The Samaritan's secret oy-3

by Matt Beynon Rees

  A pair of men walked toward the camera in conversation. Both were tall. One wore the khaki vest favored by television correspondents to signal a manly taste for action. The other man did the talking, while the journalist frowned with exaggerated concentration. Omar Yussef recognized the second man, in a checked sport jacket and open-necked pink shirt, as Amin Kanaan.

  The reporter stepped back so the cameraman could frame Kanaan in a close-up. Omar Yussef twisted the ornate handles of the French doors and opened them enough to hear what was said outside.

  “Mister Kanaan,” the journalist asked, in a resonant Midwestern American accent, “what’s your response to the allegations about the death of the former president?”

  Kanaan looked grave. “This is a tawdry and perilous allegation by agitators in Hamas,” he said. His English was poised and distinguished. It was clear to Omar Yussef that Kanaan’s full vowels and distinct t had been learned from an Englishman, not an American, and he imagined that Kanaan would see this as a sign of good breeding. “The president was a symbol for the Palestinian people, as well as a father and brother to all of us. Hamas has slandered the morals of the entire Palestinian people with this accusation, and they must be punished.”

  “Punished? How?”

  “Hamas must retract the slander or face the consequences.”

  “Does that mean civil war?”

  “We who loved the former president cannot back down. Even so, be assured we will not draw blood, unless they do so first.”

  The servant who had shown Omar Yussef into the salon appeared on the patio and waited a few yards behind the cameraman.

  “Palestinian media report that people are upset. They think Hamas shouldn’t have publicized this allegation,” the reporter said. “Does this weaken Hamas politically?”

  “Hamas will pay a price for its slander,” Kanaan said. “I hope it will only be at the polls, because the Palestinian people love democracy.”

  The reporter glanced at the sound technician, who gave him a nod. “Okay, we’ve got it,” he said, shaking hands with Kanaan.

  Not exactly a grilling, Omar Yussef thought. The sheikh made a tactical error. People are starting to resent him for making them face this possible cause of the president’s demise. No one wants to think badly of a dead man, no matter what they would’ve believed about him when he was alive. As chief of the late president’s party in Nablus, Kanaan only has to keep this story bubbling for Hamas to look worse and worse.

  Kanaan waved the news crew around the mansion toward their jeep. The servant stood on his toes and whispered into Kanaan’s ear. Omar Yussef stepped out onto the red-tiled patio. Kanaan smiled at him.

  Amin Kanaan appeared both coarse and cultured, like a peasant made good. He had a wide, thick nose, pitted and rough, as though it had been modeled quickly from clay between two thumbs. His skin was uniformly brown, tanned by a better class of sunshine than the intense rays scouring the people of Nablus. His gray hair seemed at once to drift on the breeze in a debonair wave and to be locked in place by lacquer. When he shook Omar Yussef’s hand, Kanaan left a delicate residue of jasmine on it.

  “I haven’t come across that cologne before,” Omar Yussef said.

  Kanaan smoothed his hair back from his brow. “It’s Le Vainqueur. Napoleon used to wear it.”

  “In the Empress Josephine’s boudoir, perhaps. Surely not during his campaign in Palestine.”

  “I expect that here he would have had even greater need to disguise the foul smells all around him.”

  “Is that why you wear it?”

  Kanaan rocked his head back and laughed. Jamie King came outside and shook the wealthy man’s hand. “It’s good to see you again, Jamie,” Kanaan said.

  He led them to a shaded gazebo at the edge of the lawn. Pink clusters of wisteria dangled from the slatted roof. The servant brought cold carob cordials in tall glasses. Mint leaves floated among the ice cubes.

  “You told the foreign journalist that Hamas must be punished,” Omar Yussef said, in Arabic.

  “Journalists.” Kanaan spoke in English and waved a disdainful hand. King smiled obsequiously. The businessman gestured to his guests to sit in the low wicker chairs arranged to face the view.

  “Punished as Nouri Awwadi was?” Omar Yussef slurped the carob juice and felt immediately cooler.

  Kanaan lifted his glass and watched the light come burgundy red through the cordial. “This is very good for your digestion, Jamie,” he said.

