The Samaritan's Secret

by Matt Beynon Rees

  A shot came out of the alley. Omar Yussef saw the muzzle flash orange in the shadows and threw himself to his right. He landed on the steps and rolled into the darkness, protecting his head with one hand and clasping his glasses with the other.

  He held himself rigid, as he fell. He would have ugly bruises, but so long as he didn’t allow his body to bend nothing would break. He slammed to a halt against a box of rotting chicken bones and a startled cat fled the impact. He lay groaning, until he heard the shooter coming along the alley toward the steps. He pushed the box to the center of the passage, groped fast along the wall and turned a corner. He saw light through an arch ahead and he hobbled toward it.

  When he emerged from the dark, he was in the empty souk. On any other day he would’ve been safe in the crowd, but everyone had shuttered their shops to attend the big wedding. Behind him, he heard someone tumble over the box of chicken remains and curse.

  Across the souk, an iron fence caged some old tombs. A building had been erected behind and above the graves, but the wall beside the fence lay in a pile of smashed bricks. The Israelis must have entered on one of their night raids, blowing a gap to search for weapons hidden behind the tombs. Omar Yussef edged through the hole.

  Stumbling on a loose brick, he grabbed for the nearest grave. The stone was smoothly dimpled like an orange. He scrambled behind it and squatted, pressing his face against a decorative rectangle of Koranic verse carved in stately thuluth calligraphy. He ran his fingers over the text and picked out the Touqan name engraved on the limestone. It’s the tomb of a wealthy man who once inhabited the palace where Awwadi lives, he thought.

  Omar Yussef stared at the stone until the face of the corpse within seemed to glow through it. Please be quiet, he told the corpse. I’ll forgive you any sins you committed centuries ago, so long as you don’t give me away now.

  He heard someone running through the souk. With a limp. Probably from falling over the box of trash, he thought. He tried to emulate the dead beneath the gravestones, who obliged him with their silence.

  The footsteps halted outside the iron fence. Omar Yussef heard a man breathing hard. He thought he smelled the scent of cardamom and recalled once more that same spice on the breath of the man who had slapped him. The metal fence squeaked. He’s coming inside, he thought. But then he heard the feet move along the souk.

  A door swung open, slamming against a wall some distance away, and cheerful voices rushed into the street. Omar Yussef heard his stalker curse in a low voice and turn back toward the casbah.

  Omar Yussef dropped to the ground, his back against the Touqan tomb, and breathed desperately, like a swimmer surfacing from a long dive. He closed his eyes and shivered. Whoever that was, he probably saw me with Nouri Awwadi. Whatever I know about the dirt files or Ishaq’s murder, that man must suspect I know even more. He’ll try to kill me again.

  A strong wind swept through the casbah and the evening sun dropped behind Jerizim. A deep chill emanated from the old tombs. It was too late to return to the Touqan Palace to hunt for the files. Omar Yussef climbed over the rubble, lowered himself onto the worn flagstones of the souk and rushed away.

  Chapter 15

  Omar Yussef disliked restaurant food. He suspected professional chefs of cheating, adding extra fat or too much salt, rather than taking the time to follow traditional recipes. Anticipating such second-rate fare at the hotel restaurant, he waited sullenly by the window of his hotel room, tapping his finger on a book he had been trying to read, while Maryam dressed for dinner.

  Isolated blue lights were scattered across the hillside below. The people of Nablus had eaten early and gone to bed, leaving the streets to the gunmen and the Israeli patrols. And to the man who tried to kill me.

  The stillness outside his hotel window seemed illusory to Omar Yussef, like the quiet of a corpse. A dead body appears motionless, he thought, but the serenity of death is only a mask for the assiduous decaying of flesh. I would have said Ishaq’s cadaver was lifeless when I inspected it on the mountaintop. In reality, it was being eaten away by countless awful microscopic organisms. This peaceful cityscape, too, is no less riddled with destructive undercurrents than a putrefying carcass. He clasped his hands anxiously. Perhaps if I just talked to the American woman again, I could get a better idea of why Ishaq died. I might be able to guide her toward the money, without really being involved.

  Without taking any more risks.

