Finding Nouf (15 page)

He found that he was tapping his miswak against the back of his hand, and he stopped.

"Did Nouf ever go into the men's side of the house—her brothers' bedrooms? Or their former bedrooms? Their offices?"

"No, I don't think so. Why?"

"You never saw her go into the men's bedrooms?"

"To be honest, I don't go in there myself, so I don't know where she went. Why would she be interested in their bedrooms?"

"Did she ever talk about her brothers' clothing? A jacket, perhaps?"

Muhammad had to think about it, but he shook his head. "She hardly talked about her brothers at all. She was nervous around them. They weren't exactly affectionate with her."

"How were they?"

"Distant."

"One more thing," Nayir said, hearing noise in the hall. "Was Nouf superstitious?"

Muhammad looked skeptical. "No, not really."

"The camel she took to the desert had a mark on its leg—a sign of protection against the evil eye. Why would she make that mark?"

"I don't know," he said. "It seems strange."

"I noticed a Khamsa hand on the door frame." Nayir motioned to the hallway, and Muhammad turned with a jerk. "Are you superstitious?"

"My wife put that—"

Suddenly the door opened and Muhammad's wife came in. She held a baby asleep in her arms. She was wearing a scarf, but her face was exposed, and she wore a radiant, mischievous grin. Nayir looked away, but Muhammad stood up. He kissed his wife on the cheek and took the baby, turning to show Nayir, who climbed to his feet.

"My daughter," he said, beaming. "She's as loud as a plane crash, but we can show her off when she sleeps."

Nayir stroked the baby's cheek. "
Ism'allah, ism'allah
"

He wanted to ask Muhammad's wife to confirm her husband's alibi, but he was seized with shame at the idea of it. He kept his eyes resolutely on the baby and wondered if Muhammad's wife had ever met Nouf and what she had thought.

"Please don't leave," the wife said. "I'm serving dinner."

"Oh, no, thank you." Even though it made the couple feel awkward, Nayir spoke to Muhammad. His wife seemed to understand Nayir's discomfort, and quietly she took the baby and slipped out of the room.

Muhammad showed him out. "Let me know if you find Eric," he said.

Back on the street, the Sudanese women had gone. Nayir stuck the miswak in his mouth and returned to his car, which had acquired a new layer of dust. He opened the doors to let out the heat and leaned against the fender, perplexed and disturbed by his revised understanding of Nouf. The fact that she wanted to run away to America set her in a category beyond what he had previously believed: that she was a nervous bride escaping an arranged marriage. Although he had imagined that she had been dishonest with her family, the new Nouf in his mind was starkly deceptive, plotting a scheme to satisfy her desires and rebuke her family. She was not fearful; she was ambitious. She was going to appall her family, perhaps even damage their reputation, and all for what? A chance to live with dogs? He struggled to reenvision her and realized that until now he had thought of her as a victim.

Yet this version of things presented its own problems. If Muhammad had known her better than her brothers and she had
trusted him so much, wouldn't she have at least tried to say goodbye to him? Or had she been deceiving Muhammad too?

As Nayir climbed into his Jeep, one thought disturbed him above all else: it was odd that Muhammad would go out of his way to help Nouf leave Saudi but do nothing to find her killer.

T
HERE WERE MANY REASONS
to love the marina. Waking up in the morning to the smell of the sea and the delicious view of a blue horizon. Spending the day in the fresh air, cooled by the water and the wind. Watching the peddlers who wandered by, hawking prayer rugs and miswaks, brass pots and cotton sandals from China. A vendor's large silver truck was always parked at the marina gates, and at precisely 6
A.M.
the smells of fresh pita, of
ful
beans cooked in garlic, and of the best coffee in the world came wafting from the truck's windows. At 6:15 the truck's side flipped up like a mother dog's leg and the men who were queued there scrambled around for their breakfasts, falling on the vendor's window like a litter of pups. The neighbors kept their eyes open; there was no crime. No one fought over parking spots. At night the cabin's lullaby rocking was a magical thing, suggesting motion within immobility. But perhaps the finest thing about the marina was
the constant lap of water against the hull and the gentle clatter of boats against their docks, a reminder that this was not the prison of a house and that it was merely a matter of slipping the rope and starting the engine and Nayir and his entire existence would float free on a secluded vista of waves.