  “Delicious.” The American took a small sip and glanced nervously at Omar Yussef.

  She’s worried I’m starting a fight with Kanaan, he thought. He tried to reassure her with a smile.

  Kanaan switched to Arabic. “I heard Awwadi was killed by a jealous boyfriend.” His lips twitched, eager to spill someone else’s secret.

  “The rejected suitor of his new wife? That’s what his father says, but I don’t believe it.”

  A hot breeze rustled the wisteria. “I didn’t say it was his wife’s boyfriend.” Kanaan winked.

  “Whose boyfriend, then?” Omar Yussef froze with the cordial halfway to his mouth. “Are you saying Awwadi was homosexual?”

  “I apologize for our Arabic chatter, Jamie, we’re just gossiping about mutual acquaintances here in Nablus,” Kanaan said in English.

  King disturbed her fixed smile long enough to take another sip of her cordial.

  “Do you remember the classical Andalucian poem by Walladah about a homosexual fellow?” Kanaan said, in Arabic. “It says that ‘if he saw a penis up a palm tree, he’d turn into a whole flock of birds’ in his eagerness to reach it. That was Awwadi, despite his impressive wedding to a casbah girl on the back of a white horse.”

  Could Awwadi have been Ishaq’s lover? Omar Yussef wondered. He seemed disturbed when I told him of the Samaritan’s death.

  Kanaan grinned. “Don’t look so shocked. Why do you think a man in Nablus goes to the Turkish baths?”

  “I imagine you have your own private bathhouse up here,” Omar Yussef said. He had seen Awwadi’s corpse. It wasn’t something to laugh about.

  Kanaan’s smile faded and he looked out across the valley, where Nablus spread like so many broken white teeth. He cleared his throat and spoke to Jamie King in his punctilious English. “I’m delighted to welcome you to my home, Jamie.”

  “I’ve been in Nablus a few days and every time I look up I see these great houses,” King said. “It’s amazing to be able to visit one.”

  “Treat it as if it were your own home, please.” Kanaan bowed. “Have you been to see the progress on the new school I’m funding in the casbah?”

  “I have.”

  “I hope it gave you a good feeling about your work. If it weren’t for the World Bank loan you organized for local infrastructure, even I wouldn’t be able to build such a school.”

  “It’s a wonderful project. It’s unfortunate that the money may be about to come to an end.” King sipped her cordial. “If the former president’s secret accounts can’t be traced by Friday, the bank is planning to cut off aid to the Palestinians.”

  Kanaan shook his head and stroked his broad chin. “By Friday? I was told about this possibility on my last trip to Washington, but I didn’t know a decision was so close.”

  “It’s only two days away.”

  “It would be a disaster.”

  Omar Yussef thought the World Bank’s boycott would be less of a catastrophe for the millionaires along the ridge than for the poor inhabitants of the casbah. He cooled his palms with the condensation on his glass.

  “Are you perhaps close to uncovering the whereabouts of the secret accounts, Jamie?” Kanaan spoke quietly, looking at his fingernails.

  Omar Yussef watched the American. Does she see through Kanaan’s show of nonchalance? he thought.

  “I’m expecting a report any time now from one of my investigators in Geneva,” Jamie said. “I hope it will give us some new ideas.”

  “But here in Palestine,
you have made no progress?”

  Jamie shook her head. “No leads. To be frank, it seems to me that many Palestinian officials are not eager to see this money recovered.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “They were recipients of the former president’s under-the-table payments. The less that’s known about all that, the better, as far as they’re concerned.”

  Kanaan shook his head. “So people aren’t being helpful?”

  “Those that try to be of assistance,” Omar Yussef said, in English, “find themselves dead.”

  Jamie looked sharply at Omar Yussef. Her cell phone rang in her briefcase. She took it out and glanced at the screen. “It’s from Geneva. Maybe there’s some news. Excuse me.” She walked out of earshot with the phone.

  Kanaan ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “Isn’t it a bit boring, ustaz, to work for these foreigners?”

  “The people I work with are fascinating,” Omar Yussef said.

