The Samaritan's secret

Chapter 27

The lonely teenager bounced his basketball somewhere behind Roween’s house. Omar Yussef leaned on the police jeep. Khamis Zeydan limped to his side. “You seem to be leaving some tearful scenes behind you today.”

“These have been painful conversations,” Omar Yussef said. “My head’s killing me.” He stretched across the front of the jeep and dropped his forehead to the hood. The metal was hot in the early afternoon sunshine. By the time the sun rises this high tomorrow, I must have my hands on those account details, or I won’t be the only Palestinian with a headache, he thought.

He looked up at the sun. “Even people driven to suicidal despair are clearminded enough to climb to the fourth story before they end it all,” he said. “I feel like I’m throwing myself again and again from a ground-floor window. I get hurt, but I can’t make it count.”

“I’ve always warned you that a detective needs to be hard,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You have to be able to manipulate people, to make them like you, hate you, fear you. But you should be dispassionate. Don’t feel what they feel.”

“How can I fail to feel the anguish of Liana and this priest?” Omar Yussef inclined his head toward the house with the pink window frames. “That’d be inhuman.”

“Murder is inhuman.” The police chief picked a strand of tobacco off his lip. “You need to feel the inhumanity, so that you can walk beside the murderer and read his mind.”

Omar Yussef shook his head. “You’re forgetting that passion and love might figure in it. I prefer to enter the head of the killer by feeling those emotions, rather than hate and violence.”

The boy with the basketball loped around a corner. When he saw Omar Yussef, he halted with the ball at his ear and his feet wide apart in the middle of the road.

Omar Yussef approached him and beckoned. The boy didn’t move. Omar Yussef sweated as he shuffled along the empty street. From the corner of his eye, he caught another movement in the curtain behind Roween’s window.

“Clever boy,” he said, “where is the house of the man who looks after the visitor center on top of the mountain?”

The boy stared and rolled his eyes.

“A fat man.” Omar Yussef held his hands far in front of his belly, puffed out his cheeks and waddled from side to side. The boy sucked in his chin and wagged his head. He’s laughing, Omar Yussef thought. “A fat man who wears a cap with the name of his cigarettes on it.”

The boy moved along the street, the ball tucked beneath his arm. Khamis Zeydan limped up beside Omar Yussef. “If you’re intending to shoot some baskets with this kid, I warn you my leg’s in no state for me to jump,” he said.

“I imagine you’d offset your handicap by playing dirty,” Omar Yussef said.

The boy came to an alley between two squat apartment blocks and pointed into the darkness.

“Thank you, clever boy,” Omar Yussef said.

The boy headed toward the park, tossing the ball awkwardly in the air and jerking forward at the waist to catch it, his arms sagging each time as though it were a tremendous weight.

Omar Yussef moved into the dark alley. The breeze cooled him now that he was out of the sun. Behind one of the apartment blocks, a lurid green awning flapped lightly over a yard filled with junk. Against the bare cinderblock wall of a shed, the frame of an old Japanese motorbike leaned, stripped of its parts like desert carrion, the springs cutting through its dusty seat. A blackened oil drum, punctured to ventilate a fire during colder months, stood beside an upended ceramic sink and a mattress rotten with mold. In a worn leather armchair, the caretaker who had found Ishaq’s body snoozed with his cap over his eyes. His dirty white undershirt had slipped up over his belly and the sweat shone on his hairy stomach.

Khamis Zeydan flicked his cigarette. The butt landed on the undershirt and smoldered. The caretaker came upright with a gasp, swatting the cigarette away. When he saw the policeman’s uniform, he gripped the arms of his chair and dropped his jaw.

“Evening of joy,” Omar Yussef said.

“Evening of light, ustaz,” the man mumbled.

“I brought a senior colleague with me.” He gestured to Khamis Zeydan. “He’s a brigadier.”

The caretaker swallowed hard and bowed to the policeman. “Welcome, pasha,” he said. Khamis Zeydan stared at him without expression.

Omar Yussef stepped forward quickly and looked down at the caretaker. The man’s eyes opened wide with surprise. “You lock that place every night?” He lifted a finger toward the summit of Mount Jerizim, visible over the tin roof of the shed.

“That’s right,” the caretaker said.

“You lock the gate by the parking lot?”

“That’s the only entrance, ustaz.”

“Who has the key?”

“Only me.”

“Ishaq’s body wasn’t there when you locked up in the evening, but you found it in the morning.”

The caretaker nodded dumbly. Khamis Zeydan took a small step toward him and the fat man pressed himself deep into the cracked leather of his armchair.

“So how did the body get there?”

“I don’t know, ustaz.”

“Whoever took the body to the mountain must have had the key.”

