The Samaritan's Secret

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “There’s no blood around,” Sami said. “I expect he was killed before he dropped down here.”

  They made their way back to the ridge, Sami following behind. Omar Yussef was grateful to him for waiting. By the time they reached the group of Samaritans, his shirt was heavy with sweat and the wind across the mountain chilled it against his shoulders and belly.

  “Who found the body?” Sami said.

  A short, thick man in a dirty blue shirt and a baseball cap that bore the logo of a cheap Israeli cigarette brand raised his hand. “I came up here to open the site for the tourists and I saw it,” he mumbled.

  “What time?”

  “A little before eight. It wasn’t there last night, I’m sure of that. An American arrived just before I left—someone who works with one of the international organizations—and she was surprised that there are pine trees up here.” The caretaker smiled. “You know these foreigners; they only expect to see olive groves, real Middle Eastern stuff. I told her the pines were planted not long ago to reduce the wind on the mountaintop and we both looked very closely at them. I would’ve seen the body.”

  “When were you and the foreigner looking at the trees?”

  “Just before sunset. About six o’clock.”

  “So you came along the ridge this morning and looked over the edge of the path and saw the body?”

  The short man shook his head. “I saw blood on the Eternal Hill first. I thought a jackal had brought its prey here, so I looked around because I didn’t want the tourists to stumble onto a half-eaten goat. Then I found Ishaq dead in the trees.”

  “Where’s the Eternal Hill?”

  The caretaker pointed across the path to a sloping rock ten yards square. Sami and Omar Yussef stepped toward it. Blood puddled black at its center. A gory trickle ran to the bottom of the gentle, rippling slope of granite. Thicker daubs led up to the top.

  “He was tortured there in the middle of the rock,” Sami said quietly. “These other marks must be where the body was dragged over the rock, before he was thrown into the trees. Some time during the night.”

  Omar Yussef turned to the priest. “The Eternal Hill is where the ancient Samaritan temple stood?”

  “This rock is the peak of the mountain,” the priest stammered, “the home of Allah.”

  “It looks just like the stone inside the Dome of the Rock,” Omar Yussef said.

  “The Jews say that Abraham bound Isaac there on the peak of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. You Muslims just took over their tradition. But Mount Jerizim is where it really took place and that’s why we built our temple here and made it the center of our faith.”

  Omar Yussef stared at the priest. “And now it’s covered in blood.”

  The priest made a sound that was both a gasp and a sob.

  A police jeep pulled into the parking lot and six officers got out. One of the officers pulled a rucksack from the jeep and walked purposefully toward Sami.

  “Who was this Ishaq?” Omar Yussef said. “He was one of you? A Samaritan?”

  “He’s one of us,” the priest said.

  “What did he do?”

  “He works—worked for the Palestinian Authority. He lived in the village with his wife.”

  The policeman with the rucksack went down the slope toward the body. He slipped in the dirt and landed heavily on his backside. The other officers laughed as they followed him over the lip of the incline. The embarrassed policeman grabbed at one of his colleagues and tried to trip him. Sami called to him sharply.

  Omar Yussef rubbed his chin. “Who would want Ishaq dead?”

  The priest lifted his arms and let them drop to his sides. “No one, no one.”

  “That can’t quite be true, can it?” Omar Yussef sucked one end of his mustache. “What does the Samaritan religion say about evil things such as murder, Your Honor?”

  The priest looked at the blood on the broad rock. “One of our holy books says, ‘The sinner goes to the flames and I have no compassion for him.’”

  Omar Yussef raised an eyebrow. “You mean the dead man was a sinner?”

  “What?” Jibril Ben-Tabia blinked. “No, I mean the murderer. The murderer goes to the flames.”

  “He’ll have to die first. The only one in danger of the flames right now is Ishaq. Do you have compassion for him?”

  The priest’s head dropped forward. In the quiet of the mountaintop, he whispered: “Compassion? Yes. He was my son.”

  Chapter 4

  The priest fretted his white beard with shaking fingers. He ran his toe along the edge of the broad rock where the ancient temple once stood and stared at the blood of his son.

