A grave in Gaza oy-2

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Omar Yussef looked at Salwa’s eyes. They were red, but the tears were gone. He shook his head at the phone. “Not yet. I’m going to stay here a little longer.”

  “No, you’re coming with me.” Khamis Zeydan was firm. “I’m taking you to a funeral.”

  Chapter 23

  Sami rolled his Jeep toward the mahogany porch at the front of the presidential building. Military Intelligence men linked arms to restrain the crowd in the courtyard of the president’s compound. The mob chanted “Allah is most great” and jostled the soldiers, dislodging their red berets and shoving some of them against the car with low, hollow thuds that made Omar Yussef jump. A steady crackle of guns firing into the air penetrated the insulated calm of Sami’s expensive car.

  “There must be thousands of people here,” Omar Yussef said. “I thought Husseini was unpopular.”

  “He was a bastard,” said Khamis Zeydan. The police chief looked out at the crowd over his cigarette.

  “Then what’re these people so upset about?”

  “You know what it’s like when an Arab leader dies. No one liked him, but nonetheless he represented something good to them-stability, a pay check, support for the people of their village against another village. That’s all this is.”

  “They’re angry. There could be a riot, after the funeral.”

  “The funeral is already a riot. After the funeral? Someone’ll have to die.”

  Sami pulled up to the porch. An officer opened the door and saluted. Khamis Zeydan headed for the entrance. Omar Yussef squinted into the hot, dusty wind, over the mass of heads. It seemed as though the chanting, shouting crowd was pressing toward him alone, thrusting fists in the air and demanding vengeance. He was unsurprised that, at the last moment, the president had elected to stay in Ramallah and give the funeral a miss.

  From along the beach road, a deep thump rumbled like the resonating soundwaves of a bomb in the seconds after detonation. It came again, a regular beat. A band joined it and Omar Yussef realized it was a bass drum, struck with a full swing of the shoulders. The band played Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav and the big drum sounded every second bar. They were bringing the body from Husseini’s house. The crowd swelled behind the military cordon. Omar Yussef followed Khamis Zeydan into the presidential building.

  At the top of a whitewashed staircase adorned with a few potted plants, Omar Yussef entered a conference room filled with smoke and mumbling clutches of well-dressed men. At the head of the long table, large portrait photos of the president and his predecessor hung on the wall. On either side of the photographs, the Palestinian flag was draped from poles the height of a short man. A Military Intelligence officer in a neat, plain uniform and without his beret poured a small cup of bitter coffee for Omar Yussef from a plastic flask that was shaped to look like a traditional copper pot.

  Khamis Zeydan beckoned from the window. He spoke quietly to Omar Yussef as he inhaled on his cigarette. His lips barely moved. “Where did you go this morning?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I only brought you to this funeral because I want to keep an eye on you. You can’t be trusted to stay out of trouble.” His eyes flicked about the room. “So tell me, after I went to the Revolutionary Council meeting and left you at breakfast, where did you go?”

  “Why didn’t you ask me this in the car on the way here?”

  “This is not for Sami’s ears. You were supposed to be going for a walk on the beach.”

  “I neglected to bring my swimsuit to Gaza.”

  Khamis Zeydan hissed cigarette smoke over Omar Yussef. “You’ll have to find one. They’re shooting a calendar, like the American ones that have supermodels frolicking in the waves. This one’s called Assassination Victims on the Gaza Shore. You’re Miss August.”

  “My favorite time of year. Anyway, I’m not scared of ruffling feathers. I want to free Magnus, even if no one else seems to remember him.”

  “Haven’t you heard? He’s Miss September.”

  “I’m not prepared to let that happen.” Omar Yussef drew his shoulders back and raised his chin. He felt his jaw shivering with anger. “And I was doing my best to prevent his death this morning.”

  “I don’t think so.” Khamis Zeydan’s jaw tightened with every word. “I think you were making a mistake this morning.”

  “You know where I went?”

  “I have a good idea. Look, Maki can’t help you. You’ll only get into deeper trouble if you pester him.”

  “I have no other leads.”

