The Samaritan's secret oy-3

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Zuheir and Omar Yussef watched each other silently, as the waiter removed the salads and brought the grilled meats of the main course.

  “Do you have any vacancies for a business graduate at the World Bank?” Maryam touched Jamie King’s arm and pointed at Meisoun.

  Ramiz shook his head. “Mama, don’t let the World Bank steal away my new partner.”

  “I’m going to open a franchise of Ramiz’s cell phone business in Nablus, after my wedding,” Meisoun told King.

  “Great. Where did you study?”

  “In Cairo. I intended to obtain a higher degree, but the border between Egypt and my family home in Gaza was closed because of the intifada. I had to find work in a hotel in Gaza City.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Meisoun smiled. “Not so bad. That’s how I met my future husband. Otherwise, I might have married some puffed up little Pharaoh in Cairo.”

  “But at least Cairo’s not a war zone.” Ramiz slapped Sami on the shoulder.

  “If a woman doesn’t choose the right husband, she creates her own war zone.” Meisoun lifted a finger to scold Ramiz. “Sami and I will have peace, no matter what troubles engulf Nablus.”

  “So when’s the big day?” King asked.

  “Friday. But it isn’t a big day quite like the American weddings I’ve seen on the television,” Meisoun said. “It’s a big party.”

  “But no religious ceremony?”

  “Some religion, but we already made our vows to each other.”

  “The main thing was getting her father to agree,” Sami said.

  “Evidently her father said yes.” King raised her glass of juice as if in a toast.

  “Well, he didn’t actually say yes. He gave Sami sweetened coffee.”

  Nadia took Meisoun’s hand to signal that she wanted to explain. “When a man goes to ask permission to marry a woman, the host serves coffee at the end of the visit. If the coffee is sweetened with sugar, it means the family agrees to the marriage. If it’s bitter, the answer is no.”

  “I guess that’s an effective signal.”

  “Everyone prefers sweet coffee. Except Grandpa. He always drinks his coffee bitter.” Nadia made a sour face at Omar Yussef.

  King excused herself after the coffee at the end of the meal. As the American left the dining room, Omar Yussef noticed Khamis Zeydan crossing the lobby. The police chief swayed and rested his shoulder against the door of the restaurant. He took a big, rasping intake of breath through his nose, coughed up some phlegm and spat on the floor. The waiter glanced at him nervously.

  Omar Yussef touched Maryam’s arm. “I’ll see you upstairs, after you’ve finished dessert,” he said. He raised his eyebrows toward Khamis Zeydan. Maryam followed his sign and her lips parted in pity.

  Sami stood and rounded the table. Omar Yussef rose. “Sit with your fiancee a little longer,” he murmured. “This is one thing that I hope you’ll allow me to take care of.”

  “Just this one thing,” Sami said stiffly.

  Meisoun beckoned for her fiance to sit. The skin of the young man’s face grew tight until it looked stony and inhuman.

  Chapter 16

  The waiter headed reluctantly for the drunk at the door, but Omar Yussef shook his head and gestured for him to return to his station by the kitchen. “Let’s go to your room,” he said, catching Khamis Zeydan by the arm.

  “I haven’t had a proposition like that in years, darling,” Khamis Zeydan said. He slurred his words and laughed bitterly with an exhalation that smelled like a dirty ashtray doused in scotch. Omar Yussef held his breath.

  At the elevator, Khamis Zeydan needed two hands to get his lighter to the end of his cigarette and, in the corridor to his room, he leaned so hard on Omar Yussef that the schoolteacher’s knees almost buckled.

  “Amin Kanaan’s a fucking bastard,” Khamis Zeydan said. He dropped his keys outside his door.

  Omar Yussef held his listing friend against the doorjamb with one hand and bent to pick up the keys. He opened the door and maneuvered Khamis Zeydan inside.

  The room smelled of cigarettes and urine. Khamis Zeydan pulled a pint of scotch out of a tubular olive kit bag on the bed. He propped himself against the headboard and drank. Omar Yussef flushed the stinking toilet and glanced with distaste at the cigarette butts floating in a mug by the sink.

