The Samaritan's secret oy-3

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “You shot him?” Omar Yussef asked.

  The police chief grunted and pointed over his shoulder.

  “I’m not so good with my left hand, Abu Ramiz.” Sami holstered his gun. “That’s why the bastard’s still struggling.”

  Omar Yussef’s legs were weak. “Sami, Nadia mustn’t. .”

  The young policeman beckoned to them. As Omar Yussef rounded the corner, Khamis Zeydan stood above Mareh. Nadia shuddered when she heard the shot.

  Khamis Zeydan followed them into the alley.

  “You just finished him off?” Omar Yussef whispered, his eyes wide.

  “Because slapping him in the face like a girl won’t stop him trying to kill you again.” Khamis Zeydan grabbed Omar Yussef’s elbow. “Come on, he saw Sami shoot him. He saw me, too. If he’d lived, he’d have been after all of us. I prefer to share my secrets only with the dead.”

  “What were you doing here?”

  “Sami and I got hungry for some qanafi, so we thought we’d join you.”

  Omar Yussef recoiled when Khamis Zeydan turned his eyes on him. The habitual blithe confidence of the police chief’s gaze, his ability to be at once as hard as nails and yet to take nothing seriously, was gone. In its place a naked wildness oscillated. He hauled Omar Yussef along the passage.

  Nadia was pale and she whimpered with every gunshot that echoed through the casbah.

  Sami was right about Ishaq’s murder, Omar Yussef thought. The amount of money involved is so great, it was bound to interest powerful people who would pay someone like Mareh to take my life without hesitation. I ignored Sami and I exposed my sweet Nadia to the killing of a man. And still I’m not safe, just because Mareh’s out of the way. They’ll send someone else.

  I have to get to them first.

  At the bottom of Sami’s stairwell, Omar Yussef leaned on the metal banister, exhausted and wheezing. Nadia mounted the first flight of steps. “Come on, Grandpa, hurry.” He waved her on, but she stayed where she was, until he followed her.

  In Sami’s apartment, Maryam hugged Nadia and gave Omar Yussef a look of reproach and concern. He puffed out his cheeks, thrust open the bathroom door and let himself down onto his aching knees. He gripped the cold rim and vomited.

  Chapter 24

  Though the assault weapons in the casbah splintered the quiet, the women fell asleep in the bedroom, where they had gone to comfort Nadia. Omar Yussef drowsed on the black leather couch. The chase through the old town with his granddaughter disturbed his dreams. He plunged back into the panic he had felt when he had let go of Nadia’s hand. Shivering with desperation, he awoke, gasping, detecting cardamom on the air and fearing that Mareh wasn’t dead after all.

  Khamis Zeydan watched him from an armchair, tapping his pinkie on the leather.

  Omar Yussef’s breath was quick. A shot sounded close to the apartment block and he let out a frightened grunt.

  “Sami ought to have bought an apartment that was less noisy,” Khamis Zeydan said. “After his marriage, he’ll find the nightlife of the casbah too exciting for a steady family man.”

  In the kitchen, Sami boiled a pot of coffee. At least that’s the source of the cardamom, Omar Yussef thought. I must have smelled it in my sleep. He shuddered at the thought of the gunman’s breath, hot and sweet on his face.

  “I couldn’t afford Amin Kanaan’s neighborhood,” Sami said. “Not on a policeman’s salary.”

  “Serves you right for being an honest policeman,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You should accept some bribes.”

  “As a police officer, I have a good role model.” Sami smiled at Khamis Zeydan. The police chief waved a dismissive hand at him.

  Omar Yussef’s sons had arrived while he slept.

  Ramiz sat on the edge of the sofa, biting his knuckle and sucking on the mouthpiece of a nargila, his eyes nervous. The water rumbled in the glass bulb at the bottom of the nargila.

  Zuheir held himself taut and upright on a dining chair, his elbows close to his sides, his hands folded on his lap, watching his brother.

  Another volley of gunfire rattled through the casbah.

  Ramiz exhaled a blue cloud of nargila smoke. He offered his brother the brightly striped pipe.

  “What’re you smoking?” Zuheir sniffed. He grimaced at the fruity odor of the smoke. “That’s Bahraini apple tobacco. I’m not touching that cheap crap. Why don’t you get something good?”