“No, that’s not possible.”

“Unless they had your help.”

The caretaker removed his baseball cap and wiped his bald head with his forearm. He looked at the front of the cap. Sweat soaked the band. He ran a hairy finger across the logo of the cheap Israeli cigarettes. “There’s a path in the pines beyond the village. It goes through a hole in the fence behind the fortress.”

“What’s the point of locking the gates, if there’s a hole in the fence?”

“No one knows about the hole in the fence, except us. Anyway there’s nothing up there to steal.”

“Who’s us?”

The caretaker bit his bottom lip. “The people from the village.”

“The Samaritans?”

The caretaker kept his eyes on Khamis Zeydan. The police chief shuffled closer and stroked the leather glove on his prosthetic hand.

Omar Yussef moved closer, too. “Ishaq was taken up to the peak of the mountain after he died, or he was killed there. But he certainly didn’t go through the gate, because it was locked. He must have entered through the hole in the fence-a hole known only to the Samaritans.”

“So the body must have been taken there by a Samaritan.” Khamis Zeydan smiled. “That narrows things down.”

“A Samaritan would never defile our holy place that way.”

Omar Yussef thought for a moment. “Unless he was doing it for the good of the Samaritan people,” he said.

“How could a murder be good for us?” The caretaker raised his arms. The dark hair in the pits glistened with sweat.

Omar Yussef watched the man closely. “Who’s up there now?”

“No one.” The caretaker opened his palms. “I have to take a break sometime, don’t I?”

“We may be back to talk to you again.”

The fat man bobbed his head. “Welcome, ustaz. Welcome, pasha.” They left him examining the cigarette burn on his undershirt.

When they reached the street, the police chief’s upper lip curled. He lifted a thumb and gestured back down the alley. “My dear father used to say, ‘When the wolf comes, the guard dog disappears for a shit.’” He turned to Omar Yussef. “Convenient that he wasn’t around when the murder occurred, eh?”

Omar Yussef scratched his cheek thoughtfully. He led Khamis Zeydan toward the jeep. “Ishaq told his wife he wanted to bury the dangerous thing he was dealing with behind the temple. That must have been the account details. I think he meant that he hid them up there on Mount Jerizim.”

“Behind the temple? What does that mean?”

“The temple of the Samaritans once stood at the summit of this mountain. We have to look there.”

“You wanted to climb up high enough that falling would be fatal. Maybe you found the right spot. The only place higher than that temple is heaven.”

The distant sound of rifle fire disturbed the silence of the village. “The entertainment started early today,” Khamis Zeydan said.

Omar Yussef blinked into the vivid blue sky. The gunfire was ugly and incongruous on the quiet mountaintop.

A deeper sound punctuated the cracking of the rifles. Omar Yussef brought his eyes down to the street. The boy with the misshapen ears caught his basketball as it rebounded from the side wall of Roween’s house. He stopped and watched Omar Yussef, then threw once more at the wall. He grabbed the ball and made his way through the flame pits, halting to stare at Omar Yussef before moving on again.

Omar Yussef looked at Khamis Zeydan, lifted his chin toward the boy, and headed after him. The police chief sighed and followed.

Thin smoke rose from the coals at the bottom of the pits where the Samaritans had made their sacrifice. The air was thick with the aroma of lamb fat. Fed by the grease, it might take days for the fires to burn themselves out.

The boy led them to a stand of trees at the edge of the park. The smell of the sacrifice mingled with the sauna scent of pines in the sun. Their footsteps crunched the carpet of fallen needles.

A figure in a blue gown watched them from a small glade. In the clearing, Roween caressed the boy’s cheek and tidied his hair. Sweat glowed along the fringe of darker brown skin edging her lips and in the fine auburn hairs that spread onto her cheeks. She pulled back into a shadowed corner and sat on a rock.

“He’s my brother,” she said to Omar Yussef, with her hand on the boy’s arm. “Ishaq was very close to him.” She whispered in the kid’s ear and he loped through the trees toward the village.

Omar Yussef watched him go and wondered at the bond between the homosexual, his retarded brother-in-law, and his stumpy, ill-favored wife. The misfits had shared some sort of tenderness in a community bound by rough convention.

Khamis Zeydan positioned himself on a rock with his back to the clearing, guarding the approach.

Roween turned a faint smile of conspiracy to Omar Yussef. This woman has her secrets, he thought. Ishaq may not have been the husband she bargained for, but they were joined in some kind of love and they shared things no one else knew.

“Is this the way to the gap in the fence? To get onto the mountaintop when the gate is locked?” he asked.

