Finding Nouf (27 page)

She spat out a laugh and clapped a hand to her mouth, which was behind a
burqa.

He frowned.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"You shouldn't be here," he snapped. "This is a
zina
crime, you know. Did you tell Othman you were coming here?"

"No, but—"

"And why aren't you at work? I thought you had a job."

"I took the morning off. Look, I'm sorry to intrude." She said it as if she meant it. He averted his gaze. Even though she was wearing a
burqa,
he still didn't like staring into her eyes. "I need your help with something," she said.

"What?"

"I want to investigate a site that may be connected to Nouf's death."

"What do you need me for? You've got a driver. And a fiancé."

She didn't reply. She turned to the window, crossed her arms, and gripped her elbows. Nayir waited, growing more tense by the second.

"Othman doesn't want me to do this anymore," she said, her voice unsteady. "We talked about it, and he said I was risking my job."

Slowly Nayir sat down on the sofa and looked around for his shoes. "Are you?"

"Not really ... maybe a little. But I'm very careful, and this is about Nouf. It's about his
sister.
You would think he would take all the help he can get."

Nayir was torn. He wanted to tell her that it was no use complaining about Othman to him; he was Othman's friend and it wasn't going to change. He couldn't see her face behind the
burqa,
but her eyes were expressive enough to tell him that she was upset. Othman or not, he felt a pang of sympathy.

"I know that Othman wants to find out what happened to Nouf," he said carefully, avoiding his next thought:
Maybe he just doesn't want you involved.
Perhaps Othman was finally growing uncomfortable with the fact that she had a job, with her boldness in regards to this case. He wondered if she'd told Othman that they'd gone to the apartment and the optometrist.

"Why do you think he asked you to stop working on the case?" he asked.

She sighed. "I don't know. He seemed uncomfortable with it."

"Did you tell him that I went with you to Eric's apartment?"

"I told him we did some investigating together," she said. "But I told him that days ago. It was just last night he got upset. He always gets upset when I talk about Nouf. Last night I explained about the DNA. I think it upsets him especially to talk about her pregnancy, and this time he got angry. He said he was worried about me. I told him he shouldn't worry, but he insisted that I stop. He said that if I didn't, he would never forgive me for jeopardizing my career."

It surprised Nayir, because even though he understood Othman's reluctance, this was obviously more than reluctance. It was suspicious. And something else was wrong: Othman was worried that she would lose her job. Did he really care? Did he
want
her to work?

She appeared to be waiting for his reply. While it flattered him, he was wary of the consequences of expressing his opinion. He stood up, opened the closet, and took out his coat.

"I can't explain Othman's behavior," he said.

"But don't you think it's odd?"

He didn't reply. Perhaps Othman knew something about Nouf's disappearance and he didn't want Miss Hijazi to know about it. It didn't mean he was guilty.

"You think he doesn't trust me," she said.

"I didn't say that."

"Your face said it for you."

Although it made him uncomfortable, he was impressed that she'd noticed his face without looking directly at him. Her arms were still crossed in a defiant way, and he remembered her stubborn silence at the examiner's office.
She's not going to give up the investigation,
he thought.
Not even for Othman.
And he felt the same mix of indignation and grudging respect he'd had then. She was being defiant, but he couldn't disapprove of her reasons.

"I'll talk to him," Nayir said. "That's what you want, isn't it?"

She turned to face him, and he quickly averted his gaze. "Yes, if you can. But more than that..." She faced the window again. "I'd like to know that you're still in this."

He hesitated. "I want to know what happened to her. And I think so does Othman, whether he feels that way now or not."

She seemed relieved, or grateful, and she uncrossed her arms. "Then will you come with me right now? This is important. I need your expertise."

He hesitated again.

"Tracking," she said, as if that explained it.

After a pause, he nodded. "Just give me time for morning prayers."