  Ramiz shrugged. “I was in Amman last month and I found nargila tobacco scented with something called ‘Frappuccino.’ Whatever that is.”

  “Foreign nonsense, that’s what. The oldest tradition is to flavor the tobacco with roses, and that’s how it should continue. Isn’t that right, Dad?”

  Omar Yussef stared at his sons. “I dreamed that I lost Nadia.”

  Ramiz sucked on the nargila.Water rumbled in the pipe.

  A low crack resonated out of the casbah. “Grenade,” Khamis Zeydan muttered.

  “I don’t know why you can’t just hang around the hotel and chat with the other wedding guests, Dad,” Ramiz said, irritably. “Why must you always take these risks?”

  “Your father is on the trail of some big money,” Khamis Zeydan sneered. “Somehow he seems not to have grasped that there are sure to be some nasty types trying to get to it before him.” He looked hard at Omar Yussef. “Your friend Amin Kanaan wanted to get you out of the way, before you could help the World Bank woman find the money.”

  “Kanaan might not be the only one tracking the bank accounts,” Omar Yussef said. “I could be getting in the way of other powerful people who want those riches for themselves.”

  “Sami, the schoolteacher has finally come around to our way of thinking,” Khamis Zeydan called toward the kitchen. “At last, he agrees that this is too big and dangerous for him.”

  “I just mean that there could be a lot of people who might have sent Mareh to kill me.”

  “But Kanaan was the only one who created a minicivil war in the casbah with Mareh as his commander on the ground.”

  “These Fatah people disgust me,” Zuheir exclaimed. Ramiz gestured for his brother to lower his voice and swept his eyes toward the door of the bedroom where the women slept. Zuheir gave an exasperated growl.

  “What’s your problem with Fatah, anyway? Hamas started this,” Ramiz said, “by saying the president died of that disease.”

  “Who cares if they say he was the bastard offspring of the Israeli prime minister and a lame donkey?” Zuheir slapped his thigh angrily. “They can say what they want. It’s just words. Why does it always have to end in gunfire and death?”

  Sami spoke from the kitchen door. “Would you say that, if it was one of the famous Hamas martyrs who had been slandered?”

  “You think I’m Hamas? Just because I have a beard and I pray five times a day? I sometimes wonder if we Palestinians are real people with our own individual identities or just caricatures.”

  Khamis Zeydan poured a slug of Johnnie Walker. Zuheir tutted, but the police chief ignored the young man’s disapproval of the alcohol.

  Omar Yussef shuffled into the bathroom to urinate. He felt feverish as he strained against his recalcitrant bladder. When he came back into the living room, he was conscious of the heavy smoke of the cigarettes and the water pipe. He needed air. He wrenched at the window, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Sami leaned over his shoulder, clicked a catch and slid the window open easily. He handed a cup to Omar Yussef. “Here’s some coffee for you, Abu Ramiz.”

  “May Allah bless your hands.” Omar Yussef put his head out of the window and inhaled deeply. The night was cool and moonless, and the domed rooftops of the casbah were black and indistinct. As he breathed the clean air, he felt the nightmares recede.

  He pulled his head back into the room. “Kanaan says he didn’t kill Ishaq,” he said.

  He turned to face Khamis Zeydan. The police chief’s eyes were fixed on Omar Yussef.

  “I believe him,” Omar Yussef said. “He seemed
truly shocked when I told him Ishaq had been tortured. He said he loved Ishaq, but he denied that he was Ishaq’s lover.”

  “Ishaq’s lover?” Khamis Zeydan hawked up some phlegm and worked his jaw. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Nouri Awwadi said Ishaq was homosexual, and Ishaq’s wife suspected that Kanaan was her rival for her husband’s love.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before I questioned her?” Khamis Zeydan grunted and slapped his thigh just above the knee. “Bastard leg.”

  Sami folded a cheap tartan blanket around Khamis Zeydan’s legs and feet. “Before you lecture me, yes, I know it’s the diabetes,” the police chief said to Omar Yussef. He put his hand on Sami’s head, as the young man tucked the blanket into the armchair. “You’re going to have to delay the wedding if this gunfight continues for a few days, Sami. The guests won’t be able to move about safely.”

