by Matt Rees
Jihad Awdeh nodded and breathed smoke from his nostrils.
“But why did Yunis Abdel Rahman become a suicide bomber?” Omar Yussef said.
“A martyr, Abu Ramiz. You should refer to him only as a martyr.” Jihad Awdeh smiled sarcastically. “Self-disgust, I suppose you might say. It’s his father’s fault really. He’s a nasty piece of work, old Muhammad Abdel Rahman. Muhammad told the kid that Dima was fucking Hussein Tamari. He said she had wanted Louai out of the way so she could be with Hussein and that she had persuaded Hussein to help the Israelis kill her husband. Muhammad expected the boy to kill Hussein, so the family could take back their stolen auto business. Maybe the explosives workshops, too.”
“But Yunis killed Dima instead.” The boy had spoiled his father’s plan by directing his anger not at Hussein, but at the woman he considered the most unconscionable of his brother’s betrayers.
“That’s right. He killed her for betraying his brother. It must have seemed easier than killing Hussein—he didn’t know the Israelis were going to do the job for him. He killed her and tried to make it look like a random rape. Or maybe he got a kick out of seeing what she looked like in the dirt with her ass up in the air. By the way, you were there too. Did you like her ass? I hear she was a special little pet of yours. How special was she? The police had covered her body by the time I got there, but the guards let me have a look. A lot of the guys got an eyeful.”
Omar Yussef swallowed hard. “Why were you there?”
“To tell Yunis Abdel Rahman that his dear Dad had made him a killer for nothing. I told him Dima was innocent and that Hussein didn’t even know who she was. The boy was quite upset at the news, you can imagine. Disgusted with himself and his father. Guilty. No family business, no future. I told him he could redeem himself by carrying out an operation. He agreed immediately.”
“Why did the Israelis come to your apartment tonight, if you’re their collaborator?”
“They wanted to warn me not to keep the explosives factories operating. Or perhaps they just wanted to give me some cover. No one’s going to think they’d raid a collaborator’s home.”
Omar Yussef pointed at the second staircase out of the cave. “Let’s go. I’m taking you to the police.”
Jihad Awdeh rose and stretched. “Fine. They will, of course, let me go. And I’ll start building another bomb.” He moved along the cave. “This time it won’t be your American boss who gets blown up by it. I’ll make sure it takes you out, and your family, too.”
Omar Yussef gestured to Awdeh to keep to the opposite side of the cavern. He followed the gunman up the short flight of stairs, slowly. When his prisoner reached the top, Omar Yussef said: “Keep going. Not too fast.”
The darkness in the church seemed to have lifted. As Omar Yussef reached the top of the stairs, he pulled the Webley closer to his side, hiding it in the folds of his jacket.
Jihad Awdeh turned. He stared at the old gun.
“Keep going,” Omar Yussef said. His eyes were adjusting. It was too light in the church. He had spent too much time down in the cave. The killer would see the old pistol was useless. “Come on, move it.”
Jihad Awdeh pointed at the Webley and laughed. “What are you going to do? Beat me to death with that old thing?”
Omar Yussef felt his mouth dry up. He looked down and saw that the hand holding the pistol shook. “This gun is an old one. But it works.”
But Jihad Awdeh was already upon him. He punched Omar Yussef in the temple, shoved him backward, and tripped him so that he fell to the floor. From the back of his boot, Jihad slowly drew a six-inch hunting knife. He twirled its jagged blade, smiling. Omar Yussef saw the light glint off the shaft of the knife. How could he have been so stupid as to stay below in the cave until there was this much daylight in the church?
Jihad Awdeh kicked him in the side, just below the ribs. The impact stabbed through his kidneys as surely as if it were a thrust of the knife. He groaned. Then Jihad kicked again and Omar Yussef screamed, a deep bellow.
He grabbed Jihad Awdeh’s leg, but the gunman shook free. Omar Yussef looked up. Jihad crouched above him with the knife held to his own throat. He grinned, as though he would bite the schoolteacher and drink his blood. He drew the knife lightly across his throat, sighing with pleasure. It was the same murderous gesture George Saba had described, when Omar Yussef saw him in the jail. Omar Yussef would die now, like George.
The knife was at Omar Yussef’s throat. It felt warm from having been stashed inside Jihad Awdeh’s boot. He gasped. There was a moment of pressure against the flesh of his neck. Then there was a massive blast, and another. Omar Yussef thought it was the sound of his carotid ripping under the sharp metal, the tearing of the cartilage thundering through his head. But then Jihad Awdeh toppled over onto his victim’s chest. He held his head directly before Omar Yussef’s face and gave a ghostly moan that was heavy with the stale reek of cigarettes. Then he dropped his head. His brow struck Omar Yussef on the chin. The murderer was dead.
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.”
“We
ll, 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.”