  “Allah will be merciful upon him,” Omar Yussef said.

  The priest removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard. “Do you have a son, pasha?”

  “I have three,” Omar Yussef said. He glanced at the Samaritan men. Hands in pockets, they had the uneasy listlessness of teenagers at their first family funeral. But their eyes were alert and trained on the priest’s back.

  “What a blessing, pasha.” Ben-Tabia returned his thick glasses to his nose and his eyes seemed to shrink away behind them.

  Omar Yussef recalled his awkward reunion with Zuheir and his son’s new religious dedication. “Thanks to Allah,” he said.

  He moved to the priest’s side. His back ached and he would have rested his foot on the rock, but some sense of propriety prevented him. Perhaps it’s the rock’s holiness, he thought. No, it’s the blood.

  The priest’s eyebrows twitched. “I don’t know what friction usually passes between a father and his son, pasha. I know only that there was tension between me and Ishaq. I have nothing to compare it to, but I must judge myself harshly, even so.” He hesitated. “It was difficult sometimes, Abu Ramiz. He was not content.”

  “Not content with what?”

  “The village, Nablus, his wife.” The priest groaned. “Certainly not with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was rigid with him. What else could I do? I have two daughters, but my attention and my hopes focused on my son. You understand that, pasha. It’s the way things are in our society. Women count for less.”

  Omar Yussef, who loved Nadia best of all his grandchil-dren, grimaced.

  “When Ishaq was a boy, I was only a priest. By the time he was a man, I was a leader of our people.” Ben-Tabia shook his head. “The standards that I demand of all the Samaritans applied to him even more forcefully.”

  “He failed to live up to them?”

  “Perhaps he only failed because he wanted me to know that I had failed him as a father.”

  Omar Yussef realized that he had, after all, rested his foot on the holy rock. He withdrew it to the grass at the edge of the footpath. “Now is not the time for such judgments, Your Honor. A father’s high expectations are natural, and a son’s rebellion yet more so. You must forgive yourself, at least while you mourn.”

  Jibril Ben-Tabia drew a hand across his forehead. “He was a good boy, in spite of everything,” he murmured. “He helped everybody. It was as though he couldn’t deny anything to anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are some boys in the village who are, you know, not right.”

  “They’re handicapped, you mean?”

  “Ishaq always played basketball with them and talked to them. No one else bothers with them, except their immediate families. They’re outsiders.” The priest dropped his mournful eyes to the rock. “He was a good boy, but as his father I was forced to be critical of him.”

  Ben-Tabia turned to Omar Yussef and drew himself up straight. He was six feet tall, five inches greater than Omar Yussef, and his fez made him appear even taller. He took a long breath that was loud in the stillness of the hilltop. “I was Ishaq’s father, but I was also his priest. That means I have certain duties now, pasha. His body must be washed and dressed in white. We must carry out the funeral before sunset. Our tradition is for the priest to read from Deuter
onomy, chapter thirty-two, as the body is lowered into the grave. Probably you don’t know it, pasha, as a Muslim.”

  Omar Yussef glanced down at the blood on the rock. “‘They have corrupted themselves,’” he said. “‘They are a perverse and crooked generation.’”

  The priest stared at Omar Yussef, curious and wary.

  “I’m Muslim, as you point out,” Omar Yussef said, “but I grew up in Bethlehem back when it was still a town with a Christian majority, and I taught for many years in a Christian school. I know all sorts of things you might expect to be a mystery to a Muslim.”

  Sami climbed from where Ishaq’s dead body lay onto the path along the ridge. “Your Honor, was Ishaq married?”

  The priest’s eyes were distant. He made a murmur of assent through his pursed lips.

  Sami turned toward the Samaritan men. “Has his wife been told of his death?”

  The caretaker raised his hand and pointed toward the village. “I called my wife earlier and told her to go and tell Roween. She’ll have done that by now.”

  “Roween is Ishaq’s wife?”