“The path starts here. But you can take the road to the very upper edge of the village and join it there, to shorten your walk.” Roween looked quickly back toward the Samaritan houses and rubbed the sweat from her lip. “You were at the home of Jibril the priest.”

Omar Yussef remembered the movement of her curtain as he had entered the priest’s house. “We talked about Ishaq,” he said, “and the return of the Abisha Scroll.”

“What did you learn?” Roween rolled her tongue in her cheek.

“I discovered that Samaritan priests are no more likely than Muslim sheikhs to confront the hardest truths. Am I about to discover that Samaritan women will only hold back their full knowledge for so long, once they see that they’re talking to a genuine friend?”

Roween smirked with one side of her mouth. “Ustaz, Ishaq was in between Kanaan and Hamas. They both wanted something that only he could get for them.”

“Ishaq obtained scandal files on top Fatah men from Kanaan and gave them to Hamas.”

Roween nodded.

“Hamas gave Ishaq the Abisha Scroll, which they had stolen, and he passed it on to the priest,” Omar Yussef continued. “Ishaq had the details of the old president’s secret accounts and he was supposed to give them to Kanaan, in return for the files.”

“But he didn’t.”

Omar Yussef heard the pine needles crackling as Khamis Zeydan rose. Roween has caught his interest, he thought.

“Ishaq was killed because he held onto the account details.” Omar Yussef took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. The cloth came away gray from the smoke by the flame pits. “He must have known it was dangerous to keep those documents.”

“The priest told him not to give them to Kanaan.”

“Jibril? His father?”

“He wanted the scroll and the old president’s money,” Roween said.

Khamis Zeydan stepped to the middle of the clearing. “The priest got the scroll. Awwadi got the scandal files. But Kanaan didn’t get the account documents. It’s as we thought: Kanaan’s the disappointed party. There’s your killer.”

Omar Yussef scratched his chin. “Did Kanaan kill Ishaq, Roween?”

“Never. I’m sure of it. Kanaan loved Ishaq very dearly. He always helped Ishaq and promoted him. I can’t imagine him turning against someone so close to him.”

Khamis Zeydan rubbed his fingers against his thumb, his hand in a loose fist. “Three hundred million dollars would turn love into hate, don’t you think?”

“Kanaan isn’t short of money, but he didn’t have anyone else like Ishaq,” Roween said.

“How did Ishaq’s father have such power over him?” Omar Yussef asked. “Couldn’t Ishaq have simply said that it would be too risky to hold onto the account documents?”

Roween grimaced. “When Ishaq came back from Paris, he was forced to be very contrite before the village elders, so that they’d reverse their decision to expel him from our people. It was humiliating, because they referred to his-his proclivity in a disdainful way. I think Jibril may have threatened to make him appear before the elders once more.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“Would Jibril have made you go before the elders?” Omar Yussef averted his eyes. “To testify that Ishaq was unable to perform the duties of a husband.”

Roween dropped her chin to her chest. She hadn’t considered that, Omar Yussef thought. Did Ishaq risk everything to protect his wife? Roween stared at Omar Yussef with her eyes wide and aghast. “I would’ve lied for him,” she said.

“In the event of his death, Ishaq ordered that half a million dollars be sent to a man named Suleiman al-Teef at a bank in Nablus. Is that one of his friends in the Fatah Party?”

Roween looked away. “He can’t be anyone important. Half a million isn’t much compared to three hundred million, is it?”

An appalled dreaminess had descended upon her. “I’d lie for him,” she repeated, and she stood and went through the trees toward the village.

Omar Yussef watched Roween emerge into the sunshine and pick her way between the smoking pits. She held the skirt of her gown above her thick, pale ankles, as she moved over the uneven ground. She came to the yard behind her home and disappeared through a green metal door.

Omar Yussef crossed the clearing and leaned against a tree. He dabbed the back of his neck with his soiled handkerchief. “I’m hot,” he said. “I think we ought to go somewhere with airconditioning.”

“What are you talking about?” Khamis Zeydan pointed up the slope through the trees. “Aren’t we going to search the mountaintop for the financial documents?”

“That could take hours. We don’t have time for it now, not after what Roween told us. We need to take care of something more urgent. Then we can come back here.” Omar Yussef raised his handkerchief to his sweating forehead. “I think Liana was lying when she said Kanaan was down in Nablus. We didn’t pass him on the road up from town. I think he’s in his mansion and this time he’ll see us, because we know why he didn’t get the account documents from Ishaq. We need to press him on this.”

“Don’t make him cry, too. Your weepy scenes have already exhausted my compassion today.” Khamis Zeydan screwed up his face and limped through the trees.

The gunfire intensified in the valley below. It was late afternoon. The nightlife of Nablus was gearing up.