Chapter 29
Khamis Zeydan dropped Omar Yussef at his house when the dawn was still new. The police chief leaned across and gripped his hand through the open window. Omar Yussef expected the police chief to caution him to give up the amateur detective game. But Khamis Zeydan said nothing. His handshake and his expression were firm, and he nodded approvingly at his old college friend. Then he drove his jeep away, back toward the church.
Omar Yussef entered his house. Immediately he calmed Maryam with a finger on her lips. He held her tightly and wondered how long it was since he’d grasped his wife so strongly. He lay on his bed until it was time for the UN office in Jerusalem to open. Then he found the telephone message Maryam had written on a scrap of paper the night before and he returned the call to the UN regional director, a Swede named Magnus Wallender.
“Mister Yussef, I’m pleased to hear from you. Sorry to have disturbed your family with my call so late last night. It’s a very worrying time, isn’t it?” Wallender said.
Omar Yussef felt so relieved and elated after his rescue at the church that he paused a moment before he remembered why Wallender should be anxious.
“We are all very sad about Christopher’s death,” Omar Yussef said. The severed hand. The face and chest flayed like a cut of meat in an abattoir. It seemed a long time ago.
“This is why I wanted to talk to you, Mister Yussef. We consulted with New York and Geneva overnight. We think it’s simply too dangerous right now for an American, or any other Westerner, to run the Dehaisha school. Christopher Stead-man’s death was a shock that rippled all the way though the organization, right up to the Secretary-General.”
It was hard to imagine the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his office high above Manhattan hearing the news of an assassination in Dehaisha. Omar Yussef thought that if the killers had struck their true target—namely, him—it would, of course, not have reached the attention of the Secretary-General.
Magnus Wallender continued. “We feel it would be preferable and safer in the current environment to fill the vacancy as head of the Dehaisha school with a local. You’re by far the most experienced of the teachers and a figure respected throughout Bethlehem. So we’d like to offer the position to you.”
“As director of the UNRWA Girls School in Dehaisha?” It was a matter of days since Omar Yussef had thought his time at the school was over. Now he was to take charge? “Well, that’s very kind of you. Do you mind if I think it over for a day?”
“Not at all. We shall send someone down today to pick up your personnel file, just to be sure that there’s nothing to block the appointment. But that’s really just a formality.”
Omar Yussef thought of the sheets of blue paper, the negative reports his former boss, the Spanish lady, had written about him. They were at the bottom of a muddy pool across the street from the school. There was nothing else in the file that would be out of the ordinary. The collection of whining letters from parents would be easily dismissed. He thanked Magnus Wallender and hung up.
Here was Omar Yussef’s opportunity to stand up to the government schools inspector and anyone else who wished to feed hatred to the children of Dehaisha refugee camp. He would take this chance. He had focused on George Saba as the evidence he would leave behind him of his goodness, his morals. Now he wondered if his legacy might not be constantly unfolding, one for which he must fight with each new intake of students at the school.
The thought of retirement from teaching seemed attractive to him. He acknowledged that he had enjoyed the chase that led him to Jihad Awdeh. But what was he going to do? Set up a detective agency in Bethlehem?
Nadia entered the salon carrying a cup of coffee. She wore the sky-blue shirt and long, navy skirt of the Frères School. She came to Omar Yussef, gave him his coffee, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Did you find him?” she said.
“Who? Who was I looking for?” Omar Yussef pretended to search beneath the cushions on the sofa.
“The man who killed George Saba.”
Omar Yussef smiled. He hadn’t known she was aware of the aim of his investigation. “Yes, Nadia, I found him.”
“Good, I knew you’d get him,” she said. “Are George’s children going to come and live with us?”
That’s not a bad idea, Omar Yussef thought. I should do that for George. He decided to ask Maryam.
Nadia looked at the black Bible on the coffee table, where Omar Yussef had left it when he returned from the destruction of George Saba’s home. “What’s this?”
“That belonged to my father. It was a gift to him from a friend of his who was a Christian priest. I gave it to George Saba many years ago. I rescued it from the ruins of his house.”
Nadia flipped the cover open and read the inscription to Oma
r Yussef’s father from his friend the Catholic priest. She smiled. “It’s a beautiful book,” she said. “I have to go to school now.” She kissed her grandfather again and left the house.
Omar Yussef watched Nadia pass outside the window, leaning forward under her pink backpack. There was a legacy, he thought, that might be found in detective work, just as much as in teaching. It was a mistake to believe that detection was a matter of figuring out what had happened in the past and then taking revenge for it. He understood now that it was about protecting the future from the people who committed evil and who would do so again.
Omar Yussef picked up the slip of paper with the U.N. phone number scrawled across it. His accountant had told him he had the money to retire from teaching if he wished. He looked at the message and dropped it on the coffee table next to George Saba’s Bible.