Miss Hijazi told him they were going to an abandoned zoo. The night before she had flipped open the newspaper to find an article ("Monkey Business?") about the illegal sale of pet chimpanzees in the kingdom, a practice that had been banned but that flourished nonetheless. The article also highlighted the deplorable conditions for animals living in Jeddah's smaller zoos. As she studied the pictures of hairless, bone-thin chimpanzees, she found her thoughts going back to the manure on Nouf's wrist and Nayir's uncle's discovery that whatever animal it had come from had probably been poisoned. She hadn't yet found out where the manure had come from, but what better place to start looking than the zoo?

So, following her Toyota once again, Nayir pulled off the freeway and drove inland, down a desolate strip of road that intersected a field of gray sand. With every kilometer came a deeper sense of guilt. Now they were truly sneaking around behind Othman's back. He told himself that Othman would approve of their reasons despite what he had told Miss Hijazi the night before, but in his heart he knew the truth: when she had asked him to come to the zoo, he had wanted to be in her company.

His mind kept returning to the fact that she had told Othman they'd gone to Eric's apartment and Othman hadn't been upset. Of course he shouldn't have been—he trusted Nayir in matters like these. But it stung him to realize that it was the same trust a king has for a eunuch. He was worse than a eunuch; he wasn't missing a part, he was missing something else, a hidden seed that made him a man. He remembered Othman laughing at the jacket bazaar; he'd been laughing because Nayir was the last person on earth who should see a woman's body. It was as if the woman had flashed an ayatollah. The more he thought about it, the more disgusted he felt with himself for thinking about it at all.

He began an ascent up a broad, steep hill. Dust poured past the windows, obscuring the view, but when he reached the top, the panorama opened. Below, a dozen whitewashed homes dotted the valley wall, and above, rusted concertina wire formed the western perimeter of the abandoned zoo.

Nayir rolled down the window and took a deep breath. It wasn't camel shit; he knew that smell. This was definitely zoo smell. He had to admit that Miss Hijazi was clever to think of coming here. If Nouf had actually been to a zoo, she'd have had a dozen to choose from, but if she was meeting someone in secret, she would have come here.

They parked in a vacant lot near a children's playground that looked as if it had not been used for a decade. He got out of the Jeep and saw Miss Hijazi dragging what appeared to be a toolbox from the Toyota's trunk. Her escort assisted by fluttering around her, performing trivial tasks before she could get to them, first handling the toolbox, then shutting the trunk.

"Thank you, Ahmad," she said with a trace of annoyance. "This shouldn't take long."

She joined Nayir and they approached the old entrance, a metal ticket cage tucked in the shadow of a palm. Beside the ticket cage was a metal plaque reading,
CHILDREN MAY BE ACCOMPANIED BY EITHER THEIR MOTHER OR FATHER BUT NOT BOTH PARENTS. BOYS OVER THE AGE OF
10
ARE CONSIDERED ADULTS.
Beside that was a timetable for men, women, children, and school groups, so that the different species of humans didn't overlap.

Nayir glanced back at the driver and saw that he had returned to the air-conditioned car. His too-casual way of letting Miss Hijazi wander off with a nonfamily man rankled Nayir, even though it had happened before. Ahmad too must think he presented no danger. He was trustworthy, but it was no consolation.

The turnstile was jammed, so Nayir climbed over and turned to help her, but she handed him her toolbox and climbed over herself.

"You know, I can do this alone," he said.

She stared at him fiercely. He actually blushed. Then, quickly, she took the toolbox from him.

Turning down a palm-sheltered avenue, they saw that the road ran past buildings and empty cages, murky fountains and broken benches.

"Nouf had manure on her wrist," she said.

"Her escort also had manure on his shoes," Nayir replied, remembering the smell of Muhammad's shoes.

"Oh. You didn't tell me that." Seeing that he wasn't going to reply, she pushed on. "What would you be doing, if you were Muhammad and you came to the zoo? Looking for someone? Meeting someone?" They stepped into the shade of a nearby building.

"The real question," Nayir said, "is what would you be doing if you were
Nouf
and you came to the zoo?"

She gave him a nervous glance. "Maybe you'd be meeting a man."