  “It’s not a lead. It’s a dead end, a brick wall that you’re charging into, just because Magnus was kidnapped right after you had dinner with Maki.”

  “That’s not what I meant by a lead.”

  “What other big conspiracies have you uncovered, then?” Khamis Zeydan blew smoke furiously, as though it might cloak him and Omar Yussef from the other party men.

  “On the wall of Lieutenant Fathi Salah’s family home, there are degree certificates from al-Azhar. For him and his brother Yasser, a Preventive Security officer.”

  Khamis Zeydan shrugged. “So what?”

  “This morning I looked at their academic files in Maki’s office,” Omar Yussef said.

  “You did what? How?”

  Omar Yussef waved his hand impatiently. “Fathi’s record was clean, a regular student who evidently worked hard to make all his tuition payments. But Yasser’s was faked, and his father had told me he was recently promoted. It’s just what Eyad Masharawi alleged: al-Fara’s officers buy bogus degrees from Maki so they can get a promotion.”

  “That’s only a minor scandal.”

  “Then why did they torture Masharawi for exposing it?”

  “Because torture is a minor punishment in Gaza.”

  “I think there’s a link between the torture of Masharawi for exposing the fake degrees, and the stolen Saladin I missile.” Omar Yussef laced his fingers together and held them close to Khamis Zeydan’s face. The two men were almost touching. “If so, Magnus’s kidnapping and James’s murder are connected, too.”

  “You said Lieutenant Fathi Salah’s degree wasn’t faked. But he’s the one who was trading the missile and is now dead, not his brother Yasser. So you’ve got a guy with a degree who was selling a missile and another guy with a bogus degree who wasn’t. How does that give you a connection? And what does it have to do with the killing of James Cree?”

  “If I knew all that, I wouldn’t be arguing about it with you. I’m still trying to figure it out, but I’m certain there’s a connection.” Omar Yussef looked out of the smoked-glass window at the crowd below. He imagined them surging up the stairs to lynch him. He turned to his friend. “What do you know about websites?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “If someone made a website for me, would just anyone be able to get inside the computer and look at it?”

  Khamis Zeydan coughed out a short, scoffing laugh. “ Get inside the computer? My brother, you’re behind the times. Are you still cleaning your teeth with the bristly end of a miswak twig?”

  The delegates jockeyed for position near the door. Professor Adnan Maki entered, his arm hooked through the well-tailored sleeve of Colonel Mahmoud al-Fara. Khamis Zeydan took a deep drag on his cigarette and crushed the butt under his shoe on the carpet. “The undertaker has arrived,” he said.

  Omar Yussef strained to see through the tobacco smoke. The crowd drew faintly toward Colonel al-Fara, like nervous children approaching a big dog. Al-Fara acknowledged the men he passed with a vicious, superior smile. He wore a light gray suit, a white shirt whose cuffs came an inch beyond the sleeves of the jacket to expose gold cufflinks, and a somber silk tie. His lank, black hair fell over his forehead and his mustache was gleaming and moist. He slouched through the room dispensing mirthless grins. He brought a tissue from his pocket and expectorated. The coffee boy put out a hand and al-Fara gave him the crumpled tissue without looking at him.

  Maki caught sight of Om
ar Yussef. His smile wavered, then he lifted his hand and wiggled his fingers in greeting. Omar Yussef searched for a sign that Maki had noticed the Saladin Brigades leaflet and his handwritten notes on the floor of his office. The professor’s sybaritic lips twitched as though blowing a kiss. He went with al-Fara out of the back of the conference room to a wide balcony. The other men followed.

  The Marche Slav was close. The band’s ponderous measures punctuated a new level of hysteria in the crowd at the front of the building. The musicians came to the open yard at the back of the presidential compound and marched across a broad yellow circle painted on the concrete as a helicopter landing pad. Two men carried the bass drum and another gave it the beat with a bulbous stick he held in two hands. Behind them, a jeep brought General Moussa Husseini’s casket, wrapped in the Palestinian flag. Red-bereted troopers leaned out of the jeep, shielding the coffin, deflecting the thrashing arms of people in the crowd who managed to reach over the cordon of soldiers. The people threw their arms in the air and chanted that they would sacrifice for Husseini, whom they called a martyr.

