The Faithful Spy

warned her about dressing immodestly when she took her job at the law firm and stopped wearing robes. But she’d dismissed his complaints, telling him she needed to fit in at work. No more, Tarik thought. From now on she would do as he said.

“Hello, my sweet,” he said, and walked over to kiss her. She turned her lips from his, offering her cheek instead. “How was work?”

She didn’t respond.

“My sweet, we’ve talked about this many times before. Why are you so late? You must call—”

“Tarik—”

“Fatima.” The anger on her face stopped him for a moment, but he decided to press ahead. “Listen to me —”

“Tarik!” she yelled. “I’m through listening! Now you listen!”

Her voice echoed in the tiny kitchen, and he found himself shocked into silence. She had never raised her voice to him before.

She pushed back from the table and stepped out of her chair. He noticed a small black suitcase at her feet, a cheap softsided bag he had never seen before. He tried not to think about what it might mean. He realized he had lied to himself. He didn’t just want her respect. He wanted her to love him again, to smile the way she had when they had first met.

She took a deep breath, composing herself. The kitchen was eerily silent, and Tarik felt as if he had suddenly been given superhuman powers of sight and sound. He heard the slow drip of water from the leaky kitchen faucet, and saw the faint dark fuzz on the peaches that she always kept in a bowl on the counter, the grain of the cheap dishrag in the sink. He looked up and found that the light from the overhead bulb burned his eyes.

When Fatima spoke again, her voice was quiet and firm.

“Tarik. I can’t live with you—”

His thoughts contracted to a single word: No. “My sweet. Of course you can live with me.”

She laughed bitterly. “Don’t you see you’ve proven my point? I say I can’t live with you and you don’t even let me finish my sentence—”

“Don’t you love me, Fatima?”

A pained expression crossed her face. “Do you know why I married you, Tarik? I thought you were a scientist. That you would understand a modern marriage. But you’re as bad as the rest of them. Worse.”

“This is no way to speak.” He tried to keep his voice steady.

“Tarik.” Her voice broke. “Do you think I want to do this? Since spring I’ve tried to talk to you a dozen times, a hundred times, but you don’t listen.”

“I want to talk—”

“You say you want to talk, but you don’t. You disappear into that hole”—she pointed accusingly at the locked basement door—“and don’t come back for hours. Days. You don’t tell me what you’re doing. You never let me bring anyone over. I feel like a prisoner in this house.”

“You’re not a prisoner—”

“And you’re changing, Tarik. You don’t sleep—”

“I sleep—”

“You don’t. You’re not the same man you were even a month ago. I don’t know what you’re doing down there”—again she looked at the basement door, and Tarik felt his stomach clench—“but you’ve turned into someone who scares me. You beat me last week, Tarik. I never would have imagined that.”

“I didn’t beat you—”

She pulled up her shirtsleeve, exposing black-and-blue welts the size of credit cards on her left arm, above the elbow. “What would you call this?”

Shame and rage rose in him. “I didn’t mean—” But even as he said the words he could feel his fist clench.

She picked up her suitcase. “I’m leaving, Tarik. It will be better for us both.”

Now the shame was gone. A pure white rage filled him. He remembered finding his mother dead in her bed in their apartment in Saint-Denis. The yellow paint peeled from the walls, and Khalida’s eyes yellow too, the needle still in her arm. He had hated his mother so much at that moment. But this was worse.

“You can’t leave,” he said. “Where will you go?”

“You think I don’t have friends?”

“What kind of friends?” he said. “I won’t let you. You belong to me.”

At his words an ugly sneer formed on her lips. “You think I don’t have a boyfriend? My poor little Tarik —”

Had she really said that? He slapped her hard, across the face.

“No more, Tarik—”

He slapped her again. She stumbled backward and banged against the kitchen counter. But she just shook her head and stood up straight, her brown eyes fierce. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, but as she reared back she seemed twice his size.

“Yes, a boyfriend,” she said. “A kafir boyfriend. A real lover, not like you—”

And Tarik knew he would never have her back. He raised his hand to slap her again, but she put up her own hand. “Don’t—”

He spat instead, a white glob landing on her cheek.

“Bitch. Worthless whore. The infidels have filled your head with rot. I won’t divorce you.”

The spittle trickled slowly down her cheek. She raised her hand and wiped away his venom. Her eyes never left his.

“Then I’ll tell the police what you’re doing down there.” She pointed again to the basement. “Don’t you think they’d like to know?”

“You said you didn’t know.”

“Of course I know. Am I a fool? Maybe I’ll tell them anyway.”

THEN THE KNIFE was out of the drawer and in his hand. A big butcher knife with a black plastic handle. A fevered god spoke in his head and he obeyed. Fatima began to scream even before he landed the first blow, slashing across her stomach so the blood sprayed out through her clean white shirt.

She turned to run but he stabbed her in the back and she fell and he was on her. He cut at her again and again, plunging the knife into her tiny body, stabbing into her back and neck, cutting through skin and fat and bone until she stopped screaming and her blood covered him. She was dead in less than a minute.

THE BUZZ IN his ears faded to silence. A bird chirped in the night outside, behind the blinds that he always kept drawn. He stood and looked at his wife.

“Allah forgive me,” he said quietly. Had he really just killed her? He couldn’t believe it, and yet there she was, unmoving, her legs splayed, her blood pooling thick as paint on the kitchen’s white linoleum floor.

He dropped the knife. Already his rage was fading. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. Didn’t she know he loved her? She shouldn’t have pushed him, shouldn’t have done this to him. She was to blame.

He knelt beside her and stroked her hair. “I’m sorry, Fatima,” he said.

What would he do? Had the neighbors heard her scream? What about the people in her office? Her boyfriend? All of them must know that she had planned to leave. Soon enough the police would come. Tarik could stall them for a few days, tell them that she had left Montreal to see friends. But the boyfriend, whoever he was, wouldn’t let this go. Eventually the police would come back with a warrant. And the basement would be the first place they would look.

Dear God. What had he done? His plans, his work. About to be lost. Because of this whore. Pity filled him, pity for her and for himself. He had nothing left now, nothing but a few days to work, not nearly enough time to take his revenge on this world.

But he couldn’t give up. Not yet, anyway. Maybe he could salvage his plans, get his germs someplace far from the gray house, someplace the police wouldn’t find them. At least find a way to make use of the Y. pestis he had grown.