City of Veils by Zoë Ferraris Page A

wasn’t needed.
    Katya bent over the cloak again, running gloved fingers slowly over every inch of the fabric like an instrument waiting to register a seismic event. Eventually she took off her gloves and began to feel with her fingertips. It was the not-feeling that finally occurred to her. There, around the knee, the fabric was smooth.
    She moved her fingers to the right, shutting her eyes, feeling for irregularities. Slowly, her touch encountered a softer spot. She wanted to open her eyes to check if this was true, but she squeezed them shut and kept feeling until the worn area became an imperfect circle with a definite boundary enclosing an area in the shape of a knee. Bent to what? Who prayed on one knee?
    Katya opened her eyes and held the cloak to the light. It was difficult to see at first, but there it was, a spot where the fabric was slightly thinner. But only on one side.
    She switched tables, focusing now on the clothing. Eve’s jeans, which had been laid out on the table, had dried stiffly. Katya studied the knees. Again, it looked as if the left knee was slightly more worn than the right.
    She went to the phone and called Adara.
    “The Eve case,” she said. “Were there calluses on the left knee?”
    Adara put the phone down with a clunk. Katya heard her walk across the room, heard the hiss as the freezer door opened, the metal screech of a table being pulled from its frozen nest. Adara came back to the phone. “It’s hard to say,” she said. “Neither knee is very calloused.”
    Katya was disappointed, but it didn’t mean anything. The robe and jeans could have protected the knee from developing a callus.
    Eve had an old wound in her lower right leg, but that wouldn’t have caused her to pray on one knee. The wounded usually prayed in a chair. But what if she did try to pray on one knee, desperate to show some sign of her subservience to Allah? If she were that desperate, she might have bitten back the pain in her right leg and just gone ahead and prayed on both knees.
    “The wound in her lower right leg,” Katya said. “Would that have prevented her from kneeling on it?”
    Adara thought for a moment. “It might have caused her some soreness, but I don’t think it would have made her immobile.”
    “All right. Thanks.”
    “By the way, Katya, the Syrian woman I told you about is here. She’s working on the facial sketch now. I’ll have her bring up the picture when she’s done.”
    Katya was surprised. “You’re not sending it to Majdi?”
    “I thought you’d like to see it first. Whenever you’re done with it, just give it to Zainab or Majdi.”
    Katya smiled. “Thanks, Adara.”
    She went back to the tables, her mind abuzz. So when Eve left the house, she didn’t go to the mosque, or she would have worn down both knees. Katya herself had never felt entirely comfortable in a mosque. It was a formal place for prayer. Her own spiritual comforts belonged to the back porch of the house, a room enclosed by shutters and cool shade where she and her mother had always done evening prayers before dinner.
    But what reason would a woman have for getting on one knee when she left the house? It was possible, of course, that she hadn’t left the house. That she lived in a household where she was required to wear a cloak so that she could serve a roomful of strange men. Bring them dinners. Kneel before them to set a coffee service on a low table. But why not bend over or squat? Getting down on one knee raised the frightening possibility of stretching the cloak in such a way that the other leg was exposed.
    Finally, Katya turned to Eve’s burqa and headscarf. The scarf was plain black polyester, the kind most women wore. There was no label, but one side of the fabric was lighter than the other, suggesting that it had been exposed to the sun on a regular basis. The scarf hadn’t been checked for fibers yet, so Katya went over it with a magnifying glass. When they had found Eve’s body, the scarf