A welcome coolness enveloped them as they wandered beneath a row of palm trees overlooking a former Serengeti exhibit. A few animal bones lay in the deep wells between the cages and viewer platforms—perhaps thin fragments of a giraffe's neck, the skull of a large cat. Lions, the kings of the jungle, were the wimps of the desert. The heat had killed them all.

No, Nayir thought, the
Saudis
had killed them all, with their ambition to build an outdoor zoo in the world's most inhospitable climate. They imported the animals, but the crowds didn't come. And why should they? Who would want to walk through the stifling heat to see a bunch of suffering beasts? Certainly not Saudis, notoriously scornful of anything lower on the food chain than themselves.

A faint breeze swept beneath his coat as they entered the reptile house. Here the bones were more interesting. He saw long spinal fragments within larger remains, as if a snake had eaten its cellmate, swallowed it whole before dying. Would the snakes have survived if the keepers had bothered to set them free? Rumor had it that they'd moved the easy animals to a local pet store and left the dangerous ones to die.

Nayir and Miss Hijazi crept out onto the avenue again, past crocodile cages and old apiaries covered with dried-up vines. In the distance they could see the top of a mountain, an imitation Matterhorn, undoubtedly once populated by goats.

"Let's check that out," she said. He grunted a reply.

The Matterhorn was as quiet as a tomb, and they approached it carefully. It was not as tall as it seemed from a distance—perhaps ten meters high. Its base was sprinkled with flowering plants.

"I think that's oleander," he said.

"Yes," she said. "Odd that it should grow here, where the animals could eat it." They walked through the bushes, stepped over the low gate that surrounded the mountain, and crossed a narrow field of grass, now dried to a crisp, with gullies full of sand. Miss Hijazi set her toolbox on the ground and opened it. Extracting a baggie, she took a sample of an oleander and the dirt around it.

While she worked, Nayir circled the mountain. The shell was made of green and brown plaster, and the tip was painted white to look like snow. At the bottom edge he spotted a doorway. Pulling gently, he pried the door open and peered inside.

The interior was hollow. Through various cracks in the plaster the light poured in, revealing a dirt floor, white walls, and a blanket bundled in a corner. The air was wet and heavy. Nayir studied the floor. Just past the doorway he saw wide trails in the dirt, as if someone had swept there recently. The trails spilled outside and into the nearby grass. There were no footprints in the dirt.

"Find something?" she asked.

"A hideout," he said.

She entered the room. "It smells like..."—she gazed hesitantly at Nayir—"...sex."

"I know," he said, then silently asked forgiveness for lying. He stepped inside and pressed his sleeve to his nose. A dozen alarms
went off in his head: How would she know that? Maybe it was part of her job to know it, but how did they
teach
that? Another alarm went off, announcing that they occupied a very small, private space. That smelled like sex. He stepped back outside.

She came out holding the blanket. Carefully she unfolded it, held it up, and studied its surface. "I may be able to get something from this."

Going back into the mountain, he switched on his penlight and ran it quickly over the ground, stopping once at a small piece of gravel but carrying on. She poked her head inside.

"Anything else?" she asked.

He shook his head. "The floor is pretty smooth, considering what was going on here. Someone cleaned up." He looked around one last time and, satisfied that nothing else was there, left the mountain.

"I'll take this blanket," she said. "If I'm lucky, I'll get some skin cells."

Nayir shut the door in the Matterhorn's side. "It may be no relation to our case at all." He caught a smile in her eyes. "What?"

"You said 'our case.'"

"I said
'your
case.'"

Amused, she went back to her toolbox, where she found a bag large enough to hold the blanket. They spent another half-hour scouring the grass around the mountain, but their search produced nothing. When they were done, they wandered out of the alpine exhibit, past a long row of birdcages, and down a narrow dirt path that led to the perimeter fence. The fence was topped with barbed wire, but the gate was unlocked. Exiting the zoo, they followed a footpath down a very steep hill and into the valley on the zoo's southern side. The air was heating rapidly, and both of them were beginning to sweat.

"I need to know everything you've found out so far," she said. "Is there anything you haven't told me? It's going to be easier if we both know all the facts."

"I meant what I said—this is your case."

"Fine. Is there anything you haven't told me?"