“With them?”
“In this storeroom. They’ll go to the funeral soon. There’s something I need to check here.”
“What?”
“This is where Awwadi lived.”
“I gathered that from what the Hamas boys said.”
“I think he might have stored the dirt files here. On the other side of this wall.” Omar Yussef ran his hand over the damp stone.
Khamis Zeydan stroked his mustache. He kept his eyes on the doorway. They twitched slightly with each gunshot in the courtyard.
“If you hang around, you might be able to find your file,” Omar Yussef said. “And dispose of it.”
His friend gave a low whistle and sat in the darkest corner of the storeroom. “I’ll wait,” Khamis Zeydan said.
A chorus of ululating women wailed in the courtyard as the family learned of Nouri’s death.
Omar Yussef lowered himself with a snort of pain and sat against the wall. He shivered on the cold floor and hugged himself. He would hide underground until Awwadi’s funeral, when the dead man would take his place under the earth. He remembered an eleventh-century Syrian poet had written that the surface of the earth was nothing but the bodies of long-dead men. Lighten your tread, the poet wrote, reminding the living that their corpses, too, would become the dirt on their grandchildren’s sandals.
Khamis Zeydan closed his eyes. Omar Yussef watched him. He wouldn’t have stayed with me, if I hadn’t told him that the file of dirt on him might be in the next room, he thought. I should ask the people here if they saw anybody emerge from this passage, but they’ll be in no mood to talk now. And anyway I don’t want word getting around that I’m tracking Awwadi’s killer.
“I’m grateful to you for coming with me through the tunnel,” he whispered. “You didn’t have to.”
Khamis Zeydan shrugged and swallowed hard.
He’s nervous about finding his file, Omar Yussef thought. What will he do if it’s not in the room next door?
The gunfire stopped. The wailing women moved up to the terrace and went inside. Omar Yussef lifted his head. “The men have gone to the funeral,” he said.
Khamis Zeydan crept up the steps and looked out. He beckoned Omar Yussef to follow him with a wave of his hand. The courtyard was empty. The goats gazed at Omar Yussef dumbly. He put his hand behind the ears of a dark brown kid and rubbed its bony head.
“Where’re the files?” Khamis Zeydan asked.
Omar Yussef moved along the wall. He shoved the gate of the horse’s stable. Its bottom edge squeaked across the stone floor. He froze, fearful that he had been heard, but the women went on screeching upstairs.
The stallion was white and ghostly at the rear of the stable. He stamped and shied as the gate opened. Sharik, Omar Yussef thought. Partner. A good name for a horse, until its partner is murdered. Omar Yussef felt unaccountably guilty, as though he ought to console the horse for the loss of its master. They slipped past him and down the steps at the back.
They entered another dark, damp storeroom. Omar Yussef cast the flashlight around. The room was empty. Khamis Zeydan dug his heel into the dirt floor and looked nauseous.
Omar Yussef came up the steps and stroked the dry hair of the horse’s mane. He peered into the sunny courtyard. Perhaps the files had never been in the Touqan Palace after all. Awwadi may have hidden them elsewhere. But if he had kept them here, someone else had them now. Either way, Omar Yussef sensed that Awwadi wouldn’t be the last person who would die for these files. No man was safe, so long as he walked above the dead bodies that were the surface of the earth. Not in the casbah.
Chapter 19
The men at the head of the funeral procession surrounded Sheikh Bader, thrusting their M-16s above their heads and chanting to Allah. Despite the perspiration and frenzy around him, the old man held his head still, glowering as though he were leading the mourners into hell to stare down Satan himself. When they left the vaulted souk, they fired their rifles into the air to honor the martyr Nouri Awwadi.
Omar Yussef clapped his hands over his ears and kept them there as the van that he had heard broadcasting Islamic songs at Awwadi’s wedding jarred the street with a heavy drum beat. Another troop of gunmen followed the Volkswagen, jogging in black combat fatigues, their faces obscured by stocking caps, the green sash of Hamas around their heads. They marched in military order, lifting their knees high, clutching machine guns across their chests. A few small boys skipped along beside them.
