking.

“So, Miriam,” Jacob said, interrupting his wife and swinging his attention to Miriam like an interrogation light. Patty fell silent. “Did you find your husband?” he asked.

Miriam shook her head, feeling an ominous tickle on the back of her neck. She took another swig of beer. “He wasn’t at work today?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t in the office,” Jacob said, all the while keeping his eyes on her face. “I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

“You said on the phone you saw him that day he came to the airport to pick me up?” Miriam asked.

“Yeah, but only for coffee. He seemed normal.” Jacob’s gaze narrowed. “Why? You think I had something to do with it?”

“With what?” she asked, attempting to look arch.

Jacob gave her a cold, eerie look that made her insides convulse.

“I thought you might be able to tell me if there was something strange going on,” she said. “If he said anything to you…”

“He said nothing.” Jacob’s tone was insulting, but Patty intervened by dropping a metal spatula on the floor. It startled everyone. She apologized, picked up the spatula, and set it in the sink.

Miriam stood up and collected her purse. “Patty, thanks so much for the food. The doughnuts were delicious.”

“He’s probably just been picked up by the religious police,” Jacob said, his eyes still boring into Miriam. “You live in that kind of neighborhood, you know.”

I know
, she wanted to snap. “I’ll see myself out. Patty, thanks again.”

Patty looked awkward and stricken, as if she wasn’t sure what to do. It was Jacob who followed Miriam into the living room. She passed a side table in the foyer and glanced down at the framed pictures. She hadn’t noticed them when she came in, but one of them caught her attention now. It was a picture of Jacob and Eric. She stopped to look at it.

Jacob stood a little too close behind her. “Did he tell you we went camping?” he asked in a tone that said
Bet he didn’t tell you anything.

Miriam felt herself flushing with anger. Eric hadn’t mentioned a camping trip. “Yes,” she said, “sounds like you guys got into your usual trouble.”

She could see from his face that Jacob wasn’t buying it.

The table was strange. All the pictures showed Jacob and his friends doing guy things—fishing, surfing, hunting in the desert. No pictures of Patty or their daughter. Even the frames were masculine, grainy wood in dark browns and greens.

At the back she saw a picture that stopped her heart for a beat. Three men stood in the frame. Each one was holding a hunting rifle, and behind them the mountains of southern Arabia were draped in a yellowing light. Eric was on the left, looking pleased with himself. There was a cut on his chin. Jacob looked thuggish in the middle of the frame, and on the right stood a man she recognized as Apollo Mabus.

“How do you know this guy?” she said, pointing.

“Mabus? Met him through a guy at work a few years ago. He’s a Brit. Kinda stuffy until you get him out to the desert. Why do you ask?”

“He looks familiar.” She kept her eyes on the picture so she wouldn’t give anything away. She knew she looked nervous. All she needed now was for Jacob to start thinking that she was cheating on her husband.

It shocked her to realize that Mabus had lied. He wasn’t from New York, he was British. He’d spoken English just like an American.

“You met him here?” she asked, confirming.

“Yeah.”

“And you’re sure he’s British?”

“Pretty damn sure,” Jacob replied.

“Then it can’t be the same guy I’m thinking of,” she lied. “When was
this
hunting trip?”

“Why do you want to know?” Jacob was moving closer again, so she shrugged, although it looked more like a nervous tic. When he saw that she wasn’t going to answer, he said, “We went out to Mabus’s place. Did some camping on the dunes.”

“Hmm.” Smiling feebly, clutching her purse, she went straight to the front door and pulled it open, but Jacob followed her onto the lawn.

“Later,” she said, walking briskly away. He stood in the front yard watching her leave, but she didn’t turn around. She walked, trying not to seem hurried, until she was out of sight of the villa. Then she took the cell phone from her purse and called the taxi driver again, relieved to hear that he wasn’t far away. They arranged to meet at the gate.

She already knew how old the picture was, because the cut on Eric’s chin had happened right before she’d left for the States. The picture had to have been taken within a few days of her leaving. She didn’t mind, really. He had a right to his friends, especially when she was out of town, but they’d spoken on the phone a few times that week and he hadn’t mentioned it once. Normally he told her when he was going somewhere.

And,
she wondered suddenly,
who took the picture?

F
aiza sat beside Osama in the front seat, laughing at a comic display of gesticulation between two young boys fighting over a soccer ball on the street. Osama steered carefully around the soccer game, smiling to himself. He enjoyed her laughter and let it wash over him. He had never been bothered by her forwardness, the sloppy way she wore her hijab, or the simple banter that sprang up between them on the rare occasions they went on interviews together. With a different woman these things might have seemed like efforts at seduction, but with Faiza they were as natural as air and sand and stone. She was older, at thirty-seven just reaching the age where immodesty was forgiven, where women passed into the sanctuary of perceived sexlessness. Yet he found her attractive in a simple, old-fashioned way; the flat, broad gestures of her hands, the way her shoulders shook when she laughed, and the plainness of her features, which—on the occasions that he saw them—she wore with unabashed frankness. She was wholesome and comforting precisely because she had no idea of her own sexuality, and he suspected that this had been as much the case with her at sixteen as it would someday be at forty.

She let out a sigh, the kind that said
My, that was satisfying, now back to serious.
They were heading to talk to the victim’s brother Abdulrahman Nawar, who owned a lingerie store. If there was even a possibility that they would have to interview a woman, Osama had to bring a female officer along. A lingerie store was strange, tricky territory. He’d brought Faiza on the off chance that this would be one of the 250-odd lingerie boutiques in Jeddah that had actually managed to comply with the Labor Ministry’s new edict enforcing the hiring of women. “Encouraging more women into the workplace,” they called it, but it was really a bid to clamp down on one of the few places where men had access to women, where women could confer with men in whispers about their panty preferences and cup sizes and which of the dazzling variety of erotic “looks” they preferred in the bedroom.

The religious establishment had been scrutinizing and pressuring the industry for years, but until recently store owners had always managed a successful defense, arguing that they couldn’t hire women because most of their customers were actually men shopping for their wives. Since women had a more difficult time getting out of the house, they sent their husbands to buy for them—hence the need for male clerks. When the Labor Ministry issued its new law—only women should work in lingerie stores—the religious establishment roared. The idea of male employees handling brassieres and thongs sent the imams into a lather, but apparently the threat of women leaving off child-raising and cooking to find outside work was even more depraved.

Faiza’s hand plunged into her paper bag. They had stopped for coffee and doughnuts, and she ate a cream-filled without any of the delicacy he’d come to expect from someone wearing a burqa—the gentle angling of the sticky pastry beneath the fabric, the careful biting to avoid dropping crumbs in the collar. She simply went at it. He watched surreptitiously for lapses of judgment, but she didn’t so much as smear frosting on her thumb.