And yet people always wanted to know, how had the devoted desert man come to have such an affair with the sea? He had no answer, really. He had learned to love the desert as a boy, but as an adult he had come to desire a newer version of the wild. On the sea he found a curious replication of the sandy waste. There was vastness, quietude, hidden life, and the challenging paradox of monotony and uncertainty. There was also the ability to get away from your neighbors. If it ever became too difficult to avoid their scrutiny, their questions about his career, his family, his possibilities for marriage, he could simply relocate to a different slip and voilà—a whole new set of strange eyes, not yet comfortable enough to begin spying, would keep their modesty behind curtained portholes. Since coming to the marina, he had not actually moved, but knowing that it was an option brought him a tremendous sense of freedom and made having neighbors more bearable.

This morning he stood on the dock gazing up at the western sky, Columbo coat draped over his arm. He was trying to abate a terrible mood by contemplating the goodness of his world, and he might have contemplated further had it not been for his neighbor Majid.

"
Salaam!
" Majid called from the opposite slip. He was standing on his bow looking curiously at Nayir.

"
Sabaah al-khayr.
" Standing alone with a strange item of clothing on his arm was, he realized only too late, an invitation to comment.

"What's the news?"

"
Al-hamdullilah
" Nayir replied.

Majid was the dock's other frustrated bachelor, and as such served as both a comfort and a warning. Between them there was a hint of disgust at this uneasy parallel, enhanced by the fact that they were of the same height and age, their faces were uncannily similar in structure, and they both carried Palestinian blood. The great difference between them was that Majid was the youngest son of a very large family—and not just his immediate family; his female cousins numbered in the dozens—and yet he had managed never to marry. He was a pedantically devout man, but apparently no woman was righteous enough to have him.

Majid stepped onto the pier. "Heading out this morning?" he asked.

"Yes. I've got some things to do."

"What is this?" Majid motioned to the coat. "Let me see. Did you buy yourself a coat?" He drew out the arm and inspected the buttons. "Is it a raincoat?" He smiled. "Tell me, where are you going that you might encounter rain?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

Majid grinned. "Are we expecting rain
here?
"

The wickedness of his grin was a satisfying reminder that Nayir and Majid were as different as dogs and cats. Nayir thought too that this was a man who, precisely five times a day, performed his ablutions and strutted down fifteen meters of parking lot to the marina mosque. If in his short walk through sparse pedestrian traffic he should spot a woman and therefore ruin his ablutions by witnessing the unclean, he would shout at the woman at the top of his lungs, march back to his boat, bang open the cabin hatch, climb below, and with great rocking and splashing perform his ablutions again. He would then emerge, cleaner of soul and body, and gaze up and down the pier in an awkward way, as if hoping to detect a woman at the very periphery of his vision, which would not be quite the same thing as
seeing
her. And then, detecting none, he would flip a pair of prophylactic sunglasses onto his nose and march down the pier. Nayir had never seen him bump into a woman twice in one outing—usually his first explosion was enough to chase the women, not to mention all the birds, from the dock—and Majid would stride confidently back to the mosque.

He looked into Majid's eyes. These were precisely the judging eyes that would worry him the most, and for that reason it was always worth being polite. "And what's your news? How is work?"

Majid shrugged. "The same. What about you—how is it in the desert these days?"

"Fine." Nayir began heading down the pier, calling abruptly over his shoulder, "Have a good morning." But the tone of condescension in Majid's question rankled him all the way to the Jeep.

The morning only got worse. Traffic was terrible. He stopped for coffee and eggs at a roadside vendor, but the air was so thick with exhaust fumes that he couldn't breathe, so he went back to the Jeep and drove recklessly off, forgetting his plans for the day, desperate only to get away from the honking traffic and the gagging smell of diesel. But there was no getting free, even when the buildings thinned out and there was nothing near the freeway but fields of sand. In a fit he drove onto the shoulder, switched to four-wheel drive, and drove off into the sand, heading for nowhere. When the freeway was nothing but a thin line at the horizon, he stopped the Jeep and ate his breakfast and then, checking his prayer schedule, got out with his rug to pray on the sand.