  “Kanaan stole your girlfriend twenty-five years ago,” he said, sitting in an uncomfortable desk chair at the foot of the bed. He leaned back in it. It creaks almost as much as me, he thought. “Isn’t it time you put all that behind you?”

  “Everything’s behind me. Everything good.” Khamis Zeydan wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and stared with hate at the glove covering his prosthesis. “They’re all fucking bastards.”

  “Who?”

  “All of them, the whole fucking bunch.”

  When you’re sober, no one is more boring than a drunk, Omar Yussef thought. He had never seen Khamis Zeydan this far gone and he wanted to get out of the room.

  “My wife is a bastard,” Khamis Zeydan said. “My sons, my daughters, everyone. Fucking bastards.” He shook his head and drank. He considered the bottle for a moment and his eyes became teary. “Not Sami. Sami’s like a son to me.”

  Omar Yussef stood. “I’ve had enough of this stupidity. Pull yourself together.” He heard the words, angry and harsh, and paused. It seemed as though another man had entered the room to yell at the sot on the bed. Yet no one else was there, only the bottle and his feeling of how much he hated to want it as he did, and then he recognized the voice as his own.

  Khamis Zeydan waved his scotch at the schoolteacher. “He’s like a son to me. The son I should’ve had instead of those milquetoast little shits in Jordan. Fucking mama’s boys. How dare they. . they called me a. . I’m not a. .” He lost the thread of his anger, took another swig of scotch and came back at full volume: “How dare they?”

  “My brother, don’t blame your children for resenting you. You were always away from home while they were growing up.”

  “Fighting for our people.”

  “And they’re fighting for their mother, who was the only person who seemed to care for them.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that. You’re a good man and everyone tells you so.”

  Omar Yussef sighed. He sensed tears coming and he blinked hard. “You’re a good man, too, Abu Adel.”

  “People always seem to like me better than I like myself,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  “Is that because they don’t have as much information as you do?”

  Khamis Zeydan paused with the bottle halfway to his lips, examining the schoolteacher.

  Omar Yussef thought of the file of dirt about his friend that Awwadi had hidden somewhere. He looked at the police chief’s pale eyes. He knows what’d be in his file, he thought. He can’t imagine anyone could love a man who’s done such terrible things, no matter in what cause he was fighting.

  Khamis Zeydan took a slow swig of the scotch, as though he had suddenly lost his taste for it. “I’ve been betrayed all my life,” he said. “Maybe I overreact to my family’s complaints about me. Whenever I’m criticized I feel like it’s the prelude to some greater betrayal. That’s how it was in exile with the Old Man. People like Kanaan would scheme behind my back, smear me, create rumors to discredit me. I had to be at headquarters all the time to cut off the plots before they went too far. That’s why I could never be with my family, never experience the love everyone else gets from their children.”

  “That’s finished now. You’re not in exile anymore.” Omar Yussef lowered himself once more into the uncomfortable chair.

  “It’s not over. I saw that much in Kanaan’s face when I bumped into him yesterday at the police headquarters.” Khamis Zeydan put the bottle on the nightstand. “I’ll never be free of it. Now it’s happening to Sami, too. People suspect he must’ve done something for the Israelis. They think that otherwise he wouldn’t have been given a permit to retur
n to the West Bank from Gaza.”

  Omar Yussef remembered the Samaritan priest’s ques-tions and the angry embarrassment in the young man’s response. If Sami’s story had made its way to the Samaritan village on the peak of Mount Jerizim, how much more suspicion must surround him down in the casbah? “It won’t be the same for Sami,” he said. “He’s in love with Meisoun. They’ll have a good marriage. He’ll be happy.”

  Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “He needs me to be a father to him.”

  “He has a father. In Bethlehem. Hassan’s my neighbor, and I can tell you that he’s a good man.”

  “Then Sami needs me to be his godfather. So that he doesn’t end up like me.”

  “You’re drunk, my brother.”

  “His hand.” Khamis Zeydan stared at his prosthesis. “Even Sami’s hand is the same as mine. Broken, useless.”

  “He only has a broken arm. It’ll heal. And, believe me, you’re an admirable man. Sami would be proud to be like you.”

  Khamis Zeydan dabbed away a tear with his fingertip. He tried to hide the motion by wiping his nose with the back of his hand, but Omar Yussef saw it.