  Kanaan puffed out his lips. “If you say so. I find Americans too serious and literal minded. In any case, I like your atti-tude, ustaz.”

  Omar Yussef sucked on a cube of ice. Here comes the payoff, he thought. He knows Jamie won’t track down the secret accounts without local help, and he thinks that means me. He wants me on his side. So that he can be the first to the money?

  “I could make good use of a man like you.” Kanaan’s eyes drifted to the left, as though he’d just had an idea. “Really, working on these boring development projects year after year, it must be like drinking coffee from the same dirty cup every day. I could offer you a position in my company where you would have wonderful opportunities and every day would be different.”

  “I always drink my coffee the same way-bitter,” Omar Yussef said. “I didn’t come here to be bought off. I came here to find out what you know about the death of Ishaq.”

  “Ishaq?” Kanaan narrowed his eyes, as though straining to focus on the distant ridge across the valley. Omar Yussef thought the rich man’s jaw trembled slightly. “What does that have to do with the World Bank?”

  “He was about to meet Miss King when he was killed. Did his partnership with you put him in jeopardy?”

  “He was a close associate, but our business wasn’t anything dangerous.”

  “Nonetheless, he was murdered. Then Awwadi, who was a follower of your rival for power in Nablus, Sheikh Bader, was killed-right after the sheikh slurred the man who once led your faction.” The wicker easy chair creaked, as Omar Yussef leaned toward Kanaan. “It’s dangerous to be either for you or against you.”

  “Fuck Sheikh Bader.”

  Omar Yussef was taken aback by Kanaan’s sudden vehe-mence and vulgarity.

  Kanaan lowered his voice. “You have me all wrong, Abu. .”

  “Abu Ramiz.”

  “Brother Abu Ramiz, I don’t pretend that I’ve never been involved in questionable things. I’m a businessman, a Palestinian, and successful. You may draw your conclusions from that. But I’m no killer.”

  “You have higher morals than that?”

  Kanaan shook his head. “I simply don’t need to kill.” He swept his hand to take in the mansion and the town below. “From this hilltop, I hear the gunshots down in Nablus, but I never know if they’re killing each other or celebrating a wedding. Do you think my wealthy neighbors are all running around with guns in their pudgy little hands, settling scores?”

  “As long as there’s cash in those soft hands, you can find someone else to hold the gun for you. That doesn’t make you blameless,” Omar Yussef said. “Ishaq’s killing was somehow connected to his dealings with you, even if it wasn’t you who beat him to death.”

  Kanaan winced.

  “Beaten to death, that’s right.” Omar Yussef brandished his glass. The ice cubes tinkled in his shaking hand. “Tortured and beaten.”

  The wealthy man covered his face with his thick, hairy fingers. Was he the boy’s lover, as Roween thought? Omar Yussef wondered. He doesn’t seem to have known exactly how Ishaq died. He appears truly horrified to hear about the torture.

  “You Fatah people took a nice young man with a good head for numbers and you made him into a dirty little villain who hid your money all over the world,” Omar Yussef said. “Ishaq intended to hand over the Old Man’s secret account details to the World Bank. So you decided to prevent him.”

  “What’re you saying? That I killed him?”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “That’s insane. I loved him.”

  “Loved him? How?”

  “I loved him, that’s all.” Kanaan stood and lifted both his arms to the canopy of pink buds above him. “I don’t pretend that the aims of the Fatah party are entirely pure. But neither was Ishaq. He was homosexual.”

  “Morals are suddenly important to you?”

  “He disappointed me. Too many people knew about his preferences.”

  “So they suspected your sexuality, because you were close to him?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I have a wife.”

  “So did Ishaq.”

  “I have a real wife, a beautiful, accomplished woman, not a frowsy little sham wife chosen by the tribal elders.”

  “You loved him,” Omar Yussef sneered.

  “Not like that.” Kanaan pulled out a fistful of wisteria petals and rolled them between his fingers. His voice was quiet. “For the sake of our society, we must be led by men of clear morals.”

  Omar Yussef growled out a scornful laugh. “I forgot to mention, Awwadi told me he’d obtained some files of dirt on you top party men. He got them from Ishaq. So don’t talk to me about moral leadership.”