  “I hope the hotel doesn’t overcook the shish tawouk.” Maryam stepped out of the bathroom, slipping a small gold earring into her earlobe. “These restaurants always ruin chicken, so that you have to drown the food in lemon juice to give it any life.”

  Omar Yussef laughed. “Next time we travel, I’ll rent a hotel room with a kitchen for you,” he said. “That way we’ll be able to avoid restaurants entirely.”

  Maryam pulled on a black woolen jacket. “Omar, these restaurant people do all kinds of terrible things with food. They don’t love the food or the people who eat it.”

  Omar Yussef noticed Maryam had left his short-sleeved shirt hanging from the shower rail in the bathroom, damp across the chest where she had scrubbed away the hummus stain. The food at Abu Alam’s snack bar had been good, even if it had offended Maryam that he ate there. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so quick to condemn restaurant meals. “My darling, tonight’s dishes may not be so bad.”

  His wife raised a scolding finger. “Yes, maybe the meal will be as good as the hummus in the casbah.”

  Omar Yussef’s mouth dried up, like the overdone chicken on which he imagined he’d soon be choking. Can she read my thoughts, he wondered, or just my guilty conscience?

  “I’m going to taste the salads,” Maryam said, “and if I don’t think they’ve made them correctly, I won’t even touch the main course.”

  She frowned, lifted his hand, and inspected a greenish bruise on his wrist. “Did that happen when you stumbled after that scum slapped you?”

  Omar Yussef hoped there was a limit to his wife’s ability to see through him. “That must be when it happened,” he said. He pulled back his hand. He ached all over from his tumble down the steps, but he didn’t want to alarm Maryam.

  “I still don’t understand why they would hurt Sami.”

  “He’s a policeman. They’re criminals.”

  “I’m proud that you tried to stop them.”

  Omar Yussef set his book on the dresser. He had tried to reread some poems by a famous Nablus writer, but the book had frustrated him. The poet struck a heroic tone that seemed to Omar Yussef as false as the melodrama of a news-caster. The poems praised people who, instead, ought to have been shaken to their senses before they made useless sacrifices of themselves. Even our artists can’t tell us the truth, he thought. It’s no wonder our politicians find it so easy to lie. “I’m going down for a quick coffee while you finish getting ready, Maryam,” he said. “It’ll relax me.”

  “Of course, my darling.” She blinked hard. “I just have to tidy my hair and then I’ll join you.”

  Omar Yussef smiled at his wife. Beside her black clothes, her skin appeared gray, though it was really a yellowed brown like the flesh inside an eggplant. She blinked frequently when spoken to, an idiosyncrasy she had devel-oped during the years of the intifada. Omar Yussef worried that it was the result of excessive tension, of repressed concern for her family amid the violence of Bethlehem. Perhaps she’s just surprised that she’s still alive, after what our town’s been through, he thought.

  Maryam went back into the small bathroom. “I worry about Zuheir,” she said quietly, as Omar Yussef turned the door handle to leave the room.

  He took his hand away from the knob. “Because he’s become religious?”

  Maryam snapped her face toward her husband. “Because he’s all skin and bones. He isn’t eating well.”

  “It’s just the stupid loose clothes he wears, like some Saudi herdsman,” Omar Yussef said. “Or maybe it’s because he’s fasting twice a week like
a good Muslim.”

  “Omar, don’t criticize the boy. He’s stubborn, just like you. If you tell him he’s taking the wrong path, it’ll only make him more determined.”

  She leaned close to the bathroom mirror and, with a finger and thumb, toyed with the sagging skin at the corners of her mouth.

  “Maryam, turn away from that mirror,” Omar Yussef said. “When you look at yourself like that, it reminds me how much worse my own reflection appears. Do you want to be cruel to your poor husband?”

  Maryam twiddled the brass buttons on Omar Yussef’s blazer and brushed the lapels. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You look smart, as always.”

  It wasn’t true that, confronted with a mirror, Omar Yussef examined himself critically. He saw more than a trace of the handsome young man he had been. He even imagined that he might be less bald than in fact he was and that his gray mustache gave him a manly gravity. But he was unsure of himself tonight. The mirror might catch him with haggard, drawn eyelids and new lines scored beside his mouth like scars.