It was only then that his anger dissipated and, finishing his prayers, sitting back on the sand in the shade of the Jeep, that he was able to contemplate the cause of his mood. A new dread had cropped up since the conversation with Muhammad. Nouf had made plans to run away. To
America.
She had died in the desert, but her running to America would have been another kind of death. And that was what caused the dread. That America represented all that was free and exciting, that it was a destination worth erasing your life for, that this place, this city, this desert, this sea, weren't the material of a young girl's dreams.

Qazi ash-Shrawi laid the clipboard on the desk and came to the window to stand closer to Nayir. He had a quiet voice, and the sounds from the warehouse below were causing him to speak louder than was comfortable.

They were in Qazi's office at his father's shoe warehouse. It was a glass-paneled room looking out over row after row of inventory boxes, some stacked so high that only a crane could reach them.

Qazi was almost as tall as Nayir but half as wide. He wore a clean white robe and an immaculately pressed headscarf held down by a new black goat-hair
igal.
When he walked, Nayir noticed a pair of dingy old sneakers peeking out from the bottom of his robe—odd considering that his father ran the biggest shoe import business in
Jeddah, which Qazi, the oldest son, was set to inherit one day. Yet the shoes looked comfortable and suggested that despite his elegance and refinement, Qazi was a hard worker.

"I only saw her once in person," he said. "And everyone was there—my uncle, my cousins, my father. There were servants in the room. She wasn't allowed to lift her
burqa,
so I didn't see her face."

"Did you talk to her?" Nayir asked.

"I asked her if she was excited about the wedding and she said yes. That was it."

"Did she sound excited?"

"I don't know. I think she was nervous." Qazi looked down at his workers and grew thoughtful.

"So you had no idea what she looked like?" Nayir asked.

"Well, I saw a picture. Othman showed it to me."

"What was she like?"

Qazi gave an anxious smile.

Ever since meeting Qazi, Nayir had felt protective of him. There was an air of caution about him, and an immediate impression of grace; he was like a giraffe in the savanna, ears sharply poised to listen for danger, and like a giraffe, there was something sad and oddly vulnerable about him.

Nayir looked dolefully at the panorama and tried to imagine what had really prompted him to want to marry Nouf. Family pressure? Money? Love? He didn't seem the sort of man who would rush into a marriage unless every detail was right. With his clear brown eyes and square jaw, he was remarkably handsome. Nayir could imagine women lining up to have him. There must have been a reason he chose Nouf.

"Do you know what happened to her?" Qazi asked.

"As I said, it's still under investigation."

"I thought the police said it was an accident," he whispered.

"They did."

A worker opened the door behind them and, seeing them, apologized for the intrusion.

"It's no problem, Da'ud," Qazi said. "Just give me a few minutes."

"I'm sorry to take your time," Nayir said.

"No, really." Qazi raised his hand. "You sure you don't want coffee?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Then please have a seat. I can give you all the time you need."

Nayir returned to the desk and Qazi joined him, moving the clipboard aside and putting his elbow squarely on the desk as if to say,
Go ahead, ask me anything.

"So you never spoke to Nouf except that one time?" Nayir asked.

Qazi pressed his lips together and stared at the desktop with eyes that said,
I take that back—ask me something else.

"Getting married—that's a big decision," Nayir said. "You're young."

"I'm nineteen."

"If I'd gotten married when I was your age, I would have wanted to know everything about the woman before making that kind of commitment." Nayir saw his face twitch. "That's a decision for life. I'd want to make sure I was doing the right thing, and then I'd want to make sure again, especially if I didn't know the girl that well."

"I did kind of know her," Qazi said. "We used to play together when we were kids."

"What was she like then?"

He shrugged. "I liked her. She was beautiful."