  Kanaan looked suspiciously at Omar Yussef. “I live amongst politicians, Abu Ramiz. I bribe them, I buy dinners and cars for them, pay for their children to go overseas for a decent education. As you see from the opulence of my home, this has proved a healthy invest-ment.” He turned to his mock-Classical palace with a resentful scowl in which Omar Yussef read the traces of all the wickedness the rich man had committed to pay for it. “But when these politicians get sick, I have to put them in quarantine, so they don’t infect me.”

  “What was Ishaq’s sickness? Why did you kill him?”

  “I didn’t kill Ishaq. I could never have done such a thing. I believed he had a bright future.”

  “Who would you not sacrifice if they got sick, as you put it? Your wife? Or is she expendable, too, in the national interest?”

  “I would sacrifice everything for Liana.”

  Liana had inspired the devotion of Amin Kanaan and Khamis Zeydan. Yet it seemed neither man had given her quite what she wanted. Omar Yussef’s impression of her had been that the course of her life had somehow been taken out of her hands, leaving her resentful. He thought Ishaq might have suffered from a similar bitterness, prevented by social constraints from finding a love that would bring happiness and bound to a partner whose fondness he couldn’t return.

  Jamie King snapped her cell phone shut and returned to the gazebo. She shook her head. “I don’t know if this is really anything,” she said. “It could be a lead from Geneva, but it may just as easily be nothing.”

  “What’s that?” Omar Yussef said.

  “I’ll have the details soon. I can’t say until then.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Kanaan asked.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you could try to break through some of the barriers I’ve run into at the upper levels of the government,” Jamie said. “There’re some people who were close to the former president and who’re reputed to be corrupt. You know who I mean. See if you can get them to give me a lead, anonymously. No questions asked.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “If the money does get cut off on Friday, I’ll try to save the joint projects we have underway with you, Mister Kanaan.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d better get back to the hotel. My people in Geneva are faxing me the documents they’ve unearthed. I
should get on top of it.”

  Kanaan bowed, as Jamie turned toward the house.

  Omar Yussef lifted himself out of the wicker chair. Before he followed the American, he looked into Kanaan’s muddy eyes. “I’m a student of history, Your Honor Amin. You might think that means I care only about the past. But the future is more important to me. I remember the future.”

  Kanaan opened his palm. “Pardon me?”

  “I remember the future our leaders told us about when they returned from exile,” Omar Yussef said. “The future as it might have been.”

  “It still might be, if Allah wills it.”

  “If Allah willed it, he would have sent the Palestinians different leaders.” Omar Yussef stepped out of the gazebo and squinted into the sun over Nablus. “And Ishaq would never have met you.”

  Chapter 23

  The manager of the Grand Hotel prodded at the inner workings of his fax machine. He slammed down the cover and rubbed his ashtray-colored face with both hands.

  Omar Yussef entered the empty lobby, while Jamie King parked her Suburban. He passed the desk and pressed the elevator call button. “Peace be upon you,” he said.

  The manager dropped his hands to the pine desk and spoke absently: “Upon you, peace.”

  Omar Yussef waited for the elevator in silence. The manager breathed shallowly, his chin on his chest.

  For a hotel with almost no guests, this elevator is taking a long time, Omar Yussef thought.

  The manager rubbed his wide upper lip and seemed to notice Omar Yussef for the first time. “It’s not working, ustaz,” he said. “The elevator. It’s under maintenance, I mean.”

  Omar Yussef glanced at the staircase without relish.

  “There’s also a message for you.” The manager reached for the only envelope in the pigeonholes behind the desk.

  It was a note from Maryam. She had gone to Sami’s home with Nadia. “Thank you, darling,” Omar Yussef whispered. “You’ve saved me a climb.” He went outside and hailed a taxi.

  Sami’s place was a fourth-floor apartment on a spur of rock above the casbah. Since they had signed their marriage contract, Meisoun was permitted to visit Sami there, provided others were present. Omar Yussef assumed she had requested that Maryam come along to ensure propriety. When he entered, Meisoun greeted him warmly.