  He kissed his wife’s forehead and opened the door. She reached for her hairbrush, as he went out.

  In the elevator, the mirror challenged him. He glimpsed a sallow face, streaked with deep gray shadows. He turned his eyes swiftly to the flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling, keeping them there until the elevator doors opened on the lobby and allowed him to escape his reflection.

  Jamie King stood in the center of the lobby with her hands resting together in front of her. Her eyes wandered around the room as though she were waiting for someone. She wore her red hair down and Omar Yussef admired its thickness. A surge of purpose overcame his melancholy. I must talk to her before Maryam arrives, he thought. As he approached her, the American straightened her jacket, smiled and extended a firm hand to greet him.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.

  “No, in fact, I—”

  “Jamie, I need to continue our talk about Ishaq, the Samaritan,” Omar Yussef said, moving close to her. “Ishaq was very young to be in charge of the Old Man’s secret finances, wasn’t he?”

  “There weren’t many people the president trusted.” King stroked the soft hairs by her ear. “The people who first told me about Ishaq all used the same phrase: ‘Ishaq was like a son to the Old Man.’ But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the president simply had something on Ishaq.”

  “Some sort of dirt?” His homosexuality, Omar Yussef thought.

  “Something that would give him power over Ishaq. So that if Ishaq ever tried to pilfer the cash, the president could ruin his family.”

  “He went to Paris with the president, when the Old Man was dying,” Omar Yussef said. “Once the president died, Ishaq could’ve kept all the money.”

  The American dipped her head closer to Omar Yussef. “Unless someone else also knew his secret and was in a position to blackmail him.”

  “If that were the case, why would he return to Palestine? He was walking right into the arms of his blackmailers.” Omar Yussef shook his head. “What do you think happened to the money?”

  “I’ve traced no recent transactions that would suggest the money has been moved. I assume Ishaq still controlled the secret accounts when he was killed.”

  “Where’s the money likely to be?”

  “What we’ve found so far was in accounts in the Bahamas, Belize, Panama, those kinds of places. There were also investments in companies all over the world. Telecom businesses in Libya, food distribution companies in Saudi Arabia, all sorts of industries. But most of it was in easily accessible cash accounts, to pay for things the president needed quickly. I’ll keep trying to track it all down— my investigators are in Geneva at the moment, following up a couple of leads. But I’m worried. If someone killed Ishaq for the details of the accounts, they might have cleaned them out by the time I catch up.”

  “Whatever you discover, perhaps you’ll share it with me?” Omar Yussef whispered. “It might help you to consult someone who knows the culture.”

  Jamie King gave a distant smile of politeness that Omar Yussef knew well from years of working with foreigners at the United Nations. I won’t be waiting up for a phone call from her, he thought.

  The elevator sounded its electronic tone. When the doors opened, Maryam was close to the mirror, pulling at the bags under her eyes and Nadia was mimicking her grandmother and giggling. The girl hurried across the lobby, beaming at Jamie King. “Grandpa, I invited Miss Jamie to join us for dinner,” she said.

  Omar Yussef touched his fingers to his mustache, trying to hide his surprise. “Are you going to talk about your book with her all night, Nadia?”

  The girl shook her head. “I won’t give away anything else about it,” she said. “You’re going to have to guess who the bad guy is, first.”

  Jamie King shook Maryam’s hand. “Nadia tells me this meal will be a very inferior experience compared with your home cooking, Umm Ramiz,” she said.

  Maryam kissed Nadia. Omar Yussef watched the pleasure that overcame her tired face when she held her granddaughter. He couldn’t help but think of his wife as a simple woman whose pleasures were all in the domestic, familial things a woman was supposed to enjoy. Yet, he often felt sure that there were complicated elements of her character about which he knew nothing. He would have enjoyed reading all Maryam’s secrets, if they had been included in the dirt files Awwadi had procured for Hamas.

  In the dining room, Nadia spotted her father, Ramiz, and her uncle, Zuheir, near the window and made her way toward them. Maryam stopped to chat with a woman at the next table, where other friends of Sami’s family from Bethlehem were sharing skewers of lamb and chicken.

