The kid was standing beside the school principal, waiting for me. They’d arrested his father on suspicion of money laundering, racketeering, and extortion. The trifecta. My colleagues had knocked in the front door of their house and found a lot of cash on the premises. They took the mother away too. One visit from the cops, and your whole family’s gone. I was supposed to bring the kid to child protective services, since he was a minor. I made a wrong turn at first. There was traffic, and it was raining. Springtime was working against us.
The kid didn’t speak, just looked out the window. I figured he had no idea what his parents had been up to, though you never really know. Someone had warned him to keep his mouth shut, but he suddenly seemed to realize I wasn’t just some random guy.
“You doing okay at school?” I tried.
His face twisted. I wasn’t his older brother or any other relative, I was a cop, even though I wasn’t in uniform. He turned away, but I could see he was having a hard time of it.
“I used to want to be a doctor,” I said. “Then you can help people get better. But I became a police officer instead.”
“Nobody trusts a cop. You’re all traitors.” The look in his eyes was harder than granite.
“Who killed Nadia?” he demanded when he got out of the car. As if he were interrogating me. As if I knew something about it. Why do these kids all think the police are part of the problem?
I visited the other members of the family. Everywhere I went, I was received graciously. Maybe a friendly reception makes it harder to find the solution.
Her sisters told me she loved movies, but she never went out. I kept my own opinion to myself. She never hung around with bad boys. They’d never known a purer girl. Then they cried. The conclusion I drew from these conversations was that Nadia had kept her sisters in the dark too. They knew nothing about her. No details that could send us in a useful direction. Nothing.
Maybe she was murdered because she was so present, because she was dominant, because she was different. At least that’s how her girlfriends described her: radiant, well behaved, defiant. There had to be plenty of guys in the neighborhood who were attracted to her. Everyone was absolutely convinced of the goodness of her character. She was an unusual girl, unique. That breeds jealousy. Killed because she was too good for this world. Something like that.
Her death had made Nadia a martyr. She had been promoted to sainthood. She would be held up forever as an example.
He was six years older than Nadia. They’d met at a Turkish restaurant she frequented with her girlfriends. He was there with his buddies. There was chitchat and flirting. The two of them began texting each other. They both loved Turkish comedies. He had a Turkish background. “I’m an Alevite,” he told me. She was a Moroccan Sunni.
So she couldn’t tell her parents about their relationship?
He nodded.
Was it serious between them?
“She meant everything to me.” A romantic soul, but I believed him. I could see in him the same sense of loss I’d seen in her girlfriends. “She was one of a kind. She didn’t know how to lie. She lived from the heart. You don’t meet many people like her.”
I didn’t pay much attention to whatever he said after that. What it came down to was that Nadia had been his guarantee against bad behavior.
But their relationship had been troubled. He wanted more time with her than she was willing to give. At last, a few weeks back, she had pulled the plug.
Had he been devastated?
No. In fact, he’d been relieved. He’d been wondering how long it would take before she finally acknowledged her doubts. He didn’t have a steady job, no wealthy parents, no brothers to support him. He had little chance of making something of himself. “She woke me up. I never hated her, not for one second.”
We had to believe him, he said.
Why do we always have to believe these people?
When I left him, we shook hands. His were dry, and rough as sandpaper.
The forensics report came in. No traces, which now suggested she hadn’t fought against her attacker. The conclusion was that she’d been lured to her death by someone she knew. “The killing must have been premeditated. It was carefully planned by someone who knew what he was doing.”
“I told you,” said Ali. “Whoever did this wasn’t normal. Wasn’t from around here. But he had an eye for pretty girls.”
Back on the street, I encountered two young Muslim men.
“As-salaam alaikum,” they said.
“Alaikum salaam,” I replied.
They introduced themselves. They were on their way to the mosque. Would I come by sometime, talk about my work as a policeman and what I contributed to society? “We are proud of you. You are one of us.” They’d be happy to welcome me to the mosque. The House of Good. I didn’t want to insult them, so I accepted their invitation. I would come. When I was ready, they said, when I was spiritually clean. When that day came, I would also call my parents.
That evening, I went to Ali’s home. I was uncomfortable about those two Muslims. It was as if they knew of my torment. And there, in Ali’s living room, I felt the earth shift beneath my feet. For the first time in months, I drank. By the end of the evening, I had no idea what I was saying. I talked and talked and talked. I rattled on about the young girls, my feelings of guilt, of rejection. I talked of death, said I hoped that when my time came I would be laid to rest with my head facing Mecca.
Ali comforted me. When I left, he looked at me differently than he had when the evening began. My only hope was that he would always be my friend.
I wanted to find out where that peppermint had come from, so I decided to go downtown. There were a number of places to get a quick bite near the Pathé De Munt. I went into many of them, ostensibly to use the men’s room, and on my way out I took a peppermint from the bowl by the door. It was, of course, a fool’s errand. She could have gone anywhere in the city that evening.
But I knew she’d been here. In the area around the theater. She’d had something to eat. To drink. She lived her life to the fullest.
In New-West, you didn’t have the luxury to be naive. She’d told him everything about her life, her yearning to be free, her bossy brothers. Her sweet sisters. Her wonderful parents. And he had listened. Understood that she was suffering. She told him everything. Deep inside her was a human being in pain. Someone who couldn’t see any hope for the future. The moment she stepped back inside her house, it was as if she’d confined herself within a glass cage. Running away wasn’t an option; it would break her heart. She was a good girl. Honest. But where had her honesty gotten her? She was living a lie, deceiving her family. And some boy had taken advantage of her.
A few months later, I was pulled off the case. Despite my background and knowledge, I hadn’t produced the result they’d expected. I rubbed them the wrong way. I wasn’t the Mocro-cop they’d dreamed of, who would fit in among the Moroccan community. In my evaluation, they wrote that my familiarity with the killer’s milieu and my ability to win the trust of its inhabitants had gotten in the way of my professional judgment, had perhaps even prevented the murder from being solved. They were ready to trade their approachable Moroccan man in for a more standoffish model. That’s how I read it, those are the conclusions I drew. Not long after that, I requested a transfer and left Sloten.