  “Do the idiots think he died for Allah?” Omar Yussef muttered. “A martyr?”

  Khamis Zeydan lifted an eyebrow at that. “Jihad is a very flexible concept,” he said.

  The jeep reached the clear space behind a double row of troops and, as the band stepped to the side, it circled to the corner of the yard. Two ranks of Military Intelligence troopers rested their rifle butts at ease against their heels, forming a lane to the grave. They came to attention.

  The party men on the balcony trotted down the steps to the yard and crossed the yellow paint of the helicopter pad. An imam waited at the graveside, his hands crossed in front of him, wearing a long brown robe and a white turban wrapped around a scarlet fez. The imam lifted his chin from his chest and stroked his short gray beard, as Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan moved grimly toward the grave. The delegates dropped their cigarettes as they left the helicopter pad and stepped into the sand by the fence, where Husseini was to be laid to rest. The imam led them in the funeral prayer. The troopers in the back of the jeep lifted Husseini’s body from the open coffin and brought him, wrapped in two white cloths, to the graveside. Omar Yussef considered the rituals of burial, the traditional washing of the corpse that was omitted for a martyr because the manner of his death purifies him. A martyr would be buried with blood on his face, where it sprayed from his wound, and dirt under his fingernails, where he clawed the ground in agony. He wondered what the men who wrapped Husseini in his shroud had done about the feces in the general’s underpants.

  When they handed Husseini down into the grave, his skin was tinted light green against the white sheet that circled his face. The corpse looked small, dropping out of sight, but a soldier inside the grave had to struggle as he maneuvered Husseini’s tubby body onto its right side, so that it would rest facing Mecca. The imam’s prayer urged those present to praise Allah and consider the reward to which the dead man went. Omar Yussef thought that Husseini had already received his reward for a violent, cruel life, and that it had been a machine-gun magazine emptied into his spine and his bowels voided into his underpants. Further weighing of eternal balances was unnecessary.

  The prayers were barely done when the Revolutionary Council leaders turned back to the presidential building. Behind them, the two ranks of Military Intelligence men fired volleys over the grave. Maki made a joke and al-Fara gave an exhausted smile. He glanced toward the crowd and his languid slouch tensed. His expression switched to fear and then to anger.

  The mob was breaking through the cordon at the side of the building. People rushed across the concrete with their fists raised, heading for the grave. Al-Fara turned to the armed funeral detail for protection, but the soldiers retreated behind the grave and made no move toward the party men.

  The delegates of the Revolutionary Council hurried on old legs for the safety of the presidential building. A black Audi roared from the side of the paved lot. The back door opened and al-Fara jumped in. The crowd flowed toward it. A window dropped and one of al-Fara’s guards aimed a pistol into the air. He fired off a few rounds and the car sped around the far side of the building.

  The head of the crowd came to the grave and halted, pumping fists in the air and chanting to Allah. To reach the graveside, the mass of people at the back of the crowd looped quickly to the side. Their swing caught Omar Yussef as he fell behind the dignitaries escaping into the president’s building. He saw Khamis Zeydan turn and shout to him, just as the crowd enveloped him.

  The force of the swarm took him a few paces sideways, setting him off balance, and he couldn’t counter its momentum. He fell onto his right knee. He put his hand to the ground to keep from falling further. Someone trod on his fingers. He cried out, but he dared not move the hand. If he went down, he’d be trampled to death. A man put his knee in Omar Yussef’s shoulder and tumbled over him. The man came down on his back and rolled a few times as the mob kicked him into the hard surface of the president’s helicopter pad.

  The cries of the crowd were hoarse. Omar Yussef sensed its force, as though he were far down in a body of water or buried by a weight of earth. The screams of the trampled man punctuated the mob’s chant. Dust was thick in the air and his eyes were full of it. Someone’s fist connected with the side of his head and he took a knee in the small of his back. He felt a hand under his right arm, lifting and dragging him. He pushed his glasses into place on his nose and went with the hand that supported him. He blinked the dirt from his eyes and threw his arm around Sami Jaffari.