  “Sami shouldn’t take any risks,” the police chief said. “You know what I mean, don’t you? This dead Samaritan. Forget about him.”

  Khamis Zeydan’s voice was suddenly firm and intense. Omar Yussef wondered if his friend had faked his drunken self-pity to soften him up for this. He straightened in his creaking chair. “If you’d seen the Samaritan’s corpse, beaten and bloodied, could you forget it?” he said.

  “Sami has a chance to live a secure life here in Nablus with his new wife-to have the kind of family I never had. Don’t try to make him investigate this case. It’ll force him to confront powerful people. They’ll finish him. At best they’ll destroy his career and send him to swelter in a crappy one-room village police station chasing goat thieves for the ignorant Bedouin down south. But they might even kill him or Meisoun.”

  “Sami isn’t involved. Don’t worry about him.”

  “Should I worry about you?”

  “I’m not involved either.” Omar Yussef stood and stretched his back. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to the Turkish baths in the casbah. Does that sound like the action of someone obsessed with tracking down a murderer? Why don’t you come?”

  “Sweat out the hangover?”

  Omar Yussef squeezed Khamis Zeydan’s shoulder. “More than just the hangover. You can purge yourself of all the suspicion and loneliness.”

  “I might flood the entire casbah, if I start to sweat that out.”

  “Why not? I need to cleanse myself, too. I just hope our pores are big enough for the job.”

  The two men smiled as Omar Yussef left. He went along the corridor to his room and found Maryam in a pale blue nightdress, spreading cold cream over her cheeks and fore-head. “Is he all right?” she asked.

  Omar Yussef hung his blazer on the back of the door and went to the window. “He’ll never be all right.”

  His wife layered a final smear of cream around her lips and raised her eyebrows, questioningly. “What is it?”

  “Why did you stay with me, Maryam?”

  “Omar?”

  “It isn’t so many years ago that I was like our dear friend Abu Adel.”

  “You were never quite like that.”

  “I was a drunk. I was easily angered. I couldn’t believe that anyone really liked me and I suspected everyone of mocking me behind my back.”

  “But I never allowed you to be lonely, as he is.” Maryam linked her hands behind Omar Yussef’s neck.

  He smelled the rosewater in her lotion and kissed her. When he came away from her, there was cold cream in his mustache. She smoothed it into the white hairs and twisted the ends upwards.

  “I would never leave you, Omar,” she giggled. “Not even if you oiled your mustache like a stuffy old Turkish pasha.”

  Chapter 17

  In the alley outside the baths, Khamis Zeydan blew loudly through pursed lips, rubbed his bloodless gray forehead and swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I’m up for this,” he rasped. “If I go into the steam room, I might pass out.”

  “What about all the sweating you need to do?” Omar Yussef followed his friend up the steps.

  “If I sweat those things out, they’ll leave traces of my dirty history all over the tiles in the baths for people to read.”

  Someone has already unearthed those secrets, my friend, Omar Yussef thought. He wondered if he ought to tell Khamis Zeydan that they were about to meet Awwadi in the bathhouse. By introducing them, he hoped to persuade Awwadi that Khamis Zeydan was a good man and to prevent him using his dossier of dirt against the police chief. With his friend irritable and hungover, though, he wasn’t sure Awwadi would take to him.

  “Never mind,” Khamis Zeydan said. “The sooner I get some hot water on my head, the quicker we’ll know if this is the hangover that’s finally going to kill me.” He labored toward the doorway.

  The main hall of the Hammam al-Sumara centered on an old fountain of scalloped limestone. Water spouted softly from a stone column in the middle of the fountain into a pool tiled turquoise. The window at the peak of the high domed ceiling was sectioned into blue, green and orange triangles. Long vines grew around the glass and emerald mold streaked the white plaster. The room was light, but the dampness gave it the scent of an old cellar.

  Nouri Awwadi lay on a divan by the entrance. When he noticed Khamis Zeydan, he raised his eyebrows and pushed his chin forward at Omar Yussef, as though complimenting a host on a finely prepared dish. He played his thumb across the keypad of his cellular phone and pointed it at a bulky man beside him, who directed his own phone at Awwadi. They laughed as the handsets sounded the refrain of a cloying Lebanese love song. Omar Yussef recognized the tune from the music video channel to which Nadia some-times danced about the living room.