  Sami shoved his good hand into his pocket.

  “My permit expires one day after the scheduled date of the wedding,” Omar Yussef said. “The same for Maryam and Nadia, Zuheir and Ramiz, too. If the wedding is delayed, we’ll have to return to Bethlehem and miss the big party. The Israelis will never give us an extension.”

  “Why don’t you get your pal Kanaan to intervene?” Khamis Zeydan spat into a tissue.

  A disjointed volley of gunfire sounded, close and loud. Omar Yussef moved away from the window and sat on the end of the couch. “When the fighting dies down, perhaps we should go and confront Kanaan, tell him he’s exacted enough revenge on Hamas, and ask him to stop.”

  Khamis Zeydan stared. “Are you serious, schoolteacher? Screw your sister, you’re insane.”

  “So you’ll come with me?”

  “If it’s the only way to stop this fighting and to make sure Sami’s wedding goes ahead, of course I’ll come with you.”

  Omar Yussef smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Ramiz, give me your cell phone, please.”

  His son handed him a silver Nokia. A photo of Ramiz with his wife and children lit up the screen when Omar Yussef touched the keypad. He took Jamie King’s business card from his pocket and clumsily plugged her mobile number into the phone. “How do I make it dial?”

  Ramiz sighed. “Press the button with the little green telephone on it, Dad.”

  Omar Yussef brought the phone level with his ear. “There’s something wrong with it. Nothing’s happening.”

  Just as Ramiz reached for the phone, a voice came from the handset.

  “Jamie?” Omar Yussef said. He held the phone a few inches from his head and looked sideways at it.

  “Speaking.” Jamie King’s voice sounded clearly.

  “This is Omar Yussef Sirhan. The grandfather of Nadia, your partner in crime.”

  “Since you came to Kanaan’s place with me, I guess you’re now my coconspirator, too. How’re you, ustaz?”

  “Fine, thanks be to Allah.”

  Khamis Zeydan and Ramiz, who knew Omar Yussef’s suspicions about the health hazards of cellular phones and his ineptitude with technology, sniggered at the mistrust with which he eyed the phone in his hand.

  “Get off the line quickly, before it gives you radiation sickness,” Ramiz said.

  Omar Yussef scowled and turned to the window. “I’m sorry to call you so late at night.”

  Jamie King laughed. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not easy to sleep in this town, anyhow,” she said. Another shot reverberated in the dark outside.

  “You’re quite right.” Omar Yussef lowered his voice. “I wondered if your fax from Geneva contained anything useful.”

  “It took a long time for me to receive the whole thing,” King said. “The fax at the hotel isn’t very reliable.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “My investigators in Switzerland managed to turn up a couple of small accounts. Nothing like as big as we’re looking for.”

  “That’s disappointing.”

  “My staff happened to be the first to inform the people at one of the banks that Ishaq was dead. It turns out he left instructions with this particular bank that, in the event of his death, they’re to transfer a half million bucks to a Nablus account in the name of Suleiman al-Teef.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “No idea. The manager of the bank where the account is held refuses to tell me anything about it without permission from his boss in Amman. That won’t come through until at least next week, which is too late to stop the funding boycott. In any case, that’s only half a million bucks. It leaves us still more than two hundred and ninety-nine million short of our target.”

  Omar Yussef nodded at the phone, until King spoke into the silence to ask if he was still on the line. “Yes, I’m here. So the World Bank really is going to cut funding?”

  “Friday afternoon the board turns off the cash.”

  “What time is it now?” He looked at his wrist watch. Before he could read the time, he noticed that it was scratched. That must have happened when I stumbled in the casbah, before Mareh tried to kill me, he thought. He clicked his tongue and rubbed his thumb across the face. Such a beautiful watch.

  “It’s three a.m. It’s already Thursday,” King said.

  “We have less than two days.”

  “That’s not much time, ustaz.”

  Omar Yussef held his watch to his ear. It was still ticking. “I’ll do my best, don’t worry.”

  “Hey, keep trying.”

  He was about to hand the phone to his son, when he remembered what he had wanted to ask the American. “Jamie, when we first met, you said that Ishaq told you he could lay his hands on the bank documents within an hour.”