  The short man lifted his chin to indicate that Sami was correct and turned his attention to the policemen on the slope below.

  “I’d better go and see her,” Sami said.

  In the village, the boys were gone from the concrete lot. Sami went into a small grocery to buy cigarettes and ask directions to Ishaq’s house.

  Omar Yussef looked up toward the hilltop where the corpse lay. He remembered Sami’s question about the Samaritans. Part of Palestinian culture, yes. They’re murdered just like we are, he thought.

  The bright morning sun made him squint, but he felt gloomy. He recalled the Samaritan priest’s regrets over his son. He vowed to be as forgiving as he could about Zuheir’s decision to quit his job at a British university for a position at an Islamic school in Beirut.

  Sami jogged back from the shop. He lit a cigarette as he ran the car slowly along the street to a small park. The thin grass was studded with deep, rectangular pits, arranged in ranks and lined with concrete.

  “This must be where they cook the sheep they slaughter for their Passover,” Omar Yussef said.

  Sami took a sharp drag. “Ishaq had a front row seat for the big kill, then. That’s his house, right next door.”

  They went to the front entrance and were greeted by a short woman in her late twenties with dry auburn hair cut like a man’s and parted on the left. Her thick eyebrows had been plucked, but as they grew back they met above her upturned nose. Acne mottled red and purple triangles between the corners of her mouth and her jaw.

  The woman glanced past Omar Yussef to the police car at the curb and he saw that her eyelashes were wet with tears. “Please come in,” she mumbled. “Feel as if this were your home and you were with your own family.”

  The door opened onto a living room furnished with sofas upholstered in velour swirls and an elegant cherry-wood dining set.

  “Greetings. We’d like to talk to Ishaq’s wife,” Omar Yussef said.

  The woman bowed. “Double greetings. I’m Roween al-Teef, Ishaq’s wife,” she said. “Please wait, ustaz, while I prepare coffee for you.”

  On the wall, there was an enlarged photo of a man bowing to receive a kiss on the forehead from the old president. Sami froze in front of the photo. Omar Yussef adjusted his spectacles and squinted: the president, wearing the checkered keffiyeh that was his trademark, puckered his lips before the smiling face of Ishaq, the son of Jibril the priest.

  Sami and Omar Yussef sat on one of the stiff sofas in silence. Sami stubbed out his cigarette in a ceramic ashtray painted with a blue symmetrical design in the Armenian style and stared at the photo.

  “This may have been a mistake,” he said.

  Omar Yussef wished he had told Roween not to bother about the coffee. It couldn’t have been an hour since she had learned of her husband’s death. She ought to be looking after herself, not attending to me, he thought.

  A basketball bounced in the backyard of the house, a deep repetitive impact, as though someone were venting his anger on the concrete.

  “A mistake?” Omar Yussef said.

  Sami cracked his knuckles. “I don’t want anything to do with that guy.” He pointed at the photo of the president.

  “Really, a big fucking mistake.”

  Omar Yussef squinted at Ishaq’s face on the wall. Sami may be scared of the old president, but that young man wasn’t, he thought. The eyes once again struck Omar Yussef as familiar, just as they had when he had seen the corpse. They were knowing and conspiratorial. Ishaq seemed to be signaling to the famously duplicitous old guerrilla that he was nobody’s fool, even as he accepted the benediction of those moist lips. “This isn’t a condolence call.” Omar Yussef turned to Sami. “You have to question her.”

  “You ask whatever you want, Abu Ramiz.” Sami scratched his head. “I can’t think straight. I really don’t want to be here.”

  Omar Yussef was about to argue, when Roween came out of the kitchen and set the coffee on carved side tables the color of caramel.

  “May Allah bless your hands,” Omar Yussef said, raising his coffee cup.

  “Blessings, ustaz,” Roween said. Her voice was hoarse and restrained, as though with every word she forced herself to strangle some emotion. Omar Yussef noticed that her neck was thicker than he would have expected, taut and muscular, beneath her blue robe.

  “Allah will be merciful upon him, the departed one,” Omar Yussef said.