The last of the mourners sweated past, bellowing their desire to sacrifice their souls and blood for Awwadi.
Omar Yussef intended to talk to Nouri Awwadi’s father about the way his son had died. He was sure Awwadi had been on the trail of the secret bank accounts. Omar Yussef thought he might be able to use the fact that he had been with Awwadi just before he died to win the father’s trust and obtain information that would be useful to Jamie King. He would have to wait until the burial was over, so he paced warily about the casbah, keeping close to the busiest streets where he thought he’d be safe from the man who had tried to kill him.
He passed the most famous qanafi bakery. The soporific sugariness of the dessert lingered in his nostrils as he walked on. He drank a cup of bitter coffee, and he loitered by a man selling chickens from dirty metal crates. Neither aroma conquered the cloying scent of the qanafi, as though he were condemned to inhale the cheese and the syrup until the funeral ended. He decided that only when he caught the smell of sweat on a worker’s shirt or cigarette smoke drifting from the mouth of a passing man would he know Awwadi was under the ground.
Omar Yussef circled the cheap clothing stores in the souk and went through the lower casbah. He felt as though he were exploring the old town for the first time. When Awwadi had shown him around, he had thought that the place belonged to his guide and to the others who lived there. Now he saw that the casbah owned its inhabitants. Nouri Awwadi was muscular and powerful, but the casbah had taken him. The Touqan Palace, atrophied and decrepit, would still stand when everyone who remembered Awwadi had joined him beneath the earth.
Omar Yussef detected the bitter scent of urine in a dark corner. The sweet smell had finally left him. The funeral must be over, he thought, sniffing the cologne on the back of his hand.
At the Touqan Palace, he weaved through a crowd of older men who had returned to the house of mourning after the funeral, while the youngsters went to throw stones at the Israeli checkpoint. He climbed the steps to the terrace fronting the Awwadi family apartment, overlooking the uneven roofs of the casbah. A row of potted kumquat bushes quivered in the hot breeze. Omar Yussef plucked an orange fruit, inhaled its fragrance and savored the texture of its rind as he rolled it between his fingers.
A black tarpaulin shaded the mourners. A boy offered Omar Yussef a finger of thin, unsweetened coffee in a tiny blue plastic cup. He drank and wiggled the cup from side to side to signify that he didn’t want a refill. He saw Nouri’s father under the awning, made his way through the plastic chairs where the mourners sat, and shook the man’s hand.
“May Allah have mercy upon him, the departed one,” he said.
“May you live a long life,” the man mumbled, letting go of Omar Yussef’s hand quickly. He fiddled with a string of green worry beads like the one his son had used. Omar Yussef wondered if they had been recovered from Nouri’s clothes at the baths. The man’s stumpy fingers fretted the beads in his wrinkled brown hand, like an elephant’s massive feet kicking a row of watermelons.
Omar Yussef lowered himself into the seat beside the bereaved man. “I’m Omar Yussef Sirhan, from Bethlehem,” he said. “I was in the baths when Nouri was killed.”
“Welcome.”
Omar Yussef put his palm over his heart and bowed slightly. “Who would have killed your son, Abu Nouri?”
“I know exactly who is to blame.” The man lifted a thick finger. Omar Yussef remembered the shaven, scented corpse in the baths. The father’s gray chest-hair curled over the top of a so
iled white T-shirt and he smelled of grease and sweat. His bottom lip hung heavily and his dead brown eyes reminded Omar Yussef of the dumb goats in the courtyard.
“Who did it?”
“He will pay,” Awwadi’s father hissed.
“Who?”
“My son had a big argument about his wedding with another young man from the casbah.”
“What was the argument about?”
“This other bastard wanted to marry the same girl.”
“The girl Nouri married yesterday, at the big Hamas wedding?”
Awwadi’s father blinked his vapid eyes. “Nouri was killed by this man because he was jealous. We’ll fight his family to get revenge.”
“Who is he?”
“Halim Mareh, that son of a whore.”
Omar Yussef remembered the tall young man in the blue overalls, leaning against the sacks stacked in the doorway of the Mareh family’s spice store, and the harsh stare he had shared with Nouri Awwadi. “How do you know it was him?”