  Omar Yussef greeted the Bethlehem people with some jokes about the rarity of finding Maryam in a restaurant and sat beside his wife. Ramiz stroked his daughter’s long, straight hair and whispered to her. They laughed together and the healthy chubbiness at Ramiz’s jaw rolled. Zuheir cradled a glass of water and stared at the cigarette burns on the white tablecloth. The waiter came over with a wide tray of small salads and spreads. He laid them out on the table.

  Ishaq thought he was free, once the president died, Omar Yussef thought. He returned from the safety of France to the village on Mount Jerizim to be with his wife and his adoptive father. He believed the president had taken his secret with him to the grave. But someone knew Ishaq’s shame and used it against him. Could it have been Nouri Awwadi? The Hamas man had told Omar Yussef that Ishaq was gay. He had also managed to obtain the dirt files from Ishaq. Perhaps he had murdered him, after all. Had he squeezed the president’s secret bank accounts out of Ishaq, too, under threat of blackmail? Awwadi may have told me about the scandal dossiers on the Fatah men because he wanted me to believe that they were all he received from Ishaq. Omar Yussef fretted at a small rip in the tablecloth. But when I told Awwadi that Ishaq had the president’s millions, he seemed totally surprised. Unless he’s a very convincing actor, he doesn’t have the money. Not yet.

  Sami and Meisoun crossed the dining room. She linked her hands demurely. They were allowed to be together in public before the wedding, but they had to behave with reserve. Sami stopped at the table next to Omar Yussef’s to greet his family friends, grinning sheepishly when they joked about the cast on his arm. He caught Omar Yussef’s eye and his smile wavered. The schoolteacher turned away. Meisoun kissed Maryam. As she hugged Nadia, she quickly appraised Jamie King and spoke to Omar Yussef. “So, ustaz, it seems I’m to be relegated to your third wife.”

  Omar Yussef’s face grew hot.

  Sami bent to kiss Ramiz and Zuheir, muttering quiet greet-ings. He sat beside them, hunched forward with his eyes on the tablecloth and his broken arm hidden beneath the table.

  The poor boy’s ashamed that he isn’t working on Ishaq’s case, Omar Yussef thought.

  Maryam dropped a crisp chip of fried flatbread onto her plate, clicked her tongue and folded her arms. “The yoghurt in the huwarna is too thin,” she said
in English.

  King leaned over the small plates spread across the table. “Which dish is that?”

  Maryam pointed at a shallow bowl of plain yoghurt, dotted with tiny dark pods. “All you have to do is wash the mustard seeds and put them in the yoghurt. How difficult can that be? They didn’t even add the slightest bit of mint.” She wanted to be angry, but she couldn’t help smiling as she explained the local food to the foreigner. “I always put fresh mint in my huwarna just before I serve it, to give it a little extra flavor.”

  Omar Yussef scooped some of the yoghurt dip onto a bread chip and crunched it in his mouth. “Ignore her, Jamie,” he said. “It’s really quite good.”

  Maryam glared.

  “It’s not as good as yours, of course, darling,” he said, in English. Then he switched to Arabic. “Nadia, tell your Grandma that she’ll starve in Nablus if she refuses to eat the rotten food in this restaurant.”

  Maryam lifted a small dish of greens and spooned some onto King’s plate. “Jamie, try this. It’s jarjeer. It’s a very traditional part of Palestinian meals. It’s a leaf that in English I think you call ‘arugula.’ To make the salad, you add lemon juice and this purple ground spice, which we call sumac. I don’t know what it is in English.”

  King ate appreciatively. “It has a very zesty taste.”

  “The lemon highlights the fresh flavor of the arugula leaves,” Maryam said.

  “Jamie, they say this salad makes a man vigorous in bed,” Omar Yussef said with a laugh. “Which is why Maryam hasn’t given me any.”

  Maryam dropped the dish of jarjeer on the table in front of Omar Yussef. “Eat it all, and see if I care,” she said.

  Nadia sniggered and blew some of the cola she had been drinking out of her nose, which made her fall to the table in a fit of giggling. Omar Yussef watched her and chuckled. He stroked the back of Maryam’s hand and smiled at her until she, too, laughed.