  Roween sat with her hands clasped on her thighs.

  “The Brother Sami is investigating the death of your husband,” Omar Yussef said, ignoring the impatient drum-ming of Sami’s fingers on the arm of the sofa. “We have been to the place where he died and Sami has examined his body.”

  Roween’s thumb pulsed up and down where she folded it over her wrist.

  “So far, all we know about him is that he worked for the Palestinian Authority and that he was the son of a priest,” Omar Yussef said.

  Roween’s thumb pressed so hard into her wrist that Omar Yussef could see its tip grow red.

  “Can you tell us more about him, my daughter?” Omar Yussef spoke quietly. “Perhaps it will help Sami identify suspects in the murder.”

  That word brought Roween’s eyes up to Omar Yussef’s face. “He was a good man, ustaz. Who would murder him? Couldn’t it have been an accident of some kind?”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “He was a sweet man.”

  “His father says he was discontented.”

  “His father.” Roween’s lip twitched. “His Honor Jibril was his adoptive father, ustaz. Ishaq’s parents died in a car crash when he was a few months old. The priest took him into his house, because he had no other sons.”

  “A car crash? Where?”

  “Ishaq’s parents lived in a town inside Israel, where there’s a small Samaritan community. They were on their way to Nablus, to visit this village, when their car went off the road and they died.”

  “What sort of work did Ishaq do for the Authority?”

  Roween’s mouth fell into a desolate pout as she looked at the photo of her husband on the wall. “Ishaq worked for the Old Man,” she said.

  “For the old president?”

  “He was his private financial adviser. Perhaps because Ishaq never knew his real father, he always looked for strong relationships with older men—men who could have been his father. He and the Chief were very close.”

  Omar Yussef sipped his coffee. The murder of an ordinary Samaritan was a very different matter from the killing of a man who was close to the former president. He noticed Sami grip the arm of his chair tightly. He put down the coffee cup. “How long did Ishaq work for the president?”

  “Three years. Ishaq studied at Bir Zeit University and got to know the Chief while he was there in Ramallah. His degree was in finance. He was extremely clever. He was always with the president, even after we married a couple of year
s ago. He tried to come home once a week and for our holy days, but most of the time he lived at the president’s headquarters in Ramallah. The Old Man wanted to keep him close all the time.”

  “What does that mean—the president’s private financial adviser?”

  “He managed the president’s money, ustaz.” Roween opened her hands with her palms up. “The president had personal control of all Palestinian finances, so Ishaq controlled the entire budget. Unofficially, of course.”

  Omar Yussef thought of the bloody, beaten body on the slope of Mount Jerizim. Had his connection to the former president’s money put Ishaq there?

  “When the Old Man became sick, Ishaq accompanied him to Paris for his final days,” Roween said. “He missed several of our important Samaritan festivals and he came back only a few months ago.”

  Omar Yussef recalled what the priest had said about Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles—if the Samaritans didn’t celebrate these holy days on Mount Jerizim, they’d cease to be Samaritans. This was how Ishaq failed to live up to his adoptive father’s expectations, he thought. The expectations of his entire people. “Was there a penalty from the community for his absence during those festivals?” he asked.

  “He had to pay a fine, before he could return to live here. He had to go to the elders and beg them to let him back into the community.”

  “Why did he stay in Paris after the president died?”

  Roween shook her head. “His business dealings kept him away,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me what they were, but when he came back he went to work for Amin Kanaan.”

  “The famous businessman?” Sami rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

  “He owns one of the big mansions further along the ridge. If you have eyes in your head and your head is in Nablus, you can’t miss those houses.”

  Omar Yussef recalled the stately pillars, the domed roofs and the plate glass of the mansions visible from all over Nablus. In a few minutes, this simple village murder victim had been elevated into the company of the former president and one of the wealthiest Palestinians.

  “To my husband, Kanaan may have been another father figure. Kanaan often made deals with the president, so Ishaq handled the details.” Roween knitted her fingers together once more. “Before he died, Ishaq said some strange things about one of his deals.”