“I saw the murderer and his friends here in the courtyard of my own home.”
The passage, Omar Yussef thought. “But Nouri wasn’t killed here.”
“There’s a tunnel between the baths and this courtyard. They used it to escape from the baths.”
“Does the tunnel go anywhere else?”
“To a halva factory. But that’s a very busy place. They would’ve been noticed. Here they hoped to go unseen. But I saw them come through the courtyard with their weapons. Four of them, including this jealous bastard. I thought nothing of it at first-several families live in this old palace and we all use the courtyard. Then Nouri’s friends came to tell me he had been killed in the baths and I realized imme-diately who was guilty.”
“Didn’t the girl’s father make the decision that she would marry Nouri?”
“Of course he did.” Awwadi’s father opened his clumsy hands wide. “But this jealous bastard didn’t accept it. The girl’s father is a follower of Hamas, and so am I. The jealous one decided he had been refused because he’s a member of Fatah. That’s why he killed my Nouri.”
Omar Yussef tasted bile seeping over the back of his tongue. “When will the fighting begin?”
“We must give them an opportunity to make amends, to pay a blood price for Nouri’s death,” Awwadi’s father said. “But if they don’t, we’ll go after their family in a couple of days. And we’ll destroy them.” A vein pulsed in his temple, and he slapped his thick fist into his palm. The worry beads clicked on the impact. “Even then, my existence will be over. Without Nouri, I’m finished.”
Omar Yussef touched the man’s knee. “I know that revenge is demanded by our tribal traditions, Abu Nouri. But as a Muslim you must also remember what happened when the third caliph, Uthman, put family ties before justice. It led to civil war, to the division of Islam into Sunni and Shia.”
“What are you? A history teacher? You think I’m going to start a civil war here in the casbah?”
“It could be.”
“In this case, there’s no contradiction between family ties and justice. By the will of Allah, the guilt is on the men who killed my son. When they did that, they ceased to be Muslims. Don’t speak to me about caliphs and ancient history.”
“When I talked to Nouri in the baths, he told me he was about to become very rich,” Omar Yussef said. “Did he mention anything to you about finding something? Something valuable?”
Awwadi’s father waved his hand. “Anything Nouri had, he gave to Hamas. Ask Sheikh Bader.”
“Did he give Sheikh Bader the files?”
The heavy neck lifted a suspicious face toward Omar Yussef. “Files?”
“Nouri told me he obtained some files of dirt about Fatah leaders.”
“Those things? They’re in the storeroom behind Nouri’s horse. Sheikh Bader will send someone for them soon enough.”
Not quite soon enough, Omar Yussef thought. He shook the big, limp hand and weaved back through the plastic chairs.
Omar Yussef walked through the casbah, away from the Touqan Palace. Awwadi’s father believes a Fatah man killed his son, he thought. Could it have been revenge for the killing of Ishaq, who worked for Kanaan, the local Fatah boss? But Awwadi was shocked when I told him of Ishaq’s death. He even seemed to have liked him.
The quiet alleys darkened in the twilight. Old Awwadi’s world was at an end with his son’s death. Omar Yussef wondered if anyone would feel that way, were he to die. He imagined Zuheir praying over his body at his funeral, but then he realized that he had it the wrong way around. The older Awwadi and Jibril, the priest, were fathers who had lost their sons. He gasped as he reversed the scene and saw himself weeping over Zuheir’s body, shrouded for burial. His legs shook and he leaned his back against a wall for support. The stone was hot from the day’s sunshine. As darkness fell, Omar Yussef felt the heat ebbing away.
Chapter 20
Jibril Ben-Tabia cradled the tarnished silver case of the Abisha Scroll like a sooty newborn, rocking on his heels as if to lull it to sleep. The old priest wore a thin smock, tight around his bony waist, and a cloth embroidered with a gold floral design twisted around his red fez. He gazed over the crowd of strangers who had come to the summit of Mount Jerizim to observe his people’s Passover celebration.