  Awwadi gave his companion’s heavy shoulder a slap. He turned to Omar Yussef. “We’re swapping ringtones.”

  Omar Yussef frowned. He resented their loud laughter and the intrusion of the idiotic jingle into this traditional place. “When they built these baths five hundred years ago, cell phones were one annoyance they didn’t have to suffer,” he said.

  Awwadi’s friend smiled. His thick black hair was slicked back from a low forehead and his beard shone with oil. “This was always a place for meetings, ustaz. If you return later in the day, this hall will be filled with men smoking the nargila and playing backgammon.”

  “In that case, I’m glad we came early.”

  “Do you think in Paradise there are no people?” The dark-haired man lifted his arms wide. Under his black-and- white checked shirt, his chest expanded and he rolled his neck. “People are part of Paradise.”

  “If everyone made it to Paradise, you’d be correct.” Omar Yussef wagged his finger and smiled. “But I hope that Allah, the King of the Day of Judgment, will weed out anybody who tries to take their cell phone into Paradise.”

  “If Allah wills it.” The heavy man laughed, reaching out to give him a big, slapping handshake. “I apologize for some mess you may find here and there around the baths. An Israeli special forces unit came last night.”

  “Why?”

  “Looking for something.”

  “For what?”

  “I failed to qualify for the Israeli special forces, so I’m not privy to such information. My name is Abdel Rahim Dadoush. I’m the manager of the baths.”

  “And the best masseur in Nablus, too.” Nouri Awwadi stood up and greeted Omar Yussef with three kisses. He took Khamis Zeydan’s hand.

  “Good, I need a massage,” Khamis Zeydan said. “My body’s as stiff as a donkey’s cock in midpiss.”

  Awwadi clapped his hands and laughed.

  “Only the pain of a rough massage can free you from this stiffness,” Abdel Rahim said. “I will kill you with my massage and make you feel alive again. But first, the baths.”

  In the narrow changing ro
om, Omar Yussef pulled a thin white towel around his slack waist. Khamis Zeydan took an extra towel and draped it casually over his arm to disguise his prosthetic hand.

  Awwadi smiled as they entered a wide room filled with steam. “Once a man has been in the baths with another man, they have no need for secrets,” he said.

  Khamis Zeydan glanced at the towel over his lost limb, but Omar Yussef knew that Awwadi wasn’t referring to the prosthesis. He’s telling me that Khamis Zeydan’s file won’t be used against him, Omar Yussef thought.

  The three men lay on the floor of the steam room. Colored light radiated out of the vaulted ceiling, passing through small circular shafts each with a pane of stained glass at the top. Omar Yussef felt the mulberry scent of the steam opening his lungs.

  “When you experience the warmth of this air, it’s like a drug,” Awwadi said. “You feel that nothing can harm you.”

  “Steam can’t protect you from a bullet,” Khamis Zeydan murmured.

  “What can make a man bulletproof?”

  “Money.”

  “Perhaps I will soon have enough of that to deflect every bullet in the arsenals of all the Palestinian factions, and the Israelis, too.” Awwadi winked at Omar Yussef.

  He’s close to finding the secret account documents, Omar Yussef thought. Or perhaps he already has them. How am I going to persuade him not to use the money for Hamas operations? He has to turn it over to Jamie King.

  Awwadi rose and slapped his palms on his smooth pectoral muscles. “Excuse me for a while, please. I like to have my massage when I’m sweating like this,” he said.

  “Nouri, there’s something you ought to know,” Omar Yussef said. “On Friday, the World Bank-”

  “In a few minutes, Abu Ramiz. I’ll rejoin you later for the hot water.”

  The steam closed behind him.

  Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan went to the next chamber. The walls were divided into cubicles as wide as a man is tall. In each cubicle, a cinder block lay on the floor on either side of a low stone basin. Khamis Zeydan sat on an upturned block and ran the hot water.

  Omar Yussef stared at the black mold surrounding the basin and creeping along the grouting between the cream-colored tiles. Higher up the wall, the plaster was streaked with a lime green mold so bright that at first it looked like paint. “Why don’t they clean this off? It’s disgusting.”