The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Chapter 28

Omar Yussef shoved Jihad Awdeh’s corpse away. It rolled heavily onto its back. The dead man’s hand released the knife. It tinkled on the stone floor. Blood seeped from two wounds in Jihad Awdeh’s side and pooled about Omar Yussef. The schoolteacher felt its warmth melting through his jacket. He pushed himself up to escape the gore and backed a few paces away from the corpse, as though unsure that the murderer wouldn’t rise and try to take his life once more.

There was a silhouette in the doorway to the church. It moved toward Omar Yussef. This was the man who had saved him, firing from the other end of the church with enough accuracy to strike Jihad Awdeh, rather than the victim pressed to the stone beneath him. As the shooter came on, his footfalls echoed about the ancient walls. Omar Yussef stared at the dark figure. When Awdeh had held the knife to his throat, he had been sure he was about to die. So sure that the relief of his reprieve was still somehow unreal.

The figure passed through the first dusty shaft of light from the high windows. The police beret on the man’s head was askew. Omar Yussef saw a hand gloved tightly in black leather straighten it. The footsteps came closer. It was Khamis Zeydan. Now was the time when Omar Yussef would learn if his suspicions were misplaced, if the police chief were as befouled by murdered blood as he thought. Khamis Zeydan had saved him by killing Jihad Awdeh, the man who had beaten and humiliated the police chief only two hours before. But would he finish off Omar Yussef too?

Three other policemen rushed through the Gate of Humility and ran down the aisle behind their commander. The police chief turned to look at them and then quickened his pace toward Omar Yussef. He reached the schoolteacher and stared at him hard, tapping the barrel of his pistol against his false hand. His face had the fierce callousness of one who has killed, one who will kill. Omar Yussef lifted his eyes toward the sunlight where it cut the blackness high inside the church. He filled his lungs, and in that moment he pictured Khamis Zey-dan, young and suave and filling their favorite student café in Damascus with laughter, and he knew that whatever his old friend had become, he would remember that youthful warmth on his face and it would draw him far from this gloomy church in time and space. Omar Yussef held that breath.

Khamis Zeydan holstered his gun. He looked down at Jihad Awdeh. “This bastard’s dead,” he said. He turned to his men. “Get this son of a whore out of the church. I don’t want anyone to know that I shot him, and certainly not that it happened inside this holy place. You two, carry him over to the station. You, get a bucket and a mop. Clean up the blood.”

“His rifle is down in the cave,” Omar Yussef said.

“Let’s go and get it. We’ll see what else he left down there.”

Omar Yussef hesitated.

Khamis Zeydan cocked his head and wrinkled his moustache. “I just saved your life. Do you think I’ll murder you, now?”

“I’m sorry, Abu Adel,” Omar Yussef said. “I’m not thinking straight.”

“Well, that has been to your credit lately. You had reason to suspect people. Even me. But now you can start taking things at face value once more.”

“I don’t know if I will, ever again.”

Khamis Zeydan went down the steps to the Cave of the Nativity. Omar Yussef followed. His legs felt weak. In two days, he had been near to his own death three times, and he had seen even more dead bodies, of people he loved and of those he feared. It was too much. He sat on the bottom step and put his hands on his head.

“He was about to kill me,” Omar Yussef said.

Khamis Zeydan slung Jihad Awdeh’s Kalashnikov over his shoulder and looked inside the rucksack. “What’s in here? Food.” He looked over at Omar Yussef. “You’re right about that. You’d be dead now for sure, if Maryam hadn’t told me you were coming to the church.”

“Maryam?”

“You left a message with my desk sergeant. I’m sorry to say that I was drinking after I dropped you at your home. I kept thinking about George Saba’s wife, the way we found her with her children under her arms. I’ve seen so many people dead, Abu Ramiz, but I hated myself for letting that happen to Sofia Saba. So I locked myself in my office and started back on that bottle of whisky. I came out to take a piss, and the sergeant told me you had called. I drove down to your house. Maryam was in a terrible state. She told me you’d gone to the church. It seems I got here just in time.” He came toward Omar Yussef. He pulled Jihad Awdeh’s black vest from the rucksack, stuck his hand in one of the pockets, and pulled out a fistful of shiny copper tubes, a dozen spent MAG cartridges. “Well, look at this.” He let them drop back into the rucksack. “I guess we’ll call this Exhibit A.”

“No, that’s Exhibit C,” said Omar Yussef. From his jacket, he took the old MAG cartridge he had found outside Louai Abdel Rahman’s home and the one from George Saba’s roof. “These are Exhibits A and B.”

The long, thin devotional candle Jihad Awdeh had lit in the cave sputtered to its end. Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan went up the stairs. A policeman jogged down the aisle to the dark pool of Jihad Awdeh’s blood.

Khamis Zeydan looked at his watch. “See to it that the blood is gone before the priests come in here. Be quick. They’ll be arriving any moment now. They probably will have heard the shots.”

The policeman saluted and slapped a soapy mop onto the flagstones.

“I found your friend Father Elias outside the church. He was in a bit of a panic, but when he calms down he can make sure none of the priests get too curious about what went on here. Later I’ll dump Jihad’s body and make it look like the Israelis got him.”

Omar Yussef nodded. “It seems miraculous that you saved me just at the very moment he was about to slit my throat. Did you really shoot him, or was he killed by bolts of lightning from heaven?” he joked.

“It might have been divine intervention,” Khamis Zeydan said, as they came out of the Church of the Nativity into the crisp air of dawn. The rain had stopped. The sun was bright on the wet flagstones. The bell rang in the Armenian monastery. “In that church, you were as close to death as it’s possible to be.”

Omar Yussef laughed with deep relief. “Evidently God didn’t want another martyr.”