Ben-Tabia appeared pleasantly bemused, like a grandfa-ther who had expected everyone to forget his birthday, only to find himself among well-wishers whose identity he couldn’t quite recall. Some of the onlookers wore dark suits, marking them out as diplomats. Photographers jostled at the front of the crowd and a handful of foreign journalists chatted together at its edge.
“Where was the body?” Khamis Zeydan lifted his foot a few inches above the chippings in the tourist parking lot and shook it.
“Your foot’s bothering you?” Omar Yussef said. “It’s the diabetes.”
Khamis Zeydan stamped. “It just went to sleep with all this standing. The body, please?”
Omar Yussef pointed to the sloping stone where the ancient Samaritan temple had stood. “That spot behind the priest was covered with blood,” he said, “but the body was actually found on the hillside there, in the pines.”
Khamis Zeydan elbowed through the crowd to get a better look at the place where Ishaq’s corpse had lain. Omar Yussef struggled to catch up to him.
“The body came to rest against that tree,” he whispered, pointing.
“Witnesses?”
Omar Yussef shook his head. “The caretaker confirmed that the body was left here three nights ago. There was nothing here when he closed up at night and then he found the body in the morning.”
“That’s not much to go on.”
“Not so little. We have the body and the site of the murder, and we spoke to the victim’s wife, who told us he was doing a deal with Amin Kanaan.”
“So he was doing a deal and it wasn’t necessarily clean.” Khamis Zeydan raised his chin impatiently. “He was a Palestinian. Do you think it unusual that he should operate outside the law?”
“Sami wants out of this investigation and you don’t seem to take it very seriously, either,” Omar Yussef said. “Can I really be the only one interested in this poor man’s death?”
“If you don’t want to be the only one interested, perhaps you ought to drop it. Then you won’t be alone anymore.”
Omar Yussef stared at the police chief. He remembered the way Roween had touched her fingertips to the acne beside her lips and the pity he had felt for her in her lonely house of mourning. “I misspoke. I’m not alone,” he said.
Khamis Zeydan rolled his tongue behind his mustache. “We can’t make too much of the location of the body,” he said. “It must be pretty deserted up here most nights. You could kill someone without anyone hearing. But chances are that Ishaq was killed elsewhere and the body was dropped here later. Murderers like to move their victims. They leave fewer clues that way.”
“He died up here, I’m sure of it. There was blood all
over the rock.” Omar Yussef turned toward the Samaritan men in their white robes flanking the priest. They were gathered at the edge of the sloping gray stone, the center of their temple.
“What rock?” Khamis Zeydan followed his gaze.
“That’s the stone where Abraham bound Isaac. It’s where the ancient temple was built.”
“What are you talking about? That’s in Jerusalem.”
“This is where the Samaritans believe it was. Ishaq must have been alive when he was brought to the mountain, or he couldn’t have pumped out so much blood.”
Khamis Zeydan scratched his chin with the yellowed nail of his thumb.
“I think Ishaq was brought here and killed on that stone. His body was then thrown over the edge of the hillside into the darkness, and it rolled down into the trees.” Omar Yussef peered into the pines.
“He knew about the Old Man’s money. Did someone get the secrets of those accounts out of him and then silence him? Or is there something else?” Khamis Zeydan made a quick, summoning gesture with his fingers. “Give.”
The schoolteacher exhaled deeply. “I was about to tell you when we heard Nouri Awwadi cry out at the baths,” he said. “Those files of dirt on the Fatah leaders-Awwadi got them from Ishaq.”
Khamis Zeydan’s eyes seemed to recede into his head. “That’s very interesting. Awwadi bought them from Ishaq?”
“Awwadi stole the oldest Samaritan scroll and swapped it for the dirt files.”
“A straight swap? The scroll for the files? Nothing to do with Ishaq’s knowledge of the Old Man’s money?”
“Awwadi didn’t seem to know about that. When he showed me the files, I told him about the three hundred million dollars Ishaq had hidden and I got the impression that it was news to him.”
“If you were eager for the World Bank to get its hands on that money first, it wasn’t so smart to tell Hamas about it.”
“Don’t you think someone else who was after the money might have killed Awwadi? After I told him about the secret account details, he must’ve started trying to find them. Someone probably killed him to stop his search.”
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