  The young man pulled him across the flow of the crowd, bracing his legs against its momentum, shoving and elbowing those in their way. Omar Yussef saw the limbs of those in the crowd only as blurs, but he noted faces clearly. No one looked directly at him; everyone’s eyes were unnaturally wide, unfocused, cast ahead to where they thought the grave was. They’ve all gone mad, he thought. Even when Sami pushed them hard, they didn’t seem to see the two men in front of them. They ebbed roughly around the obstruction, swirling on toward Husseini’s grave.

  Omar Yussef came to an open area, but Sami didn’t halt. He hurried him toward the corner of the building.

  “Where’s Abu Adel?” Omar Yussef asked. He looked around for Khamis Zeydan.

  “He’s inside.”

  “I need to sit down. Let’s go in there with him.”

  Sami dragged Omar Yussef. The schoolteacher stumbled as he struggled to keep up with the younger man.

  “Sami, I’m exhausted. Where are we going?”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  Sami kept going, around the corner and away from the entrance to the presidential building. “Not in there. Not with them.”

  In a parking lot at the side of the presidential building, Sami ducked Omar Yussef’s head with a hand on the back of his neck, shoving him into the passenger seat of his Jeep, slamming the door shut. He started the car and pulled around the front of the building so fast that the force pinned Omar Yussef to the leather. The crowd was thin at the gate, since it had mostly pressed into the helicopter pad. People jumped out of Sami’s way as they heard his wheels screech toward them. The Jeep cut left and started north.

  “Sami, what’s going on?”

  “I told you, you’re coming with me.”

  “Evidently. Are you kidnapping me?”

  Sami stared at the narrow roads, taking them fast and working the gears on the powerful car. He leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. There were two pistols inside. Omar Yussef pushed himself back into the seat. Sami pulled out a rag that had been wrapped around a third pistol, flipped the compartment shut and tossed the rag in Omar Yussef’s lap. “I’ve noticed you like to look neat and tidy in company,” he said. “Clean yourself up. You’re going to meet someone.”

  Chapter 24

  ami raced to the northern edge of Gaza City and into the sandy sidestreets of Jabalia refugee camp. Fro
m the murk of the dust storm, objects seemed to fly toward them as though borne on the air by a whirlwind. Children chased a goat into the road; blue dumpsters donated by the European Union loomed out of the dust; a donkey cart jogged erratically along a narrow lane. Sami negotiated all these obstacles without easing off the gas.

  He pulled up at a corner near the northern edge of the camp. “Get out,” he said.

  A scrubby dune rose at the end of the block and, beyond its crest, the sands undulated a half mile to the fence marking the end of the Gaza Strip and the beginning of Israel. In the shade of a bare wall, a stocky man in the black T-shirt and dark green baggy pants of the militias rested against the hood of a white jeep. Omar Yussef sensed that he and Sami and their expensive car were being carefully measured.

  Sami cut down an alley barely wide enough for his square shoulders. The ground was laid with concrete, set in a shallow V so that water would run down the middle in the rainy months. Now it was dry and the alley was choked with trash-packaging for cheap cookies, empty plastic bottles, the peelings of vegetables and fruit, and a small child’s leather sandal caked in sand and dust.

  Omar Yussef followed Sami down the alley, stumbling through the trash. They moved deep into the maze of single-story cinderblock hovels. He was astonished that Sami knew the place so well. At home in Dehaisha, every sad dwelling was familiar to him and he could recognize family resemblances even in children he didn’t know. But here every corner seemed identical and all the children stared at him with silent, blank faces.

  The quiet domestic sounds of mothers calling their children and of concrete floors being washed with heavy, wet cloths receded, as Sami edged into a new alley that opened onto the main street of the camp. Sami ducked past the buckets and brooms dangling from the ragged awning of a shop at the corner. He went quickly through the jammed lanes of traffic and into a falafel restaurant. Omar Yussef followed past the blackened fryer in the doorway, bubbling as it received a new batch of green chickpea balls. Sami nodded to a man chopping tomatoes at the counter and went three steps at a time up a makeshift staircase at the back.