  “That’s right. I spoke to him by phone to arrange a meeting. We talked only briefly before he was killed.”

  “The documents must be in Nablus, if they were so close at hand. Did he say anything else about where they were?”

  “Nothing substantive.” King was quiet for a moment. “I’m trying to remember his exact words. He said something like, ‘I put them out in the open, where anyone could see them. But no one except God would ever know they’re there.’”

  Out in the open. Omar Yussef remembered Roween telling him that Ishaq had said he was involved in something so dangerous that he wanted to bury it behind the temple. Does that mean the altar on top of Jerizim? That’s where offerings were left, where the Samaritan God would see them, and that’s where their temple was. “Didn’t you think that was strange? You didn’t ask him to explain what he meant?”

  “Everyone in the Middle East is always making references to God, ustaz. In my limited experience, it usually means nothing. I thought he’d tell me exactly where the documents were soon enough.”

  “Thank you, Jamie.” In his tiredness, Omar Yussef forgot to speak English. “May you have a morning of goodness.”

  “And may you be of the family of goodness,” King responded in Arabic. “That much of your language I’ve managed to learn, ustaz.”

  Omar Yussef smiled and gave the phone to Ramiz. “I’ve finished.”

  “You didn’t hang up. You see, you have to press this red button.”

  “Sami, is there a Fatah guy in Nablus named Suleiman al-Teef?” Omar Yussef asked.

  Sami tapped his good hand thoughtfully against the cast on his right forearm. “It doesn’t sound familiar, Abu Ramiz.”

  Omar Yussef leaned against the window frame. He listened to the bursts of sporadic gunfire and waited for the sun to show across the valley. When it came, the gunmen would sleep and await the cover of the next night to rejoin their battle. He had not much longer than that-thirty-six hours-to find three hundred million dollars. It seemed too short a time. In Nablus, there were centuries of wickedness to uncover beneath every ancient stone.

  Chapter 25

  Khamis Zeydan hobbled to his jeep and tossed his keys in the air. Omar Yussef juggled them, snatched them to his chest, and frowned at his friend.

  “You expect me to drive?” he said.

&n
bsp; “My foot’s all numb,” Khamis Zeydan said. “I can’t work the clutch.”

  “It’s not an automatic? I can’t drive this car.”

  “It’s not a car. It’s a jeep.”

  “I’m a bad driver, even with automatic transmission and good roads. You think I’m going to drive up that mountain on a tiny, twisting road in an enormous damned jeep-and change gears at the same time?”

  Khamis Zeydan slapped his hand on the turquoise hood of the police jeep. “Later today I’ll see if I can trade this in for a nice comfortable Audi sedan at the police depot- something with only one previous lady owner, if that suits you. In the meantime this will have to do,” he said. “And I’m sorry it doesn’t have a cup holder and a CD player and airconditioning. I’m also sorry that the ashtray is full. But most of all I’m sorry that I have to stand here listening to you complain. Just drive.”

  Omar Yussef lifted himself toward the driver’s seat with a grunt. His shoulders felt weak and he dropped his trailing foot back to the pavement. “Why do they make these vehicles so far off the ground?”

  “So pedestrians will be able to duck underneath the chassis when you run them down.” Khamis Zeydan leaned over from the passenger seat, grabbed Omar Yussef’s shoulder, and hauled him inside.

  The jeep hopped along the road. Omar Yussef clenched his teeth, trying to avoid the pedestrians wandering out of the casbah. A taxi came up behind him and sounded its horn impatiently. “Shut up, you son of a whore,” Omar Yussef muttered.

  Khamis Zeydan laughed quietly and lit a cigarette. “Mind the tomato cart,” he murmured, with the Rothmans between his lips.

  A drop of perspiration stung the corner of Omar Yussef’s eye. “Mind the what?” he said, blinking to clear the sweat. He heard a sound like the sudden crushing of a cardboard box and then a shout.

  He rolled the jeep to a halt. At the passenger side window, a bony man with a keffiyeh wrapped like a turban around his head yelled that they had overturned his cart. Khamis Zeydan took a brief look at the tomatoes spread like poppies across the dirt at the roadside and grinned at the vendor. “Show me your market license,” he